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The monument debates of the past decade, together with concerns over systemic injustice, extraction economies, and ecological disaster, as well as phenomena of global migrations and tourism, and the interleaving of live and mediated images and experience on social media, have given rise to new practices of public art and commemoration. Artists often strive to represent not specific events, persons, or points of agreement, but vast contentious problems—for publics at home and abroad, on the ground and online. A new site-specificity and media-friendly approaches to conveying it, sometimes via objects, sometimes through ‘transparent’ photographic mediums, come to the fore in recent monumental art, but also in debates about what to do with older monuments and architecture in urban space, particularly when these are the products of terror that require removal, modification, or other forms or recontextualization. Taking case studies ranging from Chicago and Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest, and Hong Kong, in media ranging from marble and glass to cardboard boxes, graffiti, and the re-enactment of historical documents, the book argues that history is being materialized by contemporary artists and activists in a register that harks back to the engaged realism of nineteenth-century art, updated to do justice both to embodied experiences of caring, and also to vaster, less tangible systems of power and information.
.1 ]. Why is it that monuments in particular are so contested and how did monument activism become a global cause? We could point to the speed of information and the connection between various movements on social media and in the news, but this in turn needs explaining: namely why monuments are so prevalent on social media. It is their occupation of space that sparks the attention. As monuments are situated in public or semi-public space, their realization must be negotiated with whoever has the power to decide their use
social media, we need to think beyond a firm presence or absence of specificity: does specificity multiply or settle, and what does it have to offer the public sphere in our mediated society? Given the recent struggles over the visibility of previously marginalized histories, and attempts to reorganize, dismantle, or reinforce monumental presence on the ground, is there a way to figure out how the ever-expanding access off-site plays into actual access to the public sphere? Can we fold these questions and
The exhibition's opening coincided with the shock election of Donald Trump as President in the United States. The Daily Mirror featured Vaucher's image (see Figure 8.11 ), Oh America! on its front cover, having been alerted to its widespread adoption as a meme on social media platforms. The publicity this generated meant the gallery incidentally received an added influx of visitors. Figure 8.11 Gee Vaucher
This chapter presents the rise of the avant-garde milieu of designers in Tokyo, which revolutionised visual and material culture beginning in the 1960s and continues to impact it in the present. This milieu included designers such as Ishioka Eiko and Tanaka Ikkō (graphic design), Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo (fashion design), Kuramata Shirō and Uchida Shigeru (interior and product design), and Andō Tadao and Isuzaki Arata (architecture). These designers all made decisions and created artefacts that radically altered and reshaped the course of Japanese design history. The development of their critical design is presented in the context of the aesthetic, economic, social, and political forces operating during this period and is linked to the rise of critical theories. Moreover, this chapter presents the development of social media and the rich working relations and collaborations among these designers and between them and members of the artistic avant-garde active during these years.
During the lockdowns of the COVID-19 crisis, every middle-class home became an office, adopting the same routines that projectarians have practised for decades. The projectarian will often transform a home into an office, with help of personal computers, mobile devices, spreadsheets, text editors, social media interfaces, email clients and newsletters. These technologies are indispensable components of the → assemblages that sustain ultra-mobile and scattered lifestyles. In March 2020, they formed an essential infrastructure for most of the
For his project Temps mort [Dead Time] (2007–9, published in 2014), French-Algerian photographer Mohamed Bourouissa works secretly (because it is against the law in France) with his friend ‘Al’ who is in prison and taking photographs of the inside, which he sends to Bourouissa with his text messages alongside. The subsequent photobook version of this project, published by Kamel Mennour in 2014, represents an extraordinary transformation of the original exhibition of the photographs and videos (online and in the Kamel Mennour gallery in Paris). Put together with blank pages, selective quotations from Al’s elliptical text-messages and a highly stylised blurring of the images in the manner of Thomas Ruff, Bourouissa’s photobook Temps mort plays out the ‘dead time’ that being in prison represents. It shows the cryptic requests from Bourouissa to his friend, with the dates in bold, and selects images, instructions, hesitations and thoughts, from the 300 messages sent by Al. The suggestion is not only that Temps mort is a collectivist (rather than a simply collaborative) photo-text; but also, that, as part of a social and political commitment, it explores ways in which prisoners can remain in contact with the outside world, and can be mentally present while temporarily absent. Furthermore, Bourouissa’s (and Al’s?) photobook points to new options for today’s photobook design, in the era of social media and mobile phones.
mainly in the United Kingdom, Western Europe and North America. Some of her findings – for example that buyers base their decisions on information they receive via social media (72 per cent), reading book reviews online (66 per cent), visiting bookshops (59 per cent) and friend recommendations (56 per cent) – seem biased by the fact that the research was only done online, and via interest groups for photography and photobooks on social media. Another finding was that 38 per cent of photobook buyers do not purchase at
another rush of overproduction, shifting their activities to social media and channels of e-communication. Moving fast, they → capture and → trawl ideas, reputations, contacts and connections. This penchant for multitasking embodies structural tendencies of the network to expand, which is the cause and reason for the proliferation and temporariness of projects: the project is a transient form (…) adjusted to a network world by multiplying connections and proliferating links, the succession of
. 2013 . ‘Late Print Culture's Social Media Revolution: Authorship, Collaboration and Copy Machines’. Authorship 1.4 . www.authorship.ugent.be/article/view/792/806 [Accessed 3 March 2017]. Eisenstein , Elizabeth L. 2010 . Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West