artist talk : Andrea Bowers

She is a political activist artist who works with variety of mediums to present her research based art works that are about the power relations or struggles in the society. She started the talk with presenting 20miutes video of , a video that is a close-up of love letters written by a feminists Emma Goldman who was very influential in Andrea Bowers works. By showing her letters she not only wanted to show the character of the writer but the history of women's mark making. There was no doubt that Andrea Bowers was a strong feminist and was pushing her art work to the extremes. She presented another work where she made political posters out of wrapping paper (commonly used in women's crafts) and handed out to people. By looking at the photographs it seems more like a political rally than an art work. The writings on the posters made her work very literal and almost pop art due to the material and the colors that she was using when making choices in choosing types of posters. In using the wrapping papers she repeatedly said that she was not interested in making the low materials such as wrapping paper, quilts and elevating it into forms of high art. However, the way she presented the work did not reflect her intensions because she would often hang the work in a gallery space. It was ambiguous as to where her voice was because I was confused if she was trying to present her research of radical political or social groups or she was trying to speak for them and she was being part of their voice. One work that really stand out was where it was a memorial of an Iraqi Faiz Ali Salim who travelled with an American Marla Ruzicka who were both killed while researching civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. She took news articles of their story and using graphite drew the articles and then only left the lines that mentioned the Iraqi Faiz Ali Salim by erasing anything that was not about him. This showed how the media was densely covering the life of a blond American girl Marla and how there was very little attribute given to the Iraqi man. This work was more appealing to me than other works of hers because the work was more indirect in what it was trying to say. The emptiness of the 20 framed graphite drawings drew me closer as a viewer to figure out what was there and what was not there. Where is the line between political art and art used to serve the political means of a group? (Posters that meat to hang in a gallery vs. on the streets for propaganda) Why does she choose to call herself an artist over a political activist?