Blanqui's Cosmology (1997-2007)
Blanqui’s Cosmology exhibition, Trolley Gallery, London, 2007
B&W silver prints, Each: 16×20″
Louis-Auguste Blanqui was a famous 19th-century political activist who was jailed innumerable times for his views. In one of his incarcerations he wrote a cosmology of revolution which forms the basis of the title of this work. This work consists of over 1200 portraits I took of men and some women with shaved heads over the past 10 years. This work investigates the early roots of a modern subject. The photos are long exposure photos and document a performance in which i draw on the head of my subjects with a pen light. What results is a work that concerns not only the beginning of photography, drawing with light, but also the history of portraiture, eugenics, phrenology, spirit photography, electricity, the unconscious, x-rays, astronomy photography and hysteria.
Untitled Program (2006)
Untitled Program
2006
For this project the Body-Wall was installed in the context of a white cube. A mimetic wall is built in the gallery space. Visitors are not initially aware of the presence of the wall, while those who have been in the gallery before are aware of an uncanny difference. The phenomenology of the space changes and Body/Wall thus becomes a work about the phenomenologic uncanny. As the visitors walk inside the gallery, they discover the entrance to the wall by chance. The wall is expanded to 60cm from its normal condition of 10cm, thus acquiring a new depth and expanding metric relations into typological warped ones. A two-sided rotating mirror is also installed in the gallery space as part of this work. Random turnings of the mirror by visitors to the gallery enable visitors inside the wall to get different views of the space.
Moving inside the walls of the gallery is an uncomfortable state of being as it constantly unmasks the hidden and secret as the inside hybridity. Once inside the wall, the visitors can look through two different holes drilled in the walls. The first hole is aligned with the rotating mirror and gives them a complete 360-degree view of the gallery and the works in it. The other aperture in the back of the wall opens onto a mini DVD screen in which a section of Belle De Jour with Catherine Deneuve, directed by Luis Buñuel has been ripped and altered. In this looping 5sec clip the actress is seen to become part of an obsessive-compulsive action of looking through and looking away from a peephole.
The Mutated Observer
The Mutated Observer, part 1
The Mutated Observer, part 1
California Museum of Photography, Riverside, California, 2001
Photography, Sculpture (Apparatuses), Installation, Dimensions Variable
This exhibition took place at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, as an intervention in the collection of early photographic and cinematic devices and photographs. It consisted of two parts: Postmodern Modernism and Hybrid Dialectics. Postmodern Modernism was an investigation of the early roots of modernism in photographs that concerned topics such as movement, psychic energy, the paranormal, and phrenology…
This exhibition took place at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, as an intervention in the collection of early photographic and cinematic devices and photographs. It consisted of two parts: Postmodern Modernism and Hybrid Dialectics. Postmodern Modernism was an investigation of the early roots of modernism in photographs that concerned topics such as movement, psychic energy, the paranormal, and phrenology. The works Writing Drawing Painting, Blanquis Cosmology and Conversation Maps were installed alongside compatible historic photographs.
Hybrid Dialectics was an installation in which the devices that I have been working with in the past 6 years were exhibited in vitrines alongside with the museum’s collections of historic photographic and cinematic devices. As such they spoke to the idea that the history of photography, cinema, and new media is a history that is conjoint with the history of the development of the eye, brain, and mind, and that all together they help constitute our idea of the world with which this history is recursively related to.
This exhibition took place at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, as an intervention in the collection of early photographic and cinematic devices and photographs. It consisted of two parts: Postmodern Modernism and Hybrid Dialectics. Postmodern Modernism was an investigation of the early roots of modernism in photographs that concerned topics such as movement, psychic energy, the paranormal, and phrenology. The works Writing Drawing Painting, Blanquis Cosmology and Conversation Maps were installed alongside compatible historic photographs.
Hybrid Dialectics was an installation in which the devices that I have been working with in the past 6 years were exhibited in vitrines alongside with the museum’s collections of historic photographic and cinematic devices. As such they spoke to the idea that the history of photography, cinema, and new media is a history that is conjoint with the history of the development of the eye, brain, and mind, and that all together they help constitute our idea of the world with which this history is recursively related to.
This exhibition took place at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, as an intervention in the collection of early photographic and cinematic devices and photographs. It consisted of two parts: Postmodern Modernism and Hybrid Dialectics. Postmodern Modernism was an investigation of the early roots of modernism in photographs that concerned topics such as movement, psychic energy, the paranormal, and phrenology. The works Writing Drawing Painting, Blanquis Cosmology and Conversation Maps were installed alongside compatible historic photographs.
Hybrid Dialectics was an installation in which the devices that I have been working with in the past 6 years were exhibited in vitrines alongside with the museum’s collections of historic photographic and cinematic devices. As such they spoke to the idea that the history of photography, cinema, and new media is a history that is conjoint with the history of the development of the eye, brain, and mind, and that all together they help constitute our idea of the world with which this history is recursively related to.
This exhibition took place at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, as an intervention in the collection of early photographic and cinematic devices and photographs. It consisted of two parts: Postmodern Modernism and Hybrid Dialectics. Postmodern Modernism was an investigation of the early roots of modernism in photographs that concerned topics such as movement, psychic energy, the paranormal, and phrenology. The works Writing Drawing Painting, Blanquis Cosmology and Conversation Maps were installed alongside compatible historic photographs.
Hybrid Dialectics was an installation in which the devices that I have been working with in the past 6 years were exhibited in vitrines alongside with the museum’s collections of historic photographic and cinematic devices. As such they spoke to the idea that the history of photography, cinema, and new media is a history that is conjoint with the history of the development of the eye, brain, and mind, and that all together they help constitute our idea of the world with which this history is recursively related to.
The Mutated Observer, part 2
Warren Neidich at Steffany Martz
Warren Neidich at Steffany Martz
April 1998 by Cathy Lebowitz
“Despite the primacy of the scientific method in this century, can art, with its nonempirical approach, produce fruitful ideas about brain function? Trained as a neurobiologist, Warren Neidich presented mainly photographs and videos exploring the relationship between perception, cognition and culture in his second solo show at Steffany Martz.” – Cathy Lebowitz
Historical In(ter)ventions
https://listart.mit.edu/exhibitions/warren-neidich-historical-interventions
Warren Neidich examines not only the contradictions of the American past but also the ways in which the media shape and distort our perceptions of current events. Neidich works to expose the fallacy of photography as an unbiased chronicle of history by subverting the medium itself.
Neidich’s installation at the List Visual Arts Center condenses work from four previous photographic series into what the artist calls “Time Pods” – groupings of photographs oriented around basic issues of American life, including family and gender roles in American history. The four earlier projects from which the “Time Pods” are culled include Recoding American History: What’s Wrong With This Picture?,a series of photographs shot in history museums, each of which includes an anachronism (i.e. a contemporary pair of sunglasses) meant to subvert the seamless image of historical authenticity;Pseudo-Event: The Politics of Appropriation, which places African-Americans in the roles of 19th-century middle class citizens, roles in which they are seldom, if ever represented; Text: Pretext, Lessons in Visual Subversion, which unveils the propagandistic representation of World War II era Japanese-American interment camps as organized by the Associated Press archive; and Contra Curtis: Early American Coverups, images of Native Americans being massacred which Neidich photographed directly from TV reruns of Hollywood “Westerns.”
These powerful photographs force us to recognize how much our perceptions of ourselves and our past are determined by convenient societal assumptions – to acknowledge just how much “story” there is in “history.” Neidich’s witty yet acerbic vignettes point up the loaded terms in which we understand the past, and by extension the present.
Nuclear Family, a video installation which explores our culture’s apathetic acceptance of the television medium, and Collaborative Memory, a wall-mounted sculpture incorporating aluminum cubes, photographs and scents which examines memory overlap and the relationship between visual and olfactory memory, are also on view.
Catalogue with essay by David Joselit with text by Warren Neidich, and introduction by Ron Platt and Anita Doutha.
Framing History: Some Recent Work by Warren Neidich
Framing History: Some Recent Work by Warren Neidich
by David Joselit in Historical In(ter)vention (MIT List Visual Art Center, 1991).
An installation consisting of photography, video and sculpture examining the contradictions of the American past as well as the ways in which the media shape and distort our perceptions of cultural events. Essay by David Joselit with text by Warren Neidich. Introduction by Ron Platt and Anita Doutha.
“Warren Neidich’s photographic works embody contradictions which are both “internal” and “external” to photography. Technology and history (including the technology of history and the history of technology) are interwoven into counterfeit objects which masquerade as “historical,” “authentic” and “natural,” while holding within them key or keys to their status as “contemporary,” “artificial,” and “constructed facts. Neidich’s intention is to collapse — or at least identify — photography’s long-standing relationship with history and to literally de-naturalize it.” — David Joselit
Turning Japanese (In)
“THE NARRATIVES TAKEN on in Warren Neidich’s recent photographic diptychs engage perhaps the two most controversial and repressed passages in modern U.S. history: the everyday life of blacks in the mid-19th-century pre-Abolitionist South, and the internment camps that held Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. These are passional moments of American history, moments of national trauma, of mass blindness and mass complicity, moments that still figure in our construction of “racial” difference, moments that return in the flash of a stereotype or at the butt of a joke; moments that appear well documented but that are equally well disguised. Rarely are such moments alluded to at all in the contemporary art world, and more rarely still are the means found to question the apparent neutrality of the archive of images that re-forms (and effaces) these histories.” – John Welchman
American History Reinvented
Burden Gallery, Aperture Foundation, New York, 1989 (first four parts)
Photographic Resource Center in Boston
Albumen Prints, polaroids, platinum prints, tin types
Variable Installation Dimensions
Visit americanhistoryreinvented.com for project details American History Reinvented consisted of five separate works. It was also produced as a book called American History Reinvented (Aperture, 1989).
1. Recoding American History
These albumen prints were made at historical living museums in the United States. I photographed the scene as a tourist would and in fact was surrouned by tourists at the time of the picture. In each picture I placed an object that i had brought with me like a no smoking sign or a dollar bill to create a visual diversion and an anachronism. Sometimes an airplane or tractor was better than the objects i brought so i used them. Thus there was a subversive performative aspect to the work.
2. Pseudo Event – the Politics of Appropriation
When i visited these sites i realized that none of the actors were of people of color. As if even in the disneyfied remnant of this reenacted history people of color were left out. I did some research at that time and found the historical archive also did not reflect this. As a way to correct this injustice I invited actor friends of mine to the Beth Page Historic Restoration in Long Island. With the help of the Afro American Historian Linda Day we staged imaginary scenes of life during the mid-nineteenth century substituting people of color for those of European descent which normally populate these historic images. At the same time I began to research the work of Allain Jaubert who investigated how the photographic archive was changed and manipulated to suit the needs of specific political figures like Mao Tse Tung and Joseph Stalin. Processes like photo retouching and cropping could change the very essence of an image and the story it told. I applied these techniques to my own fake archive to create a metadiscourse about the history of photographic representation.
3. News from No-Place
In this work Associated Press photographs of American Japanese who were interned in camps during World War II are juxtaposed to staged photographs of African Americans during slavery. The AP photographs are located on the right and the staged images on the left. Each image is accompanied by a text. The one on the right written by an anonymous person at AP describes what is happening or not happening and codifies it according to an overall system of organization and filing. Thus the numbers and titles. The image on the left also is accompanied by a text but is one of irony and samples African American History for its content and context. What one quickly understands is that the photographs of the Japanese internees are staged and were part of an overall condition of effacement, deceit and coverup of the real story of their incarceration as enemies of the American People. The destruction of their livelihood, family life and self-esteem is not told.
4. Contra-Curtis: Early American Coverups
A 4×5 camera was set up in front of a television set and photographs were taken during Cowboy and Indian Western Movies. I recorded images of the murder of native americans as depicted in films. I printed these as platinum prints as a way of linking these images to those made by Edward Curtis of Noble Savages at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. This work was not to denigrate the work of Curtis whose documentation of native american life is unparalleled as a historical and artistic work. Rather it was simply to uncover from the fictions of American Cinema the real story of what was taking place at the end of the 19th Century.
5. Aerial Photographs: The Battle of Chicamauga
This work was shown at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston. Civil War reenactments are a favorite past-time for many Americans. This reenactment took place outside Chattanooga Tennessee. I rented a plane and photographed the battle with a 35mm camera with a telephoto, normal and wide angle lens from the sky. After printing the pictures I hired a gentleman at the reenactment who was making tin types as souvenirs.
6. Amputation without anasthesia
At the same reenactment I photographed the scene of a fake amputation. I enlarged the images to life size and hired a painter to paint the blood red. I then lit the photographs in the gallery with red film studio lights so that the red blood appeared black.
