Description
Literary Nonfiction. Art. SHADOWED! confronts the slippage of time and action within Ellen Rothenberg's exhibition elsetime. Sweeping through the studio of Bertolt Brecht, Woodstock in the sixties, Berlin in the nineties, and the Syrian protests of today, SHADOWED! projects a dispersive, unfolding temporality. Beginning with a suite of elsetime photographs, the book continues with reflections on the show by Hannah B Higgins, Jeffrey Skoller, Caroline Picard, and Shawn Michelle Smith—spreading out from there into an artist's archive that includes scanned fragments of writings by Stefan Brecht, Allen Ginsberg, Angela Davis, and transcribed contributions from Simone Forti. A subsequent section includes documentation of performances produced in response to elsetime by artists, activists, and musicians. SHADOWED! ends with the transcript of a public conversation that took place within the original exhibit, capturing a discussion that incorporates an active audience. By layering these performative, photographic, and written encounters, SHADOWED! allows the afterimage of an exhibition to unfurl beyond the gallery, beyond this book, and into its own elsetime.
"Ellen Rothenberg's multimodal installation elsetime interlaced performance actions, installation, objects, public invitations to fellow artists, and visual essays. In this beautiful and thoughtfully designed book, you'll find each of these aspects explored anew as though readied for further action. New pieces by collaborators enter the scene and become enmeshed in photographic echoes from '60s collective rallying, music documentary, contemporary migrancy, material icons, and the live events generated during the exhibition. The great exclamation mark of the title brings all these absents squarely into view, while posing the pressing question: how does one avoid reenacting shadows from the past!"—Caroline Bergvall
"Rothenberg's feminist social sculpture and animated objects echo radical en-actions from Brecht, Fluxus, suffrage street theatre, and Black Lives Matter protests. Worn shoes declare that the way lies both forward and backward, for the past always underlies the present and reverberates deeply in the desires of our current work and lives. This radical book should be in your backpack at a May Day parade or protest strike! Mourn and organize!"—Faith Wilding
"Ellen Rothenberg's book/archive serves as a complex memory machine where the global 20th century's cultural, political, and social revolutions encounter the local now. The captivating imagery of Rothenberg's reflexive and expansive work lifts you out of history's shadows and makes you feel alive, resisting the wave of inevitability. SHADOWED! is timely. This book is a gift to anyone curious about or deeply interested in material culture, history, social change, and contemporary art."—Irina Aristarkhova
"Needed: An example of health which will paralyze the Angels. Provided: The fortifying Forward/Backward groove of conceptualist Ellen Rothenberg. Part performance, part archive, part tonic, elsetime is what happens to a retrospective when historical engagement is already the problem of the work. If you know Rothenberg's art, SHADOWED! is essential reading. If you are coming to it for the first time, it is a compelling invitation to voyage."—Daniel Rosenburg
"SHADOWED! troubles temporal linearity and spatial capture. It is a time of multiple moments and simultaneous directions. A performance in its own right, SHADOWED! is an invitation to time travel towards alternative futuresof the the past. In these pages we trespass (lightly, with worn shoes) through ecstatic and traumatic territories."—Bettina Knaup
"Breathing new life into dog-eared crime novellas, faded bellbottom jeans, and a tattered armchair, time-bending artist Ellen Rothenberg virtually collaborates with the past, reanimating the material traces of a gone world through an archival agency of the elsewhere."—Gregory Sholette
Contributors include: Mark Booth, Alexandria Eregbu, Simone Forti, Becky Grajeda, Hannah B Higgins, Terri Kapsalis, Tim Kinsella, Anne Elizabeth Moor, Dao Nguyen, Caroline Picard, Jeffrey Skoller, and Shawn Michelle Smith
Author Bio
Since the early eighties, Ellen Rothenberg's work has been concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. Influenced by the social and political actions of the sixties—the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements—she began locating her work outside conventional institutional venues, shifting her performances and sculpture to the street, city parks, subway platforms and other public spaces, broadening the audience for her work. At the same moment, Rothenberg began to immerse herself in research, particularly feminist histories of labor and social action. Partnering with historians, forensic scientists, research librarians and archivists, she developed a practice that includes and recognizes intellectual workers and material fabricators in a nonhierarchical approach.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA
Caroline Picard is a writer, publisher, and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artslant, ArtForum (critics picks), Flash Art International, and Paper Monument, among others. She is the Executive Director of The Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—and the Co-Director of Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/bookstore in Chicago.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA