Artists & Movement Through Space

Apr 11, 2021

NUMBER 11

Originally I wrote “Number 10”—then recounted. Oops! This is Eulipion Outpost’s 11th newsletter. Seems like a lot to me (for scheduled writing), although it’s in fact nothing compared to the many years I’ve been writing online and blogging. Nevertheless, happy anniversary to me! If you want to read some of my older, and possibly embarrassing blogposts, take a look at the Blogpost Archive on my website, Journal – Jean Vengua. Believe me, they go back farther than this particular archive goes, but a lot of it is lost to the past...

WALKING/MOVING, CONT’D.

I’m continuing the “walking” or at least “movement” theme from the last couple newsletters. And btw, this is going to be a video-heavy edition.

“Blue River Cut,” map collage and colored pencil, 9 x 12 in. 2-28-2020. Jean Vengua.

I’ve been looking around online for artists and writers who engage the act of walking or other types of movement in their art. There are a lot of them! The obvious ones, well known in the art world, include artists like Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, and Marina Abramovic & Ulay. I’m interested in artists who are especially questioning ideas around race and the movement of the body through space and across boundaries, with all the restrictions, rules—and yes, violence—that can take place, as well as connection and understanding. Check out these artists:

Rashid Johnson, “The Hikers.” On engaging the complexity of the black body, its movement through space:

Banduk Marika’s walks connect her to Yirrkala, her home, and to her traveling ancestors and their art. “Knowing the ‘law’ about what you can and cannot do defines my artwork”: Banduk Marika's art is more than paintings | Walking Together | ABC Australia - YouTube

Susan Hefuna on “Drawings, Buildings, and Walking”:

Francis Alys is Belgian but based in Mexico. His art practice is sort of all over the place; it often involves movement across or along borders, and within specific spaces, and he has an eye for the absurd. I’m interested in his intent to deromanticize land art and to question the originality of art. A Brief History of Francis Alys - YouTube

I’m throwing in a video about artists on bicycles because my arthritis will benefit from bicycling and these two women, Liz and Caroline, are local artists in my area (Monterey). I appreciate their dorky enthusiasm. This video is from way back in 2016, which seems like a world away. . .

Cycling is for Artists - YouTube

ON CURATING

In my freelance work, I’ve been transcribing and editing essays and lectures for an art historian and curator, someone whose work I find inspiring. I’ve never attended an art school, so while I have certainly encountered the term “curator,” and have had a middling understanding of how one can curate on the internet in an online “space” like a website or newsletter, as well as in a physical space like a gallery—I’m only now coming to understand some of the deeper implications of curation as, for example, an act of advocacy, and also an act of exploration that’s in some ways like walking, like reading—and even like writing, and drawing.

Catalina Cariaga, author of Cultural Evidence (see Barbara Jane Reyes’ review here), creates art/poems on an old-school typewriter. She photographs the pages with her Android phone, very much like I sometimes photograph the landscape that I walk through and post the images on Instagram. Her typewritten pieces are often responses to walks through Oakland neighborhoods.

Here’s an essay she wrote (though not on a typewriter) about her typewritten poems: Oakland: Extreme Headache Series - Writing in the Time of Pandemic and Racist Attack (pdf). See also her work on One Typed Page (look for the typewritten poems on map envelopes).

Gina Osterloh’s work makes me think about walking in public as also an act of looking, but also of being looked at, and the fluctuations (as she says, “the pleasure and pain” and “trauma” between those two modes. Gina Osterloh OAC grant recipient - YouTube

Lordy Rodriguez examines the impulse to map, and plays with these “official” demarcations, drawing up his own versions often as commentary or revisualizations of existing cartography: Art Bite: Lordy Rodriguez and the Language of Cartography - YouTube

Clarence Chun’s paintings are all about oceanic flow and movement, but also about encounters with the small details that can be found within that flow: ArtyFacts presents Clarence Chun

Jennifer Maravillas walked every single block of Brooklyn, picking up trash paper, and found that her art became a conversation about place, history, and movement: Artist Finishes Trash Map of Brooklyn After Walking Every Single Block - YouTube

That’s all for this week. I hope it’s a good one for you, whether you are inside or outside.

Comments are appreciated...

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Artists & Movement Through Space

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