Originally in The Offsetter http://theoffsetter.com/top-8-jaimey-hamilton-faris/
Jaimey Hamilton Faris is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Contemporary Art at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. She has contributed articles to Art Journal, October, and In_Visible Culture, and, most recently, the summer 2014 issue of Art Pulse.
Her recent book, Uncommon Goods: Global Dimensions of the Readymade, explores the use of everyday goods and situations in contemporary art practice in response to expanding definitions of the commodity since the ’90s.
Hamilton Faris is currently completing a collection of interviews featuring artists “of Hawaii” and continuing to work on a collection of essays on the importance of islands, straits, and oceans as geopoetic imaginaries, titled Of Islands and the In-between. Since 2008, she has directed Intersections, the visiting artist and scholar program for the University of Hawai’i Art Department, bringing in internationally recognized artists Walid Raad, Fred Tomaselli, Daido Moriyama, Michael Sorkin, Liu Xiaodong & Yu Hong, Joao Ribas, the Yes Men, Emre Huner, Wang Quingsong, Irma Boom, Heather Rowe, and more.
She also founded [OFF]hrs (a pop-up culture space devoted to community arts activities in Honolulu, running from 2011-2013), continues to organize activities through Interisland Terminal, and writes art criticism for the local papers, including the Offsetter. She is off-island for the academic year of 2014-15, living in the midwest, where she will be the Cranbrook Critical Studies Fellow in Spring 2015.
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: 50 islands I never set foot on and never will. A friend who knows my current obsession with islands recently recommended this book to me. Schalansky has a degree in art history and is also trained as a designer. She won an award for the book’s design in Germany, where it was originally published in 2009.
Each recto page features a beautifully understated map of one of the islands, and each verso features a whimsical collection of facts about the island and its history: including strange stories about its colonizers, prisoners, and castaways. Most of the islands she features are uninhabitable. Schalansky was born in East Germany in 1980 and spent her childhood fantasizing about places she could only dream of going.
For this project, she took that same armchair travel approach, doing her research by visiting historic archives and reading scientific reports. The result is not your typical fantasy of untainted paradises, but a commentary replete with ironic disdain for the romance of expedition and unrealistic expectations of exotic travel, which can be summed up in the name of one of places she highlights: Disappointment Island.
I learned from another source that cartographers often add an obscure and out of the way fictional location when they make their maps so that they can keep track of any counterfeiters and protect their copyright. Would that some of these islands, per Schalansky’s characterization of them, never even existed in the imagination. Then again, I’d hate a world in which humans were everywhere.
The lookdown fish and the lightening bug. I’ve always liked both of these creatures, but they make it to my top 8 as a pair. Together, they say a lot about my recent relocation from Honolulu to the midwest. I miss the specific qualities of equatorial light on the water and the ocean’s weird camouflaging fauna, like the lookdown fish. Its silvery scales can manipulate polarized light so as to confuse its predators.
As an open ocean swimmer, I envied their capabilities. I’m now a fish out of water. And yet, nothing could have been more satisfying than the hour I spent the other night sitting on my porch watching the luminescence in the lightning bugs sputter and flitter as the little creatures tried to seek protection in the trees during an intense lightning storm. Their warm light glowed against the cool white light of the sky and reflected the raindrops falling around them.
Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 1997, English edition (first published in French in 1990). Glissant’s work reaffirms the worldwide relevance of islands studies. He was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the Caribbean, carrying forward the legacy of Aimé Césaire hand-in-hand with one of my favorite francophone philosophers, Gilles Deleuze. In his widely celebrated book Poetics of Relation, written later in his life, Glissant turned the post-colonial conditions of the Caribbean into a complex, energetic vision of a distinctly Antillean aesthetics and politics.
The specific histories of suffering experienced on each of the Caribbean islands, he argues, gave rise to a coherent regional space of creolization. This ultimately leads him to propose that island politics and issues are fundamental to imagining a future in which the whole world understands that it is an island composed of islands. I love the combination of realism and idealism he brought to discussing the ways in which difficult histories and present conflicts of island cultures could potentially be transformed into forward-thinking proposals of living in diversity, even with extremely limited resources.
Glissant was first and foremost a poet, so it’s best to read Poetics of Relation in combination with some of his poems (I especially like the collection Black Salt). Then the lyricism of his language starts to make total sense: His words are not just wishful thinking, but a way to create new radical and ethical consciousness.
Camille Henrot, The Restless Earth, on view at New Museum, New York, through June 29th. I’ve been wanting to see Henrot’s video Grosse Fatigue, since it garnered her the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale last year. When I recently visited New York, I got my chance. The video was the centerpiece of a survey of her work on view at the New Museum. The whole show was titled The Restless Earth (borrowed from Glissant) and gave a complete picture of the artist’s deep fascination with the pitfalls of the anthropological (and especially the French anthropological) tradition.
The show started with a few of Henrot’s earlier films made in Vanuatu that play with the touristic gaze. Shot in Super 8, they first seem like vintage sixties archival footage of dancing and land diving, but they eventually jolt the viewer into understanding that these activities were recently recorded and consciously scripted for outsiders.
By the time I sat down to watch Grosse Fatigue, I was fully immersed in the artist’s commentary on the ways that the understanding of nature and culture (that old French structural dualism of the raw and the cooked…) are limited by Western knowledge systems. Gosse Fatigue focuses on two systems in particular: one is the Smithsonian Institution’s archives (where, as a fellow, Henrot composed many of the images of fossils, taxidermied and tagged animals, and cultural artifacts used in the video); the other is the mac computer (which she used to frame and connect the images in the video). What unfolds, iWindow within iWindow, is a stunning visual commentary on the limits of encyclopedic exposition.
Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde (Penguin 1965); Duchamp: A Biography, Holt, 1996, and Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, Badlands Unlimited, 2013. For Marcel fanatics who troll the Tout-fait website in search of never-before-revealed details about his dada life, the newly revised edition of Calvin Tomkins’s Duchamp: A Biography, and his recently released Afternoon Interviews might be a disappointment. The content, mostly coming from his early interviews with the artist, have been accessible in archives for quite a while.
Moreover, these two updates can not really fully recapture the excitement of Tomkin’s first take on Duchamp told in The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde. This breezy exposition of Duchamp’s importance to the emergence of the neo-avant-garde in sixties is, in my opinion one of the best art histories of the period ever written. The relationships between Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Tinguely were never so succinct and revealing. Yet the recent re-release of Duchamp: A Biography, along with the original “afternoon” interviews upon which it is based, only underscores Duchamp’s continuing relevance for the ways of the art world.
It is also a kind reminder to the rest of us art historians on how to write about art. Tomkin’s mastery at making Duchamp’s life and philosophy seamlessly conversational and of its time is still unparalleled. In reading these interviews again, I picked up on the tone, a playful tête-à-tête between Tomkins and Duchamp. One bonus in revisiting this material is that the e-book version of Afternoon Interviews, published by artist Paul Chan as part of his art project/publishing enterprise, Badlands, contains an interview with Tomkins about interviewing Duchamp. Another gem: Duchamp saying to Tomkins, “The life of an artist in 1915 was non-existent as a money-making proposition. [...] Many more people are miserable today because they try to make a living from painting and can’t.” He said that in 1964.
Herman Melville. Melville holds my admiration as an insightful chronicler of American commerce and imperialism in the nineteenth century. Moby Dick is long, and most of it does not really propel the narrative of Ishmael, Queequeb, Ahab, and Moby Dick, but it is still one of the most fascinating allegories of obsession that exist. The story is based on Melville’s own experiences on the whaling ship, the Acushnet, which he eventually deserted in the Marquesas, only to board another bound for Tahiti.
On this vessel he participated in a mutiny (the basis for Billy Budd) and ended up kicking around the Pacific, even landing in Honolulu for a while. I consider his descriptions of whaling ships to be one of the most gripping and absurd accounts of the energy business in the Victorian era—before the invention of the petroleum industry. Small wooden ships circumnavigate the globe for animals bigger than them and who only come to surface occasionally.
Regular routes from New Bedford usually popped over to the Azores to pick up crew, rounded Cape Horn, and then cruised up and down the Pacific without sightings for weeks at a time. One of the hazardous, pitiless jobs of sailors was to get in tiny boats, shoot harpoons in the whales so that they could be dragged around until the whales were too tired to free themselves. Another was to be lowered by rope into the guts of the whale (which was too big to even hold on board the ship, and so was kept floating off its sides) to harvest the blubber.
Some like to speculate that Melville’s queer adventures also included pursuing his neighbor and fellow author Nathanial Hawthorne. I also personally enjoy the speculative fiction account of Melville as a forlorn ukulelist written by Sean Carswell.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, and The Sensory Ethnography Lab, Leviathan, 2012. The poor Whitney Biennial. Most people I know love to hate it because it reeks of the art world insiderism. I think this is what fascinates me. It is more a record of who is perceived to have the favor among the New York art elite, than an objective survey of the best art talent in the U.S. (as if such a thing could actually exist).
This year’s accusations of cronyism were especially pointed, decrying the method of curation within curation featured throughout the show. Still… fascinating—especially as an indicator that we continue to stay deeply immersed in the current trend of networked intelligence (I think top 8’s also fall into this schema?). Beyond this, there was one pure and simple masterpiece: a film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, and Sensory Ethnography Lab about industrial fishing.
Using tiny cameras and optimal audio equipment mounted in some fishing vessels based out of New Bedford, the film crew captured the contemporary version of Moby Dick (hence the title of the film). Castaing-Taylor runs the Sensory Ethnography Lab out of Harvard University and has made and sponsored a number of film projects that use the best of abstract cinematic aesthetics to capture the ontology of the natural and industrial worlds.
This film pulses with fully saturated images and rumbling sounds of night fishing with football field-sized nets controlled by cranes as tall as skyscrapers. The pulsing engines of the ship were only dwarfed by the monumental forces ocean water pouring in everywhere, and the sound of hundreds of thousands of fish being poured into the hull. It was another coup for “new media” art in the context of the white cube gallery.
Clintonville, Ohio. My new abode for the year is next to a beautiful wetlands bike trail along the Olentangy River; its main street just hosted one of the largest gay pride parades in the U.S., with George Takei as the grand marshal.
OSU’s Cartoon Library and Wexner Center are down the street, and they are currently showing the work of Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Daniel Clowes (Eightball and Ghost World). All along High Street there are barbershops, tattoo parlors, and gastropubs with young proprietors showing off handlebar mustaches and full-sleeve tattoos.
I would think it all a bit too calculated, if it wasn’t for the genuine good nature of its residents and the random chestnuts I keep finding at the thrift stores for a few bucks. I still have my suspicions (especially having just witnessed similarly hip scenes in Honolulu and New York), but mostly I think Clintonville is authentically twenty-first century midwestern: a mix of nostalgia, entrepreneurialism, casualness and progressive thinking.
Jaimey Hamilton Faris is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Contemporary Art at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. She has contributed articles to Art Journal, October, and In_Visible Culture, and, most recently, the summer 2014 issue of Art Pulse.
Her recent book, Uncommon Goods: Global Dimensions of the Readymade, explores the use of everyday goods and situations in contemporary art practice in response to expanding definitions of the commodity since the ’90s.
Hamilton Faris is currently completing a collection of interviews featuring artists “of Hawaii” and continuing to work on a collection of essays on the importance of islands, straits, and oceans as geopoetic imaginaries, titled Of Islands and the In-between. Since 2008, she has directed Intersections, the visiting artist and scholar program for the University of Hawai’i Art Department, bringing in internationally recognized artists Walid Raad, Fred Tomaselli, Daido Moriyama, Michael Sorkin, Liu Xiaodong & Yu Hong, Joao Ribas, the Yes Men, Emre Huner, Wang Quingsong, Irma Boom, Heather Rowe, and more.
She also founded [OFF]hrs (a pop-up culture space devoted to community arts activities in Honolulu, running from 2011-2013), continues to organize activities through Interisland Terminal, and writes art criticism for the local papers, including the Offsetter. She is off-island for the academic year of 2014-15, living in the midwest, where she will be the Cranbrook Critical Studies Fellow in Spring 2015.
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: 50 islands I never set foot on and never will. A friend who knows my current obsession with islands recently recommended this book to me. Schalansky has a degree in art history and is also trained as a designer. She won an award for the book’s design in Germany, where it was originally published in 2009.
Each recto page features a beautifully understated map of one of the islands, and each verso features a whimsical collection of facts about the island and its history: including strange stories about its colonizers, prisoners, and castaways. Most of the islands she features are uninhabitable. Schalansky was born in East Germany in 1980 and spent her childhood fantasizing about places she could only dream of going.
For this project, she took that same armchair travel approach, doing her research by visiting historic archives and reading scientific reports. The result is not your typical fantasy of untainted paradises, but a commentary replete with ironic disdain for the romance of expedition and unrealistic expectations of exotic travel, which can be summed up in the name of one of places she highlights: Disappointment Island.
I learned from another source that cartographers often add an obscure and out of the way fictional location when they make their maps so that they can keep track of any counterfeiters and protect their copyright. Would that some of these islands, per Schalansky’s characterization of them, never even existed in the imagination. Then again, I’d hate a world in which humans were everywhere.
The lookdown fish and the lightening bug. I’ve always liked both of these creatures, but they make it to my top 8 as a pair. Together, they say a lot about my recent relocation from Honolulu to the midwest. I miss the specific qualities of equatorial light on the water and the ocean’s weird camouflaging fauna, like the lookdown fish. Its silvery scales can manipulate polarized light so as to confuse its predators.
As an open ocean swimmer, I envied their capabilities. I’m now a fish out of water. And yet, nothing could have been more satisfying than the hour I spent the other night sitting on my porch watching the luminescence in the lightning bugs sputter and flitter as the little creatures tried to seek protection in the trees during an intense lightning storm. Their warm light glowed against the cool white light of the sky and reflected the raindrops falling around them.
Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 1997, English edition (first published in French in 1990). Glissant’s work reaffirms the worldwide relevance of islands studies. He was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the Caribbean, carrying forward the legacy of Aimé Césaire hand-in-hand with one of my favorite francophone philosophers, Gilles Deleuze. In his widely celebrated book Poetics of Relation, written later in his life, Glissant turned the post-colonial conditions of the Caribbean into a complex, energetic vision of a distinctly Antillean aesthetics and politics.
The specific histories of suffering experienced on each of the Caribbean islands, he argues, gave rise to a coherent regional space of creolization. This ultimately leads him to propose that island politics and issues are fundamental to imagining a future in which the whole world understands that it is an island composed of islands. I love the combination of realism and idealism he brought to discussing the ways in which difficult histories and present conflicts of island cultures could potentially be transformed into forward-thinking proposals of living in diversity, even with extremely limited resources.
Glissant was first and foremost a poet, so it’s best to read Poetics of Relation in combination with some of his poems (I especially like the collection Black Salt). Then the lyricism of his language starts to make total sense: His words are not just wishful thinking, but a way to create new radical and ethical consciousness.
Camille Henrot, The Restless Earth, on view at New Museum, New York, through June 29th. I’ve been wanting to see Henrot’s video Grosse Fatigue, since it garnered her the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale last year. When I recently visited New York, I got my chance. The video was the centerpiece of a survey of her work on view at the New Museum. The whole show was titled The Restless Earth (borrowed from Glissant) and gave a complete picture of the artist’s deep fascination with the pitfalls of the anthropological (and especially the French anthropological) tradition.
The show started with a few of Henrot’s earlier films made in Vanuatu that play with the touristic gaze. Shot in Super 8, they first seem like vintage sixties archival footage of dancing and land diving, but they eventually jolt the viewer into understanding that these activities were recently recorded and consciously scripted for outsiders.
By the time I sat down to watch Grosse Fatigue, I was fully immersed in the artist’s commentary on the ways that the understanding of nature and culture (that old French structural dualism of the raw and the cooked…) are limited by Western knowledge systems. Gosse Fatigue focuses on two systems in particular: one is the Smithsonian Institution’s archives (where, as a fellow, Henrot composed many of the images of fossils, taxidermied and tagged animals, and cultural artifacts used in the video); the other is the mac computer (which she used to frame and connect the images in the video). What unfolds, iWindow within iWindow, is a stunning visual commentary on the limits of encyclopedic exposition.
Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde (Penguin 1965); Duchamp: A Biography, Holt, 1996, and Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, Badlands Unlimited, 2013. For Marcel fanatics who troll the Tout-fait website in search of never-before-revealed details about his dada life, the newly revised edition of Calvin Tomkins’s Duchamp: A Biography, and his recently released Afternoon Interviews might be a disappointment. The content, mostly coming from his early interviews with the artist, have been accessible in archives for quite a while.
Moreover, these two updates can not really fully recapture the excitement of Tomkin’s first take on Duchamp told in The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde. This breezy exposition of Duchamp’s importance to the emergence of the neo-avant-garde in sixties is, in my opinion one of the best art histories of the period ever written. The relationships between Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Tinguely were never so succinct and revealing. Yet the recent re-release of Duchamp: A Biography, along with the original “afternoon” interviews upon which it is based, only underscores Duchamp’s continuing relevance for the ways of the art world.
It is also a kind reminder to the rest of us art historians on how to write about art. Tomkin’s mastery at making Duchamp’s life and philosophy seamlessly conversational and of its time is still unparalleled. In reading these interviews again, I picked up on the tone, a playful tête-à-tête between Tomkins and Duchamp. One bonus in revisiting this material is that the e-book version of Afternoon Interviews, published by artist Paul Chan as part of his art project/publishing enterprise, Badlands, contains an interview with Tomkins about interviewing Duchamp. Another gem: Duchamp saying to Tomkins, “The life of an artist in 1915 was non-existent as a money-making proposition. [...] Many more people are miserable today because they try to make a living from painting and can’t.” He said that in 1964.
Herman Melville. Melville holds my admiration as an insightful chronicler of American commerce and imperialism in the nineteenth century. Moby Dick is long, and most of it does not really propel the narrative of Ishmael, Queequeb, Ahab, and Moby Dick, but it is still one of the most fascinating allegories of obsession that exist. The story is based on Melville’s own experiences on the whaling ship, the Acushnet, which he eventually deserted in the Marquesas, only to board another bound for Tahiti.
On this vessel he participated in a mutiny (the basis for Billy Budd) and ended up kicking around the Pacific, even landing in Honolulu for a while. I consider his descriptions of whaling ships to be one of the most gripping and absurd accounts of the energy business in the Victorian era—before the invention of the petroleum industry. Small wooden ships circumnavigate the globe for animals bigger than them and who only come to surface occasionally.
Regular routes from New Bedford usually popped over to the Azores to pick up crew, rounded Cape Horn, and then cruised up and down the Pacific without sightings for weeks at a time. One of the hazardous, pitiless jobs of sailors was to get in tiny boats, shoot harpoons in the whales so that they could be dragged around until the whales were too tired to free themselves. Another was to be lowered by rope into the guts of the whale (which was too big to even hold on board the ship, and so was kept floating off its sides) to harvest the blubber.
Some like to speculate that Melville’s queer adventures also included pursuing his neighbor and fellow author Nathanial Hawthorne. I also personally enjoy the speculative fiction account of Melville as a forlorn ukulelist written by Sean Carswell.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, and The Sensory Ethnography Lab, Leviathan, 2012. The poor Whitney Biennial. Most people I know love to hate it because it reeks of the art world insiderism. I think this is what fascinates me. It is more a record of who is perceived to have the favor among the New York art elite, than an objective survey of the best art talent in the U.S. (as if such a thing could actually exist).
This year’s accusations of cronyism were especially pointed, decrying the method of curation within curation featured throughout the show. Still… fascinating—especially as an indicator that we continue to stay deeply immersed in the current trend of networked intelligence (I think top 8’s also fall into this schema?). Beyond this, there was one pure and simple masterpiece: a film by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, and Sensory Ethnography Lab about industrial fishing.
Using tiny cameras and optimal audio equipment mounted in some fishing vessels based out of New Bedford, the film crew captured the contemporary version of Moby Dick (hence the title of the film). Castaing-Taylor runs the Sensory Ethnography Lab out of Harvard University and has made and sponsored a number of film projects that use the best of abstract cinematic aesthetics to capture the ontology of the natural and industrial worlds.
This film pulses with fully saturated images and rumbling sounds of night fishing with football field-sized nets controlled by cranes as tall as skyscrapers. The pulsing engines of the ship were only dwarfed by the monumental forces ocean water pouring in everywhere, and the sound of hundreds of thousands of fish being poured into the hull. It was another coup for “new media” art in the context of the white cube gallery.
Clintonville, Ohio. My new abode for the year is next to a beautiful wetlands bike trail along the Olentangy River; its main street just hosted one of the largest gay pride parades in the U.S., with George Takei as the grand marshal.
OSU’s Cartoon Library and Wexner Center are down the street, and they are currently showing the work of Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and Daniel Clowes (Eightball and Ghost World). All along High Street there are barbershops, tattoo parlors, and gastropubs with young proprietors showing off handlebar mustaches and full-sleeve tattoos.
I would think it all a bit too calculated, if it wasn’t for the genuine good nature of its residents and the random chestnuts I keep finding at the thrift stores for a few bucks. I still have my suspicions (especially having just witnessed similarly hip scenes in Honolulu and New York), but mostly I think Clintonville is authentically twenty-first century midwestern: a mix of nostalgia, entrepreneurialism, casualness and progressive thinking.