This is an art object

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Maintenance Art Performance Series (1973-74)

The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles concerns the everyday routines of life. In 1969, following the birth of her first child, Ukeles wrote “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” as a challenge to the binary systems of opposition that draw the line between art/life, nature/culture, and public/private. The manifesto proposed undoing boundaries that separate the maintenance of everyday life from the role of an artist in society. Ukeles became increasingly disturbed by the separation of the artist in society from everyday activities, such as childcare, household work, and other routine labor practices that she felt should be reinterpreted within the contexts of personal and political aesthetic values. Ukeles has stated that “Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials…”

“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order) I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. Now I will simply do these everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.” (Ukeles, 1969)

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Paula Muhr - Double Flowers (2010-2012)

“In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer labeled hysterics as “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals, producing the effect of flowers within flowers. Like a double flower, according to Breuer, the hysteric is the product of luxury and cultivation, a form of seductive female abnormality.

The work is based on reinterpretation of medical photographs of women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The women depicted in the images are predominantly hysterics. The historical photographs were taken from various medical books, magazines and journals, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified symbolic meanings.
Through my intervention, the appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility and immobilizing the elusive symptoms of madness and related diseases, are destabilised in their original function. Each of the specific foreign elements were chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. These assemblages, constructed in ways that emphasise the respective idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Owing to the slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.”

Zanele Muholi - Dada (2003)

Louise Bourgeois - Maman (1999)

Bruce Conner - Child (1959-60)

Ron Mueck - Mother and Child (2002)

Happy Mother’s Day, ya’ll.

“Jenny Holzer’s ongoing series of redaction paintings began in 2005 through adherence to a simple formula: one or more linen canvases are hand-painted with a monochromatic oil ground, each of which is then silk-screened with an enlarged reproduction of a page from a declassified United States government document pertaining to the War on Terror. The documents range from memos and bureaucratic forms to letters and email exchanges concerning Al Qaeda, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib, prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and other related matters….

The documents that Holzer reproduces as redaction paintings are routinely disregarded in public discourse, especially in the media, despite being readily available in various archives. This absence of actively maintained historical memory severs the past from the recent and creates a blind spot in the public field of vision.  By returning to the history of the War on Terror, the redaction paintings… restore[sic] the public visibility of these important documents from the recent past.  This, in turn, enables the active reconstitution of what tends to be passively disavowed: historical knowledge, especially knowledge of the recent past, without which the present will always only be the return of a repressed disaster.”

- Robert Bailey. “Unknown Knowns: Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings and the History of the War on Terror.” October 142 (2012): 145.

1. Jenny Holzer - BIG CONTAINER yellow white [detail from OUTSIDE YOUR AGENCY blue] (2006)

2. Jenny Holzer - Archive (2006)

3. Jenny Holzer - HERDER black [detail] (2006)

4. Jenny Holzer - SPECIAL FORCES yellow white (2006)

5. Jenny Holzer - ENDGAME black (2011)

Mels Dees - Tour de Force (2011)

Mels Dees - From Disséminé (La Seigneurie des Aulnaies, Québec 2008)

Mels Dees