About this Program:

This program focuses on a form of double vision — seeing the 1960s through the lens of the 1990s — in American video art in the 1990s. It argues that the stakes of the 1960s in this later period corresponds to a sense of the unfinished political promise of nonviolent direct action, and in turn, the unfinished art historical promise of early video. The videos in this program by Tom Kalin, Gran Fury, Dara Birnbaum, Leah Gilliam, Tom Rubnitz (in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz), Suzie Silver (in collaboration with Hester Reeve) and Sadie Benning all move beyond mere ‘returns to history.’ While sometimes wary about the limitations of Sixties era social movements and urban policies, each approach the 1960s as a site of innovation in media and as a site of innovation in politics. “The whole world is watching” was a chant made famous by the responses of activists to clashes between police and demonstrators at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Iterations of the phrase emerged earlier however, for example in the newspaper coverage of the Little Rock integration crisis in 1957, an event that is referenced in Leah Gilliam’s work, and in activist Medgar Evers’ 1963 televised speech that reversed the direction of the phrase to insist that black Americans were watching “what happened today all over the world.” I suggest that artists working in video in the 1990s picked up on the question of not only what was being watched, but how. I selected the title for this program because the question of media is central to both the activist chant and its invocation in art contexts. Further, I wished to quote from Randolph Street Gallery exhibition’s iteration of the “whole world is watching” because many of the artists (especially Suzie Silver) participated robustly in Chicago’s alternative arts institutions that highlighted the medium of performance. While “culture wars” debates about government censorship of the arts have tended to foreground photographic work created primarily in New York, Chicago exemplifies a broader phenomenon of alternative institutions in cities throughout the U.S. that created the space for artists to respond to politics in real time, within their art works.

Continue reading Solveig Nelson's The Whole World is (Still) Watching

Solveig Nelson is an art critic and current Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago. Nelson’s work focuses on the history and criticism of early video art, the visual and performative strategies of nonviolent direct action, and questions of art and the televisual. She has written art criticism for Artforum since 2012, including longer pieces on Steve McQueen, Anna and Lawrence Halprin, and Gretchen Bender. Her M.A. thesis at the University of Chicago considered Ken Dewey's mixed media installation Selma Last Year (1966). Previously she has worked as the fiction editor of The Baffler, collaborated with Sadie Benning on the video installation, Play Pause, 2006, and programmed literary events at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park, Chicago.