Artistic Practices: Expecting the Unexpected
By Donna L. Clovis
A single bulb casts light in a darkened lecture hall of Tisch School of the Arts in New York City during the 2007 Interna­tional Art Symposium, an academic con­ference on global art practice. Upon closer examination, the sculpture-like body lies still across a table with hair sprawled and bloodied hands. Bent over and half nude from the waist down, it is a body in perfor­mance. One of the few artists appearing at academic art conferences any more, Don­na Clovis stands up after fifteen minutes of silent performance and lectures about the importance of art in communities and spaces, such as conferences, where artists are now forgotten.
Gerald Pryor, artist and New York Univer­sity Professor, uses his nude body as a mea­sure of the outside world in a performance called, Mason Twine, A Body Measure, at the Grace Exhibition Space in Brook­lyn, New York. The mason twine, a chord historically used for measuring objects, is connected to Pryor. The mason twine is cut and gathered to create drawings on the wall, while live video feed is projected during and after the performance.
“I did things that I didn’t know I would do,” said Pryor, “Bringing the surveyor tape into the audience and wrapping them was an unexpected part of the perfor­mance.”
Winner of two NEA Awards, a New York Foundation grant, and a Gottlieb Founda­tion grant, Pryor has performed, exhibited, curated and taught internationally for over 30 years in countries like China, South Ko­rea, Italy, England, and the United States.
Artist Lyle Ashton Harris incorporates installation, video, and photography in his work with himself as subject. His identity-based photographs of the 1990’s explore race, gender, and sexuality through strat­egies like masquerade, camp humor, and the family snapshot. Of his recent work, Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote: “Like most really stimulating art, Mr. Harris’s eludes clean readings. It is
self-portraiture that is not quite self-por­traiture, based on fiction that is not quite fiction.” His work has been included at the Whitney Museum and will be part of the upcoming Venice Biennale in Italy in 2007.
tional installation inspired by the curatorial strategies of Fred Wilson, a creator of new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections by non-traditional pairings and groupings of objects. His installations lead viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning.
The term transdiaspora, created by Chow-dhry, is divorced from essentialist notions of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity, lend­ing itself to experimental re-interpreta­tions. Transdiaspora includes artists that claim diasporic status based on migration into the United States as well as Ameri­can artists who have traveled outside of the United States living in other countries as part of the American diaspora abroad. Lesbian and gay populations may be dia-sporized due to social exile and ostraciza-tion based upon the writings of scholars such as Alan Sinfield, Gayatri Gopinath and Cindy Patton. Transdiasporic posi­tions also include survivors of violence who experience internal exile resulting in self-estrangement. It is currently argued that online communities are a highly cohe­sive but a non-traditional diasporic forma­tion as well.
The exhibit has been selected by the Na­tional Women’s Studies Association to travel from Wisconsin in April 2007 to Chicago, Illinois for the annual conference in June 2007.
Nowadays, artists can be found anywhere, anytime, in real or virtual time and space transforming original perceptions of art. Artistic practices and communities are changing quickly and globally, blurring old boundaries into new unexpected ideas and works reflecting the individuality and experimentation of art by the artists.
This blurring of boundary, artistic practice unexpected by the artist in the moment of performance, in unexpected spaces, in portraiture, not quite portraiture based on fiction not quite fiction, represents artistic practices that challenge the norm.
The Transdiaspora
Curator Pritika Chowdhry of the Univer­sity of Wisconsin, brings together twenty-two artists in an exhibition called, Visceral Mappings: Transdiasporic Art Practices. Here, artist Megan Katz uses latex and condom to cover fruits placed on a long table. Artist Wendy Mirnov creates teeth-lined porcelain bowls and artist Hyunah Kim makes ruptured skin porcelain bowls set around as place settings. Artist Alice M. Unger places ceramics torsos clothed in silk corsets and seats them on high stools around the table at place settings. The exhibit conceptualizes a non-tradi-