{{Short description|Polish-American contemporary artist}} {{Infobox artist | name = Monika Weiss | image = Monika Weiss circa 2003.jpg | image_size = | caption = Weiss in ''Speaking Portraits'' | birth_date = 1964 | birth_place = Warsaw, Poland | field = Installation, Video, Performance | website = {{URL|http://www.monika-weiss.com}} }} 340px|thumb|''Phlegethon-Milczenie'' (2005). Self-shot photography, performance, books, projected video, sound. Collection: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami. '''Monika Weiss''' (born 1964, in Warsaw) is a Polish-American contemporary artist based in New York City. She works primarily with Installation, video projection, performance, sound and drawing.<ref name="Gorządek">Ewa Gorządek, [http://www.culture.pl/web/english/visual-arts-full-page/-/eo_event_asset_publisher/Ny17/content/monika-weiss “Monika Weiss,”] Culture.pl. Retrieved February 28, 2013.</ref><ref name="Szylak">Aneta Szylak, “Your trap shall be your shelter: the hidden desires and public appearances of Monika Weiss,” ''Monika Weiss Five Rivers'', Lehman College Art Gallery / Les Editions Samuel Lallouz, 2005, pp. 49-60.</ref> Her transdisciplinary approach investigates relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation.<ref name="samfox">[http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/portfolios/faculty/monika_weiss “Monika Weiss Biography,”] [http://www.samfoxschool.wustl.edu/ samfoxschool.wustl.edu]. Retrieved February 28, 2013.</ref><ref name="Bruno">[http://brunodavidgallery.com/artistBio.cfm?id_artist=135 "Monika Weiss Bio,"] [http://www.brunodavidgallery.com/ brunodavidgallery.com]. Retrieved February 28, 2013.</ref>
==Education== Weiss, the daughter of a concert pianist, studied piano and classical music from 1970-1984.<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="Herzberg1">Julia P. Herzberg, "Conversation with Monika Weiss," ''Monika Weiss: Sustenazo (Lament II)'', Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile, 2012, pp. 26-35.</ref> She attended The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1984-1989, where she studied painting and drawing under Ryszard Winiarski, Stefan Gierowski and Marian Czapla. She was an Artist in Residence at The Academy of Fine Arts In Łódź (1994-1995), Spelman College in Atlanta (1996), the Georgia State University School of Art and Design (1997-1998), The University of Maryland (1999) and at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2002).<ref name="Gorządek" />
==Career== Weiss's early works from the 1980s and early 90s consisted mostly of drawings and paintings of human figures. The drawings were made with ink mixed with paint and she often built collages on large sheets of paper from them. Later the artist's work expanded to include installations, video and sound projects.<ref name="Gorządek" />
Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions internationally.<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="artinfo1">[http://www.artinfo.pl/?pid=events&sp=list&id=12662&lng=1 “Monika Weiss – Sustenazo, instalacja,”] [http://www.artinfo.pl/ artinfo.pl]. Retrieved February 28, 2013.</ref> In 2005, Lehman College Art Gallery organized and published a retrospective of the artist's work since 1999, ''Monika Weiss: Five Rivers''.<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="artinfo1" /><ref name="Genocchio">Benjamin Genocchio, [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E4D81F31F93BA25751C1A9639C8B63 "ART REVIEW; An Artist Whose Performance Delivers,”] ''The New York Times'', December 18, 2005.</ref> In 2006, Weiss was commissioned to create ''Drawing Lethe'' at the World Financial Center, a large scale public project curated by the Drawing Center in New York.<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="Bruno" /><ref>[http://www.artslant.com/ny/works/show/313776 “Drawing Lethe,”] [http://www.artslant.com/ artslant.com] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120311075258/http://www.artslant.com/ |date=2012-03-11 }}. Retrieved March 17, 2013.</ref> Her work has been featured at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Miami (''Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art'', 2007; ''The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection'', 2009),<ref name="cifo1">[http://www.cifo.org/exhibitions-and-programs/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/item/115 “Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art,”] {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20130414134356/http://www.cifo.org/exhibitions-and-programs/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/item/115 |date=2013-04-14 }} [http://www.cifo.org/ cifo.org]. Retrieved March 25, 2013.</ref><ref name="cifo2">[http://www.cifo.org/exhibitions-and-programs/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/item/21 “The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection,”] {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20130414165420/http://www.cifo.org/exhibitions-and-programs/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/item/21 |date=2013-04-14 }} [http://www.cifo.org/ cifo.org]. Retrieved March 25, 2013.</ref> and she was part of Prague's Muzeum Montanelli (MuMo)’s inaugural show in 2010.<ref name="Bruno" /><ref name="Ozuna">Tony Ozuna, [http://www.praguepost.com/tempo/3367-low-profile-high-quality.html “Low profile, high quality,”] ''The Prague Post'', January 20, 2010.</ref>
Some other notable exhibitions include ''Moment by Moment: Meditations of the Hand'' at North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (2006); ''On the Absence of Camps'' at Kunsthaus Dresden (2006); ''POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art'' at Real Art Ways, Hartford (2008); and ''Frauen bei Olympia'' at Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2009).<ref name="Bruno" /> Weiss has exhibited alongside and collaborated with artists such as Carolee Schneemann,<ref>[http://csw.art.pl/new/2005program/0304lethe_en.htm “Monika Weiss Lethe – The Space of Drawing,”] [http://csw.art.pl/ csw.art.pl]. Retrieved March 25, 2013.</ref> Mona Hatoum, Francis Alys,<ref name="artinfo1" /> and Stephen Vitiello among others.<ref>[http://rhizome.org/announce/events/58032/view/ "Exhibition: Streaming Museum Presents Reflections on John Cage’s Influence on the Arts and Mass Culture,"] [http://www.rhizome.org/ rhizome.org]. Retrieved March 25, 2013.</ref>
Weiss has given lectures on her work at institutions around the world and her writings have appeared in numerous publications, including ''New Realities: Being Syncretic'' (Springer, Wien/New York) and ''Technoetic Arts'' (Intellect, London).<ref name="samfox" /><ref name="Harvard">[http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/events/monika-weiss-performing-the-drawing.html "Monika Weiss, ‘Performing the Drawing’,"] [http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/ Graduate School of Design Harvard University Website]. Retrieved March 14, 2013.</ref>
In 2009 she received the New York Foundation for the Arts award in the interdisciplinary art category.<ref name="Gorządek" /> She splits her time between New York and St. Louis, where she is an associate professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and faculty affiliate in the Performing Arts Department.<ref name="samfox" />
==Characteristics==
===Lamentation=== A recurring motif in the artist’s work is the exploration of the ancient ritual of lament.<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="samfox" /><ref name="Harvard" /> Group mourning, she states, is more than a response to a specific grief; it can act as a political force. Historically a feminine expression, lamentation stands "in opposition to heroic, masculine fantasies of conquest and power."<ref name="Herzberg1" /> Through lamentation she draws attention to the complexities of history, incorporating "those who have been perennially absent: the victims and the defeated."<ref name="Valdés">Adriana Valdés, “Lamentation and the Locus of Memory: Monika Weiss’s Sustenazo (Lament II),” ''Monika Weiss: Sustenazo (Lament II)'', Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile, 2012, pp. 40-43.</ref> According to art critic Adriana Valdes, lamentation is both an expression and a silence; it lacks articulation.<ref name="Valdés" /> Weiss's work focuses on this lack of articulation, "the moment when language collapses in face of the loss of the ability to signify."<ref name="Herzberg1" />
===Body=== Weiss uses her body as an artistic tool,<ref name="Genocchio" /> as a vehicle and a palette.<ref name="Campbell">James D. Campbell, "Drawing on Syncope: The Performativity of Rapture in the Art of Monika Weiss," ''Monika Weiss Five Rivers'', Lehman College Art Gallery / Les Editions Samuel Lallouz, 2005 pp. 33-47.</ref> Often she employs her body in repetitive and monotonous movements within specific limitations, such as submerging herself at long lengths in a concrete receptacle filled with water (''Ennoia'') or by rolling around, tracing her silhouette on materials such as sheets of canvas (''Leukos'') or a bed of books (''Phlegethon-Milczenie'').<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="Szylak" /><ref name="Genocchio" />
===Performance=== Her performances lack dramaturgical plot.<ref name="Szylak" /> They are noted for their syncopated rhythms, which serve to “both disrupt and, paradoxically, prolong time.”<ref name="Campbell" /> She “provides an alternative experience of space and time, which is not end-driven but steady and enduring.”<ref name="Brett">Guy Brett, “Time Being,” ''Monika Weiss Five Rivers'', Lehman College Art Gallery / Les Editions Samuel Lallouz, 2005 pp. 23-28.</ref>
===Drawing=== Drawing has been described as the touchstone of her art.<ref name="Campbell" /> It often ties together the various aspects of her art, the technological with the corporeal, the communal with the solitary.<ref name="Brett" />
==Featured works==
===Ennoia===
Enacted in 2002 at the Diapason Gallery in New York, the installation involved the artist immersing herself in a concrete basin full of water, emerging only periodically throughout the 6-hour duration of the performance.<ref name="Campbell" /> A camera suspended from the ceiling recorded the performance and the image of her submerged, curled up body was projected on a nearby wall, accompanied by sounds from below the surface of the water.<ref name="Gorządek" /><ref name="Campbell" /> As described by critic James D. Campbell, “The artist seemed to meld her own body to the contours of the water-filled sculpted basin in which it was submersed as though it were a secondary skin; a shell-like armature for her vulnerable body, providing protection. Like an embryo in vitro, the font was interpretable as exoskeleton containing a nourishing vat of amniotic fluid, replete with the waters of her life.”<ref name="Campbell" />
===Leukos===
“Leukos” was an outdoor performance installation created on the grounds of Lehman College in the Bronx. It was part of a series of works titled “Intervals,” in which drawings were made by the artist and other participants by tracing their bodies.<ref name="Genocchio" /> Over the course of two days the artist and other contributors rolled around on large sheets of cotton, for several hours at a time, tracing their silhouettes with crayons, graphite, and pigments, while wind and rain darkened and blurred the drawings.<ref name="Genocchio" /><ref name="Damian">Carol Damian, “Kaarina Kaikkonen and Monika Weiss,” ''ARTnews'', June, 2006.</ref> The cotton canvas was then installed in the gallery with a video of the performance projected on the wall behind it, accompanied by a soundtrack of opera arias.<ref name="Damian" /> ''The New York Times'' wrote of the piece: “Partly, the work helps make us look at and think differently about the body, as an inert object, and partly it is all about collapsing together artistic genres - sculpture, installation, performance and drawing - in a way so wayward as to almost obviate art altogether.”<ref name="Genocchio" />
===Phlegethon – Milczenie=== For this installation in Potsdam, books - philosophical and literary publications from pre-war Germany – served as objects on which the artist crawled and drew, outlining her body while her eyes remained shut. In an adjacent room a continuous video was projected, based on the performance.<ref name="Brett" /> In a review for ''The Gazette (Montreal)'', Henry Lehmann wrote, “Something that happens in Weiss's work, in what seems an objective manner, is that at some point the books quit being just books and become primarily art forms. They no longer ask to be read, but ask rather that we bear witness to their existence and perhaps see their yellowing pages as measures of time.”<ref name="Lehmann">Henry Lehmann, “Clinging to one's humanity over time,” ''The Gazette (Montreal)'', June 23, 2007.</ref>
===Sustenazo===
First installed in the cellars of the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the multi-media installation was inspired by an event that took place at the castle shortly after the onset of the Warsaw Uprising. In August 1944, the occupying German army ordered an immediate evacuation of nearly two thousand hospital patients. Many of the seriously ill patients died shortly thereafter.<ref name="artinfo1" /><ref name="Oelschläger">Volker Oelschläger, “Chorus of Lamentation: Video Project by New York Artist Monika Weiss Starts New Exhibition Series,” ''Märkische Allgemeine'', July 2010.</ref><ref>[http://www.csw.art.pl/index.php?action=wydarzenie&id=69&lang=en “Monika Weiss ''Sustenazo''”], [http://csw.art.pl/ csw.art.pl]. Retrieved March 25, 2013.</ref> Weiss used original documents related to the hospital's evacuation along with other images and sounds. In the video, voices in Polish are broken up, overlaid with voices in German. An eighty-year-old Polish woman, who was a young nurse at the hospital, tells the story of her experience in Polish while another woman's voice reads passages in German from ''Faust II''.<ref name="Oelschläger" /> The title, ''Sustenazo'', is a Greek word, meaning “to sigh, to lament inaudibly together.”<ref name="artinfo1" /> In her own words, “The act of ‘throwing out’ a hospital contradicts everything a hospital ought to be: a place where human lives are saved. Sustenazo evokes that event as a metaphor for war in general.”<ref name="Herzberg1" />
The artist does not perform in ''Sustenazo'' and has not performed in other recent works as to avoid autobiographical interpretations. She also stresses that it is not solely about Polish or European history either. She explains, “It is more broadly about the loss of lives inflicted by war and by other political and organized acts of violence and oppression. For me, war is not only devastating: it is unacceptable.” <ref name="Herzberg1" /> Beginning in December 2012 one of the three videos from the exhibition, ''Sustenazo (Lament II)'', is being exhibited at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile in a solo exhibition that includes an installation from antique books, medical instruments and artist's drawings. An accompanying catalogue of essays and interviews, ''Monika Weiss: Sustenazo (Lament II)'', was published in conjunction with the show.<ref>Julia P. Herzberg, Adriana Valdés, ''Monika Weiss: Sustenazo (Lament II)'', Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile, 2012.</ref>
== References == {{Reflist|2}}
== External links == *[http://www.monika-weiss.com Artist’s website]
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weiss, Monika}} Category:American people of Polish descent Category:Artists from New York City Category:Postmodern artists Category:Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw alumni Category:1964 births Category:Living people Category:Washington University in St. Louis faculty