The Miami Rail | Issue 13

Summer 2015

M AT H B A S S + L A U R E N D AV I S F I S H E R B E N D AV I S / K - H O L E / J A C O L BY S AT T E R W H I T E L I T T L E B A H A M A S, M I A M I / C Â M P I N A , R O M A N I A THE NEW WHITNEY / REVIEWS

IN THIS ISSUE

V I SUA L A RT S

EXPRES S

6 ART AND THE ECOLOGICAL Ben Davis

42 K-HOLE with Adam Abdalla

12 JACOLBY SATTERWHITE with Jillian Mayer

46 MĂIASTRA: A HISTORY OF ROMANIAN SCULPTURE IN TWENTY-FOUR PARTS Igor Gyalakuthy

16 EVOKING THE FORMS AT MOCA NORTH MIAMI Daniel A. Siedell 2O NEW WORK Jesse Moretti

LOCA L 26 “EXCUSE ME, WHERE’S COCONUT GROVE?” INSIDE MIAMI’S LITTLE BAHAMAS Sarah Trudgeon 32 CAROL MUNDER’S BROKEN FINGERS Mark Hedden 35 100 YEARS OF WEIRDITUDE: ON THE STREETS AND IN THE ARCHIVES Cristina Favretto and Tom Austin 40 SENSE AND NONSENSIBILITY: WHAT MIAMI TEACHES, FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN Sam Beebe

50 FRAMING A WALL Math Bass and Lauren Davis Fisher

ARCHITECTURE 54 THE NEW WHITNEY Jason Polan

LITERATURE & POETRY 56 A HISTORY OF HUMAN FLIGHT IN 53 BULLETS Rob Goyanes 61 POEMS Justin Boening

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS 62 CITY OF PROGRESS Nathaniel Sandler

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Photo: Sarah Trudgeon

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Grace Weber, YoungArts Alumna and Presidential Scholar in the Arts, opening for FKA twigs, James Blake and SBTRKT on the YoungArts Campus during Art Basel 2014

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Ben Davis is the Miami Rail’s Summer 2015 Visiting Writer. The Visiting Writer Program is generously supported by the John S. and the James L. Knight Foundation.

A ND THE

EC OLOGICAL BEN DAVIS

So recently culturally transformed, Miami will likely soon be transformed again, and more profoundly, by avenging nature. If the scientists’ best guesses are true, the rising sea levels ensured by global climate change will leave the epicenter of the pop-up hedonism of Art Basel an underwater ruin—sooner rather than later.1 Neither art, nor the fitful, fickle affections of the global elite drawn by it, looks likely to stop this rising tide. Indeed, inasmuch as some of the fortunes on parade each December have been made by dumping carbon into the atmosphere, the fairs play a bit part in the destruction of their own island habitat.

In New York, we got a foretaste of our own version of this story during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Storm surge decimated working-class communities in Coney Island and the Rockaways. It also inundated the blue-chip gallery nexus of Chelsea. Images of dealers salvaging sodden canvases and mucking the sludge from their ravaged spaces were like allegories of the impotence of art before the massiveness of environmental change.

We live, it seems, in the prologue of an inexorably arriving dystopian scenario. Hope for some change of course of the political-economic order that might save us is urgently needed, but out of vogue—understandably, perhaps, given the literal flood of bad news.

1 “Climate change is no longer viewed as a future threat round here. It is something that we are having to deal with today.” Ben Kirtman, quoted in Robin McKie, “Miami, the Great World City, Is Drowning While the Powers That Be Look Away,” The Guardian, July 11, 2014.

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Yet in the contemporary art context, I also find this lacuna somewhat ironic. “Utopia,” of course, means “no-place.” And “no-place” is what the white cube of the gallery is meant to evoke, a space of liberated potential, a plastic, malleable space to plant our dreams in.

In the wake of Sandy, I found one of the most powerful images to be of the sodden white walls of a gallery bearing a grimy bathtub ring showing exactly how far the terrorizing waters had risen. This ring rendered visible the normally invisible infrastructure, and thus the foundational bracketing of contemporary art from the concrete world outside. The sight made me think that making visible art’s history of relating—or not relating—to the environment could be a way to begin to imagine what productive role it might play in the present.

The Radical Future of the Radical Past Indeed, for European art, understanding its relationship to a changing sense of nature in the early modern period is key to grasping its dynamics.

For the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), aesthetic experience primarily was the experience of nature; the beauty found in human art was merely a derivative subset. When the canon of the “fine” or “beautiful arts” was first being formulated, giving a philosophical foundation to the separation of elite culture from the more common crafts of ordinary people, one common denominator proposed for capital-A Art was the “Imitation of Beautiful Nature.”2 The contemplative nature cult offered by European romanticism and American transcendentalism in the nineteenth century was a direct reply to the grubbiness and ruthless character of early industrialization. Traditional agrarian ways of life were being transformed into urban manufacturing societies by the 2 See Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 82–83.

vortex of an expanding capitalism. The resultant loss of a traditional connection to nature produced as its corollary a heightened artistic mythification of the environment’s vanishing purity.

Niagara (1857) by American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) is a classic image of the unalloyed sublimity of nature. What you do not see in Church’s panorama of heaving water—what is deliberately bracketed out—is evidence of the substantial tourist infrastructure that had already begun to litter the falls’ surroundings. The encroachment of culture on nature is the other side of culture’s romanticization of nature.

Across the Atlantic, in the same era, the Pre-Raphaelites were mythologizing the chivalry and artisanry of the medieval as their own rejection of the smog and avarice of Britain’s industrial empire. Among them, William Morris (1834–1896) is probably best remembered as the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, touting a healing investment in the handmade in an increasingly machine-manufactured world as a form of craft politics. But his case also shows the seeds of an earnest and constructive anticapitalist impulse nested within the romantic tradition.

At age fifty, Morris discovered Karl Marx, and became a comrade of Friedrich Engels in London. He wrote and lectured voluminously on how art, labor, and nature alike were victimized by a voracious capitalism. From his unique vantage point, Morris was attentive to forms of politics that radicals—let alone society at large—had not yet caught on to, helping, for instance, to found the world’s first society for preservation of historical buildings in 1877.

His writings have been rediscovered as a resource for contemporary environmental activists in search of radical lineages.

Importantly for my argument, Morris was also the author of visionary works of what was effectively utopian science fiction. His News From Nowhere (1890) was framed as a political Rip Van Winkle tale, depicting a man who wakes up in the year 2102 to discover a society transformed for the better by revolution. The inspiration for the book, in fact, can be read as

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857. Oil on canvas, 106.5 x 229.9 cm. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund

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“YET IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART CONTEXT, I ALSO FIND THIS LACUNA SOMEWHAT IRONIC. ‘UTOPIA,’ OF COURSE, MEANS ‘NO-PLACE.’ AND ‘NO-PLACE’ IS WHAT THE WHITE CUBE OF THE GALLERY IS MEANT TO EVOKE, A SPACE OF LIBERATED POTENTIAL, A PLASTIC, MALLEABLE SPACE TO PLANT OUR DREAMS IN.”

Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1990–ongoing. Plants, and industrial fencing on hazardous waste landfill, an ongoing project in conjunction with Dr. Rufus Chaney, senior research agronomist, USDA

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proto-environmentalist: it was a response to another political fable, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), which Morris deemed to be too celebratory of the industrial side of progress, not attentive enough to the pastoral.

The specifics and plausibility of these competing visions are less important to me than the simple fact that this kind of speculative Utopianism was, at one time, a resource for political debate and inspiration. This is a resource that the political misadventures of the ensuing century have depleted.

The Environment of Contemporary Art The “art world” as we know it dates from the 1960s, when the rise of the art scene, the art industry, and the various innovations that became the lingua franca of the present international style of contemporary art came together. This is an era that also, it so happens, saw the birth of modern environmental consciousness, often dated to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. But the year 1964 marks a particularly important crossroads.

In that year, American art critic Arthur Danto published his essay “The Artworld,” credited with giving the idea of an art world its modern articulation.3 Danto was responding to seeing Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York, declaring that these sculptures marked the end of traditional narratives of art—imitation of nature among them—and signaled that contemporary art could only be understood in relation to the cultural “world” within which it was embedded.

The same year plays a key role in present-day ecological thought, specifically in the recently trendy theory of the Anthropocene— essentially, that humanity’s influence on the Earth has grown to be so significant that it justifies being conceptualized as an entirely new epoch. From the point of view of the geological record, 1964 marks the moment when there was enough accumulated radioactive isotopes in the Earth’s crust, due to nuclear testing, to make it possible to read mankind’s new supremacy in the rocks themselves.4 Danto thought of the new sensibility he pinpointed in the 1960s as principally conceptual, the result of certain philosophical ideas of art being taken to their limit. From the distance of a few generations, however, we might also think of it as being the logical side effect of the new preponderance of the artificial world over the natural. Pop art aestheticized the overwhelming presence of advertising and consumer culture; Minimalism aestheticized the industrial and the machine-made; Conceptualism aestheticized the new insinuation of information and media into everyday life.

As for art’s relation to nature, it is no surprise, perhaps, that the same era also saw artists propose new strategies for relating to the environment, as well, attempting to escape the gallery and museum space via the various forms of Land art. Much like 3 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy, October 15, 1964: 571–84.

4 I agree, however, with much critique of the Anthropocene idea that it is an extremely apolitical lens through which to address the problem of contemporary ecology. See Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin, March 30, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/ anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/.

Church’s landscapes, this new artistic incursion into nature bore the stamp of the very urban realities it was trying to vision an alternative to; the monumental engineering of Land art, particularly in its more macho varieties, was (and is) heavily criticized for representing the human will to dominate nature rather than embodying a holistic celebration of it.5 The brilliant, mercurial Robert Smithson (1938–1973), who coined the term “Earthworks,” proved remarkably prescient with writings like “A Tour of the Monument of Passaic, New Jersey” (Artforum, 1967). In that seminal essay, Smithson set out to describe the white elephant infrastructure projects and machines littering his deindustrializing hometown as if they were art, providing a knowing, sci-fi-inflected update to the romantic sensibility for a present where the meaning of “landscape” had fundamentally changed.

Visionary for its time, the tenor of Smithson’s postindustrial flânerie has radiated out and become an undertone in the culture at large. The echo of his Passaic can be found in multiplying art projects and online slideshows dwelling on “ruin porn,” all those dead malls and withered factories offering the dark, intuitive thrill of a transmission from a dying future. Once again, our present-day aesthetic sensibilities are inflected by dystopia.

Imaginative Despair Ecologically, the threats of Smithson’s day were still of relatively localized catastrophe. The possibility of global climate change that gathered pace since the 1990s was not yet on the radar. How, then, has art reflected this shift?

As in the 1960s, an ambiguous celebration of the technological present is the implicit subject matter of a lot of the trendiest art today. The so-called post-Internet craze assumes delirium at the perils and potentials of consumer gadgetry and the endless plentitude of imagery online as the fundamental reference points for an art that feels of the present.

The best articulations of this sensibility do more than just surf atop the climate of technophilia. Josh Kline’s recent installation Freedom (2015), for instance, features towering Teletubbies clad as storm troopers, and sinister videos of police officers reading out scripts based on hijacked social media feeds.

Such a work amounts to something like a critique of the culture of techno-distraction, but from the point of view that makes it feel like a no-way-out, nightmare scenario. Hope appears— Kline includes a video featuring an image of president Obama, made, through an act of digital puppetry, to deliver the optimistic policy prescriptions that progressives might have hoped he would deliver—but only to highlight its actual absence.

At the same time, as in the 1960s, new forms of relating to nature through art form a counterpoint to the intensifying 5 “[T]he most significant implication of art as land reclamation is that art can and should be used to wipe away technical guilt. Will it be a little easier in the future to rip up the landscape for one last shovelful of a nonrenewable energy source if an artist can be found (cheap mind you) to transform the devastation into an inspiring and modern work of art?”

Robert Morris, “Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 87.

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obsession with art and technology. “Eco-art” has recently crystallized into a fully branded discipline of its own. The forms that this genre take are too complex to taxonomize exhaustively here, but I will mention two in turn to see what their stakes are.

At one pole you have the “alarmist” strain, which positions itself as righteously calling attention to the threat of climate change by picturing immanent disaster. A particularly effective version might be the collective Superflex’s video Flooded McDonald’s (2009), featuring the titular fast-food restaurant slowly swallowed up by rising waters.

Flooded McDonald’s might be thought of, in fact, as a post-postmodern update of the old romantic obsession with portentous ruins. It is such a convincing depiction of possible catastrophe that, during Hurricane Sandy, a still from it was widely circulated as actual news.

At the other pole, falling broadly within the crunchy genre of art-as-community-organizing known as “social practice” is what is sometimes called the “remediationist” strain of eco-art. Ditching the idea of representing politics, such projects seek to actually solve environmental problems directly.

An influential precedent is Mel Chin’s 1990 commission for the Walker Art Center, Revival Field, for which the Houston artist worked with scientists to sow plants that would suck toxic heavy metals from the soil of a contaminated lot in St. Paul.

These kinds of ameliorative initiatives have inspired many artists. Yet faced with the global scale of the challenges of climate change, they also feel untenably modest. And, too, there is a way that a recourse to such localism can dovetail or even enforce a sense of fatalism about the kind of large-scale economic reorientation that would be needed to actually cancel the apocalypse.6

Bad Utopias In her recent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), Naomi Klein offers the following insight: When it comes to the climate crisis, there are no nonradical solutions remaining. This “inconvenient truth,” she argues, is the intellectual starting point of any honest environmental politics. Once you have accepted the science, you are impelled to admit that dramatic, large-scale change of some kind is not just necessary but inevitable. Failing to propose a “people’s” vision of what a future that responds to the challenges of climate change might look like, therefore, cedes the terrain to futures that replicate and accentuate all the worst features of our present political-economic setup:

6 Speaking at a show in Los Angeles of design proposals for a changing climate, curator Frances Anderton stated this presupposition plainly: “There’s a lot of talk in this climate change conversation about mitigation—and that usually involves big ambitious projects with lots of money thrown at them. But what you see in these is the exact opposite.

It’s people saying that we can’t assume that there will be governmental commitment or resources to do a Netherlands scale of [sea wall] building.

So, instead, they come up with other simple and ingenious solutions.

There is an elegance to them.” Quoted in Carolina A. Miranda, “‘Sink or Swim’: L.A. Photo Show Looks at How Design Responds to Disaster,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2015.

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William Morris, News from Nowhere, 1890

What I am saying is that the science forces us to choose how we want to respond. If we stay on the road we are on, we will get the big corporate, big military, big engineering responses to climate change—the world of a tiny group of big corporate winners and armies of locked-out losers that we have imagined in virtually every fictional account of our dystopic future, from Mad Max to The Children of Men to The Hunger Games to Elysium. Or we can choose to heed climate change’s planetary wake-up call and change course, steer away not just form the emissions cliff but from the logic that brought us careening to that precipice. Because what the “moderates” constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?7

Building on Klein’s point, my case is that, worthy as they are, the mainstream articulations of eco-art mentioned above 7 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 59.

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implicitly participate in the logic of moderation. They are able either only to sound the alarm about incipient disaster, adding to the dystopian image gallery (the “alarmist” strain), or imagine small-scale solutions (the “remediationist” strain).

This predicament is particularly significant in that, whereas artists are stereotyped as impractical lefty dreamers, it is currently the right that is pushing its agenda through big-picture reimaginings of society. Consider the far-out proposals of the Seasteading movement, a contemporary faction of libertarian Utopianism that has actually received funding from Silicon Valley types. Declaring that the government is the enemy of cultural and political progress, Seasteading proposes to build future cities on the sea, using the legal freedom of international waters to experiment with new governments on custom-designed luxury islands.

It doesn’t take any particular political acuity to see that, actually implemented, Seasteading would quickly turn into a nautical-themed neo-feudalist nightmare. It is easy to ridicule. But at least its images and propositions offer a vision of a radically altered but articulable future, soaking up conversation, inspiring designers, and stimulating argument about what is possible in the present.

Much more alarming is that, as Klein’s book lays out, once farout ideas like geoengineering are gaining traction as mainstream solutions to the climate crisis. The idea that we might inject the atmosphere with reflective sulfates to “dim the sun” as a brake on global warming, simulating the effects of a supervolcano eruption that darkens the sky—in effect courting man-made disaster to stave off man-made disaster—is now being touted as a solution to the present-day predicament with a straight face.

The nineteenth-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837) earned himself the glory of eternal ridicule by saying that in his proposed future, humanity’s mastery of the environment would turn the seas to lemonade. In a dystopian Fourierist echo, contemporary geoengineers propose proactively changing the chemical composition of the seas as a climate-change solution.

Such pragmatic nightmares are evidentially more plausible than the obvious alternative: a reorientation of the economy that challenges the logic that puts corporate interests above ecological sanity. This astounding fact about the present intellectual debate, finally, shows the environmental crisis is also a crisis of the imagination—which may be where artists have a role to play.

we are fighting for in the first place, opening up the space to speculate how, in changed circumstances, we could actually live differently and better.8 In an Earth Day address last year at the University of Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute, contemporary sci-fi author China Miéville proposed just such a position: We should utopia as hard as we can. Along with a fulfilled humanity we should imagine flying islands, self-constituting coraline neighborhoods, photosynthesizing cars bred from biospliced bone-marrow. Big Rock Candy Mountains. Because we’ll never mistake those dreams for blueprints, nor for mere absurdities.

What utopias are are new Rorschachs. We pour our concerns and ideas out, and then in dreaming we fold the paper to open it again and reveal startling patterns. We may pour with a degree of intent, but what we make is beyond precise planning. Our utopias are to be enjoyed and admired: they are made of our concerns and they tell us about our now, about our pre-utopian selves. They are to be interpreted. And so are those of our enemies.9

The fatal inability to envision alternatives to the dominant future offered by our compromised present is not limited to artists; as Klein writes, it infects the political culture at large, to its detriment. But this also offers an opportunity. Often, radical artists attempt to use art to solve problems that are better solved through activism—but here is a problem where culture, through its very distance from practical realities, might fill a hole.

Dystopia is cool; it is the default contemporary mode of imagining the future. Utopia is not. This is an aesthetic state of affairs that is also the sedimented result of a history of political defeats and compromises that has led to cultural demoralization. Imagining what a better future would look like, making it cool to believe that there is a future worth fighting for again, is in some ways a very modest task. It is the beginning of something, the necessary but not sufficient condition of inspiring action in the present.

But you have to start somewhere, and the future is a fine place to do so.

BEN DAVIS is an art critic living in New York, and the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013).

Radical Rorschach Blots In previous times, utopian dreaming was a specialty of left politics, and a left-wing art more specifically, in William Morris and beyond. Recovering the contribution of Morris, E. P. Thompson once argued that, among other things, in its stridency to appear “scientific,” the orthodox Marxist left erred in dismissing all positive speculation about the future as woolly “Utopianism.”

Fantasies of a better future such as Morris’s News From Nowhere, Thompson argued, need not be thought of as concrete plans pursued as an alternative to movement-building in the present; they can be invitations to dream and debate about what

8 It is significant that Klein opens This Changes Everything with a quote from the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars Trilogy series represents one of the rare instances of positive utopian thinking in literature: “In my books I’ve imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all) comprehensively changing capitalism.” Kim Stanley Robinson, quoted in Klein, This Changes Everything, [page number].

9 China Miéville, “The Limits of Utopia,” Salvage, http://salvage. zone/mieville_all.html.

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Jacolby Satterwhite, Stills from Vassalage and Abduction, 2014.

C-print, video, and 3D animation. Courtesy Jacolby Satterwhite and OH-WOW Gallery

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JACOLBY SATTERWHITE with Jillian Mayer

I first met Jacolby Satterwhite in snowy Park City, Utah, during Sundance Film Festival. As snowflakes fell on our heads, he spoke about public mythology, technology, his Southern upbringing, Orange is the New Black, and the art world with an unparalleled energy, enthusiasm, confidence, and intelligence.

The magical quality of his ideas was evident. I felt the same way when he opened up his laptop for a casual studio visit in Miami at Borscht Corp.’s office about eight months ago, while we were discussing his dream, to work with Miami-based rap legend Trina, the baddest bitch.

After discovering his work in 2013 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and then again at the New Frontier exhibition at Sundance in 2014, I became aware that I was not viewing the work of an artist dealing with digital versus the physical, but rather with the consideration of a fused universe united by performative elements that incorporate himself and, occasionally, some of his role models.

JILLIAN MAYER (MIAMI RAIL): Tell me how you obtained your first computer.

JACOLBY SATTERWHITE: I got my first computer through the Make-a-Wish Foundation when I was eleven years old. I had been diagnosed with cancer, and had to do chemotherapy for two years. The

Satterwhite seems to be the ringleader of the world he makes, which is enriched by icons, objects from QVC, impermanence, form, maternal influences, and popular culture. His work investigates memory and desire, piecing conceptions of both together in a saturated and rendered, geometric plane of existence. Initially a painter who felt the limits of being still and later a video artist who found Adobe After Effects couldn’t perform in a way that matched his concepts, Satterwhite transitioned once again and taught himself Maya, a 3D animation software.

A few months ago, I got to watch him direct Trina in front of a green screen in a studio near the Miami International Airport. I felt like I was on the ground floor of a new Satterwhite universe being created from his very concise and creative blueprints—like I was watching a city being built by a brilliant engineer. He and I discussed all this and his recent and upcoming projects, including the premiere of En Plein Air: Diamond Princess at Pérez Art Museum Miami in April, featuring Trina.

program generously gives terminally ill children these gifts as a gesture to instill hope in them. I was a brat, so when I got the computer, I felt betrayed because it was 1999 and I got a Pentium I computer. They told me I was getting a top-of-the-line computer, and all I could think was, “But Pentium II is already out.” I also got mega-perverted and

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violent games for it, like Duke Nukem and Diablo. Duke Nukem was especially funny because Duke runs around shooting hookers, strippers, and aliens.

RAIL: You’ve told me you were a gamer growing up. The universes you create in your videos are fully rendered, beautiful

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“BOTH MY MOTHER’S DRAWINGS AND TRINA’S DISCOGRAPHY MAP OUT THE SAME TYPE OF LANGUAGE ARCHIVE. I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WHEN THE TWO COLLIDE.”

3D landscapes. Would you ever—or have you ever—considered making a playable game? Or, are we watching you as the player?

SATTERWHITE: I’m currently not interested in making a game. What stimulates me as a creative person is being able to control composition and space, rather than allowing the audience to have control over those variables. I’m still resolving some issues I had as a painter within the 3D animation and performance language.

But, never say never. Video games have pivoted my aesthetic tremendously.

I’ve invested over ten years of intense fourteen-hour days gaming, between my childhood, adolescence, and late teens. The logic of my space is definitely designed by sitting in front of a screen playing Suikoden, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Ocean, and Final Fantasy.

RAIL: Can your digital world exist without you?

SATTERWHITE: Of course it can.

RAIL: Your work is very sexual, but in a contained way. Can you tell me about your first sexual experiences online or IRL (or both)?

SATTERWHITE: [Laughs.] I can’t—he’d get arrested if I did…

RAIL: Did your early sexual experiences potentially inform your interest in working with famed porn actor Antonio Biaggi?

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SATTERWHITE: Not at all.

would happen when the two collide.

RAIL: How did this interest come about, then? How did you initially get involved with Biaggi and with Trina?

RAIL: Is Trina aware that she’s a gay icon?

SATTERWHITE: Both Antonio and Trina are complicated public mythologies who have difficult bodies of work that seemed useful for me to extrapolate from. Antonio Biaggi represented a certain limitlessness around his performance style that proved to be problematic for certain gay political spheres. I was amused by his blog and by how it became a densely opinionated forum responding to politics, gay rights, sexual politics, nutrition, and animal rights. He even owns a vegan bakery in Florida and contributes to animal care centers. Because the videos in my series Reifying Desire are primarily complicated narratives sitting under the umbrella of simple gestation cycles, I thought featuring a bareback porn star seemed like an appropriate way to end the series.

Trina, however, has a massive discography that lyricizes the pleasures of capitalism, larger-than-life surrealist sex, sexual control, female empowerment, and opulence. Her songs often use objects as signifiers of her status and remind me of the original archive that built my videos—my mother Patricia Satterwhite’s drawings. Her drawings of objects and the language written in them influence the narratives and decisions I make in my videos. Both my mother’s drawings and Trina’s discography map out the same type of language archive. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see what

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SATTERWHITE: Yes, most of her fans are females and gay boys from the South.

RAIL: How do you feel she speaks to this particular culture?

SATTERWHITE: Wonderfully.

RAIL: Has working with Trina and Antonio changed the way you initially perceived them?

SATTERWHITE: Trina and Antonio are some of the kindest and most gentle people I’ve ever met. I wasn’t shocked by that, but I was expecting them to be more neutral.

However, they’re both warm and beautiful.

RAIL: How did your collaboration with Trina come about?

SATTERWHITE: I was participating in Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibition, and was rapping Trina songs in front of you and the rest of the fabulous Borscht crew at a bar in Utah. I mentioned wanting desperately to work with her and Lucas Leyva generously responded with how Borscht could make that happen.

And boy, did they!

JILLIAN MAYER is an artist and filmmaker whose work is exhibited internationally.

She lives in South Florida and helps run the Borscht Corp.

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Augustina Woodgate, The Ballroom, 2014. One hundred fifty sanded World globes, dimensions variable

EVOKING THE FORMS at MOCA North Miami DAN IEL A. SIEDEL L

Evoke the forms.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Road This phrase came to mind as I walked through Alternative Contemporaneity: Temporary Autonomous Zones at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and it has remained with me as I continue to think about the show’s implications.

Alternative Contemporaneity is an eclectic and wide-ranging invitational exhibition that has the feel of the apocalyptic about it

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and the sense that the works included appear in an abandoned— and haunted—battlefield.

And indeed they have. Last year, prompted by a proposed merger with the Bass Museum of Art, the museum’s board of trustees and the city of North Miami engaged in a drawn-out dispute that ultimately resulted in the division of the museum’s collection between the city and the former board. The latter decamped to the Design District where they have founded the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in an effort to keep the city

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on the map as a destination for the international art-world elites.

Underneath the surface of art museums’ public programming—the exhibitions, lectures, and publications—boils a cauldron of cultural politics. For the stakeholders, the battles are violent, and the casualties real. And this is all the more vicious because it takes place covertly, hidden under the banner of public trust and civic responsibility for bringing culture to the community.

Whether its Joseph Goebbels, who reached for his revolver when he heard the word or Groucho Marx who reached for his wallet, “culture” is not for the faint of heart. And it is also not necessarily for the community.

Alternative Contemporaneity is a courageous attempt by director Babacar M’Bow, artist/curator Richard Haden, and educator Dr. Adrienne von Lattes to reclaim contemporary art from what M’Bow calls in his catalogue essay the “tiny, economic elite” who consider it (or its possession) solely as currency in the churning global market. For the MOCA team, contemporary art has the potential to explore what it means to be human amid the economic, social, and political systems that dehumanize. This is why, despite its apocalyptic appearance, it is a fundamentally hopeful exhibition.

Alternative Contemporaneity retheorizes contemporary art (and MOCA’s role as a presenting institution) through the conceptual frameworks of “contemporaneity” and “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” both of which offer a way to protect and develop a contemporary artistic (and critical) practice that is self-consciously aware of these dehumanizing systems of power and art’s complicity within them.

Contemporaneity Over the last decade, a few art historians and critics have sought to interrogate the empty and problematic category “contemporary art” and the presumption in the art world that, as Terry Smith observes, “one cannot—indeed should not—have any idea about it.”1 This has, according to Smith, produced an “upbeat mindlessness that has come to pass for art discourse” that is a symptom of globalization and neoliberal economies that produce dramatic inequalities, that are mediated by image-saturated cultures. This “upbeat mindlessness” about the nature of contemporary art that allows markets to define it is exemplified by the opinion of Sotheby’s former auctioneer Tobias Meyer, that “the best art is the most expensive because the art market is so smart.”

“Contemporaneity” has become a useful category through which Smith and others have sought to return historical, conceptual, and critical judgment and analysis to an art world system that has increasingly become not merely “mindless,” but inhuman. It is also a means of creating a space in the art world that is not defined by The Artworld. Smith argues, “For the history of contemporary art the core subject of inquiry is the art, the ideas, the cultural practices and the values that are created within the condition of contemporaneity.”2 Exploring this condition thus

becomes a means to recover a more concrete, embodied, relational aspect of human action, including artistic practice, both locally and globally. It is a means by which the human being, through artistic practice and the experience of art, can break out of the hermetically sealed isolation and eternal return of the “contemporary” into a porous present that is open both to the distinctive pasts and the futures of individuals and communities.

I found this porosity of the present moment in Jeroen Eisinga’s hauntingly beautiful video Springtime (2010–11), in which the artist is covered with 150,000 bees. Kyle Trowbridge’s painting, This will stay with you until you die (2014), addresses the capacity of a painting to address the viewer in multiple ways, to “look one way and behave another,” as Trowbridge observes. And Agustina Woodgate’s playful installation of fifty white spheres, The Ballroom (2014), spills out onto the exhibition floor and invites the viewer to engage with and even move the spheres at will. James Concannon’s Basing Street and Lancaster Road (2014), which features two “re-written historical odes” to British romantic poet William Blake and the English radical group King Mob (c. late 1960s), exemplifies a “contemporaneity” that exists through time.

Temporary Autonomous Zones Rather than accept its “far-flung” geographical location in North Miami as a limitation, museum leaders have transformed it into an “archipelago,” an island of resistance, for both cultural critique and creative practice. They call this island a Temporary Autonomous Zone, or TAZ. It is a term coined by Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), a self-described “sufi-anarchist,” who observed the emergence of these informal, yet unusually potent communities throughout his historical research as a recurring strategy of resistance to coercive and dehumanizing social, cultural, and political frameworks and Kyle Trowbridge, This will stay with you until you die!, 2015.

Acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 91.4 cm.

1 Terry Smith, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 46.

2 Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 256.

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forces.3 For Bey, a TAZ is an improvised community that can—for a time—preserve the integrity of authentic personal human freedom through the cultivation of creativity, spontaneity, autonomy, and imagination. “The works assembled in this exhibition,” Haden writes in his curatorial statement, “speak collectively as zones of authenticity.”4 Works that seem to create, or perhaps rely on the presence of these zones are, for example, Sofia Valiente’s humane and sensitive photograph, Doug (2013), which depicts one of the one hundred convicted sex offenders that live in a small community called Miracle Village near Lake Okeechobee. Misael Soto’s conversations and encounters explore “shared experiences and participatory situations” while Gavin Perry’s simple yet spatially suggestive rebar and epoxy resin circular forms encourage the viewer to experience shifting spatial relationships, enacted by an artifact that refuses to demand attention as precious.

Dangers The two-pronged theoretical framework for Alternative Contemporaneity, which I find provocative and promising, invites two significant dangers.

The first is to identity “contemporary art” too closely with the collectors who convene in Miami Beach, Basel, and Kassel for the art fairs, New York for the auctions, and who subscribe to ArtFacts. net. Or, put another way, confuse official Contemporary Art with contemporary art practices and institutions. For example, despite the fact that Edvard Munch’s The Scream was purchased at auction in 2012 for $129 million, this does not, or should not, cause us to forget what Munch said about his desire to paint “his soul’s dairy” as an attempt to find the truth about himself and the world, and, just as importantly, his hope that his paintings would help viewers—then as well as today—on their own personal search for truth.

Needless to say, few collectors, dealers, and curators approach works of art with that much existential and emotional skin in the game. Perhaps the concept of “contemporaneity” can be a means to recover the integrity and dignity of finding meaning in the world through works of art, no matter when they were made.

The second danger is to over-theorize. M’Bow’s catalogue essay is an ambitious, utopian call to transform art and culture locally and globally, consisting of nothing less than “re-imagination of representation through a new order of knowledge.” 5 But the heavy use of theoretical abstractions and academic jargon can tend to be just as alienating to the community as the blue-chip art collectors.

The temptation to over-theorize, against which I struggle constantly, can drain the aesthetic potency of art to challenge and nourish the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative life of the person who stands in front of it. Or, perhaps more problematically, it fails to compel readers to go to art, to live with it and allow it to live with them. Too often neither the collectors nor the theoreticians

3 Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991).

trust art’s capacity to address the dignity of the human being who encounters it, a capacity that can empower the individual spontaneously, freely, and authentically.

Bey is helpful here. In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue he reminds us, “the simplest form of the TAZ would be a love affair, or a dinner party with friends, where no one enforces rules & the goal is mutual enhancement of pleasure.” 6 Neither theory nor commodification has any place in such embodied, spontaneous, aesthetic experiences—and no, discourse about Barthes’s notion of “jouissance” is not the same as experiencing it un-self-consciously and nontheoretically with another. And it seems to me that this is the register at which artistic practices operate: the love affair, the dinner party, a search for personal truth that opens one up to others without cynicism, irony, and abstractions—too often the standard fair for theoreticians. The challenge is to mobilize theoretical thinking in the service of a “relational aesthetics” that preserves and cultivates, through particular aesthetic experiences, our capacity to flourish, individually and in communities.

Evoking the Forms “I don’t believe anyone can simply decree a TAZ,” Bey concludes in his letter to the organizers of Alternative Contemporaneity, “but I do believe that we can act in such a way as to evoke them. This form of action (or “art”) has certain things in common with magic— that is, with will & desire.” 7 Left with nothing in the aftermath, McCarthy’s man and boy use what they have to evoke the forms, to offer a ritual—an artistic performance—that in its simple beauty and human dignity, is an aesthetic embodiment, if only momentarily, of both “contemporaneity” and a “Temporary Autonomous Zone.”

May those involved in MOCA North Miami have the “will & desire” to “evoke the forms” in future exhibitions, to work toward preserving this Temporary Autonomous Zone and perhaps transform it into one that might become more permanent.

DANIEL A. SIEDELL, PHD, teaches art history at The King’s College in New York and theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale.

4 Richard Haden, “TAZ Tactical,” in Alternative Contemporaneity: Temporary Autonomous Zones (MOCA North Miami, 2015), 9.

5 Babacar M’Bow, “From Temporary to Permanent Autonomous Zones: Towards a Dialectical Contemporary,” in ibid., 5.

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6

Foreword to ibid., 3.

7 Ibid.

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“PERHAPS THE CONCEPT OF ‘CONTEMPORANEITY’ CAN BE A MEANS TO RECOVER THE INTEGRITY AND DIGNITY OF FINDING MEANING IN THE WORLD THROUGH WORKS OF ART, NO MATTER WHEN THEY WERE MADE.”

Sofia Valiente, Doug, 2013

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NEW WORK: JESSE MORETTI 20 T H E M I A M I R A I L

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Opposite: Landscape From Above I, 2015. Digital c-print. This page: Landscape From Above II, 2015. Digital c-print

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NEW WORK: JESSE MORETTI 22 T H E M I A M I R A I L

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Opposite: View Through A Screen I, 2015. Digital c-print. This page: View Through A Screen II, 2015. Digital c-print

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NEW WORK: JESSE MORETTI

Existing between abstraction, graphic art, Adobe CS, and the screen, JESSE MORETTI’S work aims for a place where the supposedly discrete states—flatness/dimensionality and analogue/digital—merge. By creating a feedback loop between digital and material space in the studio, she collapses and unifies the pictorial plane. Born in Miami Beach, Moretti received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 2013. She has received residencies at MANA Contemporary ESKFF, Jersey City, and

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Opposite: View Through A Screen III, 2015. Digital c-print. This page: View Through A Screen IV, 2015. Digital c-print

NEW WORK: JESSE MORETTI

Pioneer Works Center for Arts and Innovation, Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include a 2013 solo show at Patrick Parrish, New York, and inclusion in La Chose Encadrée at Glasgow International in 2014. Moretti teaches design at Queens College–CUNY and has lectured at École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon, École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

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“EXCUSE ME, WHERE’S

COCONUT GROVE?” Inside Miami’s Little Bahamas

SARA H TRUDGE ON

The Mariah Brown House, built circa 1890, one of the oldest houses in Miami and one of the first with a black owner. Photos: Sarah Trudgeon

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“‘I WANT TO HAVE A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD CAN AFFORD TO GET SOMETHING TO EAT,’ SAYS BEAU. AND HE MEANS IT—MEALS COST ABOUT FIVE DOLLARS, AND I’VE NEVER SEEN HIM TURN AWAY A HUNGRY PERSON (IF AFTER SOME HAGGLING).”

I sit one night eating conch fritters at Beau’s Café on Wheels, a Bahamian food truck that stays, for the most part, on Plaza Street between Franklin and Charles Avenues in Coconut Grove. The dining area is a picnic table in Beau’s driveway.

The menu variously includes items such as souse (a kind of Bahamian pork stew), conch salad, fried conch, and conch fritters, served with the ethereal “conch sauce,” the ingredients of which will not be revealed to me.

The food truck is owned by Officer Beau, a community policeman who was born and raised in Coconut Grove. He has, it seems, the phone number of every person in the neighborhood.

If you want some coconut candy, he knows who to call and dials her up on the spot. The food truck’s young chef, Jerry, worked at Coral Bagels for ten years before taking the job manning Beau’s food truck (more of a trailer, really—whenever the café needs to move, Beau has to rely on a friend with a truck.) The story is a kind of fairytale: Beau would go to Coral Bagels for breakfast, and he says he could always tell when it was Jerry making his omelets. When Beau decided to open the food truck he asked Jerry to be his chef.

“I want to have a place where people in my neighborhood can afford to get something to eat,” says Beau. And he means it— meals cost about five dollars, and I’ve never seen him turn away a hungry person (if after some haggling): “Can I get some chicken fingers?”

“Five dollars.”

“I’ve only got two dollars.”

“Well then you don’t get no chicken fingers.”

“Can I get just one chicken finger?”

Beau pauses and tells Jerry, “Give him a plate of chicken fingers.”

Prison: Beau mentions the practice of pharmaceutical companies paying inmates to test new drugs. “The guys are more fucked up when they get out of prison than when they go in.

You would not believe what’s going on in there. I mean, you would believe it, but I’ll tell you.”

Gambling: One man (of whom I will say only that he is strikingly handsome, and that it was my husband who first pointed this out) confesses to once losing all his money at the casino and then, afraid of how angry his girlfriend would be, ripped his shirt up and pretended he got mugged.

Drinking and falling down.

Sharecropping: Every so often, the old men of the neighborhood wander by wearing their watches and their khakis and their messenger caps. Beau tells a story about how the family of one of the men had been sharecroppers in North Carolina. When he was young, the man had taken all his money (and maybe some that was not his own) and fled to Miami. He went back a few years later in disguise to see his family, but the owner of the land recognized him, and he had to hightail it back out. “How did they know it was him?”

I ask. “Oh, they knew it was him,” says Beau. “They know all the slaves.”

City buses: Don’t take the 38.

Seafood: Strikingly-handsome-man tells me about catching conch and pouring hot sauce down the shells so they would come out. Beau remembers catching crabs in the “crab hole” on Franklin Avenue, when heavy rain would wash the crabs out of their holes. It used to be a cemetery, and now it’s an apartment complex, across the street from where I live.

They’d feed the crabs bread for a few days to “clean them out” (because, of course, the crabs had been living in a cemetery) then cook them in a pit.

Weekend nights, with Cokes and a bottle of rum, a small crowd gathers around the table—mostly Beau’s middle-aged friends, and a few ex-convicts he employs in his construction business, working on houses in the neighborhood. Topics covered:

Policing: Beau became a cop because an aunt he loved very

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much, herself a policewoman, told him as she was dying that the only way to make a difference was to be on the inside.

He had a bad time in the academy. His first beat was nights in Overtown, policing the same men he used to run with.

Now, he’s a community policeman, working closely with local business owners to create better, safer neighborhoods.

He’s found that what people care about most isn’t arresting drug dealers; they want him to clean up empty lots where kids get hurt playing, or search out absentee homeowners to do something about their abandoned, dilapidated houses.

The Police: Even though he’s a policeman, Beau says that he is still, as a black person, scared of the police. “You have no idea what it’s like to walk in our shoes,” he tells me. It doesn’t matter who he is; he fits the profile. Estelle, Beau’s sister-inlaw, who has emphysema and sits at the table with a small oxygen tank, says, “I will tell you something: I am going to be seventy-six years old next week, and I am still a little bit afraid of the police.”

Coconut Grove: In particular, the traditionally black neighborhood of the West Grove, or “Little Bahamas,” as Beau and some others in the neighborhood would like to rename it.

It’s always there, what it is and what it used to be. No one is under any illusions: crime rates in the West Grove are high. There are gunshots at night. But Beau’s hope is that if the Bahamian culture of the Grove can be revived and preserved, so can the Grove—not a gentrified Grove, but his Grove, Little Bahamas. Beau’s Café on Wheels is part of the project: Beau says poignantly that he serves the food that “makes this neighborhood what it used to be.”

The men around the table joke about how tourists come driving through their neighborhood and stop them to ask, “Excuse me, where’s Coconut Grove?” Most people, when they think of the Grove, think of the touristy restaurants and stores that line Main Highway, where people drink lite beer and eat brunch at all hours of the day, or of CocoWalk, the outdoor mall on Grand Avenue that includes a theater, indoor/outdoor bars, and some small chain stores, one of which exclusively sells (I still can’t really believe it) plastic cups. Some people might know about the history of the Grove as one of the oldest neighborhoods in Miami; they might have gone on a walking tour, snapping pictures of the defunct Coconut Grove Playhouse (which is being perpetually “saved” and where Waiting for Godot made its US debut in 1956 to an audience that walked out).

Some know about white settlers such as Ralph Munroe, whose house is now preserved as the Barnacle Historic State Park, and Charles and William Deering of the Deering Estate and Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.

But to a large extent, much of Coconut Grove was originally a Bahamian village. In 1899, a Bahamian man named Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup moved to the Grove, at that time pretty much a hill full of pine and palmettos and a few white settlers, including James Frow, who owned much of the land, and Charles Peacock, who owned the Peacock

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Hotel (then known as the Bay View Inn). Stirrup began buying land and building houses, which he would rent to Bahamian immigrants—many of whom worked at the hotel—and their families until they could afford to buy them. Stirrup helped build black-owned businesses, grocery stores, and restaurants along Evangelist Street (now Charles Avenue). The black business section of Coconut Grove stretched from Hibiscus Street to Main Highway, where the Mayfair shopping complex now sits. (CoconutGrove.com’s history tab makes almost no mention of any of this, and refers to the West Grove as if it isn’t part of Coconut Grove: “black Bahamians. . . created their own settlement along Charles Avenue.” The website mentions Peacock, Frow, and Fairchild, but not Stirrup. It mentions “charming ‘mom and pop’ businesses” being replaced by the Mayfair; it doesn’t mention who many of the moms and pops were.)

What’s amazing about Stirrup’s story is that he became a millionaire by creating a neighborhood: he believed that if people owned their own homes, they’d be better citizens, invested in their community. Other incredible things about Stirrup: His mother had been a black servant in his white father’s house, and when she died, Stirrup was taken in by relatives who made him work tirelessly until, at the age of fifteen, he escaped to Key West, where he worked tirelessly for another relative, traveling back and forth to the Bahamas to marry and have children.

When Stirrup eventually moved to Cutler (before he moved to Coconut Grove), he worked as a pineapple cutter during the day and cleared land at night, but instead of being paid in cash, he was often paid in land, and invested whatever money he did earn in more land.

Stirrup could have built a grandiose estate like Vizcaya.

Instead, he built a house just big enough for his family and he bought and sold land to help create a community. Not that Stirrup was a saint—an early Grove resident named Rebecca Johnson described him as a “loan master,” and very stern—but she also remembers that he called everyone his brother and his sister. They called him “Uncle Abe.” Some of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses are still standing, including the Mariah Brown House, built around 1890 for one of the first Bahamian settlers in the Grove, and the Stirrup House itself. They are wooden, built from Dade County Pine, which is amazingly durable. When, a few years ago, Beau had to rip up the floor of an old Grove house he was working on, he said that there was still sap coming out of the wood. The Stirrup House is currently owned by the sinister Aries Development, which has allowed the house to fall apart completely behind their hideous corner apartment building/ overpriced restaurant complex on the corner of Main and Franklin. (I found, on the Internet, an incensed journalist and blogger named Headly Westerfield who has been taking pictures of and advocating to restore the Stirrup House for years.)

In fact, it seems like every year a story just like this one comes out in the Miami New Times or the Miami Herald. In the age of the Internet, there have been more. Part of the history of the West Grove is the story of its unlikely survival. Someone, whether on the inside or the outside, is perpetually fighting to save the Grove while someone else wants to let it fall apart, to

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TOP Beau’s Café on Wheels patrons. ABOVE Warren barbequing chicken and ribs in his homemade smoker.

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ABOVE Odd Fellows Hall, built late 1800s. OPPOSITE Jerry, the chef, at Beau’s Café on Wheels

claim it as his own.

Even in the early days of the Grove, neither Frow (the primary developer) nor the village would agree to pave Evangelist Street. So, under cover of darkness, members of the black community carted shell and limestone to Evangelist and did it themselves. Residents of the West Grove had to fight for a sewage system as late as the fifties. It has been effectively segregated from the rest of the Grove by overgrown yards and barbed wire and hedges (look at Google Earth—you can see the tree line). In the eighties, drugs ravaged the neighborhood. Signs that read “Drug Dealers Ruin Neighborhoods” hang on fences and outside churches. Many of the men at Beau’s now have to carry inhalers, their lungs damaged from drug use. Robert, a friend of Beau, describes how many of the trees in the West

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Grove were cut down and ripped out, under the ridiculous pretense that drug dealers were hiding drugs in them—as if it were the palmettos’ fault. Grand Avenue, a main thoroughfare, has been effectively stripped: empty lots with absentee owners and concrete monster housing complexes line the street from 32nd Avenue to Douglas Road; the Ace Theatre is closed, the parks are closed, the corner stores are closed. It’s like a ghost street. If we face the facts, we know that this is because the West Grove is a traditionally black neighborhood in the traditionally segregated south. Most of the white people around are racing through in their Lexus LXs trying to beat traffic—or, more recently, developing empty lots and building houses that the people who now live in the Grove would not be able to afford.

But somehow, Stirrup still seems to be the presiding spirit,

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and the Grove—with its bright shotgun houses and mango trees and residents smoking ribs in their backyards—is still here. Officer Beau is doing his work serving cheap Bahamian food and fixing up old houses: he learned construction from his father-in-law, who learned it from descendants of Stirrup. The Coconut Grove Cemetery Committee is raising money to restore the Mariah Brown House. Although it has had its setbacks, and received little support from the city, the Goombay Festival has been held every summer for thirty-eight years, Junkanoo bands and all. And, although most of the houses being built by developers in the West Grove right now “aren’t for people who look like me,” as Beau puts it, the committee who throws the Goombay Festival is working to rebrand the West Grove “Little Bahamas,” in hopes the city will recognize it for the historical

neighborhood it is and invest in its restoration, the way it has for Little Haiti and, more recently, Little Santo Domingo, preserving the culture without displacing the current residents.

As sea levels rise (climate change, climate change, climate change!), homeowners in the Grove, the highest point in Miami, are going to have to work even harder to keep their property.

If they do, they’ll have been the first ones here, and the last ones left. Who knows what will happen to the West Grove then? For now, let’s call it Little Bahamas. Back at Beau’s Café, during a lull in the conversation, Beau says, with quiet exactitude, “Remember that place, what was it called––Beau’s Café on Wheels? Man, that place was great.”

SARAH TRUDGEON is a writer living in Miami.

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This or That, 2013. Photogravure, 25.4 x 25.4 cm

CAROL MUNDER’S

BROKEN FINGERS M A RK HEDDEN

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This is what Carol Munder does: she takes pictures, then she prints them.

She shoots black-and-white film with a Diana camera, a cheaply made, medium-format, plastic-lensed device first produced in the 1960s, sold to five-and-dimes by the gross, and often given away as novelties.

Diana cameras are the original fuzzbox of the photography world. They distort, they vignette, they are riddled with light leaks, and their ability to focus is largely theoretical.

Munder was attracted to these cameras after she went to photography school. “Everybody had about twelve camera lenses and three bodies. And it was the gewgaws that everyone got into,” she says. “The stupid fisheye lenses, and all that stuff.

Everybody became absorbed with it.”

The Diana is the opposite of that.

For a long time, Munder searched for the cameras at garage sales and flea markets. She kept a large box of broken ones around for parts.

In recent years, Diana cameras have made a comeback in a school of photography known as Lomography, the proponents of which tend to be young, raised on the easy fidelity of digital equipment, and now entranced by the textures and vagaries of

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film and rough lenses.

But Munder has been shooting with gimcrack plastic boxes for over thirty years. She was Lomo when Lomo wasn’t cool.

She owns one of the second-generation Dianas, but thinks it’s a little too well made. “I prefer the old ones, because each camera almost has a different personality,” she says. “There’s a right out-of-focus and there’s a totally wrong out-of-focus.

Blurry has to be blurry in the right way.”

Munder makes her prints on a gravure press she bought a decade ago from a woman artist in Sanibel who’d grown too old to use it. It came without a manual, but she got it for a song.

It was unexpectedly huge and heavy and murder to get into the truck. It strained the leaf springs all the way across the Everglades and down the Overseas Highway to Munder’s studio in Key West. Getting it to her second-floor space was more difficult. It helped that she shares the building with her longtime partner John Martini, a sculptor who creates outsized works cut from inch-thick steel plates, and who had a crew of usual suspects he could call on to wrangle things.

Munder worked the press for a long time with her head down, trying to teach herself how to use it. This was before the Internet became what it is, and her only source of information, other than trial and error, was a five-page section in an instruction book she had found. She frustrated herself for eight months, making lousy print after lousy print. In a last-ditch effort, she tracked down the book’s author and called him up.

“He was the nicest guy. He talked and talked and talked,” Munder says. “And at the end of a forty-five-minute conversation, he kind of cleared his throat and he said, ‘By the way, in that book, you know, there is a misprint in one of the formulas.’”

The amount of potassium dichromate listed needed to be ten times greater.

With that bit of information, things got better. 

I lay all this process out because Munder is one of the most focused and deliberate artists I know. And the production of her work relies on melding two highly variable, unreliable, and rickety artistic processes.

“My problem is that I have ideas,” Munder says. “It’s almost preconceived what I want. Which is not good, because then you have to find that to photograph.”

If you ask her if she is a photographer or an artist who takes pictures, she doesn’t have a clear answer.

“Even when I went to photo school, I never felt like a photographer,” she says. “I kind of say ‘photographer,’ then I slide into, ‘and I do this process called photogravure.’ Which is an avenue off of photography. For me, it’s more than taking the picture. It’s the image. For me, the image is an object. And I think that is why I can get uncomfortable with ‘photography’ and ‘photographer.’

But I’m proud to be a photographer. I don’t feel inferior. It’s just that my work more and more is now, really, an object,” she says.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s line about seeking “the decisive moment” is one of the most shopworn lines in photography, but it is shopworn for a reason. He, and most photographers in his

wake, laid in wait for the world to present itself, for the bicycle to arc down the alleyway in just the right way, for the man in the trench coat to leap across the puddle in the perfect silvery winter light. The camera, for them, was a fermata or a freeze ray, a way to grab a thin slice of time and hold it up to the world.

Munder’s moments are decisive, but they are organically anachronistic moments that never happened, or happened in an a-historical era in which cameras couldn’t possibly exist. If they are not primordial, they are at least antediluvian. Her images seem not so much developed and printed as unearthed, maybe banged carefully against a tree to break loose the layers of mud and ash.

“It’s a very primitive way of doing photographs,” says Valerie Hird, a New York painter who visits Key West several times a year. “Her process is very indirect. And the whole object of a process like that is to break down context,” she says. “You’re taking that object away from a normal association, and you’re building a new one, because your process is so labor-intensive that it removes you from everything else.”

When Hird was a young painter in art school, she had deft fingers that could render images quickly and easily. One of her professors came up to her and said, “It would be really great if you could break your fingers. Because you actually need to think about what you are doing.”

In Hird’s estimation, the camera and the press are Munder’s broken fingers. 

Munder rolled into Key West in a Volkswagen Microbus in 1978, the fin-de-siècle era of hippiedom, just before the Mariel boatlift and the Bubba Bust, just before a lot of money came in and the town got all renovated and respectable. When I first met her, she said the thing she really missed about the old Key West was the smell of rotting wood when she rode around on her bike.

She got a job at the library and spent the next eight years driving the bookmobile up and down the Keys, taking pictures when she could.

She quit in 1986 when she received a residency to put together an artist book at a small press in Atlanta. She came back with “Fierce Power Bad Fate,” the story of the making of a voodoo zombie, told in text, drawings, and low-angle, shadow-filled photos, shot in Key West, Miami, and Jamaica.

Munder and Martini started to make regular trips to Europe––they now live about half the year in rural France––and Munder started photographing in museums, sometimes with permission, sometimes without.

“I don’t like the light of the outside world so much. I think the light in my imagery is a lot of times self-created. It’s not the real light that’s happening in front of me. You know, in the outside world there is too much light,” she says, laughing. “There’s just too much out there. It’s too specific, maybe.”

Initially she focused on nineteenth-century statuary, primarily taking pictures of French romantic work, repurposing the sculptors’ narratives into her own. She then she moved on to Etruscan figurines––small, mysterious, and primitive statues that are some of the few remnants of a northern Italian civilization that

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disappeared without explanation two-and-a-half millennia ago.

Hal Bromm, Manhattan gallery owner who was one of the first to show Keith Haring’s work in the early 1980s, has followed Munder for years and has included her work in group shows he’s curated. “In most of her works there are figures or shapes or creatures that don’t particularly have a sense of scale, nor do they have a particular context,” he says. “They are kind of floating in a way that lets you free associate with what they mean. I’ve always just looked at those works and thought, you bring your own story to it.”

Discussing Etruscan statuettes in the American Scholar, Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and a long time friend of Munder’s, writes, “Munder’s prints seem to wake them. The figures find themselves in a fix. Their gaudy world is gone. Mute, they prayed or pray to gagged gods of whom we know nothing.” She adds that in Munder’s prints, “bodies dissolve into nothing, beginning at edges, as dead people do. They blur into silence.”

Before the gravure press, Munder made large silver gelatin prints. When Hurricane Wilma hit in 2005, a seven-foot storm surge flooded her small house on Sugarloaf Key, destroying almost all her work that wasn’t in galleries or collections.

While there is a market for her older prints––back catalogs can be profitable for photographers––Munder has declined to revisit it.

“I’m not interested in reprinting,” she shrugged. “I’m not.”

Largely inspired by the work of Giorgio Morandi, Munder moved from ancient figures to images of vessels and bottles, obsessing for several years over shape, form, and shading. It was the first time she’d worked with subject matter that didn’t have eyes, or human or animal form.

Talking to her last winter, following a retrospective show of her work at the Studios of Key West, she seemed to have come to the end of some things.

“I don’t look at vessels so much anymore. I still glance at them, but I’m looking for something else and I don’t know what that is. I’m kind of everywhere, looking at everything, but I’m not sure what I have,” she said.

It was disconcerting. For years, she’d been working in this vein that no one else had seen, and now she was at a loss. Things seemed a little grim.

“In any art. . .the vein of originality or excitement runs out and you have to lie fallow while something grows in you. You know not what,” said Dillard recently. “The fallow periods are tough. Carol had a hell of a time.” 

Things did not get immediately better when Munder returned to France in July.

“I couldn’t produce anything. I mean I had like three images or something, and I couldn’t make anything look like how I wanted it to look. Plus I was rehashing old ideas,” she says.

Munder and Martini had been visiting French flea markets for years, picking up odd toys, carvings, and sculptures.

“There was just stuff around the studio,” she says. “I actually started trying to photograph all the wrong things at the beginning.

It’s funny, I look at it now and I think, why didn’t I just go for this great stuff right away? But there was this little road that I had to

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ABOVE

Greek Figure, 2013.

Photogravure, 25.4 x 25.4 cm.

LEFT

The Running Man, 2013. Photogravure, 33 x 33 cm

go down, trying different things that were just terrible. There was nothing to the pieces, and the film sucked, and I literally had to keep looking. There was nothing conscious on my part,” she says.

Eventually, patterns began to emerge.

At her show at Lucky Street Gallery in Key West in March, she presented a tight cluster of a dozen new images, recognizably hers but with a palpable redefinition of the terms. Carved humanoid heads were montaged with photos of old wallpaper patterns. A figure of a running man bolting for the edge of the page hummed with motion. A toy house, set on its roof, came off almost like a readymade, and is probably the most modern image she has produced. A little bit of a sense of humor had begun to creep in.

“It was this long process. It was a matter of just keeping on doing it until it got right. And there was no way to tell,” she says.

“Where was that focal point? Where is it right? Until you develop that film, you just don’t know.”

MARK HEDDEN is is a writer, photographer, and semi-professional birdwatcher who lives in Key West

SUMMER 2015

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF WEIRDITUDE: On the Streets and in the Archives TO M AU STIN & CRISTIN A FAVRETTO

On March 26, 2015, Miami Beach celebrated its centennial, one hundred years of motley history capped off by the Hard Rock Rising Miami Beach Global Music Festival on 8th Street and Ocean Drive. Millions of dollars were spent on a centennial-themed park in the sand, complete with a Ferris wheel and a Hard Rock go-go dancer looming up above the entrance like a gargoyle Salome.

Immediately inside, concertgoers passed through a Hard Rock gift shop and confronted the surreal lineup of Barry Gibb, Gloria Estefan, Andrea Bocelli, and Flo Rida. Once again, Miami Beach embraced all-American excess, another wrongheaded wallow of ego, hope, cynicism, and waste. This is a place that still believes in an old-fashioned and debilitating American fairy tale, the delusion that enough money, publicity, sun, sex, and whatever ruinous rush might be handy can mitigate the essential ordinariness of life.

My family moved to Miami in 1970. A day trip to the Fontainebleau Hotel––the ballyhooed home of Goldfinger, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, and Meyer Lansky––was our first family outing. By then, the Fontainebleau was all ashes and myth, with a palpable shroud of defeat and corruption clinging to it: the real estate equivalent of one of those withered mob bosses who dodge jail by claiming all manner of pressing illnesses. Today, in synch with the era of Art Basel Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau has the obligatory contemporary art quotient, with works on view by Ai Weiwei and Tracey Emin. NADA Miami Beach is leaving behind the goofy kitsch of the Deauville Beach Resort and will set up camp at the Fontainebleau in December.

Nostalgia is a kind of violence, and everyone believes his own youth was the best possible era to be young, but the 1970s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s on Miami Beach was definitely a choice cultural moment.

During the 1972 Republican National Convention on Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau was the Republican base camp, and high school kids from all over Dade County protested outside the hotel. That same year, during the Democratic National Convention, all the forces of protest, from the Yippies to the Black Panthers, set up a kind of floating Woodstock in Flamingo Park. On top of all that

counter-culture cool, the Miami youth quake scene in that era revolved around the former pier on lower South Beach, full of feral surfer kids. Every Art Deco hotel had a gaggle of old retirees rocking on the front porch, smiling beatifically at the nice young people who would eventually price them out of their homes.

In the 1980s, South Beach was early Wynwood in tone, a mix of edgy bars and artists: at the Cardozo, one of the few places to drink, Christo hung out during the preparations for his and Jeanne-Claude’s Surrounded Islands in 1983. At night, we’d all go dancing at Beirut, a punk/New Wave club, or Club Z (now Mansion). Miami Vice had a party at Club Z, and Don Johnson–– who would wind up on the cover of Interview magazine’s Miami issue––was pretty much ignored; to even approach a celebrity was considered terminally uncool, an exercise in debasement.

In 1986, Micky Wolfson opened the Wolfsonian Museum amid the squalor of Washington Avenue. Squalor was something of a local growth industry. Bruce Weber and Helmut Newton came to South Beach for the atmospheric squalor that made for good fashion backdrops and documentary photography alike–– Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Mary Ellen Mark, William Eggleston, Gary Monroe, and Mitch Epstein all shot there.

The pre-chain store era of Lincoln Road was endlessly diverting. Long before the opening of the Frank Gehry–designed New World Center and the acclaimed Wallcasts, the symphony was based at the Lincoln Theatre. In the evenings on Lincoln Road, strollers watched concerts broadcast live on a television monitor outside. Across Lincoln Road, the Bone Boyz––a duo who lived in the penthouse of the Van Dyke building, where pioneer developer Carl Fisher once had a sales office for his real estate empire––would stage free street theater, dangling a mannequin in S&M attire off the roof like a fishing lure.

Miami City Ballet rehearsed in a former Lincoln Road department store with huge glass windows. When ballet paled, locals would wander into the art studio of Carlos Betancourt or take in the Art Center/South Florida, which was just sold for a pile of

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Photos of the Miami good life from the Florida Promotional Materials Collection. Department of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries

money and closed down with the final group exhibition Thirty Years on the Road, drawn from three decades of resident artists like Whitney Biennial veteran Luis Gispert. In the early 1990s, Mitchell Kaplan opened an outpost of Books & Books and Jason Rubell opened a gallery. The gallery proved to be too far ahead of its time, and Vanilla Ice, a Star Island resident and Madonna consort, took over the space for a skateboard/BMX/regular guy shop.

Art was a casual, everyday thing. In 1979, Roy Lichtenstein unveiled the sculpture Mermaid outside what is now the Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater, resulting in one of the earliest public art projects in Miami. Félix González-Torres and Larry Rivers were around in the early days, and Roberto Juarez adopted a street character––an old Miami Beach va-voom type who’d morphed into John Waters territory––as his muse. Antoni Miralda and Montse Guillen, early pioneers in using food as a medium, had fantastic opening parties at their Espanola Way studios. Fernando Garcia, Jack Pierson, and Carlos Alfonso would turn up at art events. Nam June Paik lived and worked in a nutty building on Ocean Drive. Kenny Scharf, Jose Parla, Tomata du Plenty, and Craig Coleman (aka Varla) created work for nightclubs. Kevin Arrow, who did nightclub installations in that era, published Tropical Depression SOBE 96, a zine about the artistry involved in the early South Beach club world. Currently, Arrow is working on an exhibition of Craig Coleman’s art. Old South Beach lives on.

Since Art Basel launched in 2002, South Beach has managed the neat trick of being simultaneously more sophisticated and more dumbed-down. South Beach is a breeding ground for EDM club music and hip hop, with Tiesto, Pitbull, Lil Wayne, and Pharrell Williams rooting its brand in the world’s brain pan, far beyond what Gianni Versace and countless other gay pioneers of South Beach could have envisioned. South Beach’s marketing punch can sell the SoBe Clutch by Louis Vuitton, and just as easily, fuel the hawking of SoBe Sodas, the South Beach Diet, South

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Beach Labsis skincare products, and South Beach Smoke electronic cigarettes. Lego Land even has a Lego block recreation of Ocean Drive, which pretty well sums up South Beach’s stature in the world. (Art Deco savior Barbara Capitman, ironically enough, had originally envisioned a restored South Beach as a kind of living theme park with guides in 1930s ensembles.)

Miami Beach officialdom, which once fought against historic designation for the Art Deco District and now considers Romero Britto a kind of goodwill art ambassador, has never really understood the true power of South Beach. Spectacles mean nothing.

A great city, like a great life, stands revealed in an accidental accumulation of small tender moments, and as the cliché goes, the best things in life are free. On the walk home from the Hard Rock Rising centennial festivities, surrounded by the usual throng of frat thugs spilling out of bars, I stumbled on an inkling of grace being conducted on the front porch of an Art Deco hotel: an evangelical minister was leading a service, smack dab in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah. The congregants were oblivious to history and their surroundings, and for a few minutes, I was young again on South Beach, struck with wonder by the weirdest place on earth.

TOM AUSTIN is currently at work on Beyond Basel: A Cultural History of South Beach, and is a finalist for the 2015 South Florida Knight Arts Challenge. 

I am not a Miami native. When I moved here six years ago, I will confess that for at least two years, I stepped very gingerly into the Miami maelstrom, and that I did not allow myself to become immersed in the culture, color, and cacophony of the Magic City.

In fact, I was utterly blind to the magic, gritting my teeth and quietly (and sometimes less than quietly) cursing the traffic, the bad service in restaurants, the lack of farmer’s markets to compare

SUMMER 2015

“ WE’RE ALL MAKING HISTORY, DAY AFTER DAY, AND BECAUSE WE LOVE THIS CRAZY, BEAUTIFUL, CORRUPT, HAPPY, SAD STRETCH OF SAND, WE WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW ABOUT IT.”

Miami fun-in-the-sun takedown courtesy of Erick Lyle (Iggy Scam) in the “Greetings from Miami Florida” issue (2009)

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ABOVE

Zines and fliers from the Erick Lyle (aka Iggy Scam) Collection.

Department of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries

RIGHT

Cover of the unintentionally hilarious Gianni and Donatella-penned (actually written by Marco Parma) South Beach Stories (Milan: Leonardo Arte, 1993).

Department of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries

with those of Santa Monica, the bandage dresses, the bad service (yes, I’ll repeat it). Los Angeles’ history seemed less shallow, and my former city of Durham seemed more sophisticated. Miami was the rebound boyfriend one can pick apart and poke with sticks. And then, as in a cheesy romance movie from the 1950s, I suddenly found myself gobsmacked in love with the rebound boyfriend, adoring his (well, really her, because this is a female city) every idiosyncrasy, marveling at the indigo-green-turquoise crystalline

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seas, the coy little black lizards, the elegant monstera deliciosas, the whirring-booming-shouting skyline, and most of all, the kooky, kooky, super-kooky beauty of its diverse, nutty, rude, loving, cheek-kissing inhabitants.

This is not to say I give the rebound boyfriend a pass. S/he needs some work, clearly, but the solid foundation is there, even though it’s built on gossamer sands and the wheedling wings of mosquitos.

And aren’t I lucky that I have the opportunity to go to my job every single day and work—together with my fabulous, hardworking, and creative colleagues—on preserving not only the history of South Florida in all its many incarnations and eras, but also safeguarding history in the making.

A word about archives and archivists: we are stealthy. We are watching you. If you’re doing something interesting, we will approach you and make you Give. Us. Your. Stuff. And you should be open to our requests, and understand that in return for your scrapbooks, photos, correspondence, and diaries, we will ensure that your place in history is firmly marked, locked, and loaded for bear. We won’t take everything, we will be selective, and we will look askance if you ask us for money because it costs us a great deal to clean it, arrange and catalog it, house it in nice acid-free boxes, and place it on temperature- and humidity-controlled shelves. In return, one, ten, or one hundred years from now, your papers will be there: clean, described, and ready for generations of researchers to pick apart, investigate, study. You will be, in the nicest possible way, immortal.

The Special Collections department at the University of Miami houses not only a fabulous collection of rare books and manuscripts, but also the archives of families such as the Monroes of Coconut Grove, the Merricks of Coral Gables, and the Mathesons of, well, Matheson Hammock. We also have over fifteen hundred boxes of materials documenting the fabulous history of Pan American World Airways, Inc. (including a gorgeous collection of flight attendant uniforms and menus from the years when they not only had menus, but also served caviar), and over five hundred collections, large and small, on all aspects of local and Caribbean culture.

Miami Beach, in all its glory, is represented in a collection of historic postcards, some of them with the obligatory “I’m here and

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you’re not, ha ha!” sentiment and many with scenes of bodacious pin-up style beauties lying in the sun in 1950s obliviousness of the damage being wreaked upon their fair complexions by UV rays.

We also have a fascinating collection of hotel brochures, many of them sadly attesting to the city’s lack of discernment when it came to tearing down jewel-like structures. Some of them still here, preserved by the insight and general swellness of a kickass preservation community and hoteliers and developers with insight and soul. And then there are the Great Unusual Hiccups, i.e., material that can’t quite be defined, like one example that might be called a coffee table book––an exegises on handsome lookalike boys wandering about South Beach with ornate shirtfronts agape and shining hair swinging in the breeze. It’s called South Beach Stories, and it purports to be by Gianni and Donatella Versace but it…well, you’ll just have to come and see for yourself.

All these types of materials are to be expected in any good archive, but here’s where we truly live up to our “special” moniker: we are building a very amazing Miami Counterculture Collection.

It contains over six thousand zines (ephemeral photocopied publications about music, art, politics, sexuality, love, fashion, anything), a good number of which are about Miami or Florida.

Some of these zines, like Erik Lyle’s (aka Iggy Scam’s) Scam document his sharp attacks on real estate–fueled greed and the slow theft of public waterfront spaces on South Beach. Lyle’s collection includes instructions on how to squat in half-finished buildings,

hand-drawn maps of his neighborhood, and fliers for punk shows at South Beach’s Cameo Club. It also contains the personal and organizational archives of a variety of Miami Beach writers, artists, and creative ne’er-do-wells.

And if we are not ever-vigilant for the creeping insidiousness of mainstream media-fueled worship of the should-not-be-worshipped crowd (e.g., the Kardashians and Kardashian-adjacent), we Miamians and Miami Beachers will be seen in just the vapid and anti-intellectual, uncool light against which we rail. And so: instead of only documenting the famous and those who can hire publicists for themselves, it is important to represent the flies in the ointment, the outliers, and the avant-gardists. These would include the great Howard Davis, who with a merry group of visionaries hosted the roving Artifacts party , and whose archive now lives on here.

There is more. Much more. There are photos of devastating damage from the Great Hurricane of 1926, cookbooks from restaurants that no longer exist , and there are the history-in-the-making papers of the O, Miami fellowship of idealistic poetry purveyors.

And it’s all there to explore, to investigate, to build upon. We’re all making history, day after day, and because we love this crazy, beautiful, corrupt, happy, sad stretch of sand, we want the world to know about it.

CRISTINA FAVRETTO is Head of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries.

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SENSE AND NONSENSIBILITY: What Miami Teaches, from the Outside Looking in SAM BE E BE

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SUMMER 2015

Flying into Miami International Airport at night from a window seat, I was puzzled by the large patches of darkness that loomed in the midst of the illuminated city grid. I wondered if I was looking at bodies of water, but these seemed too geometric, too defined by their lit-street outlines. Occasionally I saw the headlights of a lone land-vehicle cutting a straight path across them.

Upon arrival, after making my way up and down several escalators past the impressive and elaborate sea-lifethemed art commissions—twenty-odd swordfish reproductions arranged in a radiant circle—I was picked up by my one good friend in Miami, native Nathaniel Sandler. I told Nathaniel about the dark

patches I’d seen from the sky. He suggested that I had been looking at the Everglades, or the Bay, but I insisted that what I saw was in the city proper, and that I’d seen headlights cut through it. He seemed exceptionally uninterested in my drive to get to the bottom of this little mystery. This, I think now, stands as my first lesson of many about Miami: don’t expect to make sense of everything you see.

From the perspective of this Northeasterner and Miami novice, the city of Deco and Dolphins cuts a charmingly vexing silhouette. Like for many outsiders, my concept of Miami before I ever came to see it myself was a caricature: excess and tits lit by palm-frond sun shadows and neon hotel signs. And to be sure, those images are here. Caricature is, of course, always based on truths. And that’s one of the things about Miami I came to love—its un-self-conscious willingness to live up to its shit.

In one week here, I saw more absurdity each day than I’d see in a month back in New York. On day one in Miami Beach, we drove past a shirtless, fully-tatted skater dude waiting to cross the street at Lincoln and Meridian who looked like he was living in perpetual anticipation of a Billabong photo shoot. His pants were so low you would’ve seen his pubes if he hadn’t already waxed them off. Nathaniel was unclear on the nature of my interest in this guy. By a degree, I sunk deeper into Miami.

As we drove around listening to 99 Jamz, Nathaniel pointed out, like any great guide, not only the good and promising stuff, like the new art and science museums, but also the grim and gruesome, like the eyesore carcass of the Miami Herald building and the spot where that one guy ate that other guy’s face.

Nathaniel understands and appreciates that his city is a paradox in motion, a place where the grotesque and the beautiful take turns from block to block. As I helped him restock his one-shelf Bookleggers Library mounted on the exterior wall of Gallery Diet in Wynwood, he praised the thriving arts community on his inhale while questioning the contrived-quality of the neighborhood’s gentrification on his exhale. As I looked around, I saw a Miami I didn’t expect existed—low, gritty buildings wrapped with contentious-but-commissioned graffiti, weird-but-ambitious art galleries in every other storefront.

I think the character of a city seeps into the personality of its population—and vice-versa. New York is tense, excitable, self-involved, cerebral, and romantic, as are so many of its citizens—and even its visitors, for that matter, while they’re there.

Miami, to my eyes, is unreserved, fun, vain, friendly, provocative, and unapologetic, and most of the people I met there have at least a twinge of each of those qualities, if not a full-on blazing fire—the natives especially, but the transplants, too. I began to feel the dials on these aspects of myself turn up even after just a few days. Accustomed to always playing it some version of warm or cool in social encounters, I was particularly taken by the way Miamians constantly swing between hot and cold, proclaiming their love for one another after one swig, their disapproval after the next. And how they all seem built to handle it just fine, reminding me that arguments are natural and calling your friends out on their shit is part of being a good friend. And how in the end—after someone has jumped in the pool in his underwear right after the pool’s owner explicitly asked him to

go home—whether it’s before the close of the night or the next day over a Publix sub, they always find their way back to love.

If you’ve never been to one of Nathaniel’s Bookleggers event, you should go to the next one. There’s a pretty good chance that drinks will be available, a decent chance there will be a DJ, and a near-certain probability that there will be some truly good books on the table and some friendly, plucky people to get into it with. There’s little to argue with there—though a Miamian might find a way. In my own recent experience, I encountered a full roll of interesting and interested people, all of whom were appreciative of what was happening. I saw a jumble of eager and creative individuals, none of whom seemed conflicted about being in Miami. My sense is that people are coming to—or coming back to, or have stayed in—Miami because it’s a place of openness and freedom, a place where people come to try to do the things they want to do because there is an environment and opportunity here that allows for that. If you want to make art, or chill the fuck out in the sun, or start a business, or work in a bar and have a great time, or hand out books to people for free, all of that is accessible and achievable in a way that it’s not in a city like New York. Even this very essay is influenced by, and inflected with, that openness. Apparently, once you catch the germ, it’s contagious. But chances are I’m only telling you something you already know. Chances are, for better or worse, you’re already among the beautifully infected.

We spent one night at the Cucu’s Nest, a terrifically un-self-conscious bar, where we half-watched football, listened to the bewilderingly excellent selection of tunes coming from of the jukebox, and chatted with the cute and talkative Ukrainian bartender who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one.

There was only a handful of other people in the place, including one soggy dickhead who kept approaching the bar and trying to persuade the young bartender into going out with him, even though she clearly wasn’t having it. The guy was a mess, but thought he was James Bond. I half-considered stepping in, but saw that a) it would only start a stupid fight, with which I have little experience and no expertise, and b) that she was fending for herself extremely well. This girl came to Miami for the possibility of something—I have no idea what—and she wasn’t going to let this asshole fuck it up, not even for a minute.

Of course I can’t say whether she’s going to find what she’s after—we all know that many don’t, regardless (or because) of where they’re searching—but I can say that based on the evidence I gathered in this city in one week, it looks like she has a chance. Because what I see in Miami and its people is spirit, backbone, and a kind of feisty honesty. A willingness to live in the duality of human experience. The lesson that Miami sends with me as I fly back to my life in New York is that for every well-lit grid of sense there is in this world, there are lots of dark patches of mystery and nonsense lurking, and that’s okay.

SAM BEEBE lives in Brooklyn, teaches writing at New York University, and is currently writing a nonfiction book about the mysterious, unnatural death of his grandmother.

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K-HOLE

with Adam Abdalla

K-HOLE is a trend forecasting group based in New York that was formed in 2011 by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal, and Dena Yago. Using their own visual language and distinctive terminology, this amalgam of twenty-something artists and branding professionals have converted the PowerPoint into a power play through mind-bending presentations on contemporary corporate culture. Though perhaps most widely known for coining the viral concept “normcore,” the consultancy has been able to achieve rare status by deftly juggling its members’ identities as both major players in marketing culture and artists working at an institutional level. Participating as exhibitors and lecturers at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, Swiss Institute, Walker Art Center, and the LUMA& Foundation, among others, K-HOLE has helped disintegrate traditional taboos about the intersection of art and branding.

The group utilizes a coy etymology in their lauded trend reports, dynamic visual presentations that would impress even famed statistician and Sunday sculptor Edward Tufte. The reports exude an impeccable sense of self-branding that your typical CMO would assume only a demographical unicorn—i.e., a self-actualized

ADAM ABDALLA (MIAMI RAIL): The crux of the Venn diagram in which contemporary art overlaps with marketing, branding, and public relations has always been considered a murky place—with varying levels of murkiness, depending on who you ask.

Organizationally, as both artists and “creative professionals,” how do you mitigate this?

GREG FONG: Very carefully. We jumped into K-HOLE with the underlying assumption that branding decisions are artistic decisions, and vice versa. It’s not so difficult for stuff to leave the art world. It’s been much harder for businesses/brands to enter the art world, because they’re not usually

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millennial—could conceive.

This past February, the group developed and implemented the advertising campaign for the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, curated by Lauren Cornell and artist Ryan Trecartin. Concurrently, cofounder Emily Segal was named creative director of the $55 million venture-capital-backed music lyric annotation startup Genius (formerly Rap Genius), joining the ranks of former New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones and wunderkind political flack Audrey Gelman. In April, Segal collaborated with artist Simon Denny to use the opening of his PS1 exhibition as a launch party to debut Genius’s beta site.

Full disclosure: Segal held her first post-college gig as my assistant at a prominent New York public relations firm at a time during which I was establishing their arts and culture division (and where I am currently still employed). She is not a client, but a former colleague whose path and interests have dovetailed with my own remarkably. Given this intersection, the Miami Rail asked me to catch up with two members of the group to discuss their work and the evolving taboos (or lack thereof) in today's art world.

there for the criticism, theory, or discourse—they’re there to convey that they’re involved in culture. And a lot of people in the art world are too sensitive/avant-garde/ anticapitalist to really get down with that.

To be blunt, we’re artists LARP-ing as “creative professionals.” What we do, generally, is informed by and cognizant of the complex discourse surrounding art and culture. We just try to convey our thoughts in a way that is really accessible, using examples that impact nearly everyone.

SEAN MONAHAN: I always think of the tagline from The Real World when we get asked questions about the fraught

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relationship between art and branding. The snowclone of that tagline that K-HOLE has been trying to explore might be: “Find out what happens when art stops being polite… and starts getting branded.” We wanted to find out what was going on in this space of overlap that was freaking everyone out so much.

RAIL: In your first report, K-HOLE #1, you explore in-depth the concept of Fragmoretation, a term you coined that, correct me if I’m wrong, refers to corporations marketing boutique, bespoke experiences, rather than resting on the laurels of singular name recognition, with the long-term

“WE WANTED TO RIFF ON EVERYONE’S ANXIETY ABOUT BIG ‘GENERATION-DEFINING’ EVENTS. WHO’S IN? WHO’S OUT? RATHER THAN MAKE A CHARACTER TO REPRESENT WHO AND WHAT ARE IN THE EXHIBITION, WE WANTED TO MAKE A CHARACTER ABOUT EVERYONE’S ANXIETY ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT THEY FIT INTO THE FRAMEWORK OF THE EXHIBITION.”

K-HOLE members in the studio

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Image from YOUTH MODE: A REPORT ON FREEDOM, by K-HOLE and BOX 1824

goal of creating vertically integrated environments that are comprised of uniquely branded elements of the same ownership.

Do you think this concept has relevance in the art world? Zach Feuer has invested in galleries in the Donut District as if they are MLB farm teams. Many dealers—Gagosian, Zwirner, Max Levai of Marlborough Chelsea—have opened or invested in restaurants where they consistently entertain.

How far could you see this concept translating in the art world?

FONG: Obviously there’s an aspect of being VC-like with your money that lends your brand/business a bit of a baller status. And art dealers definitely want to be called “daddy.” But I don’t know if this is happening in other places, so maybe it’s also just a product of a new relationship to real estate in New York that has everyone playing Monopoly.

MONAHAN: I think the trend you’re describing is more akin to Flatmentation (the complementary trend to Fragmoretation). We used Flatmentation as a way of describing how huge multinational

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locate them in a broader cultural/political spectrum.

Halfway through the process, Lauren asked us if we’d really like our contribution to be 100 percent immaterial, and we freaked out a little. It was a pretty easy decision for us to do the ad campaign, but we did have to sell it to different people at the museum like any other advertising/creative services agency would.

We knew that one of the themes of the exhibition was language, and we had been obsessed with LINE stickers, which are essentially large, gestural emoji with better drawings. We had always thought it would be really cool to try to make a set of our own, and we worked with four or five different illustrators (and a huge list of ideas) to try to figure out the right visual vocabulary. Eventually we realized that it would be best to feature just one character, and XR seemed like the cutest, most relevant, and hilarious option.

holding groups were hoovering up ever more brands under their umbrella (e.g., LVMH). I think the bespoke element of this is more a result of the art world’s desire to do things in an understated, discreet way.

But the intention of those investments is always meant to reflect positively back on the gallery’s success and prestige.

RAIL: Speaking of success, one of the most widely discussed elements of this year’s New Museum Triennial existed outside the confines of the building itself. For this show, your contribution was essentially its mascot, a pill named XR, which was most prominently available as a digital sticker through the LINE app, in addition to print and digital advertising. What brought you to the concept for XR? Did the presentation to the curators and administrators feel like a pitch meeting or a studio visit?

FONG: Ryan and Lauren tapped us early on in the Triennial selection process to create an original commission. At first, our work with them was rooted principally in consulting. They’d bring us a bunch of themes they saw in the art world and we’d try to

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MONAHAN: We settled on the pill character because we wanted to riff on everyone’s anxiety about big “generation-defining” events. Who’s in? Who’s out? Rather than make a character to represent who and what are in the exhibition, we wanted to make a character about everyone’s anxiety about whether or not they fit into the framework of the exhibition.

RAIL: Wieden+Kennedy recently devised a campaign for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum that intended to disassociate their image from the traditional museum, utilizing terminology such as “MY-KID-COULD-MAKE-THIS” in reference to contemporary art. Unless they were advertising for a World War II museum or something of that ilk, I can’t imagine who this is supposed to appeal to. What’s your take?

FONG: I don’t think they’re very funny.

MONAHAN: I’m amused.

RAIL: Clearly, a tremendous amount of research goes into your reports. That said, do you consider your work, to some extent, to be read as satire? If so, can you associate a percentage with how seriously we should be taking it?

FONG: We don’t consider our work to be satire at all, although it’s definitely meant to be funny. We simply try to articulate our ideas in the most relatable, engaging way possible.

RAIL: What kind of opportunities have been presented to you on a corporate level based on your trend forecasts? Do they treat you as “artist as problem solver” or “cool kids— let’s milk their steeze?”

MONAHAN: Zero percent of the K-HOLE reports are ironic.

FONG: Corporations have been really interested in working with us, but it’s taken us about a year to figure out exactly what to do with them. Most companies simply want a #normcore, some way of going really viral.

Others want a new perspective on what they’re doing, to vet against other proposed strategies, metrics, or whatever. And some just really want some articulate millennials in the room.

RAIL: Did the popular engagement of the term “normcore,” which you coined in your report YOUTH MODE, affect your practice as a whole? How bastardized did its meaning become in translation?

FONG: It stressed us out.

MONAHAN: I think “bastardized” is the wrong word. Normcore as we defined it in October 2013 is not what normcore means in June 2015. But when you try to do things that impact culture on a macro level, you have to brace yourself for certain more complicated aspects of a concept to get lost in translation.

RAIL: PR, once basically dirty laundry in the art world, has become commonplace in the New York scene for galleries who can afford it. Do you think its necessary to get noticed? Has it helped you personally, as artists-cum-trend reporters?

FONG: The phenomenon of normcore wasn’t something we were in control of, or even wanted to happen. We’ve never really had any kind of management of our public relations, so it’s obviously not necessary to have PR to get noticed. On the other hand, while the exposure has helped us in some ways, the opening of so many doors has been a huge distraction. Who’d think that after a year, journalists would still be talking about normcore?

MONAHAN: I think PR has moved mainstream as social media has become an ever-larger component of how people interact with culture and each other. The threat of saying or doing the wrong thing online and becoming a meme victim is more real now than ever.

ADAM ABDALLA is a strategic marketing and communications consultant based in New York.

June 12–August 30, 2015 Celebrate Southern artistry through the innovative designs of the pioneering women of New Orleans’ Newcomb Pottery, featuring ceramics, metalwork, textiles, jewelry, photography, bookbinding, and more.

1001 Washington Ave, Miami Beach, FL 305.531.1001 wolfsonian.org Organized by the Newcomb Art Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

Supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lamp with shade, c.1902. Artist unknown. Newcomb Art Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

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Muzeul Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu (Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Memorial Museum), Câmpina, Romania

MĂIASTRA A History of Romanian Sculpture in Twenty-Four Parts IGOR G YALAKUTH Y

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PART II: THE CHIMERA “More goat than donkey.” This is how my father described B. P. Hasdeu, with an epithet he reserved for men whose intellects he admired and whose views he loathed. Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and linguist, and a prominent figure in the Romanian intellectual community of the late nineteenth century. Hasdeu was the father of Protochronism, the delusional school of revisionist history that exaggerates the feats of the ancient Dacians, a Thracian tribe thought to be the ancestors of modern Romanians. [Note: Protochronism is a historical aggrandizement that was used by Communists to stir up nationalist pride, and is yet another Romanian cultural hemorrhoid, one we will be examining in greater detail in entries to come.]

B. P. Hasdeu’s goatlike brilliance had the power to inspire and confound, and the impact of his work can be felt across Europe to this day. To Romanians, however, Hasdeu’s legacy will forever be coupled with that of his only daughter, Iulia.

Iulia Hasdeu was born in Bucharest in 1869 to Petriceicu and

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TOP Hasdeu family portrait, 1886. BOTTOM Raphael Casciani, The Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1896. RIGHT Diogène Maillart, Iulia Hasdeu in the Library, 1889

his wife, also named Iulia. Her father’s daughter, young Iulia possessed a particularly acrobatic virtuosity. By age two, Iulia could read. By age eight, she spoke French, English, and German, as well as her native Romanian. Influenced by the work of her father, she spent her childhood days writing dry, academic histories of Wallachian princes. She had a mind for complex mathematics and an ear for musical composition, studying piano and canto at the prestigious Music and Declamation Conservatory, now the National University of Music Bucharest.

More than anything, she loved writing poetry.

If they love the shady paths and the peace of wispy nights and nature, august mother as if in reverie they cheer and have no fear of the Chimera.

“The Chimera,” Iulia Hasdeu, 1887

[Note: this is the second stanza of a three-stanza poem. In the spirit of this entry, my English translation is assembled from both the Romanian and French versions of Iulia’s verse.]

When she was twelve, Iulia moved to Paris with her mother, where she soon passed her baccalaureate. Four years later, in 1886, she became the first Romanian woman ever to study at the Sorbonne. For her doctoral thesis, she wrote a treatise on Romanian folklore that caught the attention of many in her home country. Above all, she was her father’s beloved, and when she began to show promise, he dropped much of his own work in order to publish collections of her poetry. [Note: In a chimeric twist, there were faint hints that Iulia may have been born with both male and female genitalia. These hints are the basis for a thinly veiled short fiction written by B. P. in which a king, angered with the rumors his daughter’s doctors have spread, replaces the heads of the libelous men with those of various animals, and the animals’ with the heads of the doctors.

With this in mind, I walk delicately around the issue.]

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Two years later, at the age of eighteen, Iulia contracted tuberculosis and fell deeply ill. To the very end, she worked tirelessly to exercise the full range of her prodigious talents.

“I’m still alive and I will never give up this work, as long as blood is still flowing through my veins and life is still breathing in my chest,” Iulia wrote to her father from Paris in 1888. A few months later, she passed away in her home in Bucharest.

Her father crumbled under the weight of his grief. He retreated to Câmpina, a sleepy mountain town in Prahova county, where he built a monument to his late daughter.

The juxtaposition of these sculptures and reliefs is fundamental to Hasdeu’s particular brand of spiritism: the pseudoscientific connections among Egyptian, Christian, and Pagan mythologies, astronomy, and mathematics. It is the architectural chimera, an assemblage designed in the depths of the various factions of Hasdeu’s Renaissance mind and united under a single purpose: the assuaging of his enormous grief.

[Note: the chimera was a famous preoccupation of the great Dimitrie Paciurea, who sculpted the mythological creatures for years until they finally drove him mad.]

 

The Castelul Iulia Hasdeu is a folly house built to resemble a medieval castle. Like much of the architecture in Romania, the castle fell victim to two world wars, to the cultural dark ages of Communism, and to a devastating earthquake in 1977, dancing on the brink of annihilation for over one hundred years. Today, the castle houses the Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu Memorial Museum, a collection of sitting rooms decorated with family artifacts. This museum holds many art treasures: a marble bust of Iulia’s mother carved by famous Romanian sculptor Karl Storck [Note: Karl is the father of “wandering rock” sculptor Frederic Storck. See Part I.]; a portrait of B. P. Hasdeu by Nicolae Grigorescu; and many other paintings and sculptures, many of which depict Hasdeu mourning his lost daughter. A front room is dedicated to young Iulia’s personal effects, including her childhood diary, her favorite baby doll, and two collections of her poetry—not only poems written both before untimely death, but also after.

For the eleven years from the time of the castle’s completion to the time of his death, Hasdeu maintained that he communicated with Iulia regularly from beyond the grave.

The castle, stationary though it stands in its mountain hamlet, functioned as a sort Charon’s ferry uniting father and daughter. Throughout the rooms are traces of their paranormal correspondences and the remnants of Iulia’s posthumous endeavors, including a black marble tablet of sheet music titled “Sursum,” a hymn composed by Iulia from the afterlife. She is even said to have designed the castle herself, transmitting blueprints for the structure through her father’s hand.

On the building’s exterior facade, above a large stone door, is the symbol of the Eye of Providence, underneath which is written Galileo’s famous, post-confession observation, “E pur si muove [sic].” Below this inscription, on either side of the stone door, are two stone thrones, each topped with a small stone Sphinx. This Sphinx is Iulia’s totem, and two similar Sphinxes top her tomb in Bellu cemetery in Bucharest. [Note: unlike the more familiar Eg yptian version, the Greek Sphinx was typically female. A Sphinx is defined as a chimera in the more contemporary usage of the word.]

In the interior of the domed center tower stands a large, wooden statue of Jesus Christ, carved by Raphael Casciani, a sculptor of the Parisian school. This sculpture is the centerpiece of the castle’s temple room, where Hasdeu conducted his profane séances. Christianity, here, is our lion head.

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Isn’t it astonishing what rubbish will rush to fill in the widening and deepening holes of the human heart? But who can blame us? Who of us would not, when death comes knocking for a loved one, barricade the door with every table and chair in the house? And that is what this castle is: the kitchen sink, one that echoes Romania’s history, itself a sedimentary buildup of the erosions of the Roman, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires.

The morbidity of Iulia’s ghostly omnipresence, the lengths taken by her unraveling father, the awe at their shared brilliance and the depths of their misfortune: it is, all of it, admittedly overwhelming. Written on the museum’s informative website is a scolding: “Some people’s ignorance, other people’s prejudices, their impossibility to raise at the level of Hasdeu’s mind, sometimes labeled the monument as a strange place.” The caretakers of this museum are understandably offended by a certain rigidity of perspective, a retreat into fear rather than the blankness of a curious mind. But to their objection to the word “strange,” or straniu—a word that hovers in the air around the mountains of this region like a fog—I must respectfully object.

The Castelul Iulia Hasdeu is nothing if not strange.

“Strange” is a cipher for unlocking the emotional and intellectual significance of the monument, of the sculptural history I present here, and exactly where we must begin. It is an adjective free from the prescription of any singular, definitive emotion. Instead, the word “strange” is an amalgam of sentiments, a chimeric mixture equal parts repelling and intriguing.

It represents nothing more than a proximity to the shaded spaces between light and dark, living and dead, spaces that reconcile this monument’s haunted appearance with its status as an important, even beautiful part of our architectural past.

If we love the shady paths, we must not fear the chimera.

DR. IGOR GYALAKUTHY is a professor emeritus at the Universitatea Nationala de Arte in Bucharest. In 1993, he received the National Medal for achievement in the field of art history. He lives in Cluj-Napoca with his Lakeland terrier Bausa.

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FRAMING A WALL Math Bass and Lauren Davis Fisher

Los Angeles-based artists Math Bass and Lauren Davis Fisher recently collaborated on the exhibition Math Bass: Off the Clock at MoMA PS1. The nature of the collaboration is interesting, not only because it counteracts the structure of a solo show, but also because the artists are uniquely connected through their simplified and pared down visual language and modes of operation, which incorporate raw materials, identifiable symbols, architectural forms, conditions of space, and shifting spatial perspectives. The artists—who live together in a space that is also shared by Fisher’s studio—discuss here their recent collaboration in the context of the personal and creative relationship it was built on, as well as the physical and theoretical overlaps in their respective practices.

LAUREN DAVIS FISHER: Maybe we should start by talking about Sax Etc.—your studio.

MATH BASS: When I first got the studio, I was excited about the possibility of having events there. The first performance I organized at the space was an improvisational sax quartet between four people I knew who had never met each other and never played together before. After that, I called the space Sax Etc. FISHER: You offered me the opportunity to do a show at Sax Etc., as part of Eve Fowler’s project ACP. I was really inspired by the space and for me that’s one of the most exciting starting points for any project. I often start with thinking about what a space is—both, “what is the context that I’m working within?” and “what are the structures that are held within and hold up that context?” Also, in both a physical and nonphysical sense, “what are the conditions of that space?” I’m interested in how responding to the specificity can actually be a way to open up to the nonspecific.

So I had come up with an idea for the show, part of which involved building this

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wall structure to fit into a small nook off to the side under the stairwell. This architectural anomaly was very defining of the studio, which is otherwise a rectangle. I built the wall structure offsite at my studio. In the end, the show never happened, but the wall became a fixture in my space, which then became our space.

BASS: So, we live together. We live together, we live with this wall, and at a certain point I had pieces that had been at my studio for a long time moved into our space because I needed to clear it out. A couple of those pieces were these concrete casts of the interior of jeans, which were made in conjunction with the performance Brutal Set at the Hammer. You also participated in that performance along with eight other people. We both have an interest in the arrangement and position of objects in relation to one another and the placement of the concrete casts in relation to the wall in the studio happened organically, but the subtext of it is that we were both articulating these negative spaces and there was intentionality in that placement.

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FISHER: Our space feels like an airplane hanger. Its about two thousand square feet with thirty-five-foot ceilings and it’s mostly just open. The wall has come to be this mobile device for separating parts of the space and it’s been amazing to see how successfully it operates that way.

BASS: It really does. Even though you have total visibility through the wall, when you take the wall out of the space, there’s no barrier between anything.

Despite its transparency, it somehow manages to separate your studio from our living space, and because of its transparency, it also functions as a frame.

FISHER: I built it based on the standard increments for framing a wall, with studs, 16 inches on center. It’s the American standard, so it literally comes from the term framing a wall, and it does really function as a frame. It’s framing my studio from one side, and from the other side it’s framing our living space. And in turn, the casts are framing the wall.

BASS: And in the context of the PS1 exhibition, it’s framing the show. It’s a crucial

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Installation view: Math Bass: Off the Clock, MoMA PS1, 2015. Image courtesy the artist and MoMA PS1. Photo: Pablo Enriquez

piece. When I got the opportunity to do this show, and the museum said there was the potential to cut into the walls, this conversation started. It made sense that this situation that exists in our space could exist in another space. I was dealing with four small, disconnected rooms and it felt really important to open up the space, as well as bring the rooms together with this frame.

FISHER: I’ve been thinking about how the additive in general is more readily understood than the subtractive. We can see and understand accumulation, but we often don’t recognize when something has been paired down or subtracted. I think about how when making, it is often just as much about eliminating all the other ideas, or everything around the thing as it is about choosing the one idea, or articulating the thing. In a sense, all framing is subtractive, it directs the focus away from everything else. Or how an opening, a window, a door is more a lack of a wall, a barrier, an impedance, and it is called a “negative space,” but this absence is also full—there is just more possibility for envisioning how these negative spaces get filled out. For me this relates to the idea of context—context as the “negative space” around the thing or the idea.

BASS: Though we haven’t really

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collaborated that many times, we’re in ongoing conversation with each other.

With this project, being in the context of an institution and my solo show, we really considered the importance of making it clear where the collaboration exists and where the work is separate.

FISHER: That was particularly important for me. Often what I’m exploring in the structures that I build are ideas of orientation and how the foreground and background are allocated, and where these grounds shift. When does the background become the foreground? I’m interested in working with other artists and seeing how these structures can act as platforms for different dialogues. For example, the idea for the wall originated in the context of a show of mine, in the context of a particular space, your studio. I’m interested in the potential for the work to move context, to move spaces, and to frame other work and frame a different dialogue. Which, in the context of this show, is your dialogue and your work. So a question we have faced is how to talk about where the collaborative gesture is, where your voice and my voice come together, and where they’re separate.

BASS: This collaboration is interesting, because its elements are discrete, the wall

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is your piece and the concrete casts are my piece, but the scene is collaborative. When we first put them together, we both loved what they were doing for each other.

FISHER: Thinking about the wall and the casts together, deciding to cut open the existing wall at PS1 and to have the duplicating scene, that’s what we’re really considering the collaboration, the gesture—placing the scene.

BASS: Inserting the scene into the space.

FISHER: This in line with how we most actively collaborate, which is more alongside each other than really creating or articulating some one thing together.

BASS: We’ve only officially collaborated on one major performance, Quiet Work in Session, and that process was really fluid and generative. It was so much fun.

Generally, we have parallel practices and we both have a lot of overlapping interests in trying to figure out potential ways of expanding or articulating unseen spaces.

FISHER: Or the unseen in the spaces we inhabit, which may be one and the same thing. Maybe how a space can expand in the unseen?

BASS: The space between the set and the mutable.

FISHER: I’m working with this language of framing and structure, addressing the interior of the wall and the structure behind the facade, which raises questions about exposure and imposition.

BASS: The imposition is revealed through the shift, because you experience it as a frame or as a potential exposure of an internal structure and when you re-experience it, you see that it’s imposed, whether you know it’s imposed from a whole other site or just that the whole situation is imposed in the next room, askew, there is still, at the actual site, an imposition and a reveal. We were excited to insert this nonspace into another space and draw the connection between it being framed by, or framing, these heavy, weighted bodylike forms, the cast interior of jeans. They are both articulating negative spaces…filling out…framing out…filling out these spaces. And there is an inversion that’s happening there, the mobility of the wall and the immobility of the figure or the body.

FISHER: We generally think that bodies have free movement and that structures are what’s set, but maybe there’s more flexibility there than we think. Thinking about what’s familiar or what’s our familiar understanding of our abilities and our abilities for movement.

enter and which room you enter into, the question is raised, “what direction is the shift going in?” And how often our sense of orientation is built on really unfixed points of reference, but that we, in seeking orientation, often assume that there’s a certain fixity that we’re orienting ourselves toward. Something exciting about the show as a whole is that there are two stairwells from either side and there isn’t one entry point, so the orientation of the show as a whole has— BASS: Multiple points of entry. I have a video playing in a satellite room, but I decided to play its audio throughout the hallway in order to activate the corridor. I wanted the sound to leak from one space into another and tie together these multiple entry points. I think of the sound as a subtle pulse for the show.

For the performance we did in Portland, I was interested in how we were facilitating these tableaus that were activated in our absence. Sound and light became a central character and the performer; the performance of bodies was more that of facilitator of these shifting scenes. There was a theatricality in the way things shifted as well as an idea of the cinematic or distilling all of these movements into this succinct image that became activated by a soundtrack.

We were using sound, weaving sound throughout the piece. We’re both invested in unpredictable patterns.

FISHER: And when predictable falls away.

BASS: Breaking through the wall.

FISHER: Breaking through the wall.

BASS: The interesting thing about this gesture is that it’s not one gesture, it’s not two gestures, but it’s a gesture repeated.

Everything changes, the hole in the wall changes when that axis of the whole scene shifts, the visibility changes, the barrier changes. But it also all stays intact. The whole scene stays intact, it just shifts like a revolving door and how your experience will be affected is determined by what end you enter on.

FISHER: A shift in orientation is something I think a lot about in my work and in this situation, depending on where you

BASS: Yeah. For example, we had this basketball, and we all have this cognitive relationship with this object—what it does, how it functions, what it looks like, and how we know it and see it and can predict its actions. In that performance, we used a ceramic basketball as a stand-in, and it shattered—it had its cue and it broke a scene.

The scene broke with the ball breaking, it was symbolically and literally a breaking scene or breaking prop, but also breaking the predictability of this object. And in that collaboration, those ideas of shattering the predictable function of something familiar opens up into this interest that we both share in the familiar as an entry point into things that are more obtuse. And how that can be uncomfortable, potentially, that

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you’re easing yourself into a foreign situation and slowly raising the temperature of the water.

FISHER: This notion of challenging the familiar is central in both of our work.

We largely deal with articulating negative spaces, articulating the nonmaterial or the unseen, and how this relates to the idea of the familiar. The very nature of the familiar is that it is unseen, it’s taken for granted, it’s the context that frames how we move. We don’t see the labor or the structures that hold up and uphold the familiar. These notions of negative space or absence, around the thing, or maybe just those words we use, seem somewhat inadequate because they do not in their familiar sense accommodate the fullness of possibility, or the heaviness of a given context.

BASS: I think this idea of challenging the familiar or challenging predictability relates to an idea of precarity.

FISHER: There’s a latent potential in precarity, for something to happen. With a lot of my work I think about propositions, so what can happen is the question or it’s a suggestion toward a multiplicity. How something can be appropriated in a sense to different actions and in that there are different performances in the action or situation.

BASS: Precarity often has a negative connotation.

FISHER: Maybe because it implies that if there is some sort of stasis or stability, there is also the potential for it to be disturbed, and that can make people uncomfortable, often the idea of disturbance or collapse has negative connotations.

BASS: Neither of us have any inherent belief in stability. We’ve both gotten really comfortable with unstable, unfixed ways of moving through the world, it’s a condition that both of us have been living in for a long time.

FISHER: If there is a belief, it’s in the unstable and in actively seeking the unstable as an opening.

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JASON POLAN began drawing New Yorkers for

his ongoing project Every Person in New York in 2008, with a drawing of thirty-three people at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2005 and 2012, he published The Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art books 1 and 2, illustrating every work the museum had on view for the public.

He has a thing for museums (and how New Yorkers interact with them), so we asked him for his take on Renzo Piano’s new building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened on May 1, 2015.

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A HISTORY OF HUMAN FLIGHT IN 53 BULLETS RO B G OYAN E S

For any achievement that is beneficial to man is said to be beautiful, and anything not beneficial, is said to be clumsy.

MOZI, 470–391 BC

Early Beginnings: Mythic Sparks and a Daredevil Monk • ~6 MILLION YEARS AGO: The earliest ancestors of humans look up and see birds flying in the sky. There is no going back.

• BETWEEN 500,000 AND 91,000 YEARS AGO: We learn how to throw rocks and spears through the air to kill our prey. The first employment of projectiles, this is the first technological step in what will prove to be a very slow escape from gravity’s prison.

• BETWEEN 45,000 YEARS AGO AND 5000 BC: Sailing is developed. So begins the long and very uneven drag toward the knowledge and vessel production needed for flight. There are different theories about the “first” use of advanced seafaring technology—it could explain Australia’s inhabitation, or it was a civilization on the Arabian Sea, or on the Bay of Bengal, or it was the Egyptians, or maybe it was the Chinese—some European people possibly, or aliens, perhaps.

• ~400 BC: Mozi, a Chinese philosopher and technician whose Mohism school of thought called for an end to the ritual dependence and structures of Confucianism, creates the first credible kite. Eagle-shaped, the kite flew for a full day. Mozi’s precocious student, Lu Ban, in turn made a kite that flew for three days. Unimpressed, or secretly jealous, or saying something deeper and different altogether, Mozi responded, “Your accomplishment in constructing a bird does not compare with that of the carpenter making a linchpin.“ • 8 AD: The Greek poet Ovid publishes his Metamorphoses, in which he writes about Daedalus, the mythological artist/ architect/craftsman on retainer for King Minos of Crete. Minos, the son of Europa and Zeus, prayed to Poseidon for victory during his ascent to power. He asks Poseidon to send a white bull as a show of support, which Poseidon does with one qualification: Minos must sacrifice it as a display of honor. Minos, however, foolishly decides to keep it, because he finds it just too beautiful. This move by Minos pisses Poseidon off, so he punishes

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Minos by casting a spell on his wife Pasiphaë, one that makes her lust after the bull. Pasiphaë, consumed with desire, commissions Daedalus (behind Minos’s back) to build a wooden cow suit so that she can secretly copulate with the cow.

Around nine months later, Pasiphaë gives birth to a monster that is part-man, partbull, who is named the Minotaur. King Minos, cuckolded and disgusted with the creature, commissions Daedalus to build a prison for the Minotaur. Daedalus and his son Icarus design the labyrinth—a structure so complex that even the two builders have a hard time getting out. The Minotaur is put away and fed citizen-subjects as votive offerings. Long story long, the increasingly paranoid King Minos locked up Daedalus and Icarus in a tower so they couldn’t reveal the secrets of the labyrinth. Daedalus, in a move of logic that will repeatedly cause the delay of flight for millennia to come, built two sets of wings out of wax and feathers, and Icarus is the first to leap. Despite the advice of dad, he flies too close to the sun, so the wax melts, Icarus plummets into the water, and drowns.

• 850: Taoist alchemists in China experiment with chemicals in an effort to produce an elixir that will give everlasting life. The ingredients of this elixir, ironically, turn out to be the mixture required for gunpowder.

• 852: Córdova, a medieval Muslim state and Caliphate in al-Andalus (Andalusia of present-day Spain and Portugal), is a cultural and scientific epicenter. Abbas Ibn Firnas, a poet, musician, and inventor of many things including “reading stones” (early glasses lenses), attempts flight with some vulture feathers and two wings. He suffers serious injuries that lead to his death years later. Also, a crater on the moon is named after him (as is an airport in northern Baghdad).

• 1010: Eilmer of Malmesbury, a Benedictine Monk, is inspired by the story of Daedalus (and possibly that of Firnas), and jumps out of a tower with a pair of wings. He sustains flight for a couple of seconds—then a pair of broken legs.

the New Town Hall after a rock was thrown at them from the tower during a political procession and defenestrated Roman Catholic officials (threw them out the window).

• ~1485: Leonardo da Vinci draws up plans for his human-powered ornithopter, a winged device that requires users to flap like a bird. Though still based on the faulty bird-logic, da Vinci is on to something by using math and physics to inform his design.

• ~1500: Wan Hu, a Chinese bureaucrat, attempts to fly using a chair, some kites, and forty-seven rockets. Things don’t end well.

• 1591: Johann Schmidlap, a German fireworks maker, successfully flies a multi-stage rocket (little rockets applied to a bigger rocket).

• 1670: Italian Jesuit Francesco Lana de Terzi publishes a description of an “Aerial Ship” using copper spheres/balloons as the means for flight.

• 1680: Tsar Peter the Great establishes the first rocket factory in Moscow, where signal and illuminating rockets are created for the Russian army.

Image from Wonderful Balloon Ascents: or, The Conquest of the Skies. A History of Balloons and Balloon Voyages. C. Scribner & Co., 1870. Courtesy Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries

Fireworks, Balloons, Rockets, and Sky Ships: The Middle Period of Flight • 1212 OR 1264: The first use of a true rocket occurred in China sometime in the thirteenth century. The first mostly reliable record we have of an internal-combustion rocket propulsion device is a firework used at a grand feast held by Emperor Lizong.

• 1419: Bohemia was a real place, a Holy Roman territory ruled by the Hapsburgs in the current-day Czech Republic. In Prague, the capital, a group of Czech Hussites—a radical Christian group who were forerunners of the Protestant Reformation—stormed

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• 1783: A big year for balloons, the French are at the forefront of the form. Starting with the Montgolfier brothers at Versailles, they perform the first aerostatic balloon flight. The first balloon passengers are a sheep, a duck, and a cockerel. After this, JeanFrançois Pilâtre de Rozier performs the first manned balloon flight. This is also the year when Les Fréres Robert (the Robert brothers Anne-Jean and Nicolas-Louis) made the first hydrogen balloon, which was attacked by paranoid villagers after it crashed.

• 1785: Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (mentioned above) dies in an attempt to fly across the English Channel. He and his buddy Pierre Romaine are the first casualties by air.

• 1797: The first successful parachute descent is performed by André-Jacques Garnerin.

• 1852: Frenchman Henri Giffard is the first to fly in an engine-powered

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Flying cops and robbers. From materials held by Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries

(steam) ship.

• 1873: The term “aviation” is coined

by Guillaume Joseph Gabriel de La Landelle, a French writer who was a naval officer stationed in South America before he devoted himself fully to literature and journalism. He wrote maritime adventure novels. The components of “aviation” are avier, the French verb for flying, and –ation, the suffix denoting action.

• 1884–85: A. F. Mozhaysky, a Russian naval officer, tests a heavier-than-air craft. The steam-powered monoplane does not successfully obtain lift.

• 1895: German engineer Otto Lilienthal starts flying around in a pair of wings, becoming the first person to successfully

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and repeatedly fly (and document it, too).

These wings do not flap—they glide.

• 1903: Orville and Wilbur Wright fly a gas-powered airplane at Kitty Hawk for thirty-five meters. It is the first heavier-than-air controlled flight.

• 1909: The Rheims first international flight competition is held.

• 1913: Igor Sikorsky flies his Russky Vityaz, the first multi-engine, fixedwing, heavier-than-air craft.

Modernity is a Pie in the Sky Best Served Cold • 1914: With the outbreak of World War I comes the arrival of aerial machines of war. Propagandists,

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artists, and the newly forming media networks of radio and mass print distribution reflect a period of fear, wonder, and appropriation of technology as a means for formulating identity. Warplanes become a fixture of the American, German, and Russian consciousness.

• 1918: The Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) is founded in Moscow

by Nikolay Zhukovsky.

• 1921: Vladimir Lenin signs a drafted document titled “About Air Transportation,” which lays out some of the basic regulations regarding air transport over the USSR. Significant because it was the first assertion of Soviet sovereignty over its air space, it was part of the early wave of

regime-making concerning notions of nonterrestrial territory.

• 1925: Pioneering aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev designs a twin-engine angular monoplane bomber, the highly advanced TB-1, which composes the majority of the USSR’s bomber fleet.

• 1930s: Stalin’s Five-Year Plan is enacted and includes provisions to radically modernize manufacturing and industry, especially the military.

Engineers, scientists, and technicians are held in a Gulag where, instead of mining coal or lumbering timber, they are forced to produce new (or recreate Western) inventions and scientific achievements. Planes of war are a primary focus.

• 1937: Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to travel solo across the Atlantic Ocean, disappears somewhere in the Pacific Ocean during an attempt at a circumnavigational flight around the world. This is the same year that the Hindenberg—a German passenger airship—explodes in a fiery blaze in New Jersey.

• 1941: Japan launches a surprise strike from the air on the Pearl Harbor naval base. The United States is stunned by the aerial assault for its destructive effect, both real and temporal.

• 1947: The first-ever supersonic speed tests are performed by the TsAGI using wind tunnels.

• 1948–49: Berliners undergo an occupation of their city by the Soviet Union in the East, and the Allies in the West. With competing economic ideologies, the Soviets block access to Allied-controlled areas, offering to end it if the newly introduced Deutschmark is abolished.

The first incident of the hallucinogenically nonviolent confrontation of the Cold War, the Allies fly more than 200,000 flights into West Berlin, providing food and other necessities, without any military response by the Soviets.

Airlines, fails to get airborne during a takeoff at night out of Karachi, Pakistan, and crashes into the embankment of an empty drainage canal and kills the five crew members and six passengers on board. They are the first casualties in the history of casualties caused by jetliners.

Spectacular Jet Age: Tourism, Terror, and the Great Beyonds

• 1957: The International Geophysical Year is established. Lots of stuff is done by an international consortium of scientists utilizing the technologies that had been developed and advanced during WWII: Submarine ridges are discovered, thus further confirming the theory of tectonic plates; extensive deep measurements of the polar ice caps; detection of dangerous radiation in space; and the launch of Sputnik, which totally freaks out Americans and prompts the “Space Race.”

Aircraft and people both have a fate, happy or otherwise.

• 1958: NASA is established, and Americans promptly put Explorer I into orbit.

YEFIM GORDON AND KEITH DEXTER, MIKOYAN MIG-21

• 1952: The first commercial jetliner— the de Havilland DH 106 Comet—is unveiled for public use.

• 1953: The Empress of Hawaii, a DH Comet 1A flown by Canadian Pacific

• 1945: Following the end of World War II, the United States evacuates/ forcibly removes a cadre of German scientists: rocket scientists, engineers, physicists, opticians, in the formally dubbed Operation Paperclip. What had started as the capture and interrogation of scientists before the end of the war, turned into an effort to skim top rocket talent for domestic production, achieved with a mix of threat and promise. Wernher von Braun, German designer of the V-2 rocket—the first long-range guided ballistic missile—is among the 1,500 or so scientists. A former member of the Nazi Party and SS, von Braun goes on to a long and esteemed career, designing ICBMs and later developing the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that jettisoned Apollo to the moon.

• 1960s: Convair B-58 Hustlers, the first supersonic fighter bombers to hit Mach 2, are flown back and forth across the United States and around the world. The US Air Force receives over 10,000 claims of broken windows from homeowners.

• 1961: Yuri Gagarin, a Russian The Hindenberg. From materials held by Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries

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Frank Culbertson’s view on September 11, 2001, from space. Image courtesy the Boston Globe

cosmonaut, becomes the first human in outer space when he and his Vostok 3KA orbit the Earth.

• 1963: Valentina Tereshkova is the first woman in outer space. She logs over three nauseous days above the Earth, which is more than the total combined times of every American (man) to go before her.

• 1969: Apollo 11 lands on the moon. Neil Armstrong steps onto its surface, as 500 million people watch its live broadcast.

• 1971: In the return of the mission to dock the first space station (the Soviet Salyut 1), the Russian crew of the Soyuz 11 dies during their return flight due to improper decompression. They— Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev—are the only humans (currently) to have ever died outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

• 1978: Carl Boenish performs and films the first BASE jumps from El Capitan, the granite monolith in Yosemite National Park.

• 1983: A Soviet Su-15 interceptor

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accidentally shoots down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was on its way from New York to Seoul.

• 1986: The Challenger space shuttle disintegrates seventy-three seconds after takeoff.

• 1998: The construction of the International Space Station begins.

• 2001: A coordinated attack by the terrorist group al-Qaeda is carried out on the United States with three hijacked passenger jets. The only American not on the planet at the time was the astronaut Frank Culbertson, who was stationed on the International Space Station with three cosmonauts. They watched the plumes of smoke from space, and noted the near total absence of plane trails that are otherwise always visible over the American landmass.

• 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappears without a trace somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

• 2014: Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists accidentally shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

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• 2015: A depressed Germanwings pilot by the name of Andreas Lubitz flies himself and 149 passengers into a mountain range of the French Alps.

• 2015: Get up after reading this and lay flat on the floor, with your arms and legs spread out. Notice the pull of gravity, the hardness of the earth against you—the invisible grip—and what do you feel? Pain, or comfort?

This text is an excerpt from Goyanes’s first book, Balalaika: An Owner’s Manual for Asif Farooq’s MiG-21.

Major parts of the research for this piece were conducted at the University of Miami Library’s Special Collections, at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, and on the Internet, so many thanks to each.

ROB GOYANES writes for the Miami Rail, Paris Review (forthcoming), and others. He is currently the writer-in-residence at the de la Cruz Collection.

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Who is it that never falls in love with a good lie?

Who the hell do you think you are?

of apologizing. This was her way of sending me threats.

No. A man on the side of a road swaddled an infant and waved a flare.

No. In the field a prop plane was burning the field, was yelling at the sky.

Yes. In a muggy room a woman, with the blinds clacking in a breeze, with the television talking buzz on mute, packed a suitcase, a photograph on top, and every word heard in the room was an afterlife? The room became dumbly an afterlife? This was her way

The room closes its doors, wanting just to rest his eyes a little, and I open them back up.

down the dead limbs of a backyard tree.

I scan the radio, hear nothing good. I argue my side like a child crying

Is it acceptable if I repeat myself?

That’s my cue.

dangles from his white collar neck. Right.

The room is walking into a woman and he claims this time he has evidence. A telephone

The room is walking into a woman. It’s lying to you again—hasn’t learned.

MY MOTHER TAKES THE STAND

POEMS by JUSTIN BOENING

and trying to recall just what it was that had gone so completely right, or why it is the way you left me was over and over again.

and, especially then, scooping the fallen ash, as if it were snow, to lift just some of what was left to your tongue;

and realizing, also, what I’d always known to be the case, that I wanted to believe I could finally walk on the brink of my body, but didn’t know if belief was the right response, that I wanted to kiss each of my guests on the cheek as they left with the lights on;

when, as the sky went motionless, then dark, then loud and precise, everyone at the party covered their mouths, covered their eyes, and the mutt sitting at my feet started to hum, started to froth, which is to say the wine became unbearably sweet, and the crack in the front door grew longer, not wider;

and forgetting, of course, because by then the cruel music will have stopped, that woman in the foyer buttoning and unbuttoning her shirt, trying on all of my winter hats,

It’ll be funny knowing for once they won’t be singing to me forever, like hearing a woman’s voice walking farther and farther into an empty field wearing a stranger’s coat;

after Mark Strand

WHEN THE BUSKERS LEAVE TOWN FOR GOOD

NOTE: This piece is accompanied by an incredibly strange playlist created by Andrew Yeomanson a.k.a. DJ Le Spam for the readers of the Miami Rail. These obscure and bizarre tracks were made in Miami and are searchable on YouTube.

CITY OF PROGRESS N ATHAN IEL SAN DL ER

TRACK ONE LANG COOK, “LIBERTY CITY JAM” (1984) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TBAfzZTCAhg If you go to Andrew Yeomanson a.k.a.

DJ Le Spam’s live/work studio in North Miami he will probably make you coffee.

He’s got a restaurant-grade espresso machine in the kitchen and firmly believes that if your coffee beans were roasted more than two weeks ago, then they’re stale. The coffee machine is but one of Le Spam’s many prized possessions.

Inundated by ceaseless tchotchkes and ephemera, every scrap of available surface area inside the City of Progress—as he calls his studio—is covered with vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs, 8-tracks, and loads of audio equipment. He estimates there to be around fifteen thousand vinyl records all

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told, whether they be LPs, 45s, or 78s.

To say nothing of the actual Spam collection would be an injustice; Le Spam’s precooked meat assemblage boasts such rarities as a vintage Dutch Spam tin and one from Korea. He’s quick to note that Canadian Spam is actually called Spork.

TRACK TWO DAVID HUDSON, “MUST I KILL HER” (1978) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jnrucqGaMTk A quick run-down of the high-mileage vehicles in Le Spam’s collection: • 2002 Ford E350 Club Wagon (223,000 miles): “The Spam Allstars touring and logistics vehicle.”

• 1996 Volkswagen Golf GTI (136,000

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miles): “Daily driver, but not driven daily.”

• 1979 Volkswagen Bus (exceeds mechanical limitations): “My friend since 1992.”

• 1963 Austin-Healey Sprite (exceeds mechanical limitations): “I prefer to drive this car at night. During the day it’s like riding in a skillet.”

TRACK THREE BLOWFLY, “INTERNATIONAL PRICKS” (2007) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wwXdVcPB4gI Surrounded by vinyl records is where the awestruck stand inside the City of Progress. The records fortify the walls.

Thousands stand together, gems of the deepest crates, waiting for their moment.

City of Progress

Before his set for O, Miami Festival’s Poetry in the Park, Le Spam can barely hold back his enthusiasm at the selection of his opening track: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The late fourteenthcentury Middle English epic is blasted loudly to hundreds of eager poetry fans at the New World Symphony Park and eased perfectly into the funky drums and horns of the Spam Allstars, the band Yeomanson started and has fronted for two decades.

“He has an uncanny ability and patience to find rare collections,” says Kevin Arrow, Art and Collections Manager at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science. “And his depth of musical knowledge is profound. He has assembled one of the most complete regionally specific collections of recordings in the world.”

From poetry to Miami-specific

rarities, to a bizarre batch of records with hand-drawn adornment on the sleeves, Le Spam’s collection is made up of both oddities and more practical records that he uses for gigs in a rotating selection.

His bug-out record—the one he would grab if the City of Progress were somehow tragically overrun—is Helene Smith’s Sings Sweet Soul!, an original Deep City Records pressing from Miami that is highly collectible and outrageously expensive.

TRACK FOUR THE MAD HATTER, “DRACULA’S BOOGIE” (1984) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vLqyYlgGQ1A Le Spam is an extremely likeable and outgoing guy. He is humble and sometimes a bit

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS

goofy. In his office sits a collectible Kermit the Frog phone that he jokes is what all the important business calls go through. The line is live and the joke is possibly not a joke at all. He speaks fondly of his cat Fuzz, a.k.a. Fuzz Face, named after Jimi Hendrix’s distortion pedal. When a track plays loudly enough, Le Spam’s shoulders and distinctive bald head bounce back and forth to the beat behind the turntables or mixing board.

During every show, this almost iconic dance is omnipresent, recognizable to all of Miami nightlife. He’s been doing that dance for a while.

Twenty years ago this year, he started the Spam Allstars. Miami Beach celebrated the milestone at the band shell in North Shore Park in North Beach, one of the group’s favorite spots. Of the beginning, Le Spam says, “Our first few shows included live preparation of Spam onstage featuring

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Spam Allstars

an electric frying pan”—a gimmick no longer in practice. As he explains, “around 1996 or so, a friend brought some Capitol Records execs to see the band play at a place called South Beach Pub, however on this particular occasion, the frying pan was set too high and the smoke from the burning Spam proved to be too much for the label people to handle.”

TRACK FIVE BUBI AND BOB, “THE MUMMY” (1959) https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5AgcW7ArvCA Le Spam loves his city. The name for his studio comes from the seal for the City of North Miami that he noticed once on a garbage can. He explains, “It said ‘City of Progress’ and so I named a song, then later the studio [after it].” He goes on to clarify that, “it’s not meant to be ironic. It’s a sincere desire for advancement.”

Most musicians come to City of Progress because the studio specializes in analog tape. “It’s a texture thing,” he says, “a way to color the music.” In particular, recording drums and percussion initially to analog tape is a crucial part of his

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process. Le Spam believes wholeheartedly that music has a better sound when it’s “outside the box,” meaning, before it’s digitally tracked for compatibility with your computer, it goes through something that isn’t a computer. Anything that’s inside the box takes place on a laptop.

“I’m outside the box,” he candidly, defiantly claims.

Le Spam recently received a Knight Arts Challenge grant for the studio. In grantspeak, the money is going toward preserving the art of analog. But practically speaking, it’s to add another eight channels to his MCI analog tape machine, a massive 1980s audio console that originally retailed for around $30,000, more than some houses cost then. Music Center Incorporated, the manufacturer, was located in Fort Lauderdale.

“You can hear it in the Miami records,” Le Spam claims, referring to those pressed from Miami’s TK Records and Deep City, the funk soul and rap triumphs that are sometimes forgotten, but that this city was built on. Strong, thick sonic signatures, with a low-end boom made famous by Miami booty bass. These machines didn’t just contribute to the local sound, they made it. This is the work of the City of

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Progress, preserving a history and creating more of it by recording both local and international artists here in Miami.

Plans as of now are imminent upgrades to the facility, and as Le Spam explains, “people are gonna hear about it and people are going to want to record here.”

Here is North Miami, the City of Progress, where Le Spam—after a long journey—settled and stayed. He’s not going anywhere. “Miami is the only city in the US that I want to live in,” Andrew Yeomanson a.k.a. DJ Le Spam says. “Why? Coconuts, mangoes, avocados, and funk 45s.”

REVIEWS

Ryan Sullivan, Untitled, 2014. Latex, synthetic polymer paint, enamel, and lacquer on canvas, 243 x 213.4 cm

Ryan Sullivan INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI APRIL 16–AUGUST 9, 2015

ERIN TH U R LOW Minutes—or maybe even seconds—into viewing Ryan Sullivan’s paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the work induced a kind of reflexive mental search algorithm, bringing to mind a succession of names, images, and ideas: Jackson Pollock, Gutai, Robert Smithson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Star Trek, Edward Burtynsky, Paul Virilio, NASA, and global weather imaging. Although abstract, the paintings are recognizable in a way that makes metaphor and analogy feel

unnecessarily belabored. Sullivan seems to understand this, as the works are all untitled.

The large-scale, identically formatted paintings feel contemporary, even as the methods for creating them could seem outdated, not only by the half-century since the flagging of Abstract Expressionism, but also by imagined aeons. The process looks geologic. Sullivan’s technique appears to be a confident combination of accident and skill, pouring paint that pools and dries unevenly to make surfaces crackle, bulge, and fissure, topographies caused by the tectonics of possibly incompatible materials. These surfaces are splashed and sprayed with more paint, often at acute angles that accentuate the canvases’ irregularities in a way that

REVIEWS

reads as uncannily as light (or wind or other atmospheric phenomena) raking a battered landscape, as photographed by a high-flying drone, or a satellite.

Sullivan allows the materials to interact according to their own properties, performing much of the work across the vast picture plane, creating a huge amount of detail, giving the paintings the feeling of large, high-definition screens. Of course, there is a danger for the artist in hiding his hand and allowing so much of the process to be left to the inherent behavior of the materials. While getting lost in swirling pools of color can be a nice aesthetic experience, like staring into a fire or spotting shapes in passing clouds, it can also be boring. But Sullivan mostly saves his paintings, and viewers, from that fate. When the imagery begins to meander, he manages to keep the paintings moody and contemplative, succeeding by turning up the contrasts and keeping the action palpable.

Sullivan’s wide palette can call to mind lava, desert, aquatic expanse, superstorms, or cosmic rays, and the paintings often imply planetary surfaces wracked by natural phenomena or natural landscapes wrecked by the kind of industry that manufactures the very pigments and chemicals that were used to make them. But this kind of allusion barely warrants mentioning. It was all there as soon as I looked. These are not paintings in search of a critic, accessible as they are to the viewer in a way that can be difficult to pull off.

The illusion of light in the paintings, and their subsequent resemblance to photographs, created by the artist splashing or spraying paint across the very real bumps and ridges, has the unsettling parallel effect of describing optical phenomena while simultaneously physically embodying it.

Photographs do this, too, but in a way that coaxes us to forget the medium and actually obscures their identity as objects. In a jarring contrast, these paintings resemble photography while retaining their own highly tactile, solid aspects.

The most evocative of Sullivan’s paintings act almost too rapidly on the senses, and the brain is forced into its familiar game of pattern recognition. Rather than a singular

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image, what is actually being evoked is the blazing speed of the Internet itself. These are not ideas/images that we process with any real reflection, at least not immediately.

They wash over our minds like a stream, the way we experience most information in our overstimulated existence. But this happens in a way that does not leave us without agency.

As much as Sullivan’s painting is inspiring these image readings, they remain abstract and the brain works, pleasurably, to complete the picture, and to recall and even generate ideas, if only fleetingly. Considering how cerebral the works feel, it is doubly paradoxical that Sullivan produces them in such a highly physical way, vicariously grounding us and reminding us to return to our own visceral, desiring, aging bodies.

I initially thought that the paintings were successful in part because these qualities would translate well to the computer screen, where many of us actually view art today.

However, looking back at the images on my laptop for reference, I was disappointed. The unexpected correlation between the abstract and photographic quality is still viable, but the works lose much of their tension once flattened to the virtual and forced to forgo the physicality from which they draw their internal contradictions. It turns out that while visual prosthesis and digital information processing must be fixed firmly in our minds for these paintings to perform in the way I describe, those media are actually poor portals for experiencing them.

Of course this endeavor of situating and justifying the act of painting in the face of increasingly powerful imaging technology has been the engine of modern painting, one of its central premises as well as its source of peculiar anachronism and ascribed value, at least since the invention of the camera. By locating the sensual connection between the body and the image, Sullivan’s paintings tilt at the limits of the sensible as delineated by our virtual immersion in a world of images.

One must be in the presence of this art, and be present in one’s body, in order to fully grasp it.

Iman Issa: Heritage Studies PÉREZ ART MUSEUM MIAMI APRIL 2–SEPTEMBER 27, 2015

M E GA N VO EL L ER The conjuring of monuments and memorial sculpture is the focus of New York- and Cairo-based artist Iman Issa’s series Heritage Studies, which comprises her recent solo exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Remaking is at the core of Issa’s practice, as is her critique of—or meditation on—cultural transmission, constructions of “the other” through art discourse and museological practices, and the role of art institutions in postcolonialism. However, Issa eschews the sort of confrontational inversion that seems so often to be swallowed right back up by art, or pop culture, and instead takes an approach that is literally subtle, digging into gaps in communication and understanding that can leave an observer unsettled.

Take HS8: Remains from the Walls of the Second Court, one of seven sculptures featured. It acts as a quintessential Juddean “specific object,” a massive rectangular black box that can’t be apprehended, at least initially, as much more than a big thing around which a visitor can navigate, experiencing her navigation and the object’s slight reflectiveness in the absence of narrative or gesture.

Some evidence of hand-applied paint or varnish on top of the box disrupts the effect.

Installation view: Iman Issa: Heritage Studies, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015. Photo: STUDIO LHOOQ

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More purposefully, deep notches in the top and sides imply representation. This must have something to do with what the actual wall remains look like, I think, having read the work’s title. The accompanying text, stenciled so faintly on a nearby wall that some eyes might miss it, recalls an artifact of Near Eastern antiquity. In the artist-created object label, the mention of a “second court” may bring to mind a particular ancient Egyptian temple of a particularly august pharaoh, or it may not. (Other titles point beyond Egypt to the region, including Samarra in Iraq, that was a key city during the European medieval period, when Islamic culture flourished.) But the artifact is distant, unavailable, and on close examination of the text, which cites the generic-sounding “International Museum of Ancient Arts and Culture Collection,” has a faint whiff of fiction, suggesting a liminal status between is and isn’t, exactly. (Like the object description, this museum attribution feels uncanny, as if referencing a familiar destination like the British Museum or the Berlin Pergamon, but one that does not, in fact, exist.)

What’s on the floor, the black box, begins to make sense as a sort of afterimage of the artifact summoned by the object label’s text—except that I’m not quite sure what the artifact looks like in the first place—one heavily filtered through the sensibility of a maker schooled in the visual vocabulary of postwar American sculpture. With my gaze shunting between entities that are simultaneously present and absent to various, intriguing

degrees (physical box linked to imagined-recollected artifact conjured by representative words, which seem also to want to account for the physical box), I wonder which knowledge authority to latch on to: Perhaps my own (I know what’s in front of me is “contemporary sculpture,” but what does that mean, anyway?), the artist’s (she’s telling me there’s a relationship between these things that she produced and very old things, of which I may have only a vague comprehension of for reasons that are complexly political), or implicitly evoked institutional jurisdiction (I see information on the wall and objects to look at, now where’s the café?).

Each “remake” in the series has a unique personality: mischievous (a golden crescent nestled in a narrow white vessel, the tips of which peek out like a pair of devil’s horns); cryptic (an homage to a statue of a legendary king that suggests a pair of rabbit ears rendered in walnut); and, paradoxically, both enchanting and banal. The finest example of the latter is HS9: Spiraling Calligraphic Script on a Mausoleum’s Wall, which matches up to a row of white sculptural plinths of varying heights linked by golden rods bent into rectangular arches. Without the text, the sculpture comes off as attractive, but shallow, another drop in the bucket of post-minimal riffs; with the text, the piece takes on a layered identity as an exquisite distillation of the visual rhythms of Arabic-script calligraphy. Often, Issa’s sculptures challenge viewers not to take their braininess too seriously, by being just a bit vapid or goofy.

That said, I wonder how easy it is for viewers without some degree of knowledge about art history or wide-ranging museum experience to enter into Issa’s sculptures.

Her project is both helped and hindered by a laconic curatorial approach, which on the one hand creates a deliciously restrained installation—perfection, from a formal standpoint—but on the other leaves visitors somewhat stranded in the complexity of the artist’s process. That’s a shame only because Issa’s work offers such rich rewards to an enabled considerer.

If her project sounds quirkily Borgesian— a sculpture of an interpretation, a memory, or the thought of an object of indeterminate facticity—it’s a surprisingly effective way to call up real-life matters of art and politics.

I found myself flipping through a mental slideshow amid Issa’s collection: flashes of

ISIS destroying artifacts earlier this year at Hatra in Iraq, an ancient city and UNESCO world heritage site, as well as the looting of Baghdad’s Iraq Museum during the 2003 US invasion; a conversation with a Syrian woman who asked why it is the fate of one culture versus another to be fucked over, again and again, by forces from within and without; patrimony battles over historic objects (not just Near Eastern, but also Greek, Armenian, Cambodian, and so on) preserved in Western museums, with focal points from repatriation to whose view of an object’s meaning(s) gets printed on 150-word museum labels (the crux of generations-old, icily civil grudge matches between art historians and curators); and the clinical components, from glass vitrines to methodological best practices, of the invisible ideologies of museum work. One person’s coolly intellectual heritage studies is another person’s struggle to exist.

Aramis Gutierrez: Order of Sorcery BIG PICTURES LOS ANGELES APRIL 4–MAY 16, 2015

CA R A DESPAIN What do paintings mean today? With centuries behind us to consider, what revisions/ iterations/interpretations/abstractions/ appropriations do we have left to make, and for what purpose? Any image is about so much more than merely how it presents visually; as soon as a painting is declared art, it becomes freighted with historical and institutional implications. The unseen forces—sources, influences, networks, markets, histories—all loom large like cosmic dark matter, invisibly weighing it down. Bringing a painting forth to the viewer is part magic, part orchestration, part faith.

With Order of Sorcery at Big Pictures Los Angeles, Aramis Gutierrez posits that you can be oppositional by being untimely; punk by being painterly. “Painting is potentially the most embarrassing medium because of its directness and its instinctive connection to skill and taste,” Gutierrez says. “It comes off as a bare-naked avatar of who we think we are, who we want to be, and what we think is going on.” Indeed, the paintings in the

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exhibition are paintings he wants to make: ones that unabashedly contain a skillful and loose, romantic handling of paint. In contrast to the arbitrary and minimal markings of many post-Internet paintings, his work feels antiquated and mastered rather than sleek and of-the-moment, which is sort of uncool. But then, embarrassment is all about running that risk, and being uncool is a form of defiance.

Images, he feels, have been more relevant in cinema over the last half-century than in art, and the source imagery for the four works in the show is culled from the artist’s extensive collection of stills from B movies. Like some of his prior paintings that suspended a linear narrative and made permanent a transient moment using empty settings, these paintings etch moments of uncertainty and magic into a tactile surface. Their gothic, theatrical quality manages an air of insidious romance that is familiar beyond their impressionistic, warm palette. When I saw the paintings, I immediately thought of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781)—something a cursory art history overview has left forever imprinted on my psyche. This eighteenthcentury image of an incubus sitting atop the chest of a sleeping woman, the pressing weight threatening to suffocate her in her sleep, has a folkloric resonance: we are sleeping, yet carrying on subconsciously affected by an invisible menace. Perhaps this feeling I was interpreting in the work has metaphoric implications to the art machine—a belief system as strange as any. Or maybe it just feels like familiar existential dread.

Though they share a certain aura, Gutierrez’s works are a bit lighter than nightmares and torture. They are more stagey and mysterious, if nearly comical in their fantasy.

A reclining woman’s hand commands a backlit cloud of smoke emanating from her mouth, another is poised for an action unknown behind a golden phoenix. Two masked figures face each other as lovers or in death, a robed figure shown only from the shin down walks across a sea of bodies—we have arrived post-spell and have only rising smoke and the unclothed unconscious to help us decipher the action.

Witchy as they are, they do a lovely and, as-of-late, rare thing. Painting, like film, has the ability to suspend disbelief. In film, any one image is preceded and followed by a succession of frames that are required to get

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the full story, and therefore keep the viewer engaged and present in the other world of the story. Painting can easily do the same, because the painter can insert any imaginable thing into the picture with relatively little investment—there can be smoke without fire, faith without reason, or uninhibited sorcery—and yet the painter has the luxury of not needing a pyro-technician, a physicist, an animal handler, or a wizard to achieve the equivalent of movie magic. Standing amid Gutierrez’s paintings I was incited to think beyond them; they are just pictures that someone made in the way he wanted to make them, without feeling bound by impositions set forth by external forces. But I was kept levitating—wondering what was before and after each frame. What’s more is that they made me forget: forget about the cars, about the smog, about the dread, and, as Doug Crocco, the artist running the space pointed out, they made me ignore the soaring Carl’s Jr. billboard just outside the gallery advertising a burger fittingly called “El Diablo.”

Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova: Intimate Material Systems ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY APRIL 9–JUNE 7, 2015

J AN E T BATE T Intimate Material Systems, a solo show by Miami artist Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, features a large-scale installation bordered by several recent wall and floor works that, as an ensemble, speak to a characteristic,

painstaking inquiry about art, economics, and spirituality consistently present in the artist’s output. Based on the principle of “cultural passivity” articulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rodriguez-Casanova appropriates mass-produced construction materials, anonymous and deprived of any subjectivity, and turns them into works of art. Drywall, PVC shutters, screens, metal window frames, tiles, doors, and wooden structures become not only the physical materials that serve as starting point, but the essential conceptual fiber of the new pieces, entities in which economical and cultural existence fully reverberate.

Placed at the core of the gallery, A Divided Structural Composition is a site-specific installation that leverages the architectural features of the space, working at once as a unifying object that turns the two gallery spaces into a single room, incorporating the existing architectural partition as an active, meaningful component of the piece.

Playing with the legacy of minimalism, as in the use of serialized elements and industrial materials, the installation reflects attentively on art history and suburban architecture as it questions notions of the so-called “noble” or traditional materials and their direct correlation to art’s market value. The artist previously and masterfully addressed this concern in another recent piece: Round Faux Marble (2014, exhibited as part of the group show New Dialogues at Alejandra von Hartz last summer). In play with the minimalist tradition of neutrality that relinquishes the subjective component

OAramis Gutierrez, Untitled (Gold Eagle), 2015. Oil on canvas, 78.7 x 109.2 cm

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of materials, and looking as well at the Renaissance’s Tondo Doni widespread portraiture format associated with domestic values, this stunning piece is the perfect portrait of contemporary family, in contrast to those of the Holy Family. The 41.5-inch round work respects the conventional proportions of the Tondo Doni (at least 24 inches), but in making an effective use of the trompe-l’oeil, the expected fine art materials have been substituted by industrial ones (vinyl, wood, steel), establishing a touching metaphor about family, spirituality, and economic contingency in the contemporary world.

Addressing the elements of architecture within the space and reasserting the use of the color white, A Divided Structural Composition maintains the artist’s approach and understanding of suburban depersonalization. The work offers a wink toward the white cube as ideological space, and exposes the ensuing risk of the symbolic charge inherent in the artwork becoming trivial.

With minimal intervention, RodriguezCasanova manages to provide these rough and neutral materials with a crucial evocative power. Suddenly, we discover ourselves at the other side of the mirror, behind the scene where any subterfuge can be disarticulated. We then gain access not to the house, but to home.

Beyond the central installation, the Wall Unfinished Work series presents three pieces that hold significant interplay with the tradition of geometric abstraction. Rodriguez-Casanova creates a sort of geometric brutalism that, far from hiding the structure or trying to embellish the

Installation view: Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova: Intimate Material Systems, Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, 2015

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John James Audubon, CLXI (161), Brazilian Crested Caracara, from Birds of America, 1827–1838. Courtesy HistoryMiami

everyday, common materials, dignifies and elevates these mass-produced resources to the status of art.

The Complete Audubon: The Birds of America HISTORYMIAMI FEBRUARY 27–MAY 31, 2015

LAUR A R AN DALL In a letter to his wife Lucy, John James Audubon described his first impression of Florida as “the poorest hole in Creation,” a disheartening observation in light of Audubon’s reputation as a spirited French-American of indefatigable passion. His achievements in identifying and documenting 435 bird species for Birds of America continues to reign supreme among the environmental, historical, and art-minded alike. For three months, HistoryMiami supplied visitors who share Audubon’s sentiments with a contemporary vision of his work. One hundred eighty-four years after Audubon traversed Florida’s east coast, the museum has mounted the entire original set of prints from Birds of America in the first exhibition of its kind.

Also referred to as the “Elephant folio” for its unwieldy 39 x 26–inch scale, each hand-painted copper print reveals the intense devotion Audubon maintained throughout the thirteen years spent hunting and documenting each breed for publication.

Audubon’s concern for portraying accurately each bird’s true-to-life size, shape, and color was a painstaking duty to impart on his colorists. One can appreciate why this exhibition is truly monumental—conceivable only after the museum’s expansion into the galleries once occupied by the Miami Art Museum— upon close inspection of a single print.

Audubon’s frustrations in Florida occurred early upon his arrival in 1831, and are supremely illustrated in plate 161. The birds depicted in this plate mark the first of fifty-two new birds he would identify over the next several months in Florida. Opting to render two crested caracaras instead of one, Audubon shows off the striking marks across the bird’s tail and around his breast in a violent image. Audubon renders one of the raptors sweeping down the page in attack

mode, highlighting the bird’s long neck, while the defending bird turns in profile, his long leg outstretched. The yellow-orange patches around the face mask the mess of flesh left from the bird’s last feed—a rotting horse— enjoyed shortly before its encounter with Audubon and his partner Henry Ward.

To speak nothing of the timeless regard for these images, the “Elephant folio” sets have always been elusive, with slightly fewer in number than actual crested caracaras in Florida today (about 250). The exhibition at History Miami offers viewers a rare chance to inspect the exquisite detail of every print firsthand, all at once. Normally, when the prints are on display, the folios are viewed individually, still bound in special collections or in parcel sets on the wall. HistoryMiami presents a visually stunning archive documenting dozens of birds that once were—and hundreds that, currently, barely are—in the order they were first printed, in the salon-style hanging popular in Audubon’s time.

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Perhaps it was Audubon’s patience as an observer of birds or his arrival to the Florida Keys that eventually inspired him to turn a new leaf in his own attitudes about the state.

Regardless of how the change took place, he became uniquely equipped to discover Florida’s quiet beauty. Like our native species of plants and birds, the fleeting nature of the folios themselves requires hiding, but those of us fortunate enough to experience the true magnitude of these works through this exhibit, to celebrate their sheer diversity, may come to know what Audubon understood upon his arrival in St. Augustine: “I have ascertained that feathers lose their brilliancy almost as rapidly as flesh of skin itself, and am of the opinion that a bird alive is 75 percent more rich in colors than twenty four hours after its death.”

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America is Hard to See WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART MAY 1–SEPTEMBER 27, 2015

J ILL S PALD I N G It is impossible to separate out the new Whitney Museum from its inaugural show.

So marking is Renzo Piano’s fierce building on the canvas of New York that it presents both as a freestanding artwork and a frame for the art it contains. The inaugural show, titled from a Robert Frost poem, is a palate-cleanser between the Jeff Koons blowout farewell to the Marcel Breuer–designed building uptown and the upcoming Frank Stella retrospective this fall. On view are roughly six hundred of the twenty-two thousand works in the museum’s collection, by more than four hundred artists, which illustrate the nation’s narrative over the past one hundred twenty years.

“Nation” is loosely interpreted, given that (apart from a directorial decision in the 1970s and ‘80s to exclude those born elsewhere) the artists’ birthplace has been held irrelevant to a career that was formed here; and yet, not loosely enough, given the virtual shutout of Latin America, and even—with the exception of sculpture by Jimmie Durham and Nancy Prophet—of Native America.

Awash in light, floated on wide pine flooring and white walls, cantilevered out to mega-foot sculpture galleries, and connected umbilically by stairs indoors and out, the art looks terrific. With all its big guns lined up—there’s Bellows! O’Keeffe! Hopper!

Bourgeois!—the show could have sunk under the weight of its commitment to be a review of the Whitney’s history, but, billed as a gourmet tasting of more treats to come, it’s as frisky and promising as a pedigreed colt let out for its first full-length run. To give shape to what might otherwise run away, the selected works have been separated into galleries themed by concerns of the day, each taking its title from a work on display. Some, like “Raw War” are self-explanatory, while others, like “Scotch Tape” are more obscure, but all are selected and arranged to give pause. It was brilliant to take Calder’s beloved Circus (1926–31) out of context and regroup it with works by Paul Cadmus, Charles Demuth, and Weegee, which all reference entertainment; less clear is why Andy Warhol’s looming canvas of Coke bottles is positioned to dwarf

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Jasper Johns’s iconic Three Flags (1958). Some questions are answered, some not.

To follow the overarching narrative, borrow the thoughtful multimedia guide (the one for children is delightful) and begin on the eighth floor. The opening gambit, a pair of throbbing Marsden Hartley paintings that shoot him to the top of artists dropped from the pantheon, augurs well for curatorial sophistication. Suspended between reassurance and surprise by shrewd juxtaposition and selection, one moves chronologically through the conceits of prairie, cowboy, assembly line, and road trip; the concerns of expansion, industry, labor, suburbia, racism, capitalism, and the AIDS crisis; and the stylistic expression, refutation, and invention that collectively form the American experience.

The Whitney has never shied from strong material and here strength delivers. There are wrenching takes on poverty; there’s a powerful wall of works on paper addressing heinous injustice; a Nan Goldin slideshow plumbing social identity; and—rendering the neighboring Koons vacuum cleaners oddly anodyne—the response to mass culture of Nam June Paik’s pounding televisions.

Unexpectedly for a teaching exhibition, the show’s aura is joyous. Even the most restrained installations exhilarate—I challenge any coming across the pristine grouping of Ad Reinhardt, Jo Baer, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, John McLaughlin, and Frank Stella to think Minimalism slows the pulse—and when they fly, as with the vast atrium given over to masterworks of Abstract Expressionism, they knock you out of the ballpark. It’s not just their size and fame; it’s how Rothko throbs alongside Kline, how Kline thrusts out to the light, how Di Suvero unfolds like the gate to a temple, and how Lee Krasner, given her own wall, rules over her husband (“Give me five!” you can hear Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney crowing), who is represented by a far smaller canvas, hung across from hers, and vertically, as if in her shadow.

The Whitney’s oft-criticized predilection for shaking things up is played out here with welcome surprises; how many are familiar with artists like James Daugherty and Agnes Pelton? And who knew that E. E. Cummings was a painter? There are startling pairings, like a sculpted limb placed next to a pretty pastel, both by Robert Gober. And subtle enactments of the museum’s mission statements: it cannot be coincidental that the

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work of three powerful women artists—Lee Bontecou’s vulcan orifice, Jay DeFeo’s obsessive wall encrustation, and Louise Nevelson’s massive montage—converse here together; that a security guard stands next to an installation by Fred Wilson (himself once a security guard) that comments on their anonymous presence; or that a neon piece by Glenn Ligon spelling “America” backward riffs on the show put on by Whitney interns in 1973 (the last such experiment) titled Muesum.

Most successful is the exhibition’s conclusion that the melting pot that has generated the art of these United States has produced work that shares no DNA apart from the one characteristic that can be fairly ascribed to America, namely, an overarching compulsion to push the envelope, to make “radical” itself the most compelling investigation, even should it veer, as with the work of Elaine Sturtevant, to stealing the hallowed identity of an original fake, as she did by making, in 1967, Oldenburg’s Store her own Store, faking the fake, to create one of the most radical ideas in the authentic vernacular of American art.

BOOK REVIEWS The Argonauts MAGGIE NELSON GRAYWOLF PRESS, 143 PP.

HUNTER BRAITHWAITE As I read The Argonauts, a list of questions lengthened in my mind. Who should I share this book with? Who, at least within my immediate family, would best relate to Maggie Nelson’s love, her tendencies toward delaminating names, and other habits of language?

My aunt, not by blood, who made me mixtapes of women rockers to listen to over and over again as a small child? Melissa Etheridge, Tina Turner. And then, VHS supercuts of doomed heroines. Ellen Ripley, Thelma and Louise. My stepdad, who came into a bad situation and stayed until it got better? Who then came out. All the women, with their chafed perineums and post-pregnancy “pizza-doughlike flesh” (this is Nelson speaking); the women who the babies will forget (this is psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who appears throughout like Virgil)? Their babies?

This book—which at its very heart is a story of love and motherhood—will be talked about in terms of an idea Nelson brings about in an episode from grad school: the private made public. And, from the stack of dildos in the first paragraph to the climactic twining of death and birth, it is a private story, but one that never quite goes public. Sure, there is the publication, a book tour, reviews like this one—but the language throughout does anything but distance. Everything is kept in the foreground, immediate.

The title refers to the Argo, the ancient ship replaced piece by piece by the Argonauts—turned into a different ship— without having to change its name. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the French writer describes how “I love you,” since it also remains the same phrase, must similarly be renewed with each use. This book is one of transitions: Nelson’s coupling with artist and filmmaker Harry Dodge, pregnancy, testosterone therapy, birth, and death—some can be named, while others represent the moment when “all that is unnamable falls away, gets lost, is murdered.”

Along the way, Nelson digresses into passages about normativity, both hetero and homo; anecdotes involving a vicious Rosalind Krauss and Allen Ginsburg’s corpulent mother; totem animals; and X-Men. It’s wrong to think of these digressions as secondary— each tangent is inseparable from the flow of the text.

In one passage, Nelson says that she is “interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end.” So, too, is the structure of The Argonauts.

The book spreads out into innumerable bright points on the page, but then continues further.

Throughout, Nelson inserts aphorisms and truncated lines from writers and critics who she shares something with, even its only a moment’s affinity or disagreement.

The strength of Nelson’s metaphor, and the structure that I’ve so awkwardly yoked it to, speaks to her breadth as a writer. She has written nine books, five of which are volumes of poetry. Throughout her works, she writes with an economic freedom that hydroplanes across image and thought. But she’s also a critic, one of our best. The excerpted lines that stud the text are transformed into her own exegetic blooms. Eve Sedgwick, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Judith Butler.

And for each reference that is written, another is suggested. When Joan Didion is engaged midway through, in a paragraph about children, economic suffering, and privilege, the reader might jump back to the book’s first sentence: “The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark off the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes.” In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion describes the violence of the same winds, how their shredding presence always spells bad news. Like Nelson, she also pivots on a quotation about domesticity.

Specifically, one from Raymond Chandler, who wrote that when the Santa Ana blows, “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.

Anything can happen.” Tangents like this appear and disappear with a shifting breeze, but their faint presence takes on gravity over

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the course of the short book. Asides aren’t really aside.

For being a love story, The Argonauts has its share of violence. One of its subplots is spurred by Nelson’s 2005 book Jane: A Murder, which examined the unsolved murder of her aunt (then a first-year law student) through a variety of written forms. In The Argonauts, Nelson is contacted by a man who at first seems harmless, but increasingly becomes more threatening. When he begins stalking Nelson around campus, she hires a private eye to keep watch on her house. Her previous work, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, looked at the recurrence of violence in avant-garde and popular culture from a critical distance.

Here, she’s living it. Aside from activating some primitive fear in the reader for the wellbeing of her newborn, the episode shows how swiftly Nelson can move between types of writing. For a few pages, the book reads as LA Noir (Chandler’s influence, perhaps?). This is a book of spilt fluids; traversing genre boundaries is just another leakage.

In the last pages, Nelson intersperses short paragraphs describing the birth of her son with excerpts from letters written to her by Dodge, about the death of the artist’s mother.

“The car is where the pain turns into a luge. I can’t open my eyes. Have to go inside…” writes Nelson, recounting her thoughts while on the way to the hospital.

Then Dodge: “…on the last night, i put a pillow under her knees, and i told her i was going to take a walk. that i would smell honeysuckle and see fireflies, wet my shoes in the midnight dew. i told her that i was going to do those things because i was going to do those things because i was going to stay on earth in this form. ‘but your work here is done mama.’”

It continues, in this fashion, for several overwhelming pages. At the end, the reader looks up to see the world, like the Argo, renewed.

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The Animated Reader EDITED BY BRIAN DROITCOUR NEW MUSEUM, 209 PP.

TOM HEALY Only to man Thou hast made known Thy ways, And put the pen alone into his hand, And made him secretary of Thy praise.

—George Herbert, “Praise” Praise may not be the purpose—however we are gendered—but certain secretarial duties definitely have pride of place among the tasks of people who write poetry in 2015.

Transcripts of bureaucratic work—traffic reports, Twitter feeds, financial documents, tallies, translations, lists, doodles, passive recordings and dictations, correspondence, filing, the making of copies—are now frequent strategies of the writer formerly known as Poet.

You can find an excellent introduction to the work of some of the leading lyrical secretaries of the moment in The Animated Reader, a new (not) anthology of (not) poetry published as part of Surround Audience, Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin’s muchdiscussed 2015 New Museum Triennial.

The Animated Reader was edited by poet Brian Droitcour, who writes in his introduction: “While it’s called a ‘poetry book’...there are prose poems, short fiction, performance scripts, and, most strikingly, text excerpted from social-media platforms presented as a feed that runs through the book, asserting the possibility of poetic experience in everyday language and defining poetry as a social act while reimagining the fragment as a poetic genre.”

I have to admit there is something delicious about the editor of an anthology committed to breaking down hierarchies and established conventions having a last name that means “court of law.” But the thought I was most consumed with while I read the range of texts Droitcour brought together was the strange kinship these writers had with the “metaphysical poets” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—damn good writers who could be, and still are, an acquired taste. What Dryden said then about John Donne—that “he affects the metaphysics” and “perplexes the minds” with “speculations of

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philosophy”—could definitely be said of the aspirations of many writers included here.

It was Samuel Johnson who came up with the label “metaphysical poets.” The term was less praise than a chance for Johnson to throw some shade at poets, however different from one another, who seemed to choose ideas over sound, rigors over joy: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”

Edification at a price, admiration outweighing pleasure. Oh, the more things change… Although Droitcour calls the work in The Animated Reader “conceptual” rather than “metaphysical,” it shares similar impulses to philosophy, similar disregard for easy beauty that made Johnson so skeptical.

But what do we want from poetry? The writers in The Animated Reader certainly mess with many happy assumptions. Tweets from several of Trecartin’s artist and writer friends thread through the other collected texts. From Steve Roggenbuck: “Writers should...” / “Good poetry is...” /all / these / pointless / rule’s / tht make writing / no fun // i sugest / just MAKE THINGS YOU LOVE / . /the End Later, from a poem/translation collaboration between Hiromi Ito and Jeffrey Angles: We want to show contempt for language as nothing more than raw material...We will replace words mechanically and make sentences impossible in real / life / That is replacing words mechanically and making sentences impossible in / real life / Rip off meaning / Sound remains And from Bela Shayevich: i think I put it a good way the other day where I was explaining to someone I said, “translators are expected to not only be faithful to the ‘original text’—i.e. the voice of a whole nother human, but also to ‘standardized language’ like what the fuck is that? Can you imagine that anyone speaks anything other than their very own English?”

Taking a particularly difficult-to-love stance within the heterodox poetics of our time (the many different arguments over what a poem is, what poetry should try to do, and whether it’s possible or pointless to decide if individual

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poems are any good), The Animated Reader makes clear that eloquence, reverence, and lyrical beauty fit in its pages only with suspicion and distain.

Most of the texts in the book are deliberately not lovely or memorable. What they possess, though, is the eloquence of a certain accuracy: they measure something profound about very real ruptures happening in our literary culture, changes in even our most rudimentary linguistic habits, in our attempts to communicate with one another.

I read both a printed copy and a PDF of the book and actually preferred it on my screen, not flipping pages but scrolling down a stream of text glowing without obvious beginning or end. The roll of words felt more urgent, unsettling, and less clearly directed than reading left to right with the heft and habit of a book in my hand. Creating a feeling of awkward uncertainty about where we stand with what someone else has written is one of the book’s great strengths.

But rather than belaboring clichés of anxiety about the onslaught of image, information, text, and noise we’re encountering in contemporary life, or the speed with which technologies are disrupting and destroying anything fleetingly familiar enough to be called “our” culture, the writers in The Animated Reader have chosen simply to jump in the chaotic stream and see where it goes.

Will they drown? No more likely than anyone who hopes the levies of traditional literary culture might hold. At the very least—even if little of the work here will hit you hard in the heart, gut, or head—what you will experience is the unnerving feeling of being in the swim with writers willing to risk dishevelment, breathlessness, and occasional incomprehensibility. There’s a thrill to be found in the urgent demands they put on themselves to say something, anything that might (not?) be poetry now. Here’s how Roman Osminkin puts it: abbreviate, use acronyms / be lucid and convincing / and finish your poem already / maybe / you / can still / save someone.

Join us for the 10th Anniversary of Design Miami/ Basel The Global Forum for Design/ June 16–21, 2015

Chromatropic textile, 2015 – Design Miami/ x Pierre Frey

Design Galleries/ Armel Soyer/ ArtFactum Gallery/ ammann//gallery/ Antonella Villanova/ Caroline Van Hoek/ Carpenters Workshop Gallery/ Carwan Gallery/ Cristina Grajales Gallery/ Dansk Mobelkunst Gallery/ Demisch Danant/ Elisabetta Cipriani/ Erastudio & Apartment Gallery/ Franck Laigneau/ Friedman Benda/ Galerie Eric Philippe/ Galerie Jacques Lacoste/ Galerie kreo/ Galerie Maria Wettergren/ Galerie Matthieu Richard/ Galerie Pascal Cuisinier/ Galerie Patrick Seguin/ Galerie VIVID/ Galleri Feldt/ Galleria O./ Galleria Rossella Colombari/ Gallery ALL/ Gallery FUMI/ Gallery SEOMI/ Hostler Burrows/ Jousse Entreprise/ LAFFANOUR – Galerie Downtown/ Louisa Guinness Gallery/ Magen H Gallery/ Marc Heiremans/ Moderne Gallery/ Nilufar Gallery/ Ornamentum/ Patrick Parrish Gallery/ Pierre Marie Giraud/ Priveekollektie/ R & Company/ Sarah Myerscough/ Gallery Southern Guild/ Thomas Fritsch – ARTRIUM/ Victor Hunt Designart Dealer/

The Global Forum for Design June 16–21, 2015/ Preview Day/ June 15

Galleries/ Curio/ Design at Large/ Collaborations/ Awards/ Talks/ Satellites/

Hall 1 Süd Messe Basel, Switzerland

designmiami.com

Jock Truman. Beacon Street #2, 1950. Watercolor drawing on paper. Gift of the artist.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS + HIGHLIGHTS

MDC PERMANENT ART COLLECTION OPENING AUGUST 2015 INCLUDING WORKS BY: Mario Algaze, Robert Arneson, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, William Cordova, John Laddie Dill, Lynne Gelfmen, Emmett Gowin, Duane Hanson, Donald Judd, Alex Katz, Pat Lipsky, Arnold Mesches, Louise Nevelson, Claus Oldenburg, Anne Pearce, Emilio Sanchez, Peter Saul, Frank Stella, Robert Thiele, Peter Voulkos, Andy Warhol, Jaimie Warren, William Wegman, Purvis Young

MIAMI DADE COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART + DESIGN FREEDOM TOWER AT MDC 600 BISCAYNE BLVD MIAMI, FL 33132

www.mdcmoad.org

Jungle, 2014 by 2x4, Inc.

FA S H I O N I S HAPPENING

MI A MI DE S I G N DI STRI CT I S O PEN Miami Design District is a creative neighborhood and shopping destination, embodying the best in fashion and luxury retail, dining, art and design.

39th to 41st St between NE 2nd Ave and N Miami Ave, Miami, FL 33137 M IA M IDE S IG NDISTR I CT. N E T

Exhibitions at ICA Miami are made possible in part through a gift from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.