Mechtild Widrich
I research at the intersection of modern and contemporary art and architecture, in particular art in public space, monuments, monument activism, cultural geography and the built environment, site-specificity, performance art and performativity, and questions of the public sphere.
My newest monograph "Monumental Cares" (2023) is now available from Manchester University Press. Please find parts of the introduction below, as well as some reviews (from Art Margins Online, caa.reviews, 21 Inquiries, Public Art Dialogue).
I am Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I studied art and architectural history at the University of Vienna and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Please contact me for any questions!
My newest monograph "Monumental Cares" (2023) is now available from Manchester University Press. Please find parts of the introduction below, as well as some reviews (from Art Margins Online, caa.reviews, 21 Inquiries, Public Art Dialogue).
I am Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I studied art and architectural history at the University of Vienna and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Please contact me for any questions!
less
InterestsView All (32)
Uploads
What to do with monumental markers, particularly when these are the products of terror that require removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization? And how to work towards an accessible public sphere, in which history allows for a democratic present?
Artists in the book include: Alexandra Pirici, Emilio Rojas, Ai Weiwei, Carey Young, Yael Bartana, Dan Perjovschi, Catherine Opie, Cai Guo-Qiang, Eiko Otake, Monika Bonvicini, Honore Daumier, Doris Salcedo, Ana Lupas, and others.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley
-----------------------------------------------
'Rigorously researched and argued, this important book will become required reading not only on the history and theory of performance art but also on the history of the "performative" itself as it has transformed public art and commemoration. With ideals of participation and engagement now commonplace in these arenas, Performative monuments shows us in vivid detail how these new ideals emerged and how problematic they have become. Ultimately, this book offers a hopeful message that art can perform its own investigation of the social world and lead us to engage in new and better practices of collective responsibility.'
Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh -- .
---------------------------------------------
"A slide projection of a Balkan capital city with the government buildings painted out; a Trojan horse made of scrap wood looming above the Venice lagoon; a lead column signed as resistance against neo-fascist tendencies; a tunnel made of stone and glass to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. All these interventions in the art-historical tradition of memorials and monuments were in fact made by performance artists. How does this fit into the common story that sets the seemingly transient live art of the 1960s, with its anarchic street actions, in opposition to official monument culture? I argue that performance, once reputed as an antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and messy embodiment, in fact holds the key to its contemporary revival.
This transformation could only take place, however, through the exploration of problems internal to performance: how to document or otherwise visually symbolize ephemeral, undocumented, even impossible actions. In solving this problem through the self-conscious use of documentary photography, film, and diagrammatic collage, performance artists found themselves referring to the past: not just their own and that of their actions, but of their political and cultural context, which, more than the act itself, proves elusive for later audiences. Performance, made durable and rhetorically powerful through photographic documents, thus gave rise to a kind of monument that was self-reflexive, taking account of its conditions of possibility and involving the audience in conventional transactions with binding social force. For the first time, there is the possibility of the ‘democratisation’ of history in these monuments through the delegation of authority from artist and state to the public, but with democratisation comes the danger of subjective self-indulgence and reassuring spectacle.
Connecting speech act and photography theory with media and memory studies, my book is an original contribution to the current debate on performance and art in public space, re-evaluating both the supposed one-time encounter of performance art and its loss to documentation, and the assumption that contemporary commemoration has democratically turned ‘against itself’ through countermonuments that refuse authority."
My article "Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media" can be found under "papers."
The conversations were subsequently transcribed based on the form of a theatrical polylogue. Comments by Michael Hampe as a "voice from offstage" as well as short essays were added later on, so that the conversation is happening on several temporal layers simultaneously.
I am putting up the first pages and my essay, which the designers put sideways to indicate a different time level as well as the biographies.
Concept and Design
Elektrosmog, Zurich
Marina Brugger
Adeline Mollard
Marco Walser
With
Jürg Berthold
Elisabeth Bronfen
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Mark Jarzombek
Amelia Jones
Pál Kelemen
Elke Krasny
Thomas Y. Levin
Dieter Mersch
Rebecca Schneider
Philip Ursprung
Mechtild Widrich
Nina Zschocke
Peter Zumthor
Edited by Mechtild Widrich and Andrei Pop
I.B. Tauris
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ugliness-The-Non-beautiful-Art-Theory/dp/1780766459/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357420447&sr=8-1
Kathleen McQueen, The Art Book
"City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial is a fascinating insight into Krzysztof Wodiczko’s practice, the political and personal concepts pushing his project forward, and the idea of social responsibility infused in his work. It is a proposal parallel to the World Trade Center Memorial but with the aim of provoking a more active and critical commemoration of the September 11 terrorist attacks, understood in their historical and political context, and in the light of their domestic and international fallout.
Drawing his main argument from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Wodiczko imagines a memorial that is at once utopian and continuous with the concrete realities of the post-9/11 climate of fear permeating the Western world. It is a passionate attempt at readdressing the narratives of closure, hostility and terror, through a memorial that encourages open, critical and democratic discourse. The resulting City of Refuge is a memorial in action: on one hand an ongoing critique of a passive remembering of the attack and an investigation into the deeper causes of ‘terror’, and on the other a visionary and ambitious public art project in New York, reckoning with the catastrophe and its political implications in terms of a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’.
New and unpublished hand-drawn sketches and digital montages animate the text, creating a vivid picture of memory at work. Wodiczko’s project is complemented by a concentration on learning and proactive programs of engagement, encouraging new and informed practical initiatives, paving the way to a less unjust world. The book is supported by text from leading scholars in a variety of disciplines: Mark Jarzombek, Daniel Bertrand Monk, Lisa Saltzman, Kirk Savage, Andrew Shanken and Mechtild Widrich. Their contributions constitute a forum published alongside Wodiczko’s text, ensuring an engaging and timely debate."
Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aesthetics-of-ugliness-9781472568878/#sthash.ABAx8SlQ.dpuf
Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.”
Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/materiales-performativos-y-conmemoracion-activista/202002/
I discuss some of my most recent research topics , such as the role of social networks in the construction of the public sphere and in commemoration, the environmentally conscious use of materials for the construction of objects and the role of "care" regarding monuments as a manifestation of links between citizens and responsibility with history.
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/la-participacion-y-la-arquitectura-estan-interrelacionadas/202008/
Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.
history construction through social media; there is no doubt
about this. Monuments are already a mediation that reshapes constructions of past events for the present. Real-time digital documentation makes possible different levels of engagement, resistance, and re-mediation, on the side of production and later in the many layers of reception, in various (often newly constructed) public spheres, which are of course not less regulated. How do artists take into account this social media reality,
how to understand social engagement and performative interaction as monuments or with monuments, and how do we need to understand site in such a situation? I start with a project by Cai Guo-Qiang, discuss the current state of site-specificity, how site relates to the debate around Confederate Monuments, to then dive into a discussion of artist Alexandra Pirici.
Through analysis of VALIE EXPORT’s series Body Configurations and its use in the film Invisible Adversaries, this article historicizes the body as material from the standpoints of mediatization, photographic reproduction, and retrospective artistic modification. The structural analyses of power in the writings of Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze, as well as feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, are illuminated through EXPORT’s practice, essentially in a contemporary context of expanded performance art.
What to do with monumental markers, particularly when these are the products of terror that require removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization? And how to work towards an accessible public sphere, in which history allows for a democratic present?
Artists in the book include: Alexandra Pirici, Emilio Rojas, Ai Weiwei, Carey Young, Yael Bartana, Dan Perjovschi, Catherine Opie, Cai Guo-Qiang, Eiko Otake, Monika Bonvicini, Honore Daumier, Doris Salcedo, Ana Lupas, and others.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley
-----------------------------------------------
'Rigorously researched and argued, this important book will become required reading not only on the history and theory of performance art but also on the history of the "performative" itself as it has transformed public art and commemoration. With ideals of participation and engagement now commonplace in these arenas, Performative monuments shows us in vivid detail how these new ideals emerged and how problematic they have become. Ultimately, this book offers a hopeful message that art can perform its own investigation of the social world and lead us to engage in new and better practices of collective responsibility.'
Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh -- .
---------------------------------------------
"A slide projection of a Balkan capital city with the government buildings painted out; a Trojan horse made of scrap wood looming above the Venice lagoon; a lead column signed as resistance against neo-fascist tendencies; a tunnel made of stone and glass to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. All these interventions in the art-historical tradition of memorials and monuments were in fact made by performance artists. How does this fit into the common story that sets the seemingly transient live art of the 1960s, with its anarchic street actions, in opposition to official monument culture? I argue that performance, once reputed as an antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and messy embodiment, in fact holds the key to its contemporary revival.
This transformation could only take place, however, through the exploration of problems internal to performance: how to document or otherwise visually symbolize ephemeral, undocumented, even impossible actions. In solving this problem through the self-conscious use of documentary photography, film, and diagrammatic collage, performance artists found themselves referring to the past: not just their own and that of their actions, but of their political and cultural context, which, more than the act itself, proves elusive for later audiences. Performance, made durable and rhetorically powerful through photographic documents, thus gave rise to a kind of monument that was self-reflexive, taking account of its conditions of possibility and involving the audience in conventional transactions with binding social force. For the first time, there is the possibility of the ‘democratisation’ of history in these monuments through the delegation of authority from artist and state to the public, but with democratisation comes the danger of subjective self-indulgence and reassuring spectacle.
Connecting speech act and photography theory with media and memory studies, my book is an original contribution to the current debate on performance and art in public space, re-evaluating both the supposed one-time encounter of performance art and its loss to documentation, and the assumption that contemporary commemoration has democratically turned ‘against itself’ through countermonuments that refuse authority."
My article "Moving Monuments in the Age of Social Media" can be found under "papers."
The conversations were subsequently transcribed based on the form of a theatrical polylogue. Comments by Michael Hampe as a "voice from offstage" as well as short essays were added later on, so that the conversation is happening on several temporal layers simultaneously.
I am putting up the first pages and my essay, which the designers put sideways to indicate a different time level as well as the biographies.
Concept and Design
Elektrosmog, Zurich
Marina Brugger
Adeline Mollard
Marco Walser
With
Jürg Berthold
Elisabeth Bronfen
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Mark Jarzombek
Amelia Jones
Pál Kelemen
Elke Krasny
Thomas Y. Levin
Dieter Mersch
Rebecca Schneider
Philip Ursprung
Mechtild Widrich
Nina Zschocke
Peter Zumthor
Edited by Mechtild Widrich and Andrei Pop
I.B. Tauris
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ugliness-The-Non-beautiful-Art-Theory/dp/1780766459/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357420447&sr=8-1
Kathleen McQueen, The Art Book
"City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial is a fascinating insight into Krzysztof Wodiczko’s practice, the political and personal concepts pushing his project forward, and the idea of social responsibility infused in his work. It is a proposal parallel to the World Trade Center Memorial but with the aim of provoking a more active and critical commemoration of the September 11 terrorist attacks, understood in their historical and political context, and in the light of their domestic and international fallout.
Drawing his main argument from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Wodiczko imagines a memorial that is at once utopian and continuous with the concrete realities of the post-9/11 climate of fear permeating the Western world. It is a passionate attempt at readdressing the narratives of closure, hostility and terror, through a memorial that encourages open, critical and democratic discourse. The resulting City of Refuge is a memorial in action: on one hand an ongoing critique of a passive remembering of the attack and an investigation into the deeper causes of ‘terror’, and on the other a visionary and ambitious public art project in New York, reckoning with the catastrophe and its political implications in terms of a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’.
New and unpublished hand-drawn sketches and digital montages animate the text, creating a vivid picture of memory at work. Wodiczko’s project is complemented by a concentration on learning and proactive programs of engagement, encouraging new and informed practical initiatives, paving the way to a less unjust world. The book is supported by text from leading scholars in a variety of disciplines: Mark Jarzombek, Daniel Bertrand Monk, Lisa Saltzman, Kirk Savage, Andrew Shanken and Mechtild Widrich. Their contributions constitute a forum published alongside Wodiczko’s text, ensuring an engaging and timely debate."
Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aesthetics-of-ugliness-9781472568878/#sthash.ABAx8SlQ.dpuf
Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.”
Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/materiales-performativos-y-conmemoracion-activista/202002/
I discuss some of my most recent research topics , such as the role of social networks in the construction of the public sphere and in commemoration, the environmentally conscious use of materials for the construction of objects and the role of "care" regarding monuments as a manifestation of links between citizens and responsibility with history.
https://www.revistaarcadia.com/arte/articulo/la-participacion-y-la-arquitectura-estan-interrelacionadas/202008/
Monument debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century, turning almost entirely on questions of who is represented and by whom, might benefit from considering questions of how and with what material resources first raised in the context of post-WWII commemoration of the Holocaust and other traumatic events. The involvement of audiences in the memorial’s physical substance, entering its spaces and otherwise performing acts of commemoration rather than just looking upon public art meant to broadcast an ideal official history, has been central to the most durable memorials of the last half century, and is given a particularly radical turn by artist interested in justice and restitution. In Colombia, Doris Salcedo has taken the very fabrication of a memorial space—made from surrendered FARC firearms by women who had suffered in the war in cathartic acts of hammering sheet metal—as a performative process making commemoration physical. The same phenomena can be observed spontaneously in acts of public imagination directed at more conventional memorial objects, such as the Korean Statue for Peace, whose bronze girl commemorates the victims of sexual exploitation during WWII is clothed by anonymous contemporary Koreans. The task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility.
history construction through social media; there is no doubt
about this. Monuments are already a mediation that reshapes constructions of past events for the present. Real-time digital documentation makes possible different levels of engagement, resistance, and re-mediation, on the side of production and later in the many layers of reception, in various (often newly constructed) public spheres, which are of course not less regulated. How do artists take into account this social media reality,
how to understand social engagement and performative interaction as monuments or with monuments, and how do we need to understand site in such a situation? I start with a project by Cai Guo-Qiang, discuss the current state of site-specificity, how site relates to the debate around Confederate Monuments, to then dive into a discussion of artist Alexandra Pirici.
Through analysis of VALIE EXPORT’s series Body Configurations and its use in the film Invisible Adversaries, this article historicizes the body as material from the standpoints of mediatization, photographic reproduction, and retrospective artistic modification. The structural analyses of power in the writings of Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze, as well as feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, are illuminated through EXPORT’s practice, essentially in a contemporary context of expanded performance art.
Dieser Vortrag stammt aus einem grösseren Forschungvorhaben, das sich mit dem gegenwärtigen Zusammenhang zwischen nationalpolitischer Selbstrepräsentation, Verweigerung von Nationsbildern und deren Rekonstruktion im Rahmen des prognostizierten Zerfalls nationaler Agenden durch die Globalisierung beschäftigt.
Die National Gallery, Washington DC (1941/78), das Nationalmuseum für zeitgenössische Kunst Bukarest (2004), und die Nationalgalerie Singapur (2015) stehen für drei Momente und Orte der Globalisierung: Kulturliberale Weltmacht im Kalten Krieg, postkommunistische Identitätskonstruktion, und postkoloniale südostasiatische Handelsmacht. Die formale Konvergenz der drei Kunsträume besteht in der Anlehnung an oder Umnutzung von klassizistischer, für die jeweilige nationale Geschichte bedeutsame, Monumentalarchitektur unter Einsatz von neo-modernistischem Glas. Dessen angebliche formale Transparenz bzw. Neutralität, die zum Standardrepertoire einer globalisierten Firmenarchitektur gehört, wird zur Rahmung, Abgrenzung, oder Bewahrung der historischen Struktur, aber auch zur Oberfläche, an der in der Gegenwart ein neues Bild der Geschichte konstruiert wird.
Vortrag anlässlich der Tagung des Verbandes österreichischer KunsthistorikerInnen "Räume der Kunstgeschichte, November 2013, Museum für Angewandte Kunst Wien
Published in 2016 by Hatje/Cantz in Kunstmuseum Basel. New Building, ed. by Bernhard Mendes Bürgi. There is a German version as well, which I hope to upload soon.
A text taking one of architecture's most theorised materials, glass, to look at urban interventions by contemporary artists (VALIE EXPORT, Monica Bonvicini) and their use of its various features and connotations: voyeurism, exhibition, reflection,
First presented at the AAH conference in Belfast in 2007.
The catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the German National Library. It is bilingual - please go to page 179 for the English version of the text.
https://chicagoartistscoalition.org/artists/emilio-rojas
The text was republished for a show at the Instituto Mexico in Madrid in 2020.
There is an English Version of the book--get in contact with me if you need it."
The controversial Lueger monument in Vienna is being artistically redesigned: the planned imbalance fits with Austria's mental landscape. Hopefully the discussion about renaming the square will continue.
New York: Palgrave, 2017 in Public Art Dialogue, 2019
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3172
"
"Thoughtfully edited by Mark Jarzom-bek and Mechtild Widrich, City of Refuge creates the type of open debate theproposed memorial is intended to offer."
On the Making and Unmaking of Public Memory
Monday, October 23 2017 | 4:30 p.m.
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave.
With Lucia Allais, Romy Crawford, Patrick Crowley, Christine Mehring, W.J.T. Mitchell, Kirk Savage, and Mechtild Widrich (organiser)
"Recent confrontations over memorials have highlighted the true nature of monuments as acts of power. Proposals to take down, modify, or replace these statues confirm that monuments are as much about the present as they are about the past. But what is the best way to address these historical objects? Should out-of-date or potentially offensive monuments always be removed? Or are there ways that monuments can persist in their location but be contextualized by didactic exposition or artistic intervention so that they resonate with the present?
During this period when we are reconsidering how we make and unmake commemorative objects, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the University of Chicago are hosting a roundtable discussion to investigate how public life is tangled up with the histories of public art.
The panelists will take a historical and global perspective on the topic, presenting multiple examples for how people have responded to the tension between a changing politic and an inanimate symbol at different times and from different locations. The roundtable discussion will be followed by a moderated exchange among participants and members of the audience. Refreshments will be provided.
September 30th, 2015 / Chicago
November 18th, 2015 / New York
A two-city symposium on the occasion of the inaugural Chicago Architectural Biennial presented by the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Panel 1, Chicago (SAIC):
"Death and Afterlife of the Post-Industrial City"
organized by Mechtild Widrich (SAIC) and Martino Stierli (MoMA)
Wednesday, September 30th, 4.30-6.00pm
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
SAIC Ballroom, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603
free and open to the public
https://saic.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=22d021c9-ae74-463c-826b-f4ef146e4fb3&v=1/embed_player?iframe=True
Abstract
The rhetoric of a post-industrial (and post-ideological) society is already a half-century old, but as phenomena like the Chicago Architecture Biennial show, the challenges of articulating narratives of growth and crisis in a metropolis that is no longer primarily a factory town have not declined in complexity. If anything, global networks of trade and tourism expose the limitations of the biologistic imagery of revival and decay, which relies implicitly on a theory of progress or of quasi-natural cycles. This panel invites experts in international modernism, urbanism and race theory, and historic preservation, some of whom themselves practitioners in urban space, to reflect on the realities and the fictions of the post-industrial metropolis as it turns outward.
Shiben Banerji, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mabel Wilson, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Mechtild Widrich, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sponsored by the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Eikones Institute (Basel), with additional support from the Schapiro Center for Research and Collaboration and the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at SAIC.
Panel 2, New York (MoMA):
“Going Global? The Art-Education-Speculation Complex”
organized by Martino Stierli (MoMA) and Mechtild Widrich (SAIC)
November 18, 2015, 6pm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6VQy_saP0s
Abstract
The public face of leading American (and some European) museums and universities has in the past decade increasingly become an extraterritorial one: NYU has branches in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and the financial center of gravity of the art world (not mention architecture) is steadily shifting eastward. But this speculative growth has also brought controversy, ranging from labor disputes to issues of free speech and collaboration with repressive regimes. What roles do individual academics, museum professionals, and architects play in the minefield of global commerce and publicity? Do innovations like the Chicago Architecture Biennial, with its seemingly effort to shift attention west and indeed, into the past (Chicago as great modernist city, as well as site of reclamation), work against or merely manifest a new facet of global capitalism?
speakers to include:
Sarah Herda, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago
Jacques Herzog, Architect, Herzog & de Meuron, Basel
Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mechtild Widrich, Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Eikones Institute (Basel).
Saturday, February 2, 2013
9:30am – 5:00pm
Book project, published May 2016 (eds. Philip Ursprung, Mechtild Widrich, Jürg Berthold -- Zurich: Sternberg Press) -- see under "books"
Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, CH-8001 Zürich
A book edited by Philip Ursprung, Mechtild Widrich and Jürg Berthold, will be forthcoming in early 2014.
Presence, signifying both immediacy and being someplace at a particular moment, is one of the most controversial terms in contemporary culture and politics. The visual arts and philosophy in particular have seen much controversy about the various claims (positive and negative) related to concepts ranging from neurobiology to deconstruction. Even though the latter has shaped cultural discourse since the late 1960s, from today’s point of view it seems doubtful that we can dispense with the concept of presence too easily. Certain questions persist: how do we describe consciousness, experience, and temporality with reference to our bodies and the surrounding world? Can we understand and communicate these relations without falling into a false sense of security?
Scholars and practitioners from philosophy, art, architecture, performance studies, and music will discuss this contested term in several public roundtables.
This workshop is open to the public. No registration necessary.
Idea and concept: Philip Ursprung, Mechtild Widrich
Organized by the Chair for the History of Art and Architecture, Philip Ursprung, ETH Zürich
Further information: www.ursprung.arch.ethz.ch
Program
9:30-11:00 Welcome and Introduction by Philip Ursprung and Mechtild Widrich
Roundtable 1
- Amelia Jones, McGill University, Montreal
- Rebecca Schneider, Brown University, Providence
- Mechtild Widrich, ETH Zürich
- Carey Young, artist, London
Coffee Break
11:30—13:00 Roundtable 2
- Michael Hampe, ETH Zürich
- Mark Jarzombek, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
- Thomas Levin, Princeton University
- Nina Zschocke, ETH Zürich
Lunch Break
14:00-15:30 Roundtable 3
- Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zürich
- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University
- Dieter Mersch, University of Potsdam
- Isabel Mundry, University of Applied Arts Zürich / University of Music and Performing Arts Munich
- Philip Ursprung, ETH Zürich
- Peter Zumthor, Architect, Chur
Coffee Break
16:00-17:00 Open Discussion
"""
The seminar’s primary subject comprises the monumental memorial works dedicated to events Jasenovac, photo: Damil Kalogjerafrom World War II. These monuments can take very different forms and resist any uniform definition. The most ambitious memorializing projects may incorporate numerous structures of varying purposes, including cultural and regional centres (e.g. the Memorial Centre in Kolašin or the Monument at Petrova Gora) or make sweeping changes to the landscape (e.g. the well-marked and well-ordered system of paths for strolling and recreation that constitute the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship in Ljubljana). Today especially, it seems, we are fascinated by monumental objects of extraordinary dimensions that tend toward very purified forms or abstraction and that are situated in remote nature (e.g. the monuments in Tjentište and on Mrakovica Peak on Mt. Kozara). The tradition of building such monuments is very much alive even today, only the ideological principles behind their creation are different (e.g. the Memorial Park in Teharje and the not-yet-completed Monument to the Victims of All Wars in Ljubljana).
Another very impressive chapter of Yugoslav art can be seen in the former country’s diverse performance-art practices. Yugoslav performance artists (such as Marina Abramović, the OHO group, Sanja Iveković, and others) were well informed and very well connected internationally; important foreign representatives of this art form (such as Gina Pane, Ana Mendieta, Joseph Beuys, and Walter De Maria) also came to Yugoslavia on visits or for art events. While it is extremely difficult to find a common denominator in Yugoslav performance art, it eventually acquired the general label of an explicitly political art. In relation to our topic, two points seem interesting: first, a number of key performance artists came from the families of prominent state officials or personages in post-war Yugoslavia, and, second, this fact is explicitly underscored in their biographies.
The juxtaposition of monumental memorial projects and performance art may seem unusual – at first glance they have nothing in common. The differences in their media, their intentions, and their audiences are all too apparent. But analysis also reveals a number of convergences and similarities: both practices were at their height at practically the same time; both contain strong aspects of ritual and very actively include the body; both forms possess a great ability to stir intense emotions and establish identity; and both reach for extremes in ways that are entirely calculated and deliberate.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia, the World War II monuments often became targets of verbal and physical attacks, but in recent years a more positive fascination with these works has been persistently on the rise. Maybe, for many, the fascination comes from the monuments’ extraordinary appearance, which at times works in connection with a Romantic delight in socialist ruins. Some, however, are puzzled by how it was possible to establish modernist principles on such a mass scale and achieve such remarkable results specifically in the practice of public monumental memorials, which was generally not inclined toward the broad use of consistently implemented modernist methods – and this in a time and place that today is often labelled totalitarian. Given that the commissioners of such works were as much “responsible” for them as the artists were, the question is: why did they act as they did?
Beti Žerovc
Beti Žerovc, editor; organizers: Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory
This talk, given at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong in November 2015, discusses my research on the role of contemporary art in relationship to national and global agendas, showing how from my first book on the intersection of performance and monuments I move to my current research on national museums of contemporary art. The focus is on the National Gallery Singapore, heritage, monument making, and the positioning of history. Please excuse the Jet-lag.
http://www.aaa.org.hk/Programme/Details/738
Related essays on this page are "Babeltürme" (in German), based on a lecture in Vienna in 2013, focussing more on the architecture of the National Gallery Singapore, Bucharest and Washington DC., and the essay in Art Journal (summer 2016) "The Naked Museum. Art, Urbanism and Global Positioning in Singapore."
http://www.mg-lj.si/en/events/1442/lectures-mechtild-widrich/
Performative Monuments
Mechtild Widrich
My lecture argues the conceptual significance of performance, and of a performative model of art, to the revival of the monument in the wake of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the fall of the Eastern bloc. I argue that the centrality of performance to public art in general rests not on its ephemerality or anti-authoritarian rhetoric, but on its power to build interpersonal bonds both personal and social. This can be seen most dramatically in some classic works of 60s performance that are firmly part of history, though they never literally took place in public space. The collusion of photography and linguistic accounts to produce these events is directly applicable to the experiential, non-celebratory, spectator-oriented monuments of the past forty years. After all, these monuments are not so much made for survivors and perpetrators, as for generations of Europeans (and Americans, and increasingly elsewhere in the world) who did not personally experience the traumas they recount. This they do by eliciting social commitments, whether in the form of signatures, acts of perambulating, or promises to remember: they do not, as the dominant subjectivist model has it, get us to ‘remember’ things we’ve never seen. Because of its socially-distributed structure, the monument, whether it continues to flourish or declines in prominence in our increasingly future-centered global society, is relevant to all contemporary art.