These short reflections, from UC Berkeley faculty in a variety of disciplines, respond to the following question: “What does the phrase ‘time-based art’ mean to you? What are the central stakes, conventions, challenges, and opportunities of durational art in the contexts in which you work?” Collectively, they probe a wide range of practices and contexts, including, for example, Mexican festivals and midwestern American carnivals, Syrian documentary films and the “image-event,” bystander recordings of US police and state harassment of black men, and the photographic interventions of the Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz. The respondents are Weihong Bao, Natalia Brizuela, Allan deSouza, Suzanne Guerlac, SanSan Kwan, Anneka Lenssen, Angela Marino, Jeffrey Skoller, and Winnie Wong.
Reflections on Durational Art
Weihong Bao is Associate Professor in the Departments of Film and Media and East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which is shortlisted for the 2016 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is currently working on a new book that examines set-design theory and practice in relation to the rise of environmental thinking in early twentieth-century China.
Natalia Brizuela is Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses on Latin American art, film, and literature. She is the author of Fotografia e imperio and Depois da fotografia as well as numerous essays.
Allan Desouza is an artist working predominantly with photography, text, and performance. He is Chair of the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, and is working on a book, How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Decolonizing Art and Pedagogy.
Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sansan Kwan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent article is “Even as We Keep Trying: An Ethics of Interculturalism in Jérôme Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and Myself,” published in the May 2014 issue of Theatre Survey. She is currently working on a longer version of this Representations article.
Anneka Lenssen is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Being Mobilized, which examines the intersection of painting and popular politics in Syria.
Angela Marino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is currently writing a book on populism and performance (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press).
Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker. His works in film, video, and photography have been exhibited internationally, and his writings on experimental and documentary film and video and have appeared in numerous books, journals, and artist catalogs. He is the author of Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and currently Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley.
Winnie Wong is a historian of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a special interest in fakes, forgeries, frauds, copies, counterfeits, and other nonart challenges to authorship and originality. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Weihong Bao, Natalia Brizuela, Allan deSouza, Suzanne Guerlac, SanSan Kwan, Anneka Lenssen, Angela Marino, Jeffrey Skoller, Winnie Wong; Reflections on Durational Art. Representations 1 November 2016; 136 (1): 132–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2016.136.1.132
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