Art Crawl for Instructional Intimacies

December 17, 2024 Summer 2024

As the mid-point assignment for Instructional Intimacies, each participant made an “art crawl” — mapping out a multi-stop field trip to view artworks in-person and consider them in light of the central questions that animated the class: how has the internet (and gender, and race, and ethnicity, and family of origin) shaped your language? (For a more general overview of the class, check out this blog post.) Shoes were laced up, arts spaces were patronized, and snacks were eaten along the way. Over the second half of the ten-week session, class discussions were infused with reflections on the art that each of us sought out in our communities or the places we’d visited over the summer.

To offer a taste of that rich sharing, below are some words and images from students and teachers of Instructional Intimacies who have generously agreed to make this documentation of their art crawls public.

São Paulo, Brazil

Painting by Hermelindo Fiaminghi from "Da construção da cor à dispersão da luz" at Galeria Superfície.

“[Hermelindo] Fiaminghi is one of the most important names in Brasilian Concretism, ‘creating rhythmic compositions that suggest the displacement of shapes, specially triangles,’ as Galeria Superfície put it. Seeing one of his studies also made me think of the use of mathematics as a form of achieving images of natural harmonic movements. Cordeiro would use computational math, while Fiaminghi employed mostly trigonometry and proportion ratios. Fiaminghi's work not only proposes a new relationship with images and movement, but also portrays very well the ethos he was in, during the decade of 1950. He was involved in the creation of Noigandres, one of the most renowned Concrete Poetry magazines, the National Exhibition of Concrete Art and one of the founders of the first advertisement school in Brasil, in MASP. With that in mind, I started seeing his work as allusions to mass media technologies that had their boom in the same period of time, like the television, antenas and satellites.”

— Christiam Vilhena

These are excerpts from a longer piece that Chris published on Medium following the art crawl. An interactive map of Chris’s crawl lives here.

Leeds, United Kingdom

A pigmented polyurethane resin artwork by Hany Armanious.

“By moving from Egypt to Australia, Hany Armanious experienced a cultural shift in both material language and spoken language. Everything is a duplicate/distillations of original objects made with the use of resin casts. The idea of ‘redeeming waste’ and ‘extreme focus on a subject’s constituent parts is akin to repeating a word over and over until its meaning collapses and you are instead left with a series of sounds’ ties to concrete poetry?”

Yinka Shonibare, Hibiscus Rising.

“Yinka Shonibare’s Hibiscus Rising commemorates David Oluwale, a British Nigerian who lived in Leeds, who suffered ‘the physical and psychological destruction of a homeless, black man whose brutal, systematic harassment was orchestrated by the Leeds city police force,’ drowning in 1969. Hibiscus flowers are common in Nigeria, and Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise also served as inspiration.”

— Bunmi Davies

Madison, Wisconsin, USA

A collage by Ellsworth Kelly and On Kawara, "Date Painting," 1978

The date painting is by On Kawara and it speaks to the passage of time as a form within itself. The multicolored square collages are by Ellsworth Kelly, and they were arranged completely by chance. I think this also speaks to the freedom to work within limitless combinations given a form with rules and limits.

— Madeleine Baer

Nairobi, Kenya

“In the absence of images, words will have to suffice. On Friday 5th July 2024, I went to a salon in Westlands and watched several women get their hair done. I didn’t take photos, as I knew that there was a chance I’d share the images and I hadn’t brought consent forms with me. However, instead of images, I’ll just speak on Hair. Hair is important to many cultures around the world in a miriyad of ways, however, for this section, I am going to focus on Kenya and Hair.

Hair is an incredibly important part of Kenyan identity. If you cut your hair, the shape of the cut needs to be clean and crisp, if you grow your hair out, it must be styled to perfection. Colour, cut, natural or synthetic, wig, weave or braids, the Hair must be perfect. The pride people take in their Hair can not be overstated, it may even be more important than the outfit you're wearing, wear dirty jeans and an un-ironed shirt with muddy shoes (my mums definition of being slovenly dressed), but as long as your hair looks good, then all is good.

On Friday 5th July, after leaving the salons I attended a sound art workshop held at the Munyu Art Space in Nairobi, hosted by Sound Artist Sophia Bauer. The workshop focuses on sounding and listening as an artistic practice. In a group we listened to the sound of the space and then sounded a response to the spaces sounds, from humming back to the AC, to sounding back at each other in the room. We also got to read an excerpt from Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. The excerpt looked at the ways that non-human animals may listen and how they sound. The workshop and experience highlighted the diversity of thought and experimentation in the sound art space.”

— Natasha Khanyola

Quito, Ecuador

“I visited five exhibitions at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. ‘We are the strike within the strike!’ presented memories of the Transfeminist Assembly, which participated in the last national strike in Ecuador during October 2022, which lasted 13 days.”

Installation view of "¡Somos el paro dentro del paro!"

“‘Always Forever, Never Without Memory’ was born as a collective effort for visibility and inclusion of urban narratives in the museum space, representing a compilation of urban art languages such as large-format illustration, graffiti, contemporary mural, paste-up, stencil, and sticker.”

— Cecilia Miranda

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

“This art crawl was conducted when I was visiting Yogyakarta, a city in Indonesia with a particularly lively art scene, owing to its long-standing art schools and tight-knit informal art communities. From my home in Jakarta, it took a 7-hour train ride to get there.

First stop: “Ears to the East”, a showcase of East Indonesian artists. It took place in the studio of Udeido Collective [pictured on the map: Bengkel las], a collective of artists from West Papua who works with Papuan indigenous symbolisms and concepts to express their sociocultural reality, as well as the Indonesian government’s ongoing colonization and exploitation.

A friend recommended the show, which was located in the collective’s studio, 7 km from the gallery district in Yogyakarta—quite far from where I stayed. I had to take a motorbike taxi through the rice fields under the striking 1PM sun, and it was quite difficult to pinpoint the exact location of the studio. But when I got there, the studio was left unmanned. I tried reaching out to the collective’s Instagram account, but nobody responded, and the account seemed to have not much recent activity (later on another friend told me I should have contacted Dicky Takndare, one of the collective’s members).

I walked to the studio’s backyard to see the statues and a long table surrounded with benches, peppered with traces of the previous gatherings: leftover food boxes, mugs, and ashtray. The backyard overlooks a cliff and a landscape of cassava plants and other wild trees. I sat there, spacing out as I was absorbed by my natural surroundings, trying to shove off the tension of not knowing the context, of not absorbing knowledge, of overstepping my boundaries as a guideless art tourist.

One particular statue resonated with me: the bust of a screaming man, arms up in the air, and connected to it is a structure held together by metal bars. Dicky Takndare reinterpretation of Edhi Sunarso’s “Monumen Pembebasan Irian Barat” (Monument of the Liberation of West Papua, 1963), a public sculpture located at Lapangan Banteng, Jakarta that commemorated the unification of West Papua with Indonesia after a forced referendum. In the original sculpture, the man broke the chains that cuffed his hands, the leftover broken chains seemed like they were flying mid-air. While in Takndare’s sculpture, the chains were contained in the structure of bars. Breaking down the historical monument, the image of nationalism in a liberated body, back into this half-made construction—it is a process of dehumanization, bringing back the symbol into steel, a harsh reminder that all that heroism had been an illusion and the chains had never left the body.

Then I went to this gallery, Indieart House. It was showcasing the paintings of a Balinese artist, I Made Dabi Arnasa, a name still not quite familiar to me. Almost all of the paintings were landscapes, and often a body—the artist’s avatar—would appear in the canvas. I don’t think there’s anything new from the exhibition’s narrative of this struggle between the individual and their environment. But I like his use of pastel colors. I was also drawn to this oval triptych that illustrates the materialization of the body, which embodies a very moving image quality in addition to its unique canvas shape.”

— Dini Adanurani

New York, NY, USA

Stills from video works in Harun Farocki, "Inextinguishable Fire" at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

Some of the class members made a group crawl in New York to see a show of Harun Farocki’s work at Greene Naftali — which, as we later discussed in class, had been censored to obscure the late artist’s pro-Palestinian sentiment. Previous iterations of the show had been called “Against War”; this one was titled “Inextinguishable Fire” (obliquely referencing the anti-war sentiment of Farocki’s famous Vietnam War-era work.)

Walking between galleries, topics of discussion (allegedly) moved from name aphasia to the illicit breeding of Russian Blue cats. The second stop was Greene Naftali, to see a show of new work by Roni Horn.

Installation view, Roni Horn, Hauser & Wirth New York.

“I asked Farouk, the security guard at Hauser & Wirth, his favorite work. He spends more time with the Roni Horn exhibition than anyone else. He picked a work he said reminded him of beach goers. He said the work he does isn’t oppressive. ‘I move the pieces [ed. Horn’s sculptural works] around in my mind.’”

—  Maryam Monalisa Gharavi