IN LONGING
137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001
cuear tfoundation.org
IN LONGING Alison Chen SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY Raymond Pinto Marie Ségolène Xirin Curated by: ANNA CAHN Mentor: LEGACY RUSSELL
June 3 - July 14, 2021
1
IN LONGING Anna Cahn “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?” -Ocean Vuong1
2
longing while closely drawing us into their inner and outer worlds.
Xirin and Alison Chen’s works depict both banal and erotic moments within heteronormative Eating, drinking, gorging; relationships. Collaborating with moving, dancing, kneeling; their partners, they alternate touching, caressing, loving— between roles of submissive and these are gestures that are dominant, giver and receiver. closely documented, studied, As they move through these and performed by the artists performative gestures they affirm, of In Longing. This exhibition critique, and question the role features the work of artists Alison of feminine subjectivity. What Chen, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN does it mean to love under the HOLLOWAY, Raymond Pinto, constraints of patriarchy? What Marie Ségolène, and Xirin. It does it mean for women of color explores longing and desire to confront universal tropes of from the poetic and individual, love that are so often centered to the political and universally on narratives of whiteness? existential. Writer Ocean Vuong Writer Audre Lorde’s essay, conceives of longing as a search “The Erotic as Power,” positions for resonance between subject patriarchy as a gatekeeper of and object. Truly, a yearning self-determination by confining duet burns in all of us—a wanting women’s pleasure to the male exchange between self and other. gaze.2 The artists extend this In relationships, whether romantic discourse on femme subjecthood or spiritual, these borders are beyond Eurocentric and in constant negotiation. During misogynistic eroticism. these emotionally intense and politically charged times it is Xirin’s video work Hope Eats necessary to rethink the power of the Soul (2019) is a love story longing. We must ask ourselves without dialogue. In the film, the how desire is effected by the artist and her partner (Sebastian oppressive systems of patriarchy Chacon) inhabit intimate scenes and white supremacy. With of a relationship as it unfurls diverse practices of performance, on empty dance floors, dinner tables, and hospital rooms. installation, text, and movement, The film is a reinterpretation the artists in this exhibition of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s engage with the restlessness of
1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. However, the artist questions whether the visceral nature of this love story is changed by the absence of dialogue as well as the centralization of its non-white subjects. Xirin’s grappling with be-longing in this work shares an important dialogue with such feminist works as Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990). In an interview with bell hooks, Weems reflects:
(2015) is a film of a performance in which the artist and her partner choreograph the familiar, mundane, and sometimes awkward gestures of intimacy. In the work, two bodies embrace and intertwine—legs, arms, fingers—as they touch and caress. In a solo gesture she whips her hair in mesmerizing gyration, a motion referential to power and sexuality, as well as one of control within the patriarchy. Her other text-based work, In and Out (2005-), is an ongoing personal archive documenting her times in and out of love represented by a list of dates. Chen’s ritualistic selfarchiving speaks to the important role of feminine subjectivity. Recalling postmodern feminist works like Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971), Chen’s work also demands viewers to contemplate their own subjectivity and selfdetermination. In these private vignettes, the romantic and the quotidian collide while self and other entangle, beckoning the gaze of an outside viewer forward.
...one of the things that I was thinking about was whether it might be possible to use black subjects to represent universal concerns. When we watch Hollywood movies, usually with white subjects, those images create a cultural terrain that we watch and walk on and move through. I wanted to create that same kind of experience using my subjects. Yet when I do that, it’s not understood in that way. Folks refuse to identify with the concerns black people express which take The poetic “we” is often us beyond race into previously referenced when writing about undocumented emotional longing. Vuong writes “to be realms.3 touched thinking what we feel is ours.” It signals an invitation Xirin also leads us into these to a shared experience, but is a “undocumented emotional realms” collective longing truly possible? through her own experience as The artists of In Longing an Iranian woman. A longing to contemplate these questions be fully seen pulsates throughout as they devote the collective the film, not only by a partner, but body of “we” to the viewer. by an audience. Floating between moments of physical and cerebral cognizance, Alison Chen’s practice centers viewership demands a disciplined performance, text, and ritual as a navigation at the crossroads means of understanding the role of the subjective and the of individualism and union within political.4 SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN her marriage. For One Night Only HOLLOWAY calls this relational
3
movement between object and audience “choreographic viewership.” This kinetic force flows through HOLLOWAY and Raymond Pinto’s works, creating moments of tension that reflect how sociopolitical hierarchies affect and exclude Black, queer, and differently abled bodies’ experiences of embodiment.
4
creates his own lexicon of a Black queer ecology of motion. In his dances, bodies reach toward each other only to retract. Moments of “wildness” flash in fervor and then resolve in restraint.6 Pinto’s choreographic vision of longing lives on the precipice of being and becomingness. It is within this threshold that Pinto and HOLLOWAY invite us not to share, but to behold these moments of joy and hurt. They appear in quick flashes like piercing strobes of light.
HOLLOWAY’s sculpture, REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE (2017), is a human-sized blanket that drapes Marie Ségolène’s new work, over a large dog cage. The Rouge Gorge (2021), is a queer text “request,” “lure,” “response,” flirtation between the divine “reward,” “(who kneels on and the grotesque. She films command?)” splays across the herself in a field unearthing soil, digitally printed “silky” cloth. The sculpture references what is known vegetation, and worms. She guzzles down red wine, nearly in BDSM as “puppy play” in which choking on its excess, letting one person acts like a puppy in the abundance run down her need of discipline and submits to the control of a master. Inspired by neck and stain her white clothes. Images of gaps, fissures, openings, the queering of these devotional practices, HOLLOWAY offers a safe and holes appear throughout her installation referencing the subspace where “we” are granted actions of breaking, penetrating, the possibility of confronting our own desires without shame. At the and touching the restricted and unknown parts of oneself. The same time, the power dynamics between sub and dom, human and symbolic ritual of consuming the blood and flesh of Christ with wine animal, and the upright and the and bread is widely understood as kneeling represented here allude a means of coming into union with to the violently racist, colonialist, God. This unconscious simulation history of the animalization of of the abject may be seen as a Black femmehood.5 HOLLOWAY’s methods are seductive—luring us vessel for possessing the divine. into a [dog] bed of digital synthetic Ségolène channels the symbolic satin, only to confront these fleshy gestures of spiritual love and its realities of love and its wounds. excess in order to explore her own meditations on trauma, pain, Pinto’s movement-based works can ecstasy, and queer rapture. also feel like an erotic seduction as we are invited to witness Xirin’s “food pass” performances bodies that pulsate, bind, vex, and also deeply engage with the release. Exploring the potential abject. She and her partner of non-normative, instinctual, exchange an egg yolk, or uncontrolled movement, he sometimes a complete dinner
between their mouths, chewing and then regurgitating what would normally be discarded in a swallowing. Like Ségolène’s ritual performances, union and nourishment are born from the abject.
York: The New Press, 1995), 78. 4 André Lepecki writes about the political ontology of movement in Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1-18. 5 This history is discussed at length in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020). 6 The term “wildness” is further discussed in Jack Halberstam’s analysis of the history of categorizing queer sexually liberated bodies as “wild” in his book Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 14.
Must we touch the thing we find most abject in order to fully understand our own desires? Theorist Julia Kristeva writes that “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.”7 The artists of In Longing broaden this conversation by showing us how to touch our deepest urges, reminding us that these moments of the extraordinary may be found in the ordinary. As you walk through this exhibition * allow yourself to embrace that which chokes, that which gags, Anna Cahn is an independent that which constricts and swells curator and writer based in New in your throats. Succumb to York City. She is particularly your memories of experiencing pleasure and pain, joy and horror, interested in the intersections of performance and interdisciplinary desire and disgust. The moment media in contemporary artistic when you lost yourself in the practices. From 2016-2020 she embrace of a lover, then when worked as a Curatorial Associate you found yourself in the words at the Rubin Museum of Art where of another. In this wandering, she assisted with exhibitions we discover how desire shapes and curated performances our collective experience of the and artists’ talks such as the world. If with arms outstretched Refiguring the Future series. She we reach in longing, we may find each other in our own reflections. has held previous positions as guest curator and visiting critic for Residency Unlimited, adjunct * lecturer at the City College of New York, and research fellow at 1 Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Stanford University. Her writing Gorgeous (New York: Penguin Press, has appeared in Hyperallergic and 2019), 189. Spiral Magazine. She received her 2 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider BA from Clark University and an (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), MA in Art History from the City 87-91. College of New York. 3 bell hooks, “Talking Art with Carrie Mae Weems” in Art on My Mind (New
5
LEGACY RUSSELL Mentor
A year of collapse, transformation, seismic shifts. This year demands an ongoing inquiry into longing— what it can do as a vehicle, a tool, a weapon, how it shape-shifts and recircuits our experience of time, space, and memory. If nothing else, these manic months have shown us that everything just keeps moving goddammit hallelujah goddamn! That the things one might have assumed were fixed in fact are entirely changeable; that embedded within the volatility of this change is the decadence of possibility. It’s gorgeous and it’s rotten. Everything’s broken and we’re all exhausted—aren’t we? Tired of reaching / tired of being alone / tired of standing still / tired of Netflix / tired of FaceTime and lonely bathtime / tired of solo moves in the living room after too much tequila / tired of food / tired of your sourdough starters and Twitter rants / tired of being told who has the right to live while we keep dying / tired of so much loss / all we want is the beat back and some sweat and glitter again, some place to shake it out where the music is louder than the 6
frequency of these thoughts that keep us from the edge of sleep. What we want is this aching to stop! And somehow for it to keep going, too! A reminder that we’re still here, and still human, and still outraged, and that this, too, is our right. The tender wildness of this desire, we hope for it to do something different, to halve us harmfully like a good juicy peach and then make us whole and sweet again. Longing is a becoming: it is an absence and a presence that exists in 360° view, a feeling that carves us out and fills us in. When it’s with us, it’s a warring Goya-goblin, our complex colonized Caliban, all of it glowing neon under the awning of the state. When it’s gone, we mourn for it, fond of its violence and vitriol. Derek Walcott writes: “But I am learning slowly / to love the dark days.”1 To be in longing is just that, a siting of the self inside of this feeling, a slow occupation of darkness, the risks we take before the break of dawn. 1 Derek Walcott, “Dark August,” Sea Grapes, (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 69.
Alison Chen Still from For One Night Only (At Your Feet), 2015 HD Video 6 minutes 43 seconds
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Curated exhibitions and projects include LEAN (2020) featuring Justin Allen, Jen Everett, Devin Kenny, Kalup Linzy, Rene Matić, Sadé Mica, and Leilah Weinraub for Performa's Radical Broadcast which opened March 2020 at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway; This Longing Vessel:
Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019-20 (2020) featuring E. Jane, Elliot Reed, and Naudline Pierre at MoMA PS1; Projects: Garrett Bradley (2020) and Projects 110: Michael Armitage (2019), organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA; Dozie Kanu: Function (2019), Chloë Bass: Wayfinding (2019), and Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books. 7
8
ALISON CHEN
In and Out, 2005-ongoing 2 inkjet prints on paper 8.5 x 14 inches (left) 8.5 x 11 inches (right)
In and Out is an ongoing compilation of moments of ecstasy and downfall traced through the continuation of a singular relationship. The points chart the rises and falls that occur within the binary of being in or out of love while legitimizing the possibility of a fluctuation of feelings within the narrative of romance. Moments will be continuously added as long as they occur within this relationship, and as long as this relationship is in existence. 9
ALISON CHEN
For One Night Only is documentation of private performances that embody the transforming role of intimacy within my marriage. I use the movements of our bodies to manifest the nuanced and shifting meaning of physical connection. Each action is staged in hotel rooms, occupying a space that is simultaneously generic and temporarily personal. Body parts engage in repetitive gestures that playfully mix the awkward and the sexual.
TOP Still from For One Night Only (Footsy), 2015 HD Video 5 minutes 56 seconds BOTTOM Still from For One Night Only (Hair Whip), 2015 HD Video 56 seconds
10
Alison Chen is a Los Angelesbased visual artist working with video, performance, photography, and text. She earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons School for Design. She has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Beijing, and Marseilles and has been featured in the Beijing Design Festival, the Pingyao International Photography Festival, and the Dali International Photo Festival. She has also had the honor to study under the direction of Magnum photographer Antoine D’Agata. Most recently, she attended the Wassaic Project as a family resident. She is currently represented by Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN.
11
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY 12
RIGHT (DETAIL) AND NEXT SPREAD REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE, 2017 Blanket and cage 50 x 60 inches
13
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY
14
REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE invites viewers to reflect on desire, violence, love, and safety within the conceptual framework of what it means to designate a given space as a “home.” The work is part of an ongoing, 20-part performative publishing project, entitled The Chamber Series (2017-), that pairs graphic scores and real time performances of BDSM scenes with audiences to create an Afro-futurist narrative about a human-puppy (a popular kink identity or role play) in captivity. Meditating on the difficult yet familiar relationship between creativity and submission, a powerful discussion between themes of safety and servitude is reconstructed in the gallery as viewers take on these roles in relation to the intimacy of the dog cage-as-home.
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like the New Museum (NY), The Kitchen (NY), the Time-Based Art Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL). SHAWNÉ is a 2020-21 LeslieLohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
15
RAYMOND PINTO
Trinity Dawn Bobo in movement, wearing blue jeans and a black t-shirt. Standing, grooving, and touching Video still from SHE GATHER ME, 2021 white stones in the Courtyard of the Community HD color video, 16mm color film transferred to 122. This is the early stage of mytape creative video,Center two-channel audio: vocalization, cassette process where we are investigating the translation of recordings, synthesizer, and original electronic score waveforms into undulations throughout the body. 10 minutes 50 seconds 16
Documentation of what is left, if I am earth (work in progress), 2021 Archival photographs by the artist Dimensions variable
17
RAYMOND PINTO
Anna Cahn: What does longing mean to you?
then how that would be relative to conditions of operations…
Raymond Pinto: Longing to me is another form of yearning. There is a feeling that you are not yet in a place that you wish to be. In essence, to long is to be privy to the state of absence. It also becomes clear to me that longing gives space to place. Like somehow time begins to crystalize at a different rate of change.
AC: Your new work is going to use assemblage of both organic and fabricated materials. Can you speak about how you are thinking about these materials and how they are an extension of your choreographic practice?
AC: Do you think there is an inherent element of longing in dance? Movement? RP: Yeah, absolutely. It has to be true that this form holds this potential state...a visceral and fleshy experience. It can also be a very painful process. I think very few times I can understand what it means to be in longing. It’s a kind of pull or a tension. It’s an experience that happens that also demolishes the notion of the dyad between this emotive experience and form. There are sets of parameters that express feelings of being caught in time, but also space is shaped by the time spent moving. So, longing is movement and not stasis. This makes me wonder what the preoccupation of time and form is all about, and 18
RP: When I think of the materials I am interested in for this piece (which are dance, the body, geological formations, and sound), I am also thinking about the relation between the materials. Thus the relations assemble a method for addressing the immaterial proposition of my choreography as well. AC: Can you talk about the place of improvisation and spontaneity in your practice? RP: Improvisation is the infrastructural support of the choreographic work in certainty. Spontaneity is something else, wholly situated in the interstice between the public and the objectified performance. The combination of the two posits the space without a doubt, and it is there where I aim to harness the mindset of moving knowingly
through unknown interactions. What is important to me is not only how I move towards something, but also how I move away from it. AC: Can you speak about some of the themes you have been thinking about in this work, such as loss and growth, distance and closeness?
and the other non-human entities as a topographical experience constantly modulating draws me to investigate the power of these relations to form and function. Honestly, I am making room for the question of how ecological premises need to be critically reassessed by communities of color, especially in order to derail the settler-colonist agendas. So the constructs of blackness and queerness present vivid breeding grounds to discern an otherwise way of tending to the negotiations we propagate.
RP: Sure, there is this remarkable thing that happens when a seed is germinated. The plant has broken through the earth and continues to grow towards the light. To make this action happen, there is a combination of dynamic processes of rupture. My interest in this work * is deeply placed on the intention between the locales of loss and As an artist, Raymond Pinto growth, or distance and closeness. (he/they) mixes disciplines of Without a doubt, transformation is movement and distills remnants the very act of remembering the of gestures that attend to nonisolated action of choice and the locality. Most recently, they are impact it carries. concerned with a notion of bodilessness. Their research AC: Can you speak about your investigates the statehood interest in researching the idea of having no body. The of ecology in this new work, transmogrification of internal specifically as it intersects with experiences crystalizes to form queerness and blackness? critical choreographic dispositions rendering fragments of intimacy, RP: Yes, the role of ecology abjection, and stick-to-it-iveness. is developing as a recurring Off the beat, Raymond enjoys theme in my work. This notion DJing, cooking, and reading of understanding the relations science fiction novels by Samuel between persons, environments, R. Delany. 19
MARIE SÉGOLÈNE
Fr 27 Est ce qu’il y a un centre à cette fontaine? Fr 61 Like bees: a friction in wax. Fr 83 They say romans kept cups In the hands of the dead In which to pour the wine Fr 84 A throat irrigating a throat For a chant
20
21
MARIE SÉGOLÈNE
THIS AND PREVIOUS SPREAD Documentation of Esquisse pour Rouge Gorge, 2021 Photographs by Santiago Tamayo Soler
22
Marie Ségolène holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia Cyberarts from Concordia University (Canada). She completed her MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Marie has exhibited work in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2018, she took part in “Conversations in Contemporary Poetics,” curated by Jeffrey Grunthaner at Hauser & Wirth in New York City, and performed as part of the Performance and Noise Biennial: Tempting Failure in London. Her fifth artist publication, entitled Dehiscence (2018), was published with the support of Anteism. In 2020, Marie founded Arcadia, a series of fine dining experiences which took place in Texas, New York City, and Montreal and explored practices of radical hospitality and care, with performance interventions and intricate menus served in lush floral installations. Marie’s writing has been featured in The Wine Zine, Dinner Bell Magazine, and Desuetude Journal. Her first poetry manuscript, Yellow Berries, is set to come out in Summer 2021, designed and published by Grosse Fugue.
23
XIRIN
Libration, 2019 HD color video projection, four-channel audio, elastic, and thread Hope Eats the Soul, 2019 Dimensions variable Two-channel video installation Installation view at Red Bull Arts Detroit, Detroit, MI 60 minutes Photo by Clare Gatto
24
25
XIRIN This two-channel video installation, entitled Hope Eats the Soul, displays a one-hour film looped asynchronously on opposing walls with a tête-à-tête at the center. The film itself is a shot-for-shot remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 West German film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Hope Eats the Soul shares a new original score and places emphasis on the choreography of the two performers. The two-sided bench activates the sitting viewers to create a duet of their own as they experience different parts of the film—and its tumultuous central relationship—simultaneously.
Xirin is an Iranian, New-Yorkbased multidisciplinary artist whose work reclaims romantic tropes, emphasizing the ways idealistic notions of attachment cause pain. In her work (composed of performance, painting, video, and installation), she frequently uses the form of the duet to explore how larger social power structures locate themselves within intimate relationships. Through a series of autofiction, she investigates what it means to love men as a feminist within patriarchy. With her body often situated as the subject, Xirin’s work embraces intimacy, optimism, and romance as erotic, transgressive tools against social apathy. Recently, Xirin has performed at A.I.R. Gallery, the Jewish Museum, Knockdown Center,
Hope Eats the Soul (The Letter), 2019 Two-channel video installation 60 minutes
26
and Pioneer Works. Her writing is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been featured in publications such as Pitchfork, Vestoj, and PAPER magazine, and she has recently participated in artist residencies at A.I.R. Gallery and A-Z West: Institute of Investigative Living. Alongside Kembra Pfahler, Xirin frequently organizes performance art events in New York, known as Incarnata Social Club. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence and her MFA from Columbia University. She currently teaches online courses such as “Cruel Idealism,” a film, art, and performance studies class that explores the performativity of optimism and the taboo of radical utopias.
27
PITCH IMPERFECT Tiana Reid
While it is frustrating to shorthand, the global pandemic has exposed the isolation at the core of our condition. “Our” condition is not always shared, troubling the constitution of the collective. The upheavals followed by Covid-19 have also made clear not only how much we long for more intimacy, but also that we have trouble connecting even when we are together. Pitch-perfect, seamless connection is impossible—and boring. Or, as S*an D. Henry-Smith writes in the book of poems Wild Peach, “all isolation isn’t loneliness or yearning.” It is in that gap between isolation, loneliness, and yearning where In Longing lives. Is it in the interest of fantasia? Or, is it a cry out for love under conditions of oppression and violence? In Longing attempts to reckon with a loss of communion, but not one that is a direct result of the pandemic. The curator, Anna Cahn, tells me the idea for the show began before March 11, 2020, the day the World Health 28
Organization declared the Covid19 outbreak a global pandemic. The works that comprise the exhibition are mainly non-studiobased art practices: installation, movement, performance, video, text, and touch. All around the color palette is muted, but the feeling is resplendent, a repetition in open air. Put together, perhaps non-studio-based art is something like public sex: illicit, queer, without a requirement for delimitation. I swore I'd try to sway from post-Covid writing, as if I am responding to a school assignment, so let me try something rather formalist. Let me quarrel over the preposition in the exhibition's title. Here, we are in longing, not on longing, or at longing. Here, we are in longing, like we are in love. This is love chronicled in a diary-esque manner, groping around for vital aesthetic forms. The artist Alison Chen’s In and Out (2005-ongoing) gets after that swing, between
longing and love. In and Out #004ACCOMPANIMENT-004_ comprises two lists, black ink TRAINING-PLAN-AND-CODEon white sheets of paper, each NOTES (2019), sex can require documenting the hour, day, month, some planning, some care. In the and year—down to the minute—one show’s Chamber Series companion falls in and out of love. If only it were piece, titled REQUEST-->LUREthat easy. ->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE The temporality of longing is now. (2017), a blanket and dog cage, 8:58 a.m. or forever. Let’s call it the lushness of a silky silvery post-post-Covid art. Or, let’s say sheet—plush, ready to be dived that cruising limbo is a given of into—asks a set of questions that In Longing. Let’s say that a practice at first glance seem algebraic: of bad feelings, madness, virtuosic “Limitations of choice? Who dullness, sexual depression, abject kneels on command? Trickery or defenselessness, humiliation, protection?” HOLLOWAY refuses a feeling of not enough, a feeling to settle. of too much is at the core of this exhibition. Raymond Pinto has a push and pull to his vertiginous movementSHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN based practice. He investigates HOLLOWAY’s expansive practice how close people can really get feels all this and takes it even further. even if they are touching. With HOLLOWAY is a new media artist vernal delicacy, he wonders how who is difficult to describe by way intimate humans can get to nature, of individual works. Not only to trees, to water. because she has put in a lot of work, but because her engagement Fluids and spills and leakiness with the digital reframes the are a few of this art’s sine qua discreteness of individual and non. They’re tools for digging into thus monetizable artwork. The the sensual brutality of everyday HOLLOWAY oeuvre is like a communication and relation. waterfall of small experiments, Xirin’s work twins disgust and with a sense of humor, and it’s desire, literally drools over both, best to stand right under it to get trading spit. Don’t yuck my yum, I the full experience. Her guttural hear someone saying. The multipractice tends to lean on the new referenced “egg pass”—mucous, in new media—video, publication, viscous, nastily erotic, good software, poetry, performance, and gross—is accompanied by installation, sound, tweets, games, a perversion of Rainer Werner hashtags, cellphone photos, profile Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fear pages, GIFs—without fetishizing that Eats the Soul in Xirin’s video newness. installation, Hope Eats the Soul (2019). If you can’t take the heat, Since 2017, her Chamber start a fight in the kitchen. As a Series (2017-ongoing) has framed letter in Hope Eats the Soul interrogated the co-constitution reads, love is “so performative, of sex, race, and power. Like in but real.” 29
In Marie Ségolène’s practice, there is another suggestion of the kitchen: a whole fish draping over a sheet pan as in L’Amour Désarmé (2018), assembled with herbs and pomegranate. Sur la table (on the table), as she says in her bilingual artist statement, is red wine, almost biblical, but also trauma and desire. A queer kitchen is still a kitchen, but this is a kitchen outside of a kitchen. In Agape (2019), for instance, at the edge of sculpture, performance, and text, she spits wine out on a canvas, staining the shit out of it, and paper and pants. These themes and visuals—of feminine excess, of soft sufferings, of tangled knots—are to be continued in Rouge Gorge (2021), her new piece for In Longing.
AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation. org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. *
Tiana Reid is a scholar and writer from Toronto. She lives in New York City, where she is a PhD candidate and instructor at Columbia University. Her work has been published in many Alison Chen’s multiple channel places, including Art in America, installation, For One Night Only Bookforum, Frieze, The New York (2015), traces touch, where skin Review of Books, The Paris Review, meets skin. A pair of feet wiggle on and Teen Vogue. cream-colored sheets. The smaller * one, with toes painted vermillion, curls up into the arch and crevices of the other. They nestle each other Mentor Jessica Lynne is a writer like algae, toes swimming around. and art critic. She is a founding Toes to toes, back of hand to shin, editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online torso to torso—physical intimacy in journal of art criticism from Black the blank awkwardness of a hotel perspectives. Her writing has been room. For One Night Only runs featured in publications such as on an infinite loop. The one night Art in America, The Believer, Frieze, never ends. If only love were like The Nation, and elsewhere. She is that; instead, it’s the longing that the recipient of a 2020 Research never ends. and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced * Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy This text was written as part of the Warhol Foundation. Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICAUSA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with 30
CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines. This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2020-21 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. The proposal was unanimously selected by a panel comprised of artist Guadalupe Maravilla, curator Sohrab Mohebbi, artist Ronny Quevedo, and curator Legacy Russell. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Legacy Russell as the mentor to Anna Cahn.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Amanda Adams-Louis Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Vernon Church Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus
ADVISORY COUNCIL Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sánchez Lilly Wei Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)
STAFF Corina Larkin Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Director Sharmistha Ray Development Manager Josephine Heston Programs Associate
137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 cueartfoundation.org 31
CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals. MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP Clifford Chance
Compass Group Management LLC ING Financial Services Merrill Corporation
The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Wilhelm Family Foundation
William Talbott Hillman Foundation
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
32
All ar twork © the ar tists. Cover: Xirin, Hope Eats the Soul, 2019. Photo by Antonio Barrera. Catalogue design by Lilly Hern-Fondation.