Annegret soltau art analysis questions

Automated technologies have, in fact, replaced much of the need for manual labour. According to Bifo, manual labour only exists for the sake of disciplining the masses 17 — Capital now lies in human capital, material, and commodities rather than artificial products and commodities De Landa would suggest assemblage art. The two texts share a number of overlaps, but they also complement and inform each other with different insights.

His analysis demonstrates that, while assemblage art may gesture toward a certain kind of counter-culture or criticality, practices of it have somewhat lost their edge in the contemporary era. He describes ruin as something to pick through: a mass of opportunities for repurposing and reconfiguring new assemblages. In other words, the contemporary bricoleur or assemblage artist is hardly critical or counter-cultural.

The dominant art discourse, according to Relyea, fails to notice this. Dominant discussions of prominent and contemporary assemblage artists such as Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison often celebrate their works as being art that [stands] against the relational in favour of the substantial, against the digital in favour of the analog, against white-collar data management in favour of blue-collar sweat and grime, against far-flung communicational networks in favour of the dense, specific, and obdurate material mass… these collaged objects — or bricolage as they are typically called — [are] said to pledge allegiance to the individual, to the private workspace, and to materiality Relyea questions these analyses.

For him, the sculptures of artists such as Genzken and Harrison are neither autonomous nor counter-cultural. That is, they only reinforce the contemporary production of networks and systems described by Relyea; they fail to effect or constitute anything counter-cultural Kwan 8 While assemblage practices may have once challenged mass consumption and standardization with the bricolage of readymades, and while the readymade once called attention to mass production and the issues of an industrial society, neither concepts of bricolage nor the readymade imbue the Information, Post-Industrial Age with much criticality.

Capitalism already operates beyond mass production and standardization with a new approach — mass networking and systems design. The readymade does little to address this. Many assemblages, like those of Harrison and Genzken, are made up of found objects, repurposed. As a result, it surprises and enchants. Kwan 9 Contemporary artists like Genzken and Harrison, with their practices of assemblage, exemplify the uncritical and yet privileged and celebrated status of the contemporary semionaut That is, it fails to account for the person or people who lost the object s in the first place, and perhaps furthermore encourages the colonial lootings and capitalist exploitations that so successfully create ruin s in the first place.

On the other hand, even if it is a privileged entity who loses something or is reduced to ruin and an underprivileged individual finds it, they may not have the resources to repurpose it. If they do repurpose it, their lack of privilege might still render the repurposed much less valuable than if it were repurposed by a privileged individual.

And yet assemblage art and its artists achieve nothing new or counter-cultural with their privilege. In writing about assemblage theory and scale, De Landa notes, the importance of starting a social study at the personal and even subpersonal scale. What can it mean for assemblage to assert a sense of self — to act as a self-portrait, as an autobiography?

Although significant distinctions between portraiture and selfportraiture exist, both nevertheless seek to depict persons. The first aim seeks to produce an accurate rendering of the subject — one that reflects its social-historical ontology as is. The second aim, meanwhile, enacts a transformation or transformations on the socio-historical being of the subject at hand.

These two aims are in constant tension since interpretation of what exists as is involves some of elements of selfhood involved in transformative expression. First, an artist achieves an accurate likeness by rendering a person distinguishable. The image, he says, goes beyond resemblance Maybe the essence is how one wishes to remind themselves of the subject in the image, or the viewer-idealized version of who the subject is or might be?

Throughout all four types of portraiture, the tension between faithfulness to subject and creative aim of artistic expression is at play. Now, what is a self-portrait? If portraiture is the depiction of a person, then self-portrait must be the depiction of self. Kwan 13 Narrative self-construction organizes experiences, allowing a person to make a sense of themselves, their actions, and their conditions for existence.

As Mackenzie and Poltera point out, the narrative self-constitution view depends on five elements of what it means to be a person. Firstly, persons are capable of reflexive selfawareness. This means they are able to conceptualize themselves in complex ways — from both a first-person and third-person perspective. Secondly, reflexive self-awareness is constituted — to some degree — intersubjectively.

Because of their reflexivity, self-awareness, and responsiveness to reasons, persons are aware of changes over time. They also need to make those changes intelligible to themselves. Persons achieve this awareness through their bodies and their temporal extensiveness Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti elaborates on this concept of embodiment as it relates to selfhood and metamorphoses in her book Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming She particularly elucidates her budding theories through a feminist reading of the body, meanwhile drawing from poststructuralist theories of difference by philosophers Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze.

Braidotti, like Mackenzie and Poltera, pushes for the navigation of social reality with an approach focused on self-embodiment. This self-embodiment is subject to metamorphoses, which manifest physically but are the result of contingencies and self-directed actions that range from the metaphysical and physical. Self-interpretation is, after all, a personal reading of what already exists.

Selfexpression, meanwhile, is a projection of self that may deviate or build away from the selfinterpretation because of the re-constructive processes undertaken in reaction to the interpretations taken. That is, to be autonomous is to be capable of a faithful self-interpretation interpretation of subject and the expressive self-construction that reacts to self-interpretation to through our intentions, decisions, and actions that express our intentions and decisions.

Thus self-portraiture as defined by the two aims of faithful and expressive depiction asserted by Freeland can be said to be a practice greatly intertwined with the ontologies of self as defined by the two aims of selfinterpretation and self-construction asserted by Mackenzie-Poltera. The entity of the self, for Mackenzie and Poltera is not restricted to a stabilized historical identity.

Rather, it is able to forge relationships with external entities in an ongoing and transformative way. Any processes of stabilization do not preclude processes of de-stabilization, and vice versa. They discuss entities of different scales, from various forms of self to other social constructions. They refer to the self not as a set metric determination but a frame that changes in scale, nature, ability, and components.

And yet, this kind of self-assemblage escapes the issues of isolation and hypothetical action outlined by Relyea. Self-assemblage, with the ongoing processes of self-interpretation and self-construction at its core, performs ongoing transformation and movement. These transformations and movements do not operate within designed circumstances.

Rather, they respond to designed circumstances via relations of exteriority, allowing themselves to break away from designed systems when needed. Specifically, selfassemblage breaks away from mass design and customization through its analog, embodied and embedded means of operation. This is possible because the physical human body is contextspecific — embedded in particular social, historical, and political circumstances — while the postindustrial networks and mass design are tailored to be omnipresent and thus, unable to account for context-specificity.

I want to dedicate the remainder of this paper to a comparative case study of two female artists who exemplify this discussion of self-assemblage — Annegret Soltau and Sarah Cale. In her works, the artist deconstructs images of her own body while reassembling the fragments forming new configurations. Soltau fragments not only her own image in her works, but she also deconstructs the unity of the subject.

Deconstruction as an artistic practice is an important strategy for Soltau to question concepts of female identity and traditional gender roles on a formal and textual level. Although contemporary art has virtually no more taboos, the subject of motherhood and children are only rarely addressed. Life and work [ edit ]. Honours [ edit ].

Exhibitions [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Annegret Soltau. Archived from the original on 8 March Retrieved 5 March Reykjavik Boulevard.

Annegret soltau art analysis questions

Archived from the original on 3 March Archived from the original on 11 March Cambridge, Mass. The series shows a search for biographical traces in self-portraits with sewn-in original documents, beginning with my birth certificate and continuing on to the SIM cards that are in everyday use and in which my Self is saved in digital format.

The conclusion to this series will be a collage including my death certificate, to be put together by one of my surviving family members. They include for instance a student pass, a medical card and, shown here, a dental card, Zahnarzt front reverse and most beguilingly, two versions of her Mutterpass , a record of pregnancy and birth, Mutterpass II front reverse Looking at other pieces on Soltau's website, I found much of her work intensely affecting and personal.

In addition to the above there is also a series called Vatersuche Try , shown below in installation view. This documents literally her long and fruitless search for her missing father who was lost or killed during or just after the Second World War. She describes this quest as 'a search in a place of emptiness'. Portrait Annegret However, the work is also at times most disturbing.

It even perhaps provoked revulsion and I have been careful about the images I've chosen to show here.