Proximity to Power, American Style

Kolbowski Silvia

Just in time for the 2008 election, WhiteWalls presents a comprehensive collection of Silvia Kolbowski's wry and searching responses to the questionable actions of the American government, as well as recent national shifts in legal, corporate, and cultural power. In 2003, Kolbowski interviewed men – deliberately left anonymous – who work in proximity to men who wield greater power in the fields of business, media, art, and politics about the men for whom they worked. Interested in the vantage point of the man who occupies a support position in relation to the masculine powers privileged by American culture, Kolbowski also interviewed boys between the ages of seven and eleven, asking only one question: "What most represents power to you?" The spoken responses of these forty children were then interpreted as visual images – including Francisco Goya's "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters", the iconic face of Malcolm X, tidal waves, and sports heroes of every size and style – here presented in over one hundred full-color and black-and-white illustrations.

About the Author

Silvia Kolbowski is an artist based in New York. Her scope of address includes the ethics and politics of history, culture, and the unconscious. The slide/audio work "Proximity to Power, American Style", was first shown as part of a one-person, three-project exhibition, "Inadequate... Like... Power", at the Secession, Vienna, in 2004. In 2007 she exhibited a revised version of her 1999 an inadequate history of conceptual art at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Her most recent project, a video and photo work entitled "After Hiroshima Mon Amour", (2008), opened as a one-person exhibition at LAX<>Art in Los Angeles, on September 20th. She is on the advisory board of October journal, and teaches in the CCC program of the Ecole Superieure d'Art Visuel, Geneva.

Back to the list of books