Address: Professor: Contemporary Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies, School of Art, California State University Long Beach 1250 Bellflower Blvd. CA, 90840
Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections, 2022
A critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form, this book shows why the n... more A critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form, this book shows why the nonprofit system is unfit to administer our common collections, and offers solutions for diversity reform and redistributive restructuring.
In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in “public trust” on behalf of the nation, if not humanity. The public serves as alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.
This structure allows for wealthy individuals at the helm to gain financial benefits from, and ideological control over, what is at its core purpose a public system. The dramatic growth of the art market and the development of financial tools based on art-collateral loans exacerbate the contradiction between the needs of museum leadership versus that of the public. Indeed, a history of private support in the US is a history of racist discrimination, and the common collections reflect this fact.
A history of how private collections were turned public gives context. Since the late Renaissance, private collections legitimized the prince's right to rule, and later, with the great revolutions, display consolidated national identity. But the rise of the American museum reversed this and re-privatized the public collection. A materialist description of the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state reveals constellations of imperialist social relations.
The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art examines ... more The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and the sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the present. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with philosophically abstract ideas, and traces key strategies in contemporary art today to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics, movements that have so far been historicized as mutually exclusive. It demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. Commencing with the early oeuvre of Adrian Piper, a first generation Conceptual artist, this book offers a study of interlocutors that expanded the practice into a broad notion of conceptualism, including Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analyzed the cultural conventions embedded in modes of reference and representation such as language, writing, photography, moving image, or installation and exhibition display.
Based on American Monument, a project by lauren woods [lower-case intentional], this paper asks: ... more Based on American Monument, a project by lauren woods [lower-case intentional], this paper asks: when we say that racism is systemic, where in the system can we see it? When we use the term ‘structural racism’, how can we identify the particular properties, internal organisation, and types of connections that determine a white supremacist structure? Structure, as used in this article, is an outcome of function. The function of racism is domination, its purpose exploitation – the appropriation of labour, as it is shaped by the type of social relations specific to each historical period. As an ideology, racism has been used to rationalise plantation slavery, maintain segregation after emancipation, and divide and conquer workers for industrial exploitation. With the globalisation of production and its movement to the (so-called) global south, racism has been politically instrumentalised, under the guise of slogans such as ‘tough on crime’ or ‘war on drugs’ that are often wielded in contradiction to actual statistics, to justify incarceration and state-sanctioned killing of the army of labour that was left behind at the metropole. Racism is one of capitalism’s survival strategies.1 Pertinent to us is the question of how a civil society and its ‘civilised’ institutions (for example universities and museums) sustain and maintain structures that determine the actions of individuals who do not intend to be racist, but nevertheless are. This article takes two iterations of the work American Monument, as it reveals some principles in the interaction of individuals with structure and system.
We start from the premise of a contradiction that applies more to artists engaged with feminism t... more We start from the premise of a contradiction that applies more to artists engaged with feminism than to curators engaged with feminism. Despite any and every critique of the autonomy of art, art making is still underwritten by the expectation of autonomy, and autonomy clashes with the professionalisation of artists: that being an artist means making a living as an artist. As far as institutions go, the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA declared, on these very grounds, that "artists are workers" and not "outsiders," already in 2005.[1] (issue-52-reader/feminisminstituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-global-capitalism.html#n1) You can enact whatever critique as a feminist artist, but you also need to make your critique available through obtaining an income in the art labour market, of which the market for selling artworks is just a part, and where one can possibly make a living through teaching art, through competing for a grant, through securing a residency, and generally, through making some "cultural capital" transfer into income.[2] (issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-globalcapitalism.html#n2) This contradiction is what feminist institutional critique as an artistic practice has in common with any other institutional critique as an artistic practice. This contradiction is the opposite of what we call "dialectic" in Marxism, for the conflict between artistic autonomy and the artist's dependency on the art labour market (defined as above) never leads to a synthesis that moves us forward. The feminist curator faces a lighter predicament, because despite the autonomisation of her labour through the freelancing of her work under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in 1999, defined as the "new spirit in capitalism," she is still clearly a professional.[3] (issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-globalcapitalism.html#n3) This is the case even if a curator does not see her profession being limited to a secondary function ON-CURATING.org Feminism, Instituting, and the Politics of Recognition in Global Capitalism-ONCURATING https://www.on-curating.org/issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognitio...
In and Out of View Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship, 2021
For centuries, state-sanctioned academia and museums have regarded the historical materials of ma... more For centuries, state-sanctioned academia and museums have regarded the historical materials of marginalized groups as trivial or banal, and active suppression allowed entire histories to go unnoticed or be misinterpreted. Revisionist histories started to appear in academic and display institutions with the turn to multiculturalism, which commenced around the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and spread gradually until it became more prevalent in the 1980s. The question of how to deal with primary historical materials considered disturbing, sensationalist, or upsetting is taken up in revisionist histories in visual culture. Although their strategies differ greatly, Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day both work with the problem of historical narrative concealment. Each of these artists has made visible the historical data neglected in mainstream historical accounts and exposed the very processes of erasure inherent in institutional narratives. Acknowledging that historical materials are themselves mediated cultural objects, their works point not only to painful histories of exploitation and injustice but also to the ways in which those conditions have been framed by history or ignored by it. This essay shows the different modes by which the two artists relocated history in the present day, confronting the master narrative of history as constructed and/or censored yet having a concrete effect on living bodies.1 To reveal history’s Janus-headed operation, these artists take on the role of historian, their work a form of revisionist history.
The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, 2019
There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for ... more There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for advancing social justice and change. My contribution considers anti-racism, as a type of social analysis and political strategy, in the context of Leftist debates that also reoccur in relation to sex and gender politics. Pointing to how ideas articulated in art relate to politics, this essay identifies what makes a particular phenomenon a model, when specificities can be generalized, or from which concrete situations we can extrapolate abstractions. If we articulate the universal potential of identity politics, we can base solidarity on the intersection of class with other forms of identity-based, or ascriptive, politics.
"So Much for Philanthropy: the Marciano and 'All the Usual Suspects'," shows how the current US t... more "So Much for Philanthropy: the Marciano and 'All the Usual Suspects'," shows how the current US tax code gives philanthropists a combination of exaggerated tax subsidies and concrete control over policy and civil society, the combination of which results in an undemocratic institutional reality. When it comes to art, advantages to the wealthy are exacerbated since the status of art as an asset, or as the euphemism goes: “passion asset,” distinguishes collecting institutions (or shell institutions serving collectors), from all other types of nonprofits. Donors to hospitals, universities, think tanks, or other nonprofits providing social services, do not share financial interests in the same assets owned by the institution they serve. But Eli Broad and the Marciano brothers privately own works that can appreciate at public expense. The article further argues that philanthropy ultimately gives back the surplus it siphoned from labor and also from externalities paid for by society’s taxes.
In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic and recent mass firings of art workers by multiple mu... more In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic and recent mass firings of art workers by multiple museums, it’s time we demand a collective and anti-capitalist art world. One of a new two-part feature from contemporary art historian Nizan Shaked, today on eastofborneo.org
Adrian Piper: A Reader, Cornelia Butler and David Platzker eds. New York: the Museum of Modern Art (2018): 68-101, 2018
Piper’s work is part of a major transition in late-twentieth- century art, from a practice based ... more Piper’s work is part of a major transition in late-twentieth- century art, from a practice based on object making into one whose unity we are still defining. This essay will consider the continuity between the Catalysis works and her earlier artworks created according to the paradigm of Conceptual art, in light of the debates about the legacies and definitions of conceptualism.
Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics rev... more Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.
This article describes, on the one hand, key conduits between open fascists and the current US ad... more This article describes, on the one hand, key conduits between open fascists and the current US administration, and, on the other, the ties of major arts philanthropists to this administration. It reveals the common agendas of the patron class and a liberal world view that hopes to represent the middle class (or the petty bourgeoisie), and that purports (but fails) to serve the working classes. Historians of twentieth-century fascism have repeatedly shown how fascist takeover of state power was dependent on the complicity of groups and classes that were not otherwise fascist. In light of this and several works of contemporary anti-fascist analysis, it raises the spectre of neo-fascism as a real danger against which to measure present events. I argue that the liberal quest for a so-called civil debate, instead of community militancy, and which is prevalent in the artworld, misplaces the real site of struggle, which is the alliance of neo-fascism with capitalist interest.
The following essay by Nizan Shaked is part of "Beyond Survival: Public Support for the Arts and ... more The following essay by Nizan Shaked is part of "Beyond Survival: Public Support for the Arts and Humanities," a call for reflections on and provocation about the precarious state of arts funding after decades of neoliberal economics and the long culture wars. A major justification used in the struggle to preserve public funding for the arts is that it fuels private giving. But this serves an increasingly successful neoliberal agenda to transfer public services to the third sector,
Terry Adkins: Infinity is Always Less than One , 2018
Like a zombie rising, readings of Terry Adkins’s work ascend in the mind as they are grasped in t... more Like a zombie rising, readings of Terry Adkins’s work ascend in the mind as they are grasped in the presence of both familiar and enigmatic objects and images. His work denies resolution or singular interpretations, offering instead new modes of syntax: lighter, emerging, ascending, joining, separating, and reconnecting, as materials and their implications float from one artwork to another, recalling history, rendering the past in the present and the future as malleable potential.
Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce's work in received categories of artistic pr... more Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce's work in received categories of artistic practice, considering how these interventions suggest means of class- ification beyond media, artistic intention and identity.
A walk through confrontations and contradictions in William Pope.L: Trinket at the Geffen Contemp... more A walk through confrontations and contradictions in William Pope.L: Trinket at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
This article describes Rasheed Araeen’s groundbreaking interventions into an artistic system base... more This article describes Rasheed Araeen’s groundbreaking interventions into an artistic system based on exclusion.
The publication’s board has scheduled an event at an establishment boycotted by a long list of gr... more The publication’s board has scheduled an event at an establishment boycotted by a long list of grass-roots organizations in Boyle Heights. To support a liberal position to day is to support neolibealism, where deregulation, privatization, and financialization — which rely on globalization, militarization, and imperialism, stoked by and fueling racism, xenophobia, and nationalism — have in concert driven economic inequality to unprecedented extremes.
A meeting of the Artists’ Political Action Network failed to take into account its location in a ... more A meeting of the Artists’ Political Action Network failed to take into account its location in a neighborhood that’s been mired in gentrification controversy for quite some time.
Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections, 2022
A critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form, this book shows why the n... more A critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form, this book shows why the nonprofit system is unfit to administer our common collections, and offers solutions for diversity reform and redistributive restructuring.
In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in “public trust” on behalf of the nation, if not humanity. The public serves as alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.
This structure allows for wealthy individuals at the helm to gain financial benefits from, and ideological control over, what is at its core purpose a public system. The dramatic growth of the art market and the development of financial tools based on art-collateral loans exacerbate the contradiction between the needs of museum leadership versus that of the public. Indeed, a history of private support in the US is a history of racist discrimination, and the common collections reflect this fact.
A history of how private collections were turned public gives context. Since the late Renaissance, private collections legitimized the prince's right to rule, and later, with the great revolutions, display consolidated national identity. But the rise of the American museum reversed this and re-privatized the public collection. A materialist description of the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state reveals constellations of imperialist social relations.
The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art examines ... more The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and the sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the present. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with philosophically abstract ideas, and traces key strategies in contemporary art today to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics, movements that have so far been historicized as mutually exclusive. It demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. Commencing with the early oeuvre of Adrian Piper, a first generation Conceptual artist, this book offers a study of interlocutors that expanded the practice into a broad notion of conceptualism, including Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analyzed the cultural conventions embedded in modes of reference and representation such as language, writing, photography, moving image, or installation and exhibition display.
Based on American Monument, a project by lauren woods [lower-case intentional], this paper asks: ... more Based on American Monument, a project by lauren woods [lower-case intentional], this paper asks: when we say that racism is systemic, where in the system can we see it? When we use the term ‘structural racism’, how can we identify the particular properties, internal organisation, and types of connections that determine a white supremacist structure? Structure, as used in this article, is an outcome of function. The function of racism is domination, its purpose exploitation – the appropriation of labour, as it is shaped by the type of social relations specific to each historical period. As an ideology, racism has been used to rationalise plantation slavery, maintain segregation after emancipation, and divide and conquer workers for industrial exploitation. With the globalisation of production and its movement to the (so-called) global south, racism has been politically instrumentalised, under the guise of slogans such as ‘tough on crime’ or ‘war on drugs’ that are often wielded in contradiction to actual statistics, to justify incarceration and state-sanctioned killing of the army of labour that was left behind at the metropole. Racism is one of capitalism’s survival strategies.1 Pertinent to us is the question of how a civil society and its ‘civilised’ institutions (for example universities and museums) sustain and maintain structures that determine the actions of individuals who do not intend to be racist, but nevertheless are. This article takes two iterations of the work American Monument, as it reveals some principles in the interaction of individuals with structure and system.
We start from the premise of a contradiction that applies more to artists engaged with feminism t... more We start from the premise of a contradiction that applies more to artists engaged with feminism than to curators engaged with feminism. Despite any and every critique of the autonomy of art, art making is still underwritten by the expectation of autonomy, and autonomy clashes with the professionalisation of artists: that being an artist means making a living as an artist. As far as institutions go, the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA declared, on these very grounds, that "artists are workers" and not "outsiders," already in 2005.[1] (issue-52-reader/feminisminstituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-global-capitalism.html#n1) You can enact whatever critique as a feminist artist, but you also need to make your critique available through obtaining an income in the art labour market, of which the market for selling artworks is just a part, and where one can possibly make a living through teaching art, through competing for a grant, through securing a residency, and generally, through making some "cultural capital" transfer into income.[2] (issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-globalcapitalism.html#n2) This contradiction is what feminist institutional critique as an artistic practice has in common with any other institutional critique as an artistic practice. This contradiction is the opposite of what we call "dialectic" in Marxism, for the conflict between artistic autonomy and the artist's dependency on the art labour market (defined as above) never leads to a synthesis that moves us forward. The feminist curator faces a lighter predicament, because despite the autonomisation of her labour through the freelancing of her work under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in 1999, defined as the "new spirit in capitalism," she is still clearly a professional.[3] (issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-globalcapitalism.html#n3) This is the case even if a curator does not see her profession being limited to a secondary function ON-CURATING.org Feminism, Instituting, and the Politics of Recognition in Global Capitalism-ONCURATING https://www.on-curating.org/issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognitio...
In and Out of View Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship, 2021
For centuries, state-sanctioned academia and museums have regarded the historical materials of ma... more For centuries, state-sanctioned academia and museums have regarded the historical materials of marginalized groups as trivial or banal, and active suppression allowed entire histories to go unnoticed or be misinterpreted. Revisionist histories started to appear in academic and display institutions with the turn to multiculturalism, which commenced around the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and spread gradually until it became more prevalent in the 1980s. The question of how to deal with primary historical materials considered disturbing, sensationalist, or upsetting is taken up in revisionist histories in visual culture. Although their strategies differ greatly, Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day both work with the problem of historical narrative concealment. Each of these artists has made visible the historical data neglected in mainstream historical accounts and exposed the very processes of erasure inherent in institutional narratives. Acknowledging that historical materials are themselves mediated cultural objects, their works point not only to painful histories of exploitation and injustice but also to the ways in which those conditions have been framed by history or ignored by it. This essay shows the different modes by which the two artists relocated history in the present day, confronting the master narrative of history as constructed and/or censored yet having a concrete effect on living bodies.1 To reveal history’s Janus-headed operation, these artists take on the role of historian, their work a form of revisionist history.
The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, 2019
There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for ... more There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for advancing social justice and change. My contribution considers anti-racism, as a type of social analysis and political strategy, in the context of Leftist debates that also reoccur in relation to sex and gender politics. Pointing to how ideas articulated in art relate to politics, this essay identifies what makes a particular phenomenon a model, when specificities can be generalized, or from which concrete situations we can extrapolate abstractions. If we articulate the universal potential of identity politics, we can base solidarity on the intersection of class with other forms of identity-based, or ascriptive, politics.
"So Much for Philanthropy: the Marciano and 'All the Usual Suspects'," shows how the current US t... more "So Much for Philanthropy: the Marciano and 'All the Usual Suspects'," shows how the current US tax code gives philanthropists a combination of exaggerated tax subsidies and concrete control over policy and civil society, the combination of which results in an undemocratic institutional reality. When it comes to art, advantages to the wealthy are exacerbated since the status of art as an asset, or as the euphemism goes: “passion asset,” distinguishes collecting institutions (or shell institutions serving collectors), from all other types of nonprofits. Donors to hospitals, universities, think tanks, or other nonprofits providing social services, do not share financial interests in the same assets owned by the institution they serve. But Eli Broad and the Marciano brothers privately own works that can appreciate at public expense. The article further argues that philanthropy ultimately gives back the surplus it siphoned from labor and also from externalities paid for by society’s taxes.
In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic and recent mass firings of art workers by multiple mu... more In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic and recent mass firings of art workers by multiple museums, it’s time we demand a collective and anti-capitalist art world. One of a new two-part feature from contemporary art historian Nizan Shaked, today on eastofborneo.org
Adrian Piper: A Reader, Cornelia Butler and David Platzker eds. New York: the Museum of Modern Art (2018): 68-101, 2018
Piper’s work is part of a major transition in late-twentieth- century art, from a practice based ... more Piper’s work is part of a major transition in late-twentieth- century art, from a practice based on object making into one whose unity we are still defining. This essay will consider the continuity between the Catalysis works and her earlier artworks created according to the paradigm of Conceptual art, in light of the debates about the legacies and definitions of conceptualism.
Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics rev... more Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics reveals the irreconcilable differences between the Marxist economic definition of the term ‘value’ and its other uses in relation to the art object. It corrects the faulty assumption that rare or historical objects bear intrinsic value, symptomatic of capitalist worldview. Beech’s analysis of art’s value-form is critical to unpacking the double ontological condition of art as both an object of collective symbolic value and a hoard of monetary value, since the two operate in mutually exclusive spheres, yet function to constitute one another. The book can help us understand the capitalist sleight of hand that allows art to flicker between two forms of being, making profit appear as value, and value appear as significance (and vice versa), the toggling between the two facilitating the transfer of commonly held symbolic value in support of the individual accumulation of wealth.
This article describes, on the one hand, key conduits between open fascists and the current US ad... more This article describes, on the one hand, key conduits between open fascists and the current US administration, and, on the other, the ties of major arts philanthropists to this administration. It reveals the common agendas of the patron class and a liberal world view that hopes to represent the middle class (or the petty bourgeoisie), and that purports (but fails) to serve the working classes. Historians of twentieth-century fascism have repeatedly shown how fascist takeover of state power was dependent on the complicity of groups and classes that were not otherwise fascist. In light of this and several works of contemporary anti-fascist analysis, it raises the spectre of neo-fascism as a real danger against which to measure present events. I argue that the liberal quest for a so-called civil debate, instead of community militancy, and which is prevalent in the artworld, misplaces the real site of struggle, which is the alliance of neo-fascism with capitalist interest.
The following essay by Nizan Shaked is part of "Beyond Survival: Public Support for the Arts and ... more The following essay by Nizan Shaked is part of "Beyond Survival: Public Support for the Arts and Humanities," a call for reflections on and provocation about the precarious state of arts funding after decades of neoliberal economics and the long culture wars. A major justification used in the struggle to preserve public funding for the arts is that it fuels private giving. But this serves an increasingly successful neoliberal agenda to transfer public services to the third sector,
Terry Adkins: Infinity is Always Less than One , 2018
Like a zombie rising, readings of Terry Adkins’s work ascend in the mind as they are grasped in t... more Like a zombie rising, readings of Terry Adkins’s work ascend in the mind as they are grasped in the presence of both familiar and enigmatic objects and images. His work denies resolution or singular interpretations, offering instead new modes of syntax: lighter, emerging, ascending, joining, separating, and reconnecting, as materials and their implications float from one artwork to another, recalling history, rendering the past in the present and the future as malleable potential.
Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce's work in received categories of artistic pr... more Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce's work in received categories of artistic practice, considering how these interventions suggest means of class- ification beyond media, artistic intention and identity.
A walk through confrontations and contradictions in William Pope.L: Trinket at the Geffen Contemp... more A walk through confrontations and contradictions in William Pope.L: Trinket at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
This article describes Rasheed Araeen’s groundbreaking interventions into an artistic system base... more This article describes Rasheed Araeen’s groundbreaking interventions into an artistic system based on exclusion.
The publication’s board has scheduled an event at an establishment boycotted by a long list of gr... more The publication’s board has scheduled an event at an establishment boycotted by a long list of grass-roots organizations in Boyle Heights. To support a liberal position to day is to support neolibealism, where deregulation, privatization, and financialization — which rely on globalization, militarization, and imperialism, stoked by and fueling racism, xenophobia, and nationalism — have in concert driven economic inequality to unprecedented extremes.
A meeting of the Artists’ Political Action Network failed to take into account its location in a ... more A meeting of the Artists’ Political Action Network failed to take into account its location in a neighborhood that’s been mired in gentrification controversy for quite some time.
Like their development of “suspension of disbelief” into “suspension of beliefs,” My Barbarian’s ... more Like their development of “suspension of disbelief” into “suspension of beliefs,” My Barbarian’s approach towards attitudes rather than characters in theater defies definition through binary opposition. Through double negation, lateral intervention and the refusal of prescribed positions or hierarchies, PoLAAT offers new possibilities to shape our understanding of a term like “belief.” Suspension of beliefs is not the opposite of suspension of disbelief.
In the world of space and time, symmetry derives its meaning from a center, a repetition of forms... more In the world of space and time, symmetry derives its meaning from a center, a repetition of forms on mirroring sides of an axis. The exhibition Symmetry featured works by Los Angeles-based contemporary artists that used or related to this concept. Curated by Kimberli Meyer and Nizan Shaked, Symmetry presented work by nine artists: Edgar Arceneaux, Patrick Hill, Brandon Lattu, Sandeep Mukherjee, Amy Sarkisian, Eddo Stern and Jessica Hutchins, Stephanie Taylor and Sam Watters.
This exhibition explored the shift in meaning that the term "fetish" underwent from its beginning... more This exhibition explored the shift in meaning that the term "fetish" underwent from its beginnings as a derogatory description of African art to its Freudian and Marxist applications in contemporary art. Stunning examples of African art from the Fowler's collections were on view, including Akan gold from the Asante peoples of Ghana and nkisi, widely-misunderstood objects that traditionally served in religious, healing, and judicial practices for several ethnic groups of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Works by such modern and contemporary artists as Marcel Duchamp, Barbara Bloom, Mary Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Monica Majoli, Renee Petropoulos, Lari Pittman, and Naomi Talisman were on view to express the psychoanalytic and political connotations of fetishism.
Designed, Edited and Published by Dushko Petrovich, formerly of Adjunct Commuter Weekly, this cra... more Designed, Edited and Published by Dushko Petrovich, formerly of Adjunct Commuter Weekly, this crafty hyper-local publication promises to give gentrifiers “the refined fine print” about the goings on in their up-and-coming neighborhoods, with one side focusing on New York, and the other on Los Angeles.
A broad outline of a set of nesting phenomena that shows the contradictory nature of art’s status... more A broad outline of a set of nesting phenomena that shows the contradictory nature of art’s status as an object of value and the impossibility this poses for the public institution
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Books by Nizan Shaked
In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in “public trust” on behalf of the nation, if not humanity. The public serves as alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.
This structure allows for wealthy individuals at the helm to gain financial benefits from, and ideological control over, what is at its core purpose a public system. The dramatic growth of the art market and the development of financial tools based on art-collateral loans exacerbate the contradiction between the needs of museum leadership versus that of the public. Indeed, a history of private support in the US is a history of racist discrimination, and the common collections reflect this fact.
A history of how private collections were turned public gives context. Since the late Renaissance, private collections legitimized the prince's right to rule, and later, with the great revolutions, display consolidated national identity. But the rise of the American museum reversed this and re-privatized the public collection. A materialist description of the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state reveals constellations of imperialist social relations.
Articles by Nizan Shaked
The question of how to deal with primary historical materials considered disturbing, sensationalist, or upsetting is taken up in revisionist histories in visual culture. Although their strategies differ greatly, Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day both work with the problem of historical narrative concealment. Each of these artists has made visible the historical data neglected in mainstream historical accounts and exposed the very processes of erasure inherent in institutional narratives. Acknowledging that historical materials are themselves mediated cultural objects, their works point not only to painful histories of exploitation and injustice but also to the ways in which those conditions have been framed by history or ignored by it. This essay shows the different modes by which the two artists relocated history in the present day, confronting the master narrative of history as constructed and/or censored yet having a concrete effect on living bodies.1 To reveal history’s Janus-headed operation, these artists take on the role of historian, their work a form of revisionist history.
In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in “public trust” on behalf of the nation, if not humanity. The public serves as alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets.
This structure allows for wealthy individuals at the helm to gain financial benefits from, and ideological control over, what is at its core purpose a public system. The dramatic growth of the art market and the development of financial tools based on art-collateral loans exacerbate the contradiction between the needs of museum leadership versus that of the public. Indeed, a history of private support in the US is a history of racist discrimination, and the common collections reflect this fact.
A history of how private collections were turned public gives context. Since the late Renaissance, private collections legitimized the prince's right to rule, and later, with the great revolutions, display consolidated national identity. But the rise of the American museum reversed this and re-privatized the public collection. A materialist description of the museum as a model institution of the liberal nation state reveals constellations of imperialist social relations.
The question of how to deal with primary historical materials considered disturbing, sensationalist, or upsetting is taken up in revisionist histories in visual culture. Although their strategies differ greatly, Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day both work with the problem of historical narrative concealment. Each of these artists has made visible the historical data neglected in mainstream historical accounts and exposed the very processes of erasure inherent in institutional narratives. Acknowledging that historical materials are themselves mediated cultural objects, their works point not only to painful histories of exploitation and injustice but also to the ways in which those conditions have been framed by history or ignored by it. This essay shows the different modes by which the two artists relocated history in the present day, confronting the master narrative of history as constructed and/or censored yet having a concrete effect on living bodies.1 To reveal history’s Janus-headed operation, these artists take on the role of historian, their work a form of revisionist history.