This is the seventh blog on my Clore Fellowship/Wellcome Trust sponsored study visit to the USA. See the others here.
Julia Weist is an artist working as part of the New York City Public Artist in Residence programme. I have recently written about my meetings with other artists on this programme, including Kameron Neal who is in the midst of an inspiring residency at New York Department for Official Records and Information Services (DORIS), making artwork which interrogates the New York Police Department’s invasive surveillance activities from the 1950s-90s. Julia also conducted her residency at DORIS, between 2019-20.
Art which explores the bureaucracy around art
Julia’s focus was the broad relationship between the City’s government and its artists as captured in the bureaucratic record. Weist unearthed forms completed by officials assessing artworks for public commissions, memos sent back and forth by executives describing the artworks and their applicability for various public settings and even paperwork surrounding a proposed exhibition by ‘fine art photographer’ Rudi Giuliani. Julia assembled these artefacts as large collages; her equally large photographs of these have been acquired by various museums and formed part of a solo show at the Rachel Uffner Gallery which took place in May 2022. I was fortunate to see and photograph some of the proofs for this show (see images).
Proofs of Julia Weist’s photographic artworks
Proofs of Julia Weist’s photographic artworks
I loved the way Julia’s content and aesthetic melded into an ambiguous homage, critique and recreation of the bureaucracy that often surrounds big political and cultural moments. Her process then reinforces this. The strategies she used in working with DORIS, searching the archive and making the work means that, for procedural reasons, her artwork will now re-enter the New York City archive, to be retained for posterity.
Governing bodies
This elegant iterative play is at work in another of Julia's pieces, Governing Body (2021). Here she delved into the New York State’s archive located at Albany, specifically researching the censorship of films shown in New York State. She identified scenes the State government required to be deleted before they could be shown in the State’s movie theatres - and she then made a film solely comprising those excerpts.
From here Governing Body work multiplies in terms of its impact and implications. For one, we can see what kinds of scenes have been historically considered too taboo to show, “nearly all of which was related to women and gender nonconforming characters’ bodies and freedoms” according to Julia. Then, Julia submitted her composite film to the Motion Picture Association (MPA), to get it rated by current standards. The film was given a restricted (R) rating, apparently due to the realistic childbirth depicted and some sexual content. This rating process then triggered another bureaucratic twist. By Julia applying for (and paying for) the rating, the MPA gained control of visual representations of the film, including movie posters, which they rejected because they featured images of breastfeeding and sculptures/paintings of nude women. Julia is now prohibited from displaying these “disapproved” posters in public - contravening this could result in being sanctioned and barred from ever receiving a rating again. In a final cycle of this iterative artwork, of course, Julia has displayed them in her recent exhibition…
Thinking about art and policy
Julia’s practice provided much food for though in regard to the Art-Policy Matrix, ideas which I am including in a forthcoming article for Social Works? magazine. A more personal reflection was how Julia so adroitly brought bureaucracy and government to bear in the creation of artworks, the content of the artworks, and the aesthetic which permeated the artworks. It’s an interesting juxtaposition with my work where I often portray things relevant for policy - data, people, stories - but not the actual policy itself. The closest I have come to this is Policy Ideas from the Glass House exhibition - pictured below, wider context provided here. A question I would like to explore over the coming months is: can I bring policy more explicitly - and materially - into my practice?
Julia’s work is clever, beautiful and inspiring - thank you so much Julia for taking the time to meet - and everyone please do check out Julia’s work, link again to her recent solo show here.
I am the Wellcome Trust sponsored Clore 16 Fellow. In 2022 as part of this Fellowship I travelled to New York, Santa Fe and Los Angeles. I met an artist in New York thinking about criminal justice by using shape, an artist pushing the boundaries of interspecies collaboration, and the artist-led entertainment space innovating how audiences engage with evidence. Read about them and others here.