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Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future
A volume devoted to artists addressing our politically tumultuous times.
Soft A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others.
This expansive catalog includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and showcases work ranging from video and photography to sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collective histories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world.
Soft A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others.
This expansive catalog includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and showcases work ranging from video and photography to sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collective histories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world.
200 pages, Hardcover
Published January 21, 2020
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November 27, 2019This is an interesting assemblage of recent works by contemporary artists. The curators and venue tried to tie the works together into a theme borrowed from the (imperialist) 1980s theory of soft-power: that western "capitalist democracy" could seduce, rather than bully, less powerful nations into accepting its hegemony. It's a problematic, at best, metaphor for the power of marginalized communities to express themselves through art. And the only perceptible theme that I could decipher between the different pieces was that they were predominantly the work of artists from less powerful nations, or from marginalized communities within powerful nations.
Another thing that struck me was the almost complete absence of anything resembling traditional painting in the exhibit. Obviously, painting has been taking up less space in contemporary art venues for some time, but there was only one artist included working in that traditionalist genre. Almost all were multi-media, and almost all involved video in some way or another.
I liked the pieces of the one artist working with paint, Eamon Ore-Giron. Immense works on raw-linen rather than canvas, they look rather like Piet Mondrian dropped acid in the deserts of the American southwest. There is a competing geometricy and cosmic spiritualism at work here.
Displayed next to Ore-Giron's paintings were the other most traditional works on display. Duane Linklater's "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" series consists of linens sewn into teepees that feature patterns reminiscent of those traded by colonists with the Native Peoples of what is today Canada. Patterns of traditional native art are interspersed with the European. The fact that the teepees are now hung flat on a wall for a Eurocentric audience, no longer being used as shelters and mobile residences, is a sly commentary on the fate of the Indigenous.
I must say that these two more "traditional" wall works struck me more than most of the multi-media pieces. Many, such as those of Minerva Cuevas and Nikhil Chopra, relied on documented action-art/ land art. They were not without their power, but they served to remind me how little action-documentation and land art have evolved, perhaps because of their less prominent use, since being pioneered by such figures as Beverly Buchanan in the early 1970s.
Perhaps the most anticipated work in the exhibit was Tuan Andrew Nguyen's 4 channel video installation, "The Specter of Ancestors Becoming." It's a cinematically accomplished and powerful meditation on generational displacement. It feels rather like a Alain Resnais short-film made on four screens. But it feels like something that could have been watched in a traditional cinema, a kind of venue that is, in its traditional form, dying. Perhaps the arts are not so much in decline as they are shifting shapes and spaces. "Movies" are now watched at home on streaming services, and "art museums" are where one goes to see projections, not pictures hanging on a wall.
Another thing that struck me was the almost complete absence of anything resembling traditional painting in the exhibit. Obviously, painting has been taking up less space in contemporary art venues for some time, but there was only one artist included working in that traditionalist genre. Almost all were multi-media, and almost all involved video in some way or another.
I liked the pieces of the one artist working with paint, Eamon Ore-Giron. Immense works on raw-linen rather than canvas, they look rather like Piet Mondrian dropped acid in the deserts of the American southwest. There is a competing geometricy and cosmic spiritualism at work here.
Displayed next to Ore-Giron's paintings were the other most traditional works on display. Duane Linklater's "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" series consists of linens sewn into teepees that feature patterns reminiscent of those traded by colonists with the Native Peoples of what is today Canada. Patterns of traditional native art are interspersed with the European. The fact that the teepees are now hung flat on a wall for a Eurocentric audience, no longer being used as shelters and mobile residences, is a sly commentary on the fate of the Indigenous.
I must say that these two more "traditional" wall works struck me more than most of the multi-media pieces. Many, such as those of Minerva Cuevas and Nikhil Chopra, relied on documented action-art/ land art. They were not without their power, but they served to remind me how little action-documentation and land art have evolved, perhaps because of their less prominent use, since being pioneered by such figures as Beverly Buchanan in the early 1970s.
Perhaps the most anticipated work in the exhibit was Tuan Andrew Nguyen's 4 channel video installation, "The Specter of Ancestors Becoming." It's a cinematically accomplished and powerful meditation on generational displacement. It feels rather like a Alain Resnais short-film made on four screens. But it feels like something that could have been watched in a traditional cinema, a kind of venue that is, in its traditional form, dying. Perhaps the arts are not so much in decline as they are shifting shapes and spaces. "Movies" are now watched at home on streaming services, and "art museums" are where one goes to see projections, not pictures hanging on a wall.
Displaying 1 of 1 review