Publications by Alicia Chester
Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, 2018
Launched in October 2010 with thirteen employees, Instagram quickly grew to over thirty million u... more Launched in October 2010 with thirteen employees, Instagram quickly grew to over thirty million users by early 2012, when it made the news for being acquired by Facebook for one billion dollars. The app’s acquisition by Facebook inspired a profusion of online articles and blog entries obsessed with enumeration—thirteen employees, thirty million users, one billion dollars—as well as comparisons of Instagram to Kodak from the standpoints of both technological and economic innovation. These comparisons attempt to explore why Instagram was so successful at the very moment Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, but they are interesting less for their descriptions of evolving business models than for their historical accounts connecting outmoded analog processes to newer photographic technologies. As Instagram turns eight years old, with billions of photos to its name and millions more uploaded every day, the app has proven its staying power by cornering the market as the most employ...
Dilettante Volume II: Networks of Belonging, Jul 2016
Dilettante is a biennial publication that comes out of the residency program Summer Forum for Inq... more Dilettante is a biennial publication that comes out of the residency program Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange. Dilettante is available in a limited print edition of 90 copies, vacuum-packed with a piece by Summer Forum resident Sydney Shen, entitled, "Mithrida (eucalyptus spearmint stress relief)." Edited by Sara Knox Hunter. Print edition purchase, free PDF download, and full list of contributors are available at www.dilettantejournal.org/volume2.html.
The Left Front: Radical Art in the "Red Decade," 1929-1940, 2014
Contributor to print and online exhibition catalog for The Left Front: Radical Art in the "Red De... more Contributor to print and online exhibition catalog for The Left Front: Radical Art in the "Red Decade": 1929-1940, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University (January 2014).
Books by Alicia Chester
This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, ... more This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, interpret, and argue with visual studies and its neighboring fields such as art history, media studies, visual anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and aesthetics. The product of a multi-year collaboration between graduate students from around the world, spearheaded by James Elkins, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a truly international, interdisciplinary point of entry into cutting-edge visual studies research. The book is fluid in relation to disciplines; it is frequently inventive in relation to guiding theories; it is unpredictable in its allegiance and interest in the past of the discipline—reflecting the ongoing growth of visual studies.
Art Criticism & Artist Interviews by Alicia Chester
ArtSlant, Mar 16, 2014
Rochester's South Wedge neighborhood, on an unusually sunny winter day. While I opted for coffee,... more Rochester's South Wedge neighborhood, on an unusually sunny winter day. While I opted for coffee, Nadir and Peppermint are serious tea drinkers and brought their own special blend. Longtime partners in life and art, together they form EcoArtTech, a new media collaborative dedicated to exploring the environmental imagination through blurring the boundaries of natural, built, and technological spaces. Drawing on diverse training and backgrounds-Nadir completed a PhD in English at Columbia University and Peppermint has long been known as a new media and net artist-their work encompasses net art, mobile apps, digital video, architectural interventions, online performances, public happenings, and published writing. Nadir and Peppermint both teach at the University of Rochester in Western New York, where, in the interest of full disclosure, I have the pleasure of being a teaching assistant for Peppermint. We discussed collaboration, relational aesthetics, avantgarde strategies, digital readymades, nature, modernity, politics, play, and living in Rochester.
ArtSlant, Jan 17, 2014
At first look, Fearful Symmetries exhibits surprising choices for Faith Wilding's first retrospec... more At first look, Fearful Symmetries exhibits surprising choices for Faith Wilding's first retrospective. Best known as a performance and installation artist and writer involved with feminist art collectives, Wilding has firmly secured her place in the canon of the feminist art movement. Having studied with Judy Chicago in the Feminist Art Program-first at California State University, Fresno, and then at CalArts-she subsequently participated in Womanhouse (1971-1972), in which she performed her provocative and significant work Waiting (1972). Since that time Wilding's work has spanned performance, writing, installation, mixed media, and BioArt; she has collaborated with the Critical Art Ensemble and the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa; and she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital grant, and NEA artist awards. Wilding's threewallsSOLO exhibition is well timed to coincide with her reception of a 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art on February 15.
ArtSlant, Jun 16, 2013
Bilal recently visited Chicago to give the opening night lecture and present Technoviking (2013) ... more Bilal recently visited Chicago to give the opening night lecture and present Technoviking (2013) at Rapid Pulse, an international performance art festival hosted by DEFIBRILLATOR gallery in June 2013. I know Bilal from his days in Chicago as a hardworking graduate student in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We caught up after his lecture at Rapid Pulse, and, appropriately enough to his work, we conducted this interview on video chat soon after. Bilal came to international acclaim in 2007 with Domestic Tension, also known as Shoot an Iraqi, in which he turned a room in the now-defunct Flatfile Galleries (Chicago) into a domestic space. He lived there for a month while virtual visitors could log onto a website to remotely shoot a paintball gun at him, and in-person visitors would bring him food and keep him company. This project marked a turning point in his work toward direct interaction with his audience using performance, new media, and the internet. Soon after Domestic Tension, Bilal moved to New York to accept a position at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he continues to teach in the Department of Photography and Imaging. We discussed the boundary between his personal narrative and his art, the central place audience interaction and the body hold for him, dynamic encounters, and how his work is changing directions once again.
ArtSlant, May 3, 2013
's photographs are hard to write about. His images are not easily encapsulated by description. I ... more 's photographs are hard to write about. His images are not easily encapsulated by description. I can more easily relate the experience of viewing them, which is slow and contemplative, or, in Michael Fried's terminology, absorptive. These are self-contained worlds wholly manifest in every moment, in every detail, yet they also take time-the duration of exposure and the duration of viewing. I could say Bauer employs a modernist sensibility, in the sense that he explores and exploits photography's most essential bases as a medium: light and temporality. He is a master craftsman in controlling both, paying meticulous attention throughout his process to detail rendered in the deepest shadows, from film exposure to digitization to printing. His prints are mounted to Dibond-the gold standard for mounting-and exhibited naked, with neither glass nor lamination for protection. Materiality and process are integral to the images themselves. Bauer wants you to see the details, not to obfuscate them with a mediating surface, however vulnerable this choice renders the prints.
ArtSlant, Dec 25, 2012
Simply put, Chicago won big in 2012. The conglomerate of motley activities comprising the city's ... more Simply put, Chicago won big in 2012. The conglomerate of motley activities comprising the city's art scene, so artist-driven and local in flavor, is gaining recognition nationwide: experimental curatorial models, innovative arts organizations, often-ephemeral alternative spaces and apartment galleries, its tradition of the interdisciplinary artist/writer/curator, and above all, emphasis on community. Possibly because of the
ArtSlant, Oct 21, 2012
School of Visual Arts in Ontario, about a four-&-a-half hour drive southwest of Toronto. He wore ... more School of Visual Arts in Ontario, about a four-&-a-half hour drive southwest of Toronto. He wore a black t-shirt printed with the phrase "MASTURBATING LIFE MAKES ART," a black baseball cap with an embroidered ampersand, & a Canon G12 camera around his neck. BAXTER& has lived in Windsor-directly across the U.S. border from Detroit-since he took a position at the university in 1988, where he is now an emeritus professor. In 2005 he legally changed his name from "Iain Baxter" to "Iain Baxterand," which he writes capitalized with the ampersand symbol. Long acclaimed in Canada as the country's first conceptual artist & the founder of the "Vancouver School" of photoconceptualism, BAXTER& has only recently come to prominence in the United States with a retrospective jointly organized & exhibited by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago & the Art Gallery of Ontario, IAIN BAXTER&: Works 19582011. We discussed his new exhibition-IAIN BAXTER&: Information/Location, North Vancouver-as well as his roots in that city, his electronic catalogue raisonnE, & the ampersand.
ArtSlant, Oct 16, 2012
While the third floor of the Prairie-style Madlener House slowly filled for the opening talk of h... more While the third floor of the Prairie-style Madlener House slowly filled for the opening talk of his solo exhibition at the Graham Foundation, Richard Pare screened a video he shot of a Russian industrial bakery in continuous operation since the early 1930s. For almost twenty years now, Pare has extensively documented modernist Soviet architecture built between 1922 and 1932, subsequent to the Russian Revolution of 1917 that overthrew Tsarist autocracy and made way for the establishment of the Soviet Union. While Pare's video of the bakery's operations is not included in the exhibition, it provided a rare peek at one of these buildings still in use and a glimpse into the utopian spirit of this period of Soviet modernist architecture: a true marriage of form and function striving for maximum efficiency and manifesting the social goals and technological ideals of a young and still forward-looking state.
ArtSlant, Sep 20, 2012
is a pillar of the photography community in Chicago. Starting his career in Harlem in the 1970's,... more is a pillar of the photography community in Chicago. Starting his career in Harlem in the 1970's, he moved to Chicago in 1998. His works of portraiture seek to represent the Black community in a positive light counter to an American photographic history centered on victimization, cruelty and objectification. Bey recently concluded two exhibitions in Chicago, Dawoud Bey: Harlem, U.S.A.
ArtSlant, Sep 14, 2012
BY ALICIA CHESTER The Imagists and the Cubs are quintessentially Chicagoan institutions that are ... more BY ALICIA CHESTER The Imagists and the Cubs are quintessentially Chicagoan institutions that are similarly maligned in much of the rest of the country while continuing to hold sway locally. Like the Cubs, the Imagists have an intensely regional flavor, and the loyalty conjured of its adherents and descendants appears mysterious to outsiders. Aptly named, Afterimage traces the trajectory and diaspora of the Imagists' influence upon artists based in or with ties to Chicago. The opening of Afterimage marks the DePaul Art Museum's first anniversary in its new location. A small gallery near the entrance on the ground floor is dedicated to Imagist work produced in the mid-1960s to 1970s by such recognizable names as Karl Wirsum, Gladys Nilsson, Roger Brown, and Jim Nutt, serving as historical background to the main part of the exhibition upstairs featuring contemporary work. Although not a welldefined art movement, in some ways the Imagists can be defined by what they were not: not responsive to the mid-century's dominant New York School of abstract expressionist painting, unsympathetic to Pop art's
F Newsmagazine, Sep 2007
Review of "Escultura Social" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and "Women Artists of Mo... more Review of "Escultura Social" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and "Women Artists of Modern Mexico: Frida’s Contemporaries" at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago
Papers (unpublished) by Alicia Chester
All rights reserved for image copyright holders
Agency indicates the ability to act in the present, particularly with the power to produce change... more Agency indicates the ability to act in the present, particularly with the power to produce change or a desired effect, and, accordingly, agency is generally and implicitly assumed in philosophical writings to be conscious. After all, how could someone act or effect change without being conscious of her actions or intentions? Psychoanalysis poses a particular challenge to the idea that agency resides solely in the conscious, since the discourse posits that an unconscious or subconscious works within the mind to influence and even direct a person's actions. In the present essay I consider Sigmund Freud's and Pierre Janet's early psychological writings from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly those concerned with or pertinent to hysteria as a trauma-based disorder involving the loss of agency and weakness of willpower, in order to consider possibilities of agency beyond the field of consciousness.
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Publications by Alicia Chester
Books by Alicia Chester
Art Criticism & Artist Interviews by Alicia Chester
Papers (unpublished) by Alicia Chester
Mes vœux rejects the metaphor of photography as an illusionistic window giving view to another place and time, and thereby draws attention to the material surface of its photographs, and by way of analogy, the surface of the bodies it depicts. Accumulated layers of metaphoric skin and indexed bodies together construct hybrid photographic bodies the beholder may imaginatively touch, and which, in turn, may affectively touch the beholder to engage a visceral and embodied response. The emotionally suggestive text employs double entendres, puns, and homonyms to condense meaning in an oscillating wordplay that simultaneously causes a collapse and excess of signification.
Mes vœux’s nontraditional format provides contrast to the trend of the “tableau form” of photography discussed at length by Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), in which Fried applies his theory of theatricality, first articulated in his controversial essay challenging minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), to contemporary art photography. Photographic practices such as Messager’s that may be considered theatrical and that do not conform to the “tableau form” are notably absent in contemporary art photography theory as exemplified by Fried, narrowing the discourse and the field of possibility for the medium in art practice. Mes vœux links concepts of touch in visual art with concepts of embodied viewership and theatricality as traced through art history – including the advent of minimalism and the “tableau form” of photography – since the 1960s and binds them together through the medium of photography and the representation of bodies."
Selection of viewed prints:
http://www.mocp.org/info.php?t=objects&type=group&gid=1330
This script is a dialogical and performative approach by a photographer and a costume historian to articulate the experience of attempting to touch, and be touched by, absent bodies in the museum as a site of encounter. The objects we consider are an artwork composed of photographs of body parts, entitled Mes vœux (1988-1991), by French artist Annette Messager in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the restraint hood worn by Lewis Powell, executed for participating in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, in the Collection of the Chicago History Museum. These objects mediate our theoretical concerns, enacting the touching relationship between viewer and absent body.