Awards
2005 Art Journal Award
Nato Thompson, “Strategic Visuality: A Project by Four Artist/ Researchers” (Fall 2004)
Nato Thompson
This year’s Art Journal Award is presented to the curator Nato Thompson for “Strategic Visuality: A Project by Four Artist/Researchers.” In assembling a suite of artist’s projects for the Fall 2004 issue of Art Journal, Thompson took full advantage of the unique combination of corporate independence and audience erudition that the publication celebrates. While diverse in scope and conception, all four projects share an element of transgressive truth, an honesty that cannot be trusted but need not be proven.
In “Recording California’s Carceral Landscapes,” Trevor Paglen views the California prison system’s deep imbrication with the cultural, historical, and political matrix of the state at large. While text predominates in the work, it is supported by a web of images that Paglen alternately quotes from his larger projects, surreptitiously obtains, or appropriates. Interwoven passages of terse prose eloquently affirm not only the medievalism of our current prison-industrial complex, but also the need to rethink “rehabilitation” in emphatically contemporary ways.
A photo essay by the Speculative Archive, excerpted from “In Light of Recent Events: The Chile Declassification Project,” explores the 1973 US-supported military coup in Chile and the possibility that “terrorism in whatever its starkly real manifestations and implications was also something of a phantasm,” constructed for political purposes.
J. Morgan Puett’s 2002 project “Insecta Magnifica” for the Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery in the Bronx, New York, was represented by the elegantly designed brochure that accompanied the original installation. Looking in detail at a grafter’s shack, the work explores the art of bee grafting, in which queen bees are aided in their reproductive activities. By transporting a disappearing rural art form practiced by generations of her family into the disappearing rural space within a city, Puett eliminates boundaries while creating and preserving memories.
For centuries, the occult, the military, and the government have been on intimate terms, says Aaron Gach, cofounder of the Center for Tactical Magic. Members of the center engage in “extensive research, development, and deployment of creative problem-solving strategies related to individual and communal power.” In their innovative, often unlikely investigations, the center asks us to suspend disbelief and believe our eyes.
Committee: Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Harvard University, chair; Joanna Roche, California State University, Fullerton; Deborah Willis, New York University; Darby English, University of Chicago.
