Krzysztof Wodiczko's artistic projects stage a dynamic and vivid
encounter between aesthetics, ethics and technology. For almost 40
years, the artist's powerful and extensive body of work has deployed
contemporary technologies to engage with the problematics of alterity,
social responsibility and urban experience. Believing that 'public art'
should perform an ethical interruption of existing social processes and
their ideological underpinnings, Wodiczko's critical interventions in
the urban environment have addressed issues of urban violence,
homelessness, alienation and wartime trauma.
Since the 1980s, he has produced large-scale slide and video
projections, transforming the facades of official buildings and
historical monuments into temporary spaces for critical reflection and
public protest. The Public Projections series include: The Grand Army
Plaza Memorial Arch, Brooklyn, NY (1983), The Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington D.C. (1988), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(1989), Bunker Hill Monument, Boston (1998), A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima
(1999) and El Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico (2001).
By nature, Wodiczko's work is often controversial and the book looks at
his development of a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and
immigrant operators that function as implements for survival,
communication, empowerment, and healing. The Homeless Vehicle project in
New York City, equips nomadic 'evicts' with tools for self-articulation,
whilst the elaborate Xenology instruments are designed to empower the
'immigrant' by providing access to speech and figuration in the public
realm. Like much of his work, his interrogative designs and portable
instruments are animated by a desire to bring the socially opaque into
the public sphere of appearances, to restore voice and visibility to
those rendered mute within the parameters of the public domain.
Krzysztof Wodiczko is the first full-scale study of the artist's work,
its ethico-political imperatives, and the diverse interpretive lenses
which accompany its theorization. Developed in close collaboration with
the artist, and bringing together an array of essays by leading scholars
from a variety of disciplines, the book represents the most significant
and sustained engagement with the artist's practice to date.
