Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, Inter national Framings Situating ‘Black Artists & Modernism’ in Europe CONTENTS • Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando Introduction 4 KEYNOTE • Valerie Cassel Oliver Through the Conceptual Lens: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Blackness 218 KEYNOTE • Iris Dressler Subversive Practices: Art Under Conditions of Political Repression in 1960s and 1980s South America and Europe 14 IV DAVID MEDALLA 244 I CONCEPTUALISM AND INTERSECTIONAL READINGS 30 • Nick Aikens Introduction 246 • Nick Aikens, Annie Fletcher Introduction 32 • David Dibosa Ambivalent Thresholds: David Medalla’s Conceptualism and ‘Queer British Art’ 250 • Alexandra Kokoli Read My QR: Quilla Constance and the Conceptualist Promise of Intelligibility 36 • Eva Bentcheva Conceptualism-Scepticism and Creative Cross-pollinations in the Work of David Medalla, 1969–72 262 • Elisabeth Lebovici The Death of the Author in the Age of the Death of the Authors 54 • Sonia Boyce Dearly Beloved: Transitory Relations and the Queering of ‘Women’s Work’ in David Medalla’s A Stitch in Time (1967–72) 282 • susan pui san lok Found and Lost: A Genealogy of Waste? 68 • Wei Yu David Medalla and Li Yuan-chia: Conceptual Projects from the 1960s to 1970s 300 II NIL YALTER 96 • Sarah Wilson Introduction 98 V CONCEPTUALISM AND INTERNATIONAL FRAMINGS 312 • Fabienne Dumont Is Nil Yalter’s Work Compatible with Black • susan pui san lok Introduction 314 Conceptualism? An Analysis Based on the FRAC Lorraine Collection 104 • Alice Correia Allan deSouza and Mohini Chandra: Conceptual • Sumesh Sharma Speculations: A New Shopping List for Art History 124 Photography, Migrations and the Articulation of South Asian Identities 318 • Laura Castagnini Feminist and/or Conceptual? Reading the • Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes Notes on Activist Practices Behind the Sociopolitical in Nil Yalter’s Temporary Dwellings (1974–7) and Iron Curtain: Liberation Theologies, Experimen tal Institutionalism, Women at Work, Women at Home (1981) 140 Expanded Art and Minor Literature 332 • Juan Albarrán Repositioning Spanish Conceptualisms: III stanley brouwn 162 New Institutionalism, Coloniality and the Contemporary 352 Nick Aikens Introduction 164 • VI MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC 370 • David Dibosa (chair), E.C. Feiss, Charl Landvreugd, Sophie Orlando How to Talk about the Work: Discussion on stanley brouwn 168 • Nick Aikens Introduction 372 • E.C. Feiss Strategic Formalism: stanley brouwn’s ‘Identities’ 184 • Sandra Delacourt Back in Flow: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s • Sophie Orlando stanley brouwn and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Inanimate Ancestors Get the Canonical Minimalists to Do the Twist 376 Two Works: A Collective Intersectional Close Reading of Minimalist • Jennifer Burris Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s Collected Fragments 394 Gestures, Materials and Situated Bodies within a Museum Framework 200 • Lotte Arndt Fissuring the Erasures of Historical Violence: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s Work as a Circular Critique of Colonial Modernity 410 Contributors’ Biographies 434 Colophon 442 2 3 We are incredibly proud to present this Introduction collection of revised and expanded papers from the conference ‘Conceptualism: Intersectional Readings, International Framings, Black Artists & Modernism in Europe Since 1968’ that took place at the Van Abbemuseum. On 6 December 2017, Nick Aikens the first delegates arrived in Eindhoven, along with the season’s first snow. Stepping susan pui san lok out of the cold and into the warm and welcoming environs of the museum, the Sophie Orlando conference was the culmination of some eighteen months’ research, development and planning, a collaboration between the United Kingdom-based Black Artists & Modernism (BAM) project and the Van Abbemuseum. Artists, curators and academics were convened in exploratory conversations, with artistic practice at the core, around which two broad and converging problems were considered: how to rethink conceptualism inter- sectionally and internationally as strategy rather than movement; and how to situate ‘black artists’ and ‘modernism’ within Europe. In this introduction we outline the framework and key concerns of the conference as well as introduce the contributions that comprise the e-book. We then situate the conference in the work of both BAM and the Van Abbemuseum. We hope this constellation of ideas will inspire many ‘unfinished conversations’ to come. 4 Introduction - Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando 5 CONCEPTUALISMS Shifting perspectives on black artists and modernism to somewhere beyond British and transatlantic frames, ‘Conceptualism’ follows two earlier BAM conferences the turn to Europe highlights the specificities and in the UK: ‘The Work Between Us’ at Bluecoat, Liverpool, limits of discourses on ‘Blackness’ and ‘Conceptualism’ 20 January 2016 focused on Rasheed Araeen’s between geographic neighbours in politically entwined seminal 1989 exhibition, ‘The Other Story’ and related contexts. Conceptual art is often considered resistant ‘regional’ exhibition histories in Britain; ‘Now & Then, to identity politics. In this book, conceptualisms are Here and There’ at Chelsea College of Art and Tate looked at in artistic practices based in – or connected Britain, London, 6–8 October 2016 examined the to – Europe, stimulating debate around intersectional historical and contemporary framing of black artists readings in relation to these practices and artworks. through modernist and museological practices, and Such engagement can shift the question of how they critical vocabularies. Meanwhile, ‘Conceptualism – represent identity politics to how they produce identity Intersectional Readings, International Framings’ seeks politics. Returning to the materiality of particular art- to open up new understandings of Conceptualism works and their display, interpretation and consumption, produced by artists based in Europe after the political how might we reread and reframe them beyond the and social upheavals of 1968. In attempting to ‘situate opposition of conceptual/sociological content, from black artists and modernism in Europe’ in relation to inter sectional and international perspectives? In other conceptual practices and their relationship to the words, how might we resist seeing artworks as holders intersections of race, gender and sexuality, the for either a single idea or as representative of a socio- conference and publication look to break open political context, to approach it as a carrier for multiple, and fracture one of modernism’s most sedimented ‘intersecting’ concerns, positions and framings? Given histories. We adopt Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and the contingency of art history’s revisions of evermore Rachel Weiss’s definition of Conceptualism as a ‘wide situated perspectives, how might conceptualism per array of works and practices which, in radically reducing se be rethought and re-visioned through artistic the role of the art object, reimagined the possibilities practices? vis-à-vis the social, political, and economic realities within which it was being made’ (1999). Inter sectio na l- ‘Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International ism is associated with a feminist approach that has Framings’ unfolded over several days, framed by two acknowledged differences across ‘universalist’ keynote presentations: Iris Dressler on ‘Subversive feminism since its first and second waves. Developing Practices’ and Valerie Cassel Oliver on ‘Expanding internationally from the context of the United States, Consciousness: In the Wake of Conceptualism’. it examines the interrelation of race, class, gender and Foregrounding artistic and curatorial practice, both sexuality, understanding power differentials as co­ reflected on multiple strategies of museological inter­ constituted and co-constitutive. In the UK, feminist art vention and interruption. Signalling the need to attend historians have negotiated these situated positions to the specificity of local, historical, cultural, social and since the mid-1980s through new art history, cultural geopolitical contexts, their rich contributions opened studies and Black feminism. up questions and dialogues around the potential continuities and discursive intersections between seemingly disparate British, European and American narratives. 6 Introduction - Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando 7 The structure of this e­book reflects that of the By way of acknowledging (if also inadequately conference, with parts I and II very much correspon ding conveying) the significance of timing – the conference to the two days. Dressler and Cassel Oliver set and coincided with the opening of Rasheed Araeen: reset the tone for each half of the book, followed by A Retrospective. The resonance of Araeen’s radical, sections that engage respectively with ‘intersectional conceptual and material practice reverberated deeply readings’ (Alexandra Kokoli, Elisabeth Lebovici, susan for many of those present. pui san lok) and ‘international framings’ (Juan Albarrán, Alice Correia, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Wei Yu). Four further sections develop the research initiated through BLACK ARTISTS & MODERNISM a series of seminars organised by Sophie Orlando and generously hosted by FRAC Lorraine, Stedelijk Museum BAM is a three-year project funded by the UK Arts Amsterdam, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de- and Humanities Research Council (2015–18), led by Marne and Institute of International Visual Arts. Sonia Boyce as Principal Investigator, and susan pui These seminars consisted