Parse Journal (Jun 2022)
REPORTS from the Dropout Center
Abstract
The protagonist of this short text on authorship and the reading of elusive female art practices takes the guise of a curious night watchperson who is investigating disturbances on the campus of the fictional Krabstadt Academy. Four artists’ practices are discovered over time, and the protagonist uses ontological relationships and questions around viewing to ask what the narratives and outcomes of the practices they are “uncovering” are. The landscape is used as an intentional setting, which is partly based upon the history of the work Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) by Robert Smithson, but leaps off from that in imagining that it has been inhabited by four female artists who questioned the edges of authorship and the means of disseminating of conceptual structures—such as instruction, relational mechanisms, and production—and include Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske, Laurie Parsons, and Cady Noland. Drawing on research into their strategies of “Dropping Out,” the text intends to position their work in a historic understanding of something that is “uncovered,” by a public and encountered from a different perspective. It also attempts to situate their practices and the movement of their gestures as being ignited by their imaginative qualities—through a physical reading of real works and installations, such as the exhibition of Parsons in Rottweil, Germany, in 1991, and real works and texts by Lozano and Posenenske—thus existing both in and out of “fiction.”
