Canadians largely perceive themselves as middle class. Canadians love the middle, not just because it’s safe but also because it’s inherently democratic and fair. But…if you become too different from the others, little bells collectively go ding-ding-ding, and you will be shunned and mocked. Your only option will be to leave the country. – Douglas Coupland, Souvenir of Canada 2, p. 126.

Canada is a geographically and demographically vast country. With 9,984,670 square kilometers of land and water,  an estimated population of 33,441,300 sprawled over ten provinces and three territories,  with over a hundred non-official languages spoken by said population,  the chances of crafting a universal Canadian experience are slim. This is a mere sample of indicators that speak to the difference and diversity of Canadians; a sample of indicators that proves the futility of arriving at an agreed-upon package that constitutes Canadian identity. Certainly, with as much difference as exists in Canada, each resident is privy to a unique experience of their country—depending on their age, ethnic origin, economic background, or place of residence; Canada has the potential to be many places at once. Despite this, the fruitless search for a collective Canadian experience is continually sought out. Erin Manning, in her deconstruction of a Canadian beer commercial, notes that, “the voicing of a nationalist sentiment…has been reiterated throughout Canadian history,”¹ and this seems to be a fact of Canadian life that artist and author Douglas Coupland actively indulges in. In his attempt to construct an anthology of authentic Canadian-ness, Coupland, in his books Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2, instead produces an exclusive view of Canada predicated on his inclusion within the dominant culture, and his location within an economic privilege that many Canadians do not have access to.

In an attempt to differentiate Canada from any other country in the world, Coupland uses Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2 to outline an “authentic” Canadian experience with the use of photography, ephemera, and text vignettes. The appearance and format of these books are important elements of their overall communication. Both books are highly polished, minimally designed, and, based on their identical production, are meant to be collected as a set. Their short, anecdotal musings are interspersed with images that represent, to the author, the products, places, materials, environments and experiences that, supposedly, all Canadians can relate to. Coupland often uses the phrase, “Only Canadians ever know that,”² (or some similar iteration,) at once implying that all Canadians know the obscure tidbits he speaks of, and that their knowledge is automatic by virtue of being Canadian. The images in both books are taken from a number of sources: some of them are still-life photographs that Coupland has produced as part of his artistic practice; some are picturesque landscapes from a variety of archive sources; some are reproductions of artworks that reference Canadian experience; others still are ad-like photographs of Canadian commercial goods. Each image contributes to the atmosphere of Coupland’s book—an atmosphere that would perhaps be quite different had someone else compiled it. Aside from Coupland’s pull as a living icon of Canadian literature, the books themselves as meticulous, professional products are easily touted as an authoritative perspective on Canadian experience. Their sheen makes them downright believable. But there is an enormous disparity between the content of the books—the Canada Coupland describes—and the experience of so many other Canadians who have not been exposed to the same privilege that Coupland has. This disparity is most aptly expressed in Coupland’s use of language when discussing First Nations.

Canada’s history of colonialism, and the subsequent (and continual) marginalization of First Nations populations within Canada, appears to be lost on Coupland who surprisingly uses the language of “us” and “them” to differentiate between the dominant culture (“us”) and First Nations populations (“them”). In fact, this divide (in addition to an economic one, which I will explore later,) is how Souvenir of Canada begins—setting an exclusionary tone for the rest of the series and identifying his audience (“us”) as members of the dominant culture. (Does this mean that First Nations or immigrant readers cannot relate to a Canadian identity or experience?) In “Baffin Island,” an appropriately landscape-themed vignette, and the first one in the book, Coupland recounts his numerous journeys by airplane across Canada’s “extreme northerly spots,”³ which he considers to be disconnected from the rest of the (urbanized) country:

There’s just all of this land down there, blank and essentially uninhabited, no roads or power lines—just land, and maybe a spot of lichen. There are parts of it even the Inuit must look at, shake their heads and shrug in wonder. Down there is the land that time and space forgot. Down there are the First Nations inhabitants—roughly twenty-seven thousand—of Nunavut, a new territory created in 1999.⁴

Coupland describes this region of Canada as a mass of landscape that is somehow not actually Canadian—so far removed from the “functioning society” of Canada that it can hardly be considered a relevant part of the country. He even deems the northern land forgotten by space and time—a supposed void of Canada (is there one?)—and correlates it to the place that the residents of Nunavut call home. “Even the Inuit…” implies that of all Canadians, only the Inuit is adequately qualified to judge uninhabitable terrain. The language and sentiment used by Coupland is alienating not only toward the First Nations population in Canada, but also to Canada’s large immigrant population, which comprises approximately 13 per cent of all Canadians.⁵ A few sentences later, Coupland says, “Do the Inuit visit Canada’s south, see trees and wonder the same thing about us—how can these people live in such a freakish place?”⁶ This remark underlines Coupland’s unapologetic and exclusionary view of a Canadian experience that he attempts to universalize, and reinforces the patronizing attitudes that media has adopted toward the First Nations population since the early twentieth century.

This language of “us” and “them” in the context of Canadian nationalism, belonging and citizenship is particularly problematic in light of Canada’s very recent (and current) history of co-opting First Nations’ material culture in order to create an alluring tourist industry for European visitors and settlers. As recently as 1992 (proving that this is not a problem of the past,) symbols of Native culture have been used by the dominant culture to construct a unified vision of Canada. Daniel Francis, in his book The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, cites numerous examples of this phenomenon, most striking being an ad published in an issue of New York Times Magazine and paid for by the Canadian federal government. The headline read:

“Only in God’s Country could you meet such interesting souls.” A stunning photograph shows two figures, presumably Native people, seated on a sandy beach. They are both wearing large raven’s head masks, brightly painted, with long beaks. In the background, a third figure, carrying a ceremonial drum and wrapped in what appears to be a Chilkoot blanket, emerges from the mist at the water’s edge. Offshore, islands melt into a blue haze.⁷

This co-optation is dangerous not only because it communicates an experience that is, in fact, alien to most Canadians (less than 1% of Canadians identify as First Nations),⁸ but it is problematic in that the federal government, who conceived of the ad, has little First Nations representation within it. Francis believes that the dominant culture (including institutions) in Canada appropriates these symbols in an attempt to resolve their feeling of not belonging. Coupland does not fall into this trap but instead creates a new one. While overall, throughout both books, Coupland avoids using First Nations imagery and symbolism to construct his version of “Canadian-ness,” (although I will present an example where he does this on an employer’s behalf,) he further widens the gap of belonging. Instead of hinting at a feeling of not belonging (or infringing upon a land of which his ancestors were not the original inhabitants,) Coupland does not appear to believe that he and the First Nations population even co-exist in any way worth discussing. Additionally, he seems unaware of the fact that, as Manning puts it, the “propagandistic desire to coin ‘Canadian identity’ once and for all depends on the obfuscation of the history of Canadian nation-building which often continues to be narrated without drawing attention to the extermination and oppression of the native peoples.”⁹ Despite a brief entry including information about the genocide enacted (and being enacted) on First Nations by the dominant culture in a chapter called “Reserves,” Coupland fails to see that his entire Souvenir of Canada project is predicated on and made possible by this shameful facet of Canadian history.

In the “Reserves” vignette, the Native population of Canada is treated as ephemera of a nation instead of as an equal faction of citizenship. “Reserves” is one of the longer entries in the book, and although it includes apt questions about white-Canada’s relationship to “Indians,”¹⁰ it is largely rife with anecdotes that perpetuate the “Imaginary Indian” that Francis describes. An anecdote about a summer job Coupland held designing props for the Pope’s Vancouver visit includes this jarring admission:

In my case, one of the stadium’s…designs was to be a First Nations motif. I was told to mock up one quickly for a meeting, so I invented a fake thunderbird-motif flash sequence. The meeting went well, and a week later I was asked to prepare a flash-card sequence using genuine First Nations imagery. So I began to do research and generated designs.…As the day of the visit neared,…it was finally decided to go with the original fake thunderbird sequence because it looked the most “Indian-y.”¹¹

This design project illustrates the fictional “Indian” that European settlers invented and continue to perpetuate—when authentic Native culture is no longer sufficient for marketing and entertainment, let it be contrived by a white, middle-class designer who was admittedly exposed to very little Canadian history.¹² Coupland may not have learned much about Canadian history, but his experience as a writer and artist has allowed him extensive privileges of travel, and permit him to see Canada through the subjectivity of non-Canadians.

Many of Coupland’s musings about life in Canada are made possible by his economic position and the opportunities granted to him as a well-known cultural producer. Coupland often uses the rest of the world as a barometer of Canada’s “unified” culture, and by contrasting his Canadian experience with his experience in other countries he has visited, he is able to highlight what he believes are Canada’s quirks—a perspective many Canadians are not able to experience and therefore, one that many Canadians cannot share. The median after-tax income of Canadians is just over $23,000 per year,¹³ hovering just barely above the official poverty line.¹⁴ This limiting median bars many Canadians from partaking in activities such as noticing that the Robertson screwdriver is unique to Canada,¹⁵ or observing the differences between Atlantic and Pacific fishing.¹⁶ The Canadian-ness that Coupland describes throughout both books is one unhindered by marginalization and especially financial capacity. Returning to the vignette entitled “Baffin Island,” Coupland blankly outlines his privileged condition. The opening of the book is as follows:

I fly more than most people. On a recent flight to Frankfurt I sat and mapped out my past twenty years and made a count: I’ve flown across Canada a conservative total of fifty-five times, most likely more. And then there have been the times flying not strictly across Canada, but over it—to and from Europe—above Hudson Bay and the Ungava Peninsula, Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island…¹⁷

This show of mobility, in a Canadian-centric way, contributes to the notion of foreign validation described by S.M. Crean in “The Invisible Country,” wherein “Canadian art is good depending on how well it measures up in terms of Art, the art of the grand old imperial centres of Rome, Paris, London, New York and so forth.”¹⁸ Is Coupland an expert on Canada because he can assess it against the rest of the world? Coupland’s evaluative strategy is based heavily on his experiences with non-Canadians;¹⁹ experiences made possible by extensive travel. Indeed, even his experiences with Canadians are made possible by extensive travel—with such a vast amount of ground to cover in traveling across the country, it is likely that many Canadians will rarely visit outside of their home province. Because Coupland is so well traveled, are we obligated to believe him? Does his worldliness make him a better Canadian, or better equip him to describe what being Canadian is like? In reading both editions Souvenir of Canada, readers are expected to take his word for it.

Amongst the pages of Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2, many readers will likely find snippets of text and images that stir a touch of nostalgia. As an image of Canadian-ness, for all Canadians, however, the books largely communicate the experience of an upper-middle-class, white, English-speaking Canadian who has access and status gained by professional achievements. This limited view, touted as an “authentic” Canadian experience, preserves the alienation of marginalized and minority communities throughout Canada; a country whose geography and landscape is vast enough to allow for complex, intercultural interstices, connections, and webs, which Manning notes are “much more compelling.”²⁰ Ultimately, Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada series “perpetuates an exclusionary, racist and gendered locus of enunciation that is well-rehearsed in Canada”²¹ and surely leaves plenty of readers wondering how they fit into the puzzle of Canadian-ness.

Notes:
1 Manning, Erin. “I AM CANADIAN: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape.” Theory and Event. 4:4. 2000. 7.
2 Coupland, Douglas. Souvenir of Canada 2. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004. 29.
3 Coupland, Douglas. “Baffin Island.” Souvenir of Canada. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002. 4.
4 Ibid.
5 This figure is expected to reach 20 per cent by 2017 and does not refer to first-generation-and-beyond Canadians. (“Ethnic diversity and immigration.” Statistics Canada: Canada’s national statistical agency / Statistique Canada : Organisme statistique national du Canada. 14 Mar. 2009 http://www41.statcan.ca/2007/30000/ceb30000_000_e.htm.)
6 Coupland, Douglas. “Baffin Island.” Souvenir of Canada. 5.
7 Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992. 187.
8 “Aboriginal peoples.” Overview 2007. 17 Mar. 2009 http://www41.statcan.ca/2007/10000/ceb10000_000_e.htm.
9 Manning, Erin. “I AM CANADIAN: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape.” 30.
10 After using the term, Coupland asks, “Can we even use the word ‘Indian’ any more?” (Coupland, Douglas. “Reserves.” Souvenir of Canada. 98.)
11 Ibid. 95.
12 Ibid. 7.
13 “Selected Demographic, Cultural, Educational, Labour Force and Income Characteristics (830), Mother Tongue (4), Age Groups (8A) and Sex (3) for the Population of Canada, Provinces, Territories, Census Divisions and Census Subdivisions, 2006 Census – 20% Sample Data.” Census of Canada.
14 “Poverty Lines, 2001.” Canadian Council on Social Development / Le Conseil canadien de développement social. 13 Mar. 2009 .
15 Coupland, Douglas. “Hardware.” Souvenir of Canada 2. 38.
16 –. “Fish.” Souvenir of Canada. 24.
17 –. “Baffin Island.” Souvenir of Canada. 4.
18 Crean, S.M. “The Invisible Country.” Who is Afraid of Canadian Culture? General Publishing Co., 1976. 12.
19 See, particularly, “Canucks?” (7) and “Cheeseheads” (10) in Souvenir of Canada, though nearly every entry includes an anecdote with or about a non-Canadian.
20 Manning, Erin. “I AM CANADIAN: Identity, Territory and the Canadian National Landscape.” 13.
21 Ibid. 69.

Image, from the cover of Souvenir of Canada 2 from here.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Post tags: books, canada, daniel francis, douglas coupland, erin manning, national identity, nationalism, s.m. crean, souvenir of canada

Ray Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity refers to the point in time when machines surpass human consciousness and improve their own design beyond the point of human conception.¹ It may seem like a paranoid theory developed in the wake of rapid technological advancements; a way to explain, if not justify, the ways in which processes of human life are continually being mechanized. But that is too simple. To consider the Singularity is also to consider the capacity of the human body, where it fails, and how it can be designed in a better, more efficient way. To consider the Singularity is also to consider the language we give to functioning and disfuctioning bodies; how language is not attributed to “normal” bodies but is vast in reference to ailing ones. Disfunctioning bodies are blind, disfigured, amputated, and so on. What happens when the emphasis is inverted, when disabilities become opportunities for extra-abilities? If Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s was about extending the scope of art and life, Conceptual art of the future will be about extending the scope of what it is to be human. Performance art has already achieved a certain degree of this, through challenging the limits of the body and using it as the site where art emerges. The era approaching the Singularity, however, will allow for the body to be used as a tool for art making; for using the body as the very mechanism that enables the production of art. Aimee Mullins and Rob Spence represent the re-articulation of disability as an opportunity for creative production that is made possible by a consilience between technological and artistic ingenuity. This paper will outline how their loss of conventional human ability becomes the hinge point for an ability that is unhindered by existing bodily design.

Aimee Mullins uses her disability as an occasion to redefine the usual notions of the aesthetics of the body. Although she had both legs amputated below the knee as an infant, instead of considering the compilation of her body as a condition, or a state of deficiency, Mullins has used art and imagination to develop enhancements to the natural body, most notably as three characters in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle 3. In his Cremaster Cycle series, Barney creates vivid, elaborate and bizarre scenes and narratives that explore the hybridity of the body. David Hopkins argues that perhaps Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is “a crisis of masculinity, tied up with the social shifts arising from women’s empowerment, as endemic to the 1990s. It seems more likely, however, that it dramatizes the desire to transcend human givens, to achieve bio-mechanical syntheses.”² I tend to agree with the latter, and the inclusion of Mullins in the third iteration of the Cremaster Cycle corroborates the desire for—and possibility of—physical enhancement and, perhaps, transcendence.

Mullins’s embodiment of three characters in the Cremaster Cycle 3 is evidence of the physical extension of the body that can occur through “disability.” Without human legs, Mullins’s limbs can take any form that the artist imagines, and in the case of Barney, they take the form of articulated cheetah hinds, a potato and beet garden, and glass. With the exception of the potato and beet garden legs, none of these creative visualizations would be possible with human legs and without digital manipulation. Mullins’s cheetah hinds positively defy the appearance of human legs, with an extra knee that appears backwards, paws that have a far smaller footprint than a human foot, and even a whipping tail. No human legs could be fashioned to look this way. This realm of possibility is especially apparent with the glass legs, which are in fact “optically clear polyurethane,”³ the stuff of bowling balls. Although the legs take human form, their material reveals that no human tibia or fibula is present. They are completely transparent, revealing what is set behind the legs, tracing the movement of the characters around her, even reflecting her own white dress. Mullins recognizes her involvement in the Cremaster Cycle 3 as being the point at which she realized that her “legs could become wearable sculpture,” and when she “started to move away from the need to replicate humanness as the only aesthetic ideal.”⁴ For Mullins, “poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object into the realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand.”⁵ Although the sculptural legs imagined and produced by Barney and Mullins do not take the dematerialized form that is characteristic of Conceptual art (and are obviously manifested as objects), the aim—of widening the scope of understanding and meaning—implies a similar impulse for production. For Mullins, using the possibility of her body is a political act; an act of asserting an identity (and ability) that defies the one assigned to her by popular opinion. The interstices of form, function and aesthetics provide a basis of production for Mullins—neither element should be valued independently but instead work together, overlap, and allow even more realms of possibility to be enacted upon the body.

Toronto-based filmmaker Rob Spence takes a similar approach to disability as Mullins, using it not as a point of deficiency but instead as a site of potential. Having lost his vision in his right eye in a shooting accident when he was 13, Spence was eventually covering his eye with a patch to conceal the disfiguration that his non-functioning eye had developed. After receiving a prosthetic eye that only served an aesthetic purpose, Spence decided to enlist the help of engineers to design a camera that could be implanted into his eye socket, with the capability to transmit data wirelessly.⁶ Calling himself an “Eyeborg,” Spence follows in the footsteps of artists like Stelarc, who believes that the design of the human body is obsolete,⁸ and engineers like Steve Mann, who has long been a proponent of wearable technology.  While placing a video camera in one’s eye has obvious implications regarding surveillance and privacy (and indeed this is an issue Spence hopes to illustrate),⁹ it also extends the capabilities of sight and memory. Because a camera is designed after the inherent function of the eye, Spence is re-articulating not only his physical body by implanting a technological camera into his eye socket, he is also making physical the neurological process of storing memory. Theoretically, if Spence were to keep his eye camera on, recording what he sees for 24 hours a day, he will have essentially designed a flawless memory, without relying on his brain to store and recall moments, conversations, disputes. In the realm of surveillance, this means back up.

The notion of “back up” surveillance has already been explored by Steve Mann as a subversive response to the proliferation of public watching that is enacted by institutions under the guise of preventing crime and terrorism. But it was Spence who envisioned it as an extension of his physical self (rather than as an accessory for his physical self). Coined by Mann as “sousveillance,” or inverse surveillance, the process involves bottom-up surveillance by ordinary citizens who would wear cameras in order to balance the number of surveillance mechanisms that exist in public space. Mann finds the justification for institutional surveillance to be extremely problematic, noting that an open-loop formula drives surveillance:

…without the normal feedback mechanisms that provide important checks and balances. Feedback is the simple process of observability-controllability like we find in a home thermostat. When the homeland gets too hot, the thermostat provides the checks and balances needed to shut off the furnace. But the secret burners under the political pressure cookers have no thermostat—nothing to keep them in a state of equilibrium or balance…¹⁰

It is not privacy that is the cause of the problem. It is not the unphotographed, unfingerprinted, unsurveilled citizens who are to blame, but, rather, it is the larger pressure cooking machinery that needs to be questioned.

By creating his personal experience-record as an Eyeborg, Spence becomes a perpetual sousveiller where the apparatus of recording is actually embedded directly into his physical body. Spence can expand on Mann’s idea of wearable technology precisely because he has an empty eye socket in which to install it. Extending the body in such a way not only addresses the political issues raised by Mann regarding surveillance in the public sphere, but also allows Spence, as an artist, to reinvent the tools of his profession as a documentary filmmaker. The potential allowed by Spence’s disability enables him to transform into a cyborg in a way than an able-bodied person cannot.

One of the anecdotes that Mullins shares during her talk at the TED conference is of a friend who encountered her for the first time since she acquired her new prosthetics that elevated her to a looming 6’1”. After Mullins described how great it was for her prosthetics to allow for variable height, her friend exclaimed, “But it’s not fair!”¹¹ This exchange reveals the tension that able-bodied people feel upon the realization that “disability” means nothing of the sort; that technology and science enable those that are traditionally deemed as lacking, or as having lost, to extend the abilities of their bodies beyond any natural human function.

I believe that an increased cross-disciplinary focus will make a place for itself in the future of Conceptual art, where the overlap of medicine, science, technology and art coalesce to expand our understandings of identity, the potential of the body and conversations about beauty and aesthetics. Concepts of the bionic or robotic body are always pitted against the moral implications of augmenting traditional and romantic notions of the natural body. The latter half of this dichotomy, however, already presupposes that the disabled body is not natural, which is why there is so much vocabulary to define it—to assign it as a difference from the expected forms and functions of a human body. What is challenging about the disabled body as an opportunity for an extra-abled body is that suddenly—and this is what glues people to the romanticism of the natural body—those of us without defects and deformations suddenly become less-abled than the body that can extend itself beyond human capacity.

Notes:

1 Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005: 7.

2 Hopkins, David. After Modern Art, 1945-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000: 245.

3 Mullins, Aimee. “How my legs give me super-powers.” TED Conference. Monterrey, California. Feb. 2009. TED. Mar. 2009. 31 Mar. 2009 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Spence, Rob. The Eyeborg Project. 04 Apr. 2009 http://www.eyeborgproject.com.

7 Birringer, Johannes H. Media & Performance: Along the Border. JHU Press, 1998. 61-62.

8 Mann, Steve. WearComp.org, WearCam.org, UTWCHI, funtain and Steve Mann’s Personal Web Page/research. 02 Apr. 2009 http://wearcam.org/.

9 Ganapati, Priya. “Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket.” Wired Blogs. 4 Dec. 2008. 03 Apr. 2009 http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/eye-spy-filmmak.html.

10 Mann, Steve. “Sousveillance” WearComp.org, WearCam.org, UTWCHI, funtain and Steve Mann’s Personal Web Page/research. 02 Apr. 2009 http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm/.

11 Mullins, Aimee. “How my legs give me super-powers.”

Image: Screenshot of Aimee Mullins’s TED talk.

© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: aimee mullins, disability, ray kurzweil, rob spence, steve mann, the singularity

The Grand Subversion: Gruppo 63 and the Italian Women’s Movement

A rupture in artistic, political or social practice cannot emerge independent of the artistic, political or social conditions that precede it. The inevitable influence pervades not only the creative aims of rising groups but touches its methodology as well. The philosophical concerns of Gruppo 63, an Italian literary movement, laid the groundwork that allowed for the Italian women’s movement to emerge with its own voice.

Impetus

My interest in Gruppo 63 was born out of the relationship between the literary group and Arte Povera as outlined by Francesco Bonami. In his article, “Now We Begin,” Bonami identifies Gruppo 63 as an association “who opposed the dominant currents of Italian literature: neorealism, hermeticism, and historicism. Like Arte Povera, Gruppo 63 was an avant-garde” (112). Searching through academic journals, I came across Lucia Re’s article about gender and sexuality in the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde. I decided to start my research from there, thinking that Gruppo 63 itself perhaps addressed issues of gender and sexuality, which I thought to be a progressive trajectory for a male-dominated group.

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© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2009. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: art, gruppo 63, italy, literary, politics, research, women

I welcome any comments or questions that might help me improve this paper.

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© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: authority, collective memory, criticism, exhibition, institution, museums, national identity, theory

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© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2008. | Permalink | Comment | Post tags: art, authenticity, authorship

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© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: arpilleras, chile, human rights, politics, resistance, women

For my virtual exhibition, I was first interested in using the work of exiled Chilean artists who were active during the time of the Pinochet regime. I knew I was going about the assignment backwards — it’s much better practice to find work that inspires an idea rather than having an idea and trying to find the work to support it — but I was fairly passionate about using work that had strong political and cultural themes. In trying to find information about the Brigada Ramona Parra, I came upon an essay about arpilleras and the anonymous women who made them, beginning in the mid-70s, primarily as a means of income.

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© Marissa Neave, the last place on earth you probably want to be, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: art, critical theory, feminist, women