Elliott Linwood

Elliott Linwood (born July 14, 1956) is an American conceptual artist known for his large-scale photo grids[1] and cross-referencing sculptural installations.[2] He is based in San Diego, California.

Elliott Linwood
Born (1956-07-14) July 14, 1956
Lowell, Massachusetts
NationalityAmerican
Known forPhotography, Sculpture, Conceptual Art
MovementStand Up Theory

Early life, career and education

Linwood was born July 14, 1956 in Lowell and attended Billerica Memorial High School[3] in Massachusetts before moving to New York City when he was nineteen. He came out as a gay man just before the AIDS epidemic struck. Testing positive for the HIV virus in the early 1980s led him to a life of activism around this condition. Linwood worked in the field of electronic publishing most of his life. He earned dual bachelor's degrees in sociocultural anthropology and philosophy from New York University (NYU) in 1982, then attended the University of Chicago through 1983. He earned dual master's degrees in Arts and Education from San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) Interdisciplinary Arts Program in 1993. He attended New College School of Law in San Francisco through a state-funded HIV empowerment grant,[4] and became a California attorney in 2002.[5]

Influences

Linwood was influenced by the work of Christine Tamblyn, a feminist media artist and critic, who was Linwood’s instructor and mentor at SFSU. Tamblyn studied under Allan Kaprow, the originator of Happenings and Life Art, at the University of California San Diego. Through Tamblyn’s tutelage Linwood learned about the performative aspects of Life Art. In a 1991 interview with her Linwood wrote, “In her role as art instructor, Christine Tamblyn teaches that happenings, process-oriented conceptual art, body art, feminist art, persona art, even documentation art . . . can all be considered ‘Life Art."[6] At NYU Linwood was also introduced to works of anthropologist Gregory Bateson which analyzed rituals[7] using cybernetics and systems theory models.[8] These ideas, combined with his practical knowledge of computer programming and design of index and list publications, informed his art practice.

Film director Dereck Jarman's movie Blue, also influenced work that Linwood presented in “Share Your Vision,”[9] for which he won first place and an award. This outreach exhibition was organized to raise awareness about CMV retinitis, a preventable condition that causes blindness in people with compromised immune systems. Organized by Visual AIDS[10] and Roche Pharmaceuticals, the show was presented at Artists Space in New York City in 2003. An homage to Jarman's film (consisting entirely of a blue lit movie screen with dialog of the artist visiting doctors about his loss of sight) appears in Linwood's Halos, which reads as blurred silhouettes like dark pupils immersed in a field of iris blue light.[11]

Teaching

Linwood developed core graduate curricula in Life Art which he taught at SFSU. These seminars explored conceptual and de-materialized art forms,[12] and ephemera (printed matter, video, digital communication, etc.) generated around performance spectacles, as documentary records, which might then be commodified.[13]

Cultural criticism

Linwood wrote for High Performance Magazine in Los Angeles, and the Bay Area Reporter, The Sentinel and PhotoMetro in San Francisco from 1990 to 1994. Some of the writers and artists Linwood wrote about include Christine Tamblyn, Nao Bustamante, Sheree Rose, Millie Wilson, Carrie Mae Weems, Diamanda Gallas, The Theory Girls, Jerome Caja, Cliff Hengst, Paul Monette, Sapphire, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Justin Chin, The Hittite Empire, Joe Goode and others.

"Stand Up Theory"

Describing the phenomenon of witnessing several prominent Bay Area theorists using body art[14] and other types of performance to demonstrate the gaps between subcultural concerns and dominant cultural assumptions,[15] Linwood coined the term “Stand Up Theory”[16][17] to highlight how these performance artists highjacked the mic to seduce, ambush, and educate their audiences.[18] Linwood's sculptural works deploy these strategies. Of Initiation, a sculpture referencing AIDS and made of honey, Tamblyn wrote, “The piece adroitly expressed the melancholic sensibility that the disease evokes by capitalizing on honey’s association with seduction, entrapment and preservation.”[19]

Photo grids & cross-referencing installations
Elliott Linwood's Halos, part of an exhibition Share Your Vision, 2003

Linwood is best known for his large-scale photo grids composed of original and found images culled from the environment, the Internet, cult movies and magazine ads. His cross-referencing installations are similarly made up of found and fabricated objects.[20] Both bodies of work share similar characteristics, such as a non-linear viewpoint and an indexical relationship between the images and objects presented, which in turn point to things outside their framing device.[21] His sculptures, Initiation, and Resistance, and his projection Citizen Pan, were displayed in A Living Testament of the Blood Fairies at Artists Space in New York in 1997,[22] an exhibition that Frank Moore curated around text-based work.

Reception
Elliott Linwood, 1993. Left: "Initiation," Right: "Resistance," part of an A Living Testament of the Blood Fairies, 1996

Holland Cotter in the April 1997 Art in America wrote of the exhibition: “The bittersweet tone was set [by] pieces by Elliott Linwood which opened the show. One was a slide projection of words from Sir J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: ‘When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and spread over the entire world, and that was the beginning of fairies. But all the fairies are dying now because children know such a lot they don’t believe or laugh anymore.’”[23] Bill Arning, in the December 10, 1996 Village Voice also wrote about Linwood’s work in the exhibition, “This synthesis of queer politics, camp humour, dark children’s stories, and magic sets us up for a different kind of AIDS show than New York has seen before.”[24]

Awards
  • 1994, California Arts Council Fellowship, Sacramento, CA[25]
  • 1994, John Caldwell Award for Excellence administered by Visual AID, San Francisco, CA[26]
  • 1996, Art Matter Grant and Artists Space Grant, New York, NY
  • 2003, Share Your Vision Award presented by Visual AIDS and funded by Roche Pharmaceuticals, New York, NY[27]

Further reading
  • Strong, Strong (2003). “Sharing a Vision,” Art and Understanding, December, p. 21, repro.
  • Forbes, Rhomylly (2003). “Living Testament,” Art and Understanding, November, pp. 20–21
  • Gould, Claudia (1998). 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years, Artists Space, New York, NY, p. 293 repro.
  • Cotter, Holland (1997). “The Stuff Life is Made of,” Art in America, April, pp. 50–51, repro.
  • Arning, Arning (1996). “Days with Art,” Village Voice, December 10, p. 95
  • Art in America (1996). “Previews,” August, p. 25
  • Walker, Hamza (1995). Better Living Through Chemistry, Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, IL, repro.
  • Hormel, Julie (1994). Visions Art Quarterly, Winter, pp. 336–37, repro.
  • Roth, David M. (1994). “Marked Man,” Artweek, November 3, p. 12, repro.
  • Wolf, Sara (1994). “Corpus Memorandum,” Visions Art Quarterly, Summer, p. 22
  • Darling, Michael (1994). “Skin Deep,” Artweek, February 3, back cover
  • Levi Strauss, David (1993). “Review,” Artforum, “summer, pp. 114-115
  • Tamblyn, Christine (1993). “Boys Club, Crafthut, Carnival or Cyberspace?,” High Performance, Summer, pp. 60, 62, repro.
  • Roche, Harry (1993). “Tongue in Cheek,” San Francisco Sentinel, August 25, p. 28, repro.
  • Helfand, Glen (1993). “Like a Den of Inequity,” San Francisco Weekly, August 4, p. 13, repro.
  • Fazzolari, Bruno (1992). “Rites of Suffering,” Artweek, December 17, repro.

References
  1. AIDS, Visual. "Elliott Linwood". Visual AIDS. Retrieved 2017-06-01.
  2. "The Art of AIDS Prevention". The Art of AIDS Prevention. Retrieved 2017-06-01.
  3. "1974 Billerica Memorial High School Year Book, pg. 66".
  4. Laird, Cynthia (May 24, 2001). "Law school graduation a first for four New College students". San Francisco Bay Area Reporter.
  5. California, The State Bar of. "State Bar of CA :: Elliott Linwood". members.calbar.ca.gov. Retrieved 2017-06-01.
  6. Linwood, Elliott (1991). "Life Art: Performing Christine Tamblyn". The San Francisco Sentinel.
  7. Bateson, Gregory (1936). Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-80470520-8.
  8. Bateson, Gregory (1976). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-03905-6.
  9. "Share Your Vision catalog". 2003.
  10. "Visual AIDS, NY, NY".
  11. "Visual AIDS Online Gallery".
  12. Lippard, Lucy (1997). Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520210134.
  13. Linwood, Elliott (1994). "Performance Artist Nao Bustamante's Wake Up Calls". San Francisco Bay Area Reporter.
  14. Linwood, Elliott (1990). "Stand Up Theory". High Performance Magazine.
  15. "The Online Archive of California Guide to Christine Tamblyn Papers".
  16. Gingrich-Philbrook, Craig (2015). Reprogramming the Stage: A Heuristic for Posthuman Performance. Text and Performance Quarterly. pp. Vol. 25, Issue 4.
  17. Pelas, Ronald J. (1999). Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher's Body. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 0-8093-2235-8.
  18. Linwood, Elliott (1994). "Performance Artist Nao Bustamante's Wake Up Calls". San Francisco Bay Area Reporter.
  19. Tamblyn, Christine (1993). "Boys Club, Craft Hut, Carnival or Cyberspace?". High Performance Magazine.
  20. "Visual AIDS, Elliott Linwood (detail)".
  21. Hormel, Julie (1994). "Elliott Linwood at Morphos". Visions Art Quarterly.
  22. "A Living Testament of the Blood Fairies at Artists Space".
  23. Cotter, Holland (1997). "Art & AIDS - The Stuff Life is Made Of". Art in America.
  24. Arning, Bill (1996). "Days With Artt". Village Voice.
  25. "California Arts Council".
  26. "Visual AID San Francisco".
  27. "Visual AIDS Presents Share Your Vision". ArtDaily.org.
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