Tania Bruguera Research Articles

Oscillation of Contemporary Bodies between Biopolitics and Necropolitics

The article examines Tania Bruguera’s works 10,148,451 (2019, Tate Modern, UK) and the three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009 and 2014, Havana; 2015, Tate Modern). Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, Lauren Berlant’s on “slow death,” and Michel Foucault’s on biopolitics, Paramana suggests that 10,148,451 addresses the collective subject and critiques contemporary necropolitics, while the versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 address individuals as political subjects, and comment on the panoptic gaze and contemporary biopolitics. Through her analysis of these works, Paramana shows how Bruguera’s work is created to comment on the specific political economies in which it is presented, how the perception of the work’s politics differs when presented in different political economies, and the insights therefore the work might offer to them. Paramana argues that Bruguera’s work has often achieved more than local and national governments and that her “symbolic work with activist parameters” is surprisingly more efficacious than her activist work. The article concludes with the insights Bruguera’s work offers for the future of bodies in the 21st century.

When Doves Cry

Through bold political performance acts, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera accesses an untimely variant of utopia whose surplus exceeds Cold War binaries of revolution and exile. Bruguera’s democratic action works build collective self-esteem and challenge the official utopianism of the communist state. In free-speech performances that confront the Cuban state’s censorship apparatus, Bruguera models for her fellow Cuban citizens an inimitable practice of democratic dissensus.

The Afterlives of Indeterminacy

This article explores composer John Cage’s turn to practice in the 1960s, placing it in a history of chance that extends into the nineteenth century, when the speculations of finance capitalism, the measurement of norms and their deviations, the statistical analysis of population and disease, and the assessment and management of risk all produced ways of calculating and mitigating risk. Cage and his primary collaborator, the pianist and electronic musician David Tudor, eschewed discrete, individual works and developed shared techniques and materials that flowed from night to night and problematised the notion of individual authorship. This improvisatory mode of action opened Cage up to complexities of indeterminacy that might have escaped him previously, most notably how one narrows the vast range of unforeseen possible outcomes by working with trusted partners and developing shared expectations and desires in a manner congruent with Michel Foucault’s classic definition of power: an action upon possible future or present actions. The article focuses on Cage’s work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and especially Cunningham’s important Event format, as well as Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), Cage’s Variations IV (1963), and Pauline Oliveros’s In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969).

Do Drama Musical à Imersão: Notas sobre a “arte total” contemporânea e latino-americana

O artigo debruça-se sobre a noção de obra-de-arte-total wagneriana aplicada à Arte Contemporânea. Desta forma, versa sobre o imbricamento das linguagens performativas e visuais e a dissolução da fronteira entre palco e plateia por meio da integração do espaço, de modo a fomentar a imersão do espectador. Neste contexto, diferente da relação ator-espectador, o jogo teatral é agenciado pela dinâmica espaço-espectador. Por fim, analisa trabalhos de artistas latino-americanos, entre eles, Diego Bianchi, Marta Minujín e Tania Bruguera.

Kristeva's Thought Specular: Aesthetic Disobedience as a New Form of Revolt

AbstractIn Revolt, She Said, Julia Kristeva makes the intriguing suggestion that contemporary art may serve (or provoke) a benevolent form of experimental psychosis. Expanding on this idea in a recent essay, she argues that such art‐induced psychosis becomes distinct in its capacity for triggering wholesome impulses toward social reform broadly conceived, that is, impulses which carry a political as well as a moral charge, but fall outside the domain of professional politics and ethical theory proper. To make this case and to emphasize the significance of Kristeva's work for exploring the contested territory of the politics of aesthetics (in Jacques Rancière's phrase), the present discussion brings Kristeva's important but under‐researched notion of the “thought specular” to bear on Jonathan Neufeld's conception of “aesthetic disobedience.” By co‐engaging these authors, one can extrapolate a model for participatory art that is not framed by rationalist standards of author intentionality or by communication‐theoretical approaches, which cast the spectators as impassive recipients of the artwork's presumed political message. Rather, witnessed by Tania Bruguera's long‐term work entitled Immigrant Movement International, participation in aesthetic disobedience can deliver on Kristeva's promise of intimate revolt in the context of artistic activism or “artivism.”

Revealing Revelation: Hans Haacke’s “All Connected”

Revealing Revelation: Hans Haacke’s “All Connected”

Exhibition Review: Tania Bruguera: 10,145,915

Tania Bruguera: 10,145,915: Tate Modern , by Yoli Terziyska. London, UK: October 2, 2018–February 24, 2019. When this sentence was written, the title of Tania Bruguera’s recent exhibition at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall was 10,145,915 . For the duration of the installation, the title changed to reflect the sum of two changing figures: the number of recorded migrants globally plus the number of migrant deaths since the beginning of 2018. The steady increase of that figure was communicated with a stamp pressed on each visitor’s hand when they entered a small gallery off the Turbine Hall—the title did not appear in an exhibit’s typical places, such as on posters and brochures. It was unclear how frequently the stamp was changed, as the numeric title was dependent on information supplied by the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The project tracks incidents involving migrants who have died, or have gone missing, in the process of migration toward an international destination. The numbers revealed are publicly available on IOM’s online platform. Apart from the title, the exhibition was formed by three apparent elements: a heat-sensitive floor covering the Turbine Hall, a small “crying room” adjacent to the hall, and a sub-bass noise projected into the two spaces. The museum labels suggested that each element highlighted the necessity for collective action for social change to take place. This sentiment was contradicted by each element’s futility—the heat-sensitive floor was meant to reveal an image of a Syrian refugee on the floor when a large enough number of visitors simultaneously interacted with the installation. The intended result was nearly impossible to coordinate because it would take a considerable quantity of bodies to simultaneously touch the floor—a number that Bruguera guessed to be one hundred fifty to two hundred.1 The “crying room” contained an organic chemical substance that elicited collective crying without an emotional impetus. The eerie …

Tania Bruguera: "Hablándole al poder". Uma exposição no Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo da Cidade do México


 Recensão crítica da exposição retrospetiva da obra de Tania Bruguera “Hablándole al poder”, patente no MUAC, na Cidade do México, de maio a setembro de 2018.

Perspective

Perspective

Editor’s Plaisance

Editor’s Plaisance

Performans a sztuka partycypacyjna

The relationship between participatory art and performance is complex. On the one hand, their affinity is recognized, because in both cases we are dealing with emphasizing the role of action, but on the other, this action is understood differently. If the first aspect is taken into account, in museum or gallery press releases the manifestations of participatory art are referred to as “performances” – sometimes accompanied by an adjective. The aim of the article is to take a closer look at this issue. The discussion begins by highlighting the fact that happenings (especially European) from the 1960s are more often considered as a reference point for participatory art than performance art. Claire Bishop points to the conscious socio-political criticism of the consumer society that appears in happenings. The author of the article argues that the structure of these activities may also be an argument. When discussing the rules of public participation in happenings and performance art, she cites Erika Fischer-Lichte’s views that in the latter case a “feedback loop” should be created between the performer and the audience. Such a loop is not formed in the case of happenings and cannot be shaped in participatory art, where the artist is only one of the people participating in the action. The article examines examples of characteristic works based on the principle of participation: Rirkit Tiravanija, Tania Bruguera and Pawel Althamer. In none of them did the artist occupy a distinguished position, she/he did not affect the way the participants behaved, and she/he only created an opportunity for a community. In the first case, its formation was completely free, in the second – there were forms of pressure release from it, in the third – there was encouragement. Nowhere, however, did the artist define the rules of action, did not determine the stake, did not set goals. At the same time, while making the participants the creators of the course of the action, the question “What for?” remains important in participatory art, which lends it a political character.

Tania Bruguera’s ‘Travelling Performances’: Challenging Private and Public Spaces /Voices

Tania Bruguera ranks among the foremost contemporary conceptual artists. Both in her life and in her art, she has defied and crossed borders and boundaries. This article intends to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of Bruguera's artistic enterprise: even as she adopts a post-modern stance, mostly through live performances, her work is deeply rooted in Cuba's indigenous traditions and painful past, as well as in its present-day life and politics. Breaking traditional boundaries between artistic media – painting, sculpture and body performance – Bruguera’s installations combine solid structures with ephemeral ones, while others are performances with the artist performing in front of an audience, requested to actively participate in the artwork. This article also discusses the changes introduced by the artist in the performances that took place in the US and in Europe, and concludes by discussing the impact of militant practices in contemporary performance art on audiences in our age of globalization.

Review of After Art by David Joselit (Princeton)

David Joselit’s slim volume "After Art" offers multiple intriguing frameworks to analyze art in the present-day globalized art world. After Art backs away from the traditional approach of artist intent and production and looks at what happens to images once they are attached to the networks that circulate them. Instead of proselytizing individual or even original artworks, Joselit champions images that are constantly reproduced and remediated by artists and architects such as Tania Bruguera, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, Matthew Barney, Le Corbusier, and Rem Koolhaus.

‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics

This article explores the emphasis on usefulness in contemporary art, focusing on social practice art in the United States and Europe through Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s establishment of the ‘Asociación de Arte Útil’ in 2011, and the rebranding of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) as a ‘useful museum’. The article addresses the affirmation of usefulness and ‘use values’ within these case studies and beyond in relation to Marxist, post-Marxist, and feminist theories of social reproduction and the state. By attending to issues of citizenship, race, and migration, the article asks how we should approach the aesthetic and political stakes of artworks that strive to be ‘useful’ through performing tasks associated with social reproduction as they have historically taken place in the home or via the welfare state.

How to Make Art with a Jackhammer: A Conversation with Tania Bruguera

W.J.T. Mitchell speaks to Tania Bruguera about the relationship between art and activism, play and use, loss and utopia.

La relación arte-política en Cuba: Entre el silencio y el susurro. El arte como lugar de acción y repolitización de la vida.

Este artículo indaga cómo se expresa la relación arte-política en Cuba en el contexto de un cambio de perspectiva en la dirección del país. Se precisa cómo lo político atraviesa el arte, politizándolo y constituyendo nudos esenciales que permiten situar y revalorizar conceptos como gestión ciudadana y activismo artístico. El lapso 2006-2014 marca un periodo muy interesante en la historia cubana. Primero, porque hay una transferencia de poderes. Segundo, porque a partir de esa transición comienzan a manifestarse transformaciones que denotan un punto de giro en el enfoque socialista. El susurro de Tatlin (2014) es una performance de Tania Bruguera que marca este lapso y traza una parábola del socialismo cubano en el siglo XXI, planteando algunas preguntas, desde “¿hacia dónde vamos?”, “¿hay hacia dónde ir?”, “¿cómo llegar?”, sobre todo, cómo llegar después del camino desandado; hasta la constatación de una inminente gravitación hacia el norte.

¿Meter el arte en el mundo? Sociedad, conducta y arte en las propuestas de Tania Bruguera.

El presente ensayo versa sobre el impulso constante en la poética de la artista cubana Tania Bruguera hacia una búsqueda de mecanismos, estrategias y herramientas para incluir el arte en el mundo. Proposiciones que van en contraposición a la práctica de inclusión de otros aspectos de la vida cotidiana en el arte de manera superficial, sin una real indagación sobre los motivos y objetivos que mueven el acercamiento del arte con la vida. Para comprender esta trayectoria y como esta desemboca en una mimetización casi completa entre arte y sociedad se hará un análisis de dos momentos de la carrera de la artista. Primeramente de las acciones impulsadas por la Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, tamizadas por los estudios de estética relacional de Nicolas Bourriaud. Desembocando, en un segundo momento, en sus últimas acciones como el Partido del Pueblo Migrante y el Movimiento Inmigrante Internacional, que se aproximan a la idea de antagonismos propuesta por Claire Bishop, debido al desarrollo de sus conceptos de arte útil y de arte de conducta.

Interview with Tania Bruguera

Abstract In late December 2014, the artist Tania Bruguera was arrested after attempting to carry out an unsanctioned performance centred on freedom of speech in Revolution Square, Havana, Cuba. She was released after three days but held in the country indefinitely until a decision regarding legal action by the government was determined. In the weeks and months that followed, Bruguera dealt with legal issues and additional arrests, diplomatic contestations surrounding her confiscated passport, along with interrogations and intimidation by the Cuban government. It was not until July 2015 that her passport was returned. In mid-August, with a letter securing her diplomatic status as a Cuban citizen in hand, she returned to the United States. Due to her detention, Bruguera participated remotely as a speaker at the College Art Association session, The Ethics of Social Practice, reading a paper through a cellphone on Arte Útil and Aest-ethics (taken, along with other belongings by the Cuban authorities). I invited her to revisit her position on ethics and Arte Útil, and her work generally, in the form of an interview for this journal, to which she graciously agreed.

Tania Bruguera

This essay describes how two works by the Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera articulate the conditions of participation within both the political and aesthetic fields. That articulation unfolds in Bruguera's specifying her performances' structures of address in order to demonstrate the ways in which individuals are variously folded into or blocked out of community-forming activities. In their insistence on such specificity, which this essay traces to a modernist notion of medium specificity, Bruguera's performances are shown to question the manner in which the field of “participatory art” is frequently generated out of an optimism for effective political and artistic practice within the conditions of post-Fordist sociality.

Aesthetic Responsibility

In this conversation artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and cultural theorist Marc James Léger discuss examples from the historic avant-gardes in light of more contemporary projects, including Wodiczko's Arc de Triomphe World Institute for the Abolition of War. They discuss how the historical avant-garde took responsibility for its art as if it was non-art, transformed into life. Mentioned is the nomadological architecture of Lucien Kroll, the solvism of Atelier Van Lieshout, the autonomous activism of Tania Bruguera, the new productivism of Las Agencias, and the social projects of Thomas Hirschhorn.