Claudia Costa Pederson and Nicholas Adrian Knouf are PhD candidates in Art History and Information Science at Cornell University respectively. Here they broach the subjects of education, representation, and organized networks through a review of works by Arzu Ozkal and My Piece of Chennai.


Persistent Iteration by Arzu Ozkal is a two-channel video from a series of video works exploring identity in relation to the artist’s body. The two juxtaposed video feeds, the first of which shows a close-up shot of Ozkal’s hands and a school notebook on which she repeatedly writes türküm (Turkish); while the second image consists of a recording at an elementary school classroom attended by Ozkal in her childhood. In the latter, a stationary image of saluting Turkish soldiers is superimposed to the left of students engaged in their morning pledge to the Republic of Turkey. The soundtrack is of the students’ voices reciting in unison lead by a senior student. Ozkal is a Turkish-born artist of Turkish and Bosnian descent. The work was generated shortly after the artist’s completion of a MFA in Computer Art at State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY), and was subsequently shown at various national and international venues.

Meena Natarajan is an interaction researcher and design specialist trained at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She joined the project My Piece of Chennai as lead coordinator upon return to her native India in 2008. My Piece of Chennai is a open-source, online project developed by a volunteer network of Chennai- and North American-based designers, artists, entrepreneurs, and community organizers in collaboration with Chennai residents. The project’s website describes the aim of the initiative as an attempt at creating, “a place and medium of collaboration for local communities in monitoring civic amenities in their area, taking joint ownership of their piece of Chennai.” My Piece of Chennai follows on the heels of a number of independently run projects situated in large urban areas of India, such as Sarai, a well known collective in New Delhi, and Pukar in Mumbai, led by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. These collectives are established as spaces and networks dedicated to research, practice, and conversation on topics related to urbanism.

Common to Ozkal’s and Natarajan’s projects is an examination of questions regarding subject formation, representation, and community. The points of intersection in these projects pertain to models of organization, an issue pertinent to both artists and activists. This essay examines the relationship between art and design practices conceived from an interventionist standpoint via generative modes of research and the development of autonomous networks.

Arzu Ozkal’s video, Persistent Iteration, evokes a paradigm of population management performed as educational ritual. Students’ bodies and psyches are brought to order through repetitive writing and vocal exercises. Persistent Iteration allows us to witness present-day, ritualized subjection to a vision of community established in Ozkal’s native Republic of Turkey by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). This designing of modern Turkish subjectivity on the model of the European nation-state has its roots in an Enlightenment ideology that valorized principles of individualism, self-interest, and utilitarianism, and extolled governance by Law, linear logic, and rationality. In practice, Atatürk had set out to design the institutional apparatus of Turkey in a series of cultural, political, social, and economic reforms upholding nationalism, modernization, democracy, and secularization guided by educational and scientific progress. This became known in Turkey as Kemalism.


Arzu Ozkal,Persistent Iteration, digital video, 2008

Following the arguments of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish on the disciplinary function of teaching handwriting and military drills in schools, Ozkal represents the classroom as an extension of the state’s disciplinary apparatus, i.e., in its new forms of punishment. The militaristic ritual of the morning drill in Ozkal’s school also recalls Atatürk’s own training as a military officer. The liberal values of honesty and hard work (indicated both in speech and in writing in the video) foreground transparency, as a political principle, and efficiency, as an economic aim, two key characteristics of Atatürk’s program of economic, political, and cultural reform.

Installation view from Art of the Overhead, 2005
Menezes/Text literally and openly interpellates the viewer through a series of questions superimposed on a collage of statements collected from newspaper articles regarding Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian killed by London police on July 22nd 2005. In the work we attempt to open questions regarding the way in which the media colludes with authority in producing and spreading suspicion among the general public.

With the "Luxury" banner placed on a Regent Park building, it is an tiny attempt to cut through the smoke screen of culture and identity policies that prevents us from seeing the government's increasing detachment from our collective body, and the spatial frontiers where housing, for the most of us, is never going to be luxury.

What follows are excerpts of an exchange between the editors of C_M_L and Gregory Sholette, one of the founders of Political Art Documentations/Distribution (PAD/D), a collective whose activities included the creation of an archive of politically agitational and socially progressive art centered in New York City. The archive was initiated in 1979 by critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard as an open call. Other members of PAD/D included Barbara Moore, and Mimi Smith, Jerry Kearns, Vanalyne Greene, Mickie McGee, Janet Koenig, Herb Perr, Keith Christensen, Jerri Allyn, Beverly Naidus, Irving Wexler, Ed Eisenberg, Jody Wright, and Charles Frederick. The matter collected by PAD/D has been housed in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art since 1989.

In Lucy R. Lippard's text, Archival Activism, she writes that PAD/D strove for a "theory developed out of real experience instead of out of academically idealized notions." Was there a sense of political detachment felt among artists and performers? Do you think PAD/D succeeded to an extent in changing this attitude?

When I arrived in New York City in 1977 to attend The Cooper Union the very idea of explicitly mixing art and politics was considered retrograde. My mentor at school, Hans Haacke, was typically described as a conceptual, not a political artist. The co-founder of Group Material, Tim Rollins perhaps put it best when he quipped that “political art” conjured-up “charcoal sketches of Lenin and clenched fists.” Although I must admit developing an appreciation for amateur charcoal drawings since then, it is correct to say that compared not just to the 1920s and 1930s, but even to the 1960s and early 1970s, the critical discourse surrounding art in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a very hermetic and formalist one in the United States. The importance of feminism and performance art was not felt in art schools at the time because second-generation abstract expressionists still dominated these institutions for the most part. Meanwhile, archconservative Hilton Kramer at the New York Times policed the art world for any signs of radical dissent. At one point Kramer even called for a boycott of Artforum by commercial art galleries when the magazine’s editors, Max Kozloff and John Coplans, dared to publish essays suggesting that art actually had a relationship to society! So yes, I think by agitating from the margins PAD/D contributed to the change of discourse about art and politics especially in New York City, however, I think even more directly effective at the time was Lucy Lippard’s regular art review column in the Village Voice. Lippard was fearless when it came to writing what was on her mind, and as a key member of PAD/D that often reflected the political activism of the group at any particular moment. But in addition, we should bear in mind the widespread rejection of Greenbergian formalism and the rise of Hip Hop culture from street to mainstream during the 1980s, as well as of course the East Village art scene with its recognition of graffiti, handcrafts, outsider painting and sculpture as “serious” (collectible) artworks. But like many self-institutionalized groups formed by artists then or since, PAD/D could not sustain the multiple levels of activity it had imposed on itself. Neither was it prepared for the increasingly conservative political environment of the decade or the diminution of the organized Left.