Transformations on the Margin: Jack Smith’s Vital and Difficult Art

Transformations on the Margin: Jack Smith’s Vital and Difficult Art

Sanya Osha

Jack Smith was a visionary American filmmaker, photographer and avant-garde performance artist. Smith was able to get his co-travelers to believe in the transformative dimensions of his singular art events, adopting lowly, discarded film materials, in other words trash, marginal people and seemingly marginal subjects, to provide the grounds for transmogrification, with almost incredible results. Smith’s life and work demonstrate that a condition of absolute lack is not necessarily to be equated with inadequacy. An ostensibly deprived state can in fact be inspiring occasion to reconsider the meaning of art, the role of the artist and artistic valuation.

2021 Summer Issue - ReBuilding 2

2021 Summer Issue - ReBuilding 2

Urmila Mohan
Editorials

ReBuilding 2 continues themes of the Spring Issue, relating processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things in human lives. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, the question of how we rebuild and remake is in urgent need of consideration. The articles, interviews and essays in this issue encourage us to reflect on the religious and secular beliefs and practices that cohere communities as they cope, create, resist, protest and move forward.

Damage as Opportunity: The Art of Winnie Van Der Rijn

Damage as Opportunity: The Art of Winnie Van Der Rijn

Urmila Mohan

Winnie van der Rijn is a multi-disciplinary artist of opportunity–collecting materials, experimenting with techniques and pursuing her curiosities. Her art practice includes textiles, sculpture, collage and collaboration (which she considers its own art form). A life long learner, Winnie graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 with a BA in Sociology. She has studied printmaking, sculpture, metalsmithing and Marxist theory. In addition, Winnie has explored weaving, machine knitting, bookmaking, altars, exploding picture boxes, automata, shoe making, millinery, sewing, fusing, stamping, metal weaving, resin, riveting, precious metal clay and mixed media. She is wildly curious about how things are made.

Archaeology’s Destructive Legacy: Burning it All Down to Better Support Scholars of Color

Archaeology’s Destructive Legacy: Burning it All Down to Better Support Scholars of Color

Nadhira Hill
Articles

This essay examines the ways in which (Classical) archaeology’s inherently destructive nature is deeply intertwined with and informed by its destructive foundations. Despite the traditional prevalence of white scholars in our syllabi, in our conference panels, and in our institutions, archaeologists of color have made it exceedingly clear in the last several months that this is our discipline, too. By juxtaposing the destructive natures of both archaeological method and the discipline at large, the author suggests how professors can apply principles of archaeological fieldwork to their mentorship of students of color.

Handling Textiles: Rebuilding Object Lives in Museums

Handling Textiles: Rebuilding Object Lives in Museums

Emily A. Levick
Articles

Textiles are imbued with the multifaceted and complex values, beliefs, and ideals of the cultures in which they were produced and consumed. They have been used as clothing, shelter, and ornament, and are often remade and repurposed throughout their ‘lives’, constantly acquiring new layers of meaning along the way. As such, they are ideal media for museums attempting to widen their audience reach and more effectively represent world history and culture. How can museums rebuild the stories and lives of textiles in exhibits? This essay explores the possibility of building connections between visitors and textiles through multisensory engagement and, in doing so, suggests the remaking of the museum experience.

Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol

Breaking Down Colston: Destruction and Transformation in London and Bristol

Lindsay P. Crisp
Articles, Peer Reviewed

This article investigates articulations of material and cultural affects in the deplinthing of the Bristol memorial to Edward Colston in June 2020, and Michael Landy’s destruction of his belongings in the art event Break Down in February 2001. In Break Down, as in the deplinthing of the Colston memorial, destruction changes and expands the plane upon which objects are intelligible by bringing to our attention their material composition. The protesters’ action in Bristol and Landy’s project of systematic dismantling and granulation differ profoundly in epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. However, both events confront us with the fact that matter is never entirely ‘gone.’

Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past

Monument Lab Town Hall: Shaping the Past

Lillia McEnaney
Reviews

In October 2020, Monument Lab hosted their annual town hall, “Shaping the Past.” Through conversations between memory works, artists, and interdisciplinary scholars, “Shaping the Past” asked questions surrounding the future of monuments and monumentality, setting the stage for the future(s) of public space, artistic and curatorial activism, and community-building in the wake of 2020.

Seeing the Lost Mural: How Damage and Restoration Inform Close Looking

Seeing the Lost Mural: How Damage and Restoration Inform Close Looking

Eliza West
Articles

The 110-year-old Lost Mural, damaged by almost 30 years behind a false wall, is a patchwork of tones – some areas carefully cleaned by art conservators, other still dirty and showing chipped and missing paint. In this state, it exists simultaneously as an example of damage and restoration, and as both a significant cultural artifact and a work of religious art. This article shows how the conservation process and the practice of close looking allow us to better understand each of these aspects of the Lost Mural.

2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

2021 Spring Issue - ReBuilding

Urmila Mohan
Editorials

ReBuilding relates processes of damage and restoration, loss and healing, and the never-ending making and doing of things in human lives. In light of the pandemic, and historical and socio-cultural issues that long pre-dated 2020, the question of how we rebuild and remake is in urgent need of consideration. The articles, interviews and essays in this issue encourage us to reflect on the religious and secular beliefs and practices that cohere communities as they cope, create, resist, protest and move forward.

Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood

Colorism, Castism, and Gentrification in Bollywood

Rebecca Peters
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Colorism, prejudicial attitudes towards people with darker skin tones, like all -isms, creates a toxic environment for anyone who does not fall into the ideal category. When major media sources, like Bollywood in India, reinforce the oppressive attitude of discrimination based on skin color, it adds to the normalization of colorism and resulting social hierarchies and stigma. I argue that Bollywood’s desires for respectability among upper class Indian and diasporic audiences emboldens its attitudes about class, caste, and color, contributing significantly to the power and reach of colorism.

Civil Religion in Turkey: The Unifying and Divisive Potential of Material Symbols

Civil Religion in Turkey: The Unifying and Divisive Potential of Material Symbols

Patrycja Hala Saçan
Articles

Civil religion refers to citizens’ devotion and loyalty to the nation and state. Like other religions, it needs symbols that bond citizens to different notions and experiences whether non-tangible forms (political beliefs, the law, or a constitution) or tangible (flags, images, statues, and spaces). Visual representations of these forms can unite people around common values, goals, and history. This paper aims to widen our understanding of the importance of material objects in developing and sustaining national bonds in Turkey where objects and spaces have long helped to form and maintain Turkish identity, and mobilize and unite people.

Cecil John Rhodes: ‘The Complete Gentleman’ of Imperial Dominance

Cecil John Rhodes: ‘The Complete Gentleman’ of Imperial Dominance

Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Articles

Incompleteness engenders an understanding of resilient colonialism epitomised by Cecil Rhodes’ monuments and statues in Southern Africa. It draws on Tutuola’s metaphorical ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and the lessons on being and becoming from Tutuola’s skull to remind us that Rhodes’ legacy still suffers from illusions of completeness and a denial of debt and indebtedness. The call for humility and alertness to the imagined dream of a rainbow nation demands that South Africans stop learning the wrong lessons from Rhodes as exclusionary articulations of belonging informed by superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

Jessica Hughes and Urmila Mohan
Curatorial Essays

A curatorial essay accompanying the digital exhibit “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques” on a body of work by the French artist Claire Le pape, inspired by the frescos of the Italian painter Giotto. This essay places us on a voyage of discovery, to see color as a passionate muse for artists across widely differing centuries, worlds and materials. Through Le Pape’s video testimonials and intricate tapestries woven out of fishing twine we see how color and religion overlap to create spaces of immersive and transcendental experience. Le Pape’s series of weavings called ‘Giottoesques’ showcase the ability of colorful materials to sensorially evoke the numinous as well as reference the artist’s own religiosity or spirituality.

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