The Miami Rail | Issue 14

Fall 2015

JEDEDIAH CAESAR SHANNON EBNER THOMAS LAWSON

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COURTNEY MALICK THE MAN-THING BUCHAREST MELBOURNE MOSCOW

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REVIEWS

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PUBLISHER & FOUNDER Nina Johnson-Milewski EDITOR Kara Pickman PROGRAMS MANAGER Michelle Lisa Polissaint ARCHITECTURE EDITOR Terence Riley FLORIDA EDITOR Nathaniel Sandler LITERARY EDITOR Hunter Braithwaite POETRY EDITOR P. Scott Cunningham DESIGN Jessalyn Santos-Hall INTERNS Melissa Demarziani Rachel Lee BOARD Phong Bui Bonnie Clearwater Nina Johnson-Milewski John Joseph Lin ADVISORY BOARD Matthew Abess Christy Gast Daniel Milewski PRINTER Nupress, Miami

IN THIS ISSUE V I SUA L ARTS

EXPRES S

6 UNCOVERING UNIQUE HISTORIES: MIAMI’S CORNER OF CONTEMPORARY ART Courtney Malick

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10 JEDEDIAH CAESAR with Diana Nawi

38 TARA MCDOWELL with Camila Marambio

14 SHANNON EBNER’S MATERIAL LEXICON Carmen Hermo

44 SKETCHES FROM THE GARAGE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART Hunter Braithwaite

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

18 THOMAS LAWSON with Hunter Braithwaite

LITERATURE & POE T RY

26 NEW WORK Mauricio Gonzalez

48 ON COPS Rob Goyanes

LOCA L

51 POEMS Kathleen Rooney

28 ANDY SWEET: NEW YEARʼS EVE PARTIES ON THE OLD SOUTH BEACH Gary Monroe

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS 52 T. WHEELER CASTILLO AND EMILE MILGRIM with Monica Uszerowicz

32 GIANT-SIZE MAN-THING Nathaniel Sandler

56 PIONEER WINTER: IN PROCESS Catherine Annie Hollingsworth

SPECIAL THANKS The Brooklyn Rail CONTACT advertising@miamirail.org editor@miamirail.org info@miamirail.org

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B OOK REVIEW

The Miami Rail is made possible with the generous support of the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation.

COVER Shannon Ebner in collaboration with David Reinfurt, A HUDSON YARD, 2014–15.

Commissioned and produced by High Line Art, presented by Friends of the High Line and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Photo: Timothy Schenck

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Courtney Malick is the Miami Rail’s Fall 2015 Visiting Writer. The Visiting Writer Program is generously supported by the John S. and the James L. Knight Foundation.

UNCOVERING UNIQUE HISTORIES: Miami’s Corner of Contemporary Art CO URTN EY M AL ICK

My relationship with Miami’s contemporary art scene began not with Art Basel Miami Beach, but with a site-specific art project in which I participated, spending a week filming with my longtime friends Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. This was in 2009, and their house where most of the shoots took place was in Little Haiti. When I look back on that first trip to Miami now, it is shocking to me how little I knew about what was going on in contemporary art in the city.

What’s more, when I look back at the video work that Trecartin and Fitch produced during the year that they spent in Little Haiti, it is surprising how little of the actual place itself seeps into the stories, characters, or even the sets and backdrops of the movies that they made there. Even more surprising today is that, with the exception of Art Basel and the satellite art fairs in early December, it seems that even still the depth and historical lineages of Miami’s relationship to contemporary art is lost on many.

I too am guilty of this offense, usually coming to Miami during that one week in December when much of the artwork that one takes in has nothing to do with Miami itself and is only temporarily implanted there from more international “art cities” like New York, Berlin, London, Paris, and more recently, Los Angeles. However, having been given the opportunity to spend more time there this summer—in the off-season, no less—and meet with a handful of artists, gallerists, curators, and writers, it is amazing to me that Miami remains somewhat of a contemporary art secret, or even haven. Perhaps it’s best this way, but nonetheless, the more I learned, the more impressive the area’s connections to an art historical past shone through.

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VISITING WRITER

GucciVuitton, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2015. Courtesy GucciVuitton, Miami

One of the best examples of this that I saw is the exhibition GucciVuitton, curated by the artist-run gallery of the same name, which is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Miami (ICA) through September. The exhibition itself is unique for many reasons, presenting content in ways I have never seen or heard of elsewhere. For one thing, it is ultimately a retrospective of a gallery’s history, a rather strange endeavor in and of itself. Secondly, the exhibition design cleverly utilizes the lack of proper exhibition space the museum currently has available in its temporary building as its permanent home is being constructed.

The directors of GucciVuitton, each of whom maintains his own independent artistic and design practice, decided to activate the

interior of the lobby space, not only on the ground floor, but by installing a transparent, cage-like scaffolding all the way up to the top, fourth floor. In this way, viewers do not enter a gallery to see works installed on its walls or in its white cube space, but instead can only access the works from behind the glass through which one would normally peer downward from the second, third, and fourth floors to see the atrium-like lobby below. Each of these windows now acts as a secondary frame, detaching viewer from artwork, creating the sensation of window-shopping. Moreover, visitors are afforded the rare viewpoint of seeing nearly the entire show all at once, including the backs of works installed on the opposite side of the building.

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VISITING WRITER

While the exhibition design is also unusual in its ability to drastically alter the perspective of the viewer in ways I have never before experienced, GucciVuitton, which has taken works from each of the gallery’s past twelve shows, also serves as an important history lesson. Here attention is called to a wide range of artistic traditions, cultures, and figures throughout the entire southeastern region and its neighboring countries. This includes little-known and longstanding trajectories throughout Floridian history, such as Florida landscape painting, seminal figures and constructs in organic architecture, and sculptures and paintings directly related to the felt prevalence and mythologies of Haitian Vodou. This thus expands and reinforces these lesser-known artists and the cultural lineages from which they draw.

Certain artists featured in the exhibition were especially revelatory. For example, organic architect and sculptor, Chayo Frank, whose career began in the mid- 1960s in Miami when he designed the unusual AmerTec Building, which is today considered a cultlike architectural landmark.

Though trained as an architect, during the construction of the AmerTec Building, which favors bulbous, curved forms that emulate those naturally found in plant and sea life, Frank also became interested in creating similarly organic sculptural forms with clay. Some of these small-scale sculptures, which made up his solo show at GucciVuitton in the summer of 2014, are on view at ICA and clearly recall the colorful, sci-fi, and otherworldly aesthetic popular in the 1970s. While relationships can easily be made between Frank’s work and that of other ceramic sculptors like Ken Price, most notably, his is clearly rooted in the natural imagery, colors, and forms found in the tropical Floridian landscape.

Another great example of an artist whose work may be lesser known, but undoubtedly holds deep significance in Miami, the greater South Florida area, and especially throughout its Haitian subcultures, is Port-au-Prince-based

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sculptor Guyodo. Guyodo’s artist group, Atis Rezistans, uses items found in junkyards and other household detritus to create “idols,” as they are known—miniature figurines that represent various Haitian Vodou deities. Though the intricacies of the specific traditions to which each figure relates may be lost on some viewers, it is apparent in their installation that they all have a relationship to one another as well as to the viewer gazing in on them through the glass.

Again the sincerity of the idea of place—along with the stories that make up a place—comes to the fore and shapes the work of the individual artist and the overall exhibition as one that is less about the kinds of questions we often see exhibitions attempting to answer, such as, “What does contemporary art look like, or how does it function, today?” or “How are artists’ methodologies shifting in an ever increasingly technologized digital world?” Instead, the exhibition looks inward, which is not to say backward.

GucciVuitton seems to be asking viewers to consider where they are in space and time, perhaps how they got there, and how what they see around them in the city of Miami is informed by such histories as those being revisited and recontextualized by the participating artists.

This is certainly not to say that Miami has no stake in the larger and broader conversations that perpetuate the überglobalism of contemporary art, nor is it to say that such an expansive and all-encompassing conversation is of no relevance.

But rather that perhaps a city like Miami, which continues to dip its toe deeper and deeper into contemporary art’s murky waters—so much so that it is now apparent it will be swimming laps in the years to come—can render itself apart from other major art cities through its less global attributes and selling points.

It is an intriguing contradiction central to the draw of today’s most prominent brand of contemporary art that it tends to champion the universalism of work that speaks to many people in many places all at once and yet applauds those able to reveal the underbelly of the stone

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unturned, usually found in the geographical and cultural peripheries. The latter point may account, at least in part, for the wafting return of the popularity of abstract painting over approximately the last five years, particularly within the United States. However, to interrogate the peripheral often does not yield to the uncovering of universality. Whether or not this is to be celebrated or critically dissected ought to be taken on a case-bycase basis. However, it should by now be apparent that at least one of the reasons that too much contemporary art looks like a carbon copy of an object or image made in the image of a pre-existing image, is precisely due to this kind of “global” mandate.

Though artists need not consistently approach their work from a site-based perspective, it is not difficult to see that Miami and South Florida represent an unusual part of the United States that remains somewhat detached in ways that are far divergent from most other “major” art cities. While every year in December Miami invites the global art world onto its beautiful beaches and into its lavish hotels to celebrate another year in nonstop city-hopping for most art professionals and patrons, I hope as its contemporary art institutions and communities continue to grow, it will nonetheless look further inward at what separates it from other places rather than blend more and more seamlessly in with what characterizes the general milieu of contemporary art overall.

Courtney Malick is a contemporary art curator and writer whose practice focuses on intersections among video, sculpture, performance, and installation. She has curated a group exhibition that deals with inorganic ingestible matter and its potential long-term effects on the human body, which opens at Martos Gallery, Los Angeles, in October.

VISITING WRITER

LEFT Chayo Frank, AmerTec Building, Hialeah, Florida, 1969.

Photo: Bullet, Miami

BELOW Chayo Frank, #12B, 2012. Installation view: Chayo Frank: Sculptures 19692012, GucciVuitton, Miami, 2014. Courtesy GucciVuitton, Miami

ABOVE Guyodo, Untitled Idol (Blender), 2012–15.

Courtesy GucciVuitton, Miami

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JEDEDIAH CAESAR with Diana Nawi In anticipation of Jedediah Caesar’s exhibition Stone Underground, at Locust Projects this fall, Diana Nawi discussed with him this new project and some of the concerns that shape his practice. Caesar traveled to Miami to research and create this work, which comprises three boulders dyed in electric hues, a suite of casts created from inverted holes he dug on various sites throughout the city, and a group of glass sculpture he made from a vein of silica he uncovered while working. Rocks and cast holes are recurrent in his practice and reflect an interest in the formal and metaphorical potential of geology and the particular physical, social, and temporal space it occupies. Stone Underground takes on these concerns through its materials and processes, thinking through displaced forms about how we inhabit and conceive of the world.

DIANA NAWI (MIAMI RAIL): How did you approach this work? In a literal way, what were your first steps in conceptualizing this project for Locust?

JEDIDIAH CAESAR: This project came out of a project I did in 2012 at LA><ART called Rozoj. I was spending time in the desert around rock hunters, and thinking about that group of people agreeing on value in valueless things, and transferring

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that onto landscapes. Really miserable hot, harsh landscapes becoming quarries you would bring your grandkids to for the day, maybe camp out. It seemed like a lot of desert dwellers, these people, were there precisely because this space was so little valued by anyone else. These landscapes become a fantasy of free territories and a way to imagine yourself as correspondingly “free.” And, there they could reenact a historical idea of the fortune hunter

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with geodes and agate standing in for gold.

That led me to the framework of micro- nations that developed in the ’60s, the kind of parody of nationhood.

Rozoj was a group of sculptures low to the ground and almost filling the space, about forty containers containing thousands of small currency-like objects.

These repeated in various combinations, forming a series of landscapes that could be read relative to each other,

ABOVE AND FOLLOWING PAGE Jedediah Caesar, research images. Courtesy the artist

a dense, physically awkward group of pictographic statements. The boundaries between landscape, objects, and language were collapsed.

So I had this project in mind and then came across a lot of articles about the sovereign citizen movement in Florida, and then one in particular that talked about the arrest of a woman who claimed to be autonomous and not subject to US law based on her membership in a particular

black empowerment group. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an organization thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s existed for a long time; in fact is a precursor to the Nation of Islam. It was useful for moving past the problems of right-wing disgruntled attitudes usually associated with the Sovereign movement and thinking about the problem of social constructions as continuous enveloping spaces, and questioning our inclusion in those spaces. One can see autonomy being an objecthood within and apart from

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that continuity, or as an analogy for ideas entering materials, that material becoming art objects. The alienation of autonomy.

This kind of self-marking and value shifting was where I started and where this project became a continuation of Rozoj.

I thought about the show at Locust as a social space. I decided to do away with the containers in Rozoj and make a field of stone objects. I included material local to Miami so people could feel familiarity

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FOR ME, SCULPTURE CAN BE ABOUT LANGUAGE WITHOUT BECOMING ILLUSTRATIVE. I’M ESPECIALLY INTERESTED IN THE WAY LANGUAGES FAIL AND MISLEAD US IN RELATION TO SCULPTURE.

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with it—the Oolite, for example, is ubiquitous in local architectures. But the works break out and away from that quotidian example and become buried again in their own logic.

RAIL: How did you arrive at the particular size of these boulders and the scale and number of the inverted holes?

CAESAR: The number of boulders came out of conversations, a little education from the quarry workers, who are real stone connoisseurs. There are three prominent strata underneath South Florida: Oolite, Keystone, and Hemingway, and there’s one piece of each. At the quarry, I looked at stones until I found these ones kind of off to the side. One was being used as a table and another one was stuffed behind a big wall of cut blocks. They come from various depths in the strata of Florida—or is it the strata under Florida?

That’s the point of this project, really, the question of whether the part beneath us that we can’t see is part of our named territory, and if it is, then to what depth?

And what do we think of naming what we can’t experience and what acts without us and without our knowledge? And if it’s not part of our named territory, then what is our space? Is it just a thin skin of land with all our stuff piled on top, a veneer? I painted the boulders as a model of the second option. The holes are notes from that autonomous space underground, because that space is continuous and digging out a little piece can’t show you that continuity; it just shows you itself.

RAIL: Can you talk about revisiting processes and forms that are possibly “signature” for you—like casting holes—in a new environment, reprising these explorations in new places?

CAESAR: It was weird and geologic. I mean, a geologist could read a lot from the form about what was dug into, but I can’t.

I’m an amateur.

RAIL: What does it mean, and how does it affect your practice to be away from home, as it were?

CAESAR: I think I gravitate toward very obvious things, usually things that someone who lives in a place would be tired of talking about, or things that feel so ubiquitous that it’s not something to discuss. On the flip side, I’m filtering what I see though the ongoing conversation I’m having about artwork and objects, the banal and the spectacular, ownership and thievery, desert time vs. tropical time.

RAIL: One of the things that has always struck me about your work is its very particular scale. It feels at once really macho in its materials and processes and big in its references, but I always find the scale to be very human and contained, resolutely unmonumental even as you’re referencing geological time. How do you think about scale in your work?

CAESAR: I’d like my work to reflect that people carry monumental ideas within themselves quite easily. The human scale is kind of a digested monumentality.

We live very comfortably with images beaming back from Pluto, for example—physically remote places that we reconstruct in our minds, and between us in conversations. The other night I found myself in a web forum for people who were combing through NASA photographs of Mars looking for examples of anomalous objects, trying to prove there is or was life and technology there, and that its been hidden from us. It’s paranoid: images of landscapes of stones circled in red and speculations that they must be machine parts, or dragon bones (those were the dominant themes). It was very sincere and because there was nothing there, it was total cloud gazing.

Their project amounts to making this alien space banal, but I think it was also an attempt to communicate with this other space. In that way, it reminded me of being in the geode fields, or of trying to inhabit the earth beneath our feet by naming its strata. All of these practices we have for making the world approachable even when, or because, it contains so much that will always be remote.

does sculpture work or function in the world? You and I had discussed a (perhaps oversimplified) binary of linguistically based sculpture, which operates in the realm of symbol or representation, and works that evade language both as a point of inception and as a way of being read in the world. We also touched on this idea that we are increasingly unable to think about form without needing external narrative and language—we’re alienated from our own ability to be with or understand objects. How might you situate your practice within this space? Or do you even think this is a fair assessment of the state of things?

CAESAR: Yes, I think it’s a fair assessment.

Mainly because I think we are used to specific durations—reading or taking in images—that are fairly narrow. A lot of art asks viewers to commit significant and/or unusual amounts of time, and to internalize structures of time that are unfamiliar.

Especially with sculpture, its boundaries are often not clearly defined; we don’t know what we need to commit to in order to get in synch with a work without a certain amount of exploring, and that seems to be a leap many people can’t or won’t make.

Somehow sculpture became saddled with being about property and ownership, very unradical. It seems like the recent emphasis on a sculpture that supposedly reflects online, lateral space is a way to redeem it that’s anxiety-driven. For me, sculpture can be about language without becoming illustrative. I’m especially interested in the way languages fail and mislead us in relation to sculpture. Also the way our limited physical senses can be similarly mislead or inadequate. Thinking about it not as a binary, but as part of the demand of art, that we let ourselves move freely between, say, analogy and tactility.

I do hope that in approaching the works in this show that they ask for this.

Diana Nawi is Associate Curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

RAIL: One of things that I’m thinking about a lot lately, because I’ve ostensibly been doing a lot of sculpture shows, is how

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Shannon Ebner, Black Box Collision A, 2014. Chromogenic prints. Installation view: Black Box Collision A: Gasoline & Auto Electric, kaufmann repetto, Milan, May 22– August 8, 2014. Courtesy kaufmann repetto, Milan

SHANNON EBNER’S MATERIAL LEXICON CARM EN HERM O

AAAAAAAAAA… The letter that inaugurates our Roman alphabet cries out, repeatedly, from the installation of Shannon Ebner’s Black Box Collision A. In this ongoing work begun in 2012, Ebner displays that familiar, yet mutable form, isolated from its adjacent letters

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and real-life context. Against the “black box” of the blackened gallery walls, undulating black-and-white captures of the letter A surround the viewer. The outsize scale of the photographs imposes a kind of surreality; though the letters seem the right size for advertisement-like legibility, they refute it, offering instead an alternating study of form and style. Some letters bear the

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Shannon Ebner in collaboration with David Reinfurt, A HUDSON YARD, 2014–15. Commissioned and produced by High Line Art, presented by Friends of the High Line and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Photo: Timothy Schenck

excitable edge of handmade, come-hither commercialism, while others appear oddly ominous, with portentous volume and hard edges that, at times, extend nearly to the edge of the image. As is often seen in Ebner’s work, traces of construction and industry abound—some A’s appear to be borrowed from work site caution signs, while others are evidently extracted from graffiti tags. In making the work, Ebner ambled around Los Angeles, noticing and capturing these letters, ultimately presenting them together in a confluence of differences and similarities.

The striking effect of Black Box Collision A lies in its exchange with the viewer: the act of reading the letters as coherent words is ultimately futile, but the looking forms its own experiential reading. This transformation begins with Ebner’s dedication to black-and-white photography, a hallmark of her work. In a world subsumed with insistent and endless snapshots in living color, Ebner cools down the viewers’ intake of their environment. Photography necessarily flattens its

subject, and monochrome or grisaille palettes throw images into contrast. Ebner’s photographs seem to engender a visual language, where spindly or full shapes lose their context and their definition, but become instead a topography of the scripts that surround us. Ebner appreciates what she terms the “indeterminacy” of the black-and-white photograph, a medium that risks connoting the documentarian, historical, or archival if applied without precision. Ebner skirts this hazard by using photography as a pointed tool to question the manifestation and meaning of language itself. By shooting the latent language that surrounds us, a nonlinear anti-narrative is constructed by accumulation. It’s that totality of intent that marks Ebner’s practice as ongoing, a concerted and unceasing study of the varied forms and functions of language, most often captured through the mediums of photography and sculpture.

If all of this seems obtuse and conceptual, consider the unabashed political undertones of the body of work that

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brought her to the attention of the art world: her Dead Democracy Letters series (2002–06). Developed as a response to the ongoing War on Terror—a conflict experienced in the United States through a strain of twisted rhetoric and euphemistic obfuscation of violence and torture—the work took the form of twenty-six wooden letters, positioned and photographed across the Californian landscape. The images morphed the graphic identity of the Hollywood sign into one-off snarls of discomfort and alienation, stark landscapes injected with evocative language: “NAUSEA,” or “LANDSCAPE INCARCERTION.” At the Whitney Biennial in 2008, the characters were displayed shuffled into a wooden crate, and labeled, in spray paint, “SCULPTURES INVOLUNTAIRES.” The tagged French title alludes to the beloved snapshots of Braissaï, whose surreptitious captures of Paris between the world wars inspired the Surrealists’ affections for the irrational beauty of the quotidian. Another historical reference often appended to Ebner’s practice is that of the Conceptual artists Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Smithson—artists who traced the intersections of language and the American landscape. Braissaï, these Conceptualists, and Ebner all eschew the documentary appeal of their medium, reaching through photography to examine and uncover the latent social and cultural meaning of their subjects.

In recent years, Ebner’s work has divested its direct response to world events, moved away from the landscape, and settled into something more poetic, even archeological. That’s evident in Black Box Collision A, which is presented in its first museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA), from October 8, 2015 through January 17, 2016. It will be the first major solo presentation of the artist’s work since installations at New York’s MoMA PS1 (2007) and simultaneous shows at the Hammer Museum and LAXART in Los Angeles (2011), where the artist lives and works.

The topography of that fair, sprawling city—with both faded and of-the-moment advertisements beckoning from billboards and city walls alike—is an undeniable influence on Ebner’s recent work. Still, biographical bits from her life before Los Angeles persist. Born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1971, Ebner’s upbringing in the New York metropolitan area—where the industrial cleaves the residential and vice versa—exposed her to the odd poetry of the everyday. In 1993, she graduated from Bard College and moved to New York, where she was involved in the poetry scene associated with the (still extant) Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, working directly with Eileen Myles, who was mounting poetry workshops in artists’ studios at the time. Somewhere amid her poetry career, Ebner used a disposable camera to illustrate a particularly visual poem. The handheld, Xeroxed serial of words and images inspired her to return to photography exclusively.

After she completed her MFA in photography at Yale University in 2000, she relocated to Los Angeles. There she began her artistic project: rather than use images as indexes of language and content, Ebner creates self-reflexive works that plumb the panoply of verbal, graphic, or audible utterances that comprise our society. The alphabet—literal, poetic, or constructed—became the modular subject of her practice.

Modularity and seriality allow for exploration of the salient

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themes of Ebner’s work. At ICA, Ebner will construct two new sculptures based on earlier sculptural manifestations of graphic symbols, sited specifically for Miami. The work (…), from 2010, depicts an ampersand made from cinder blocks and cement. The readymade materials, which are the basis of all urban construction projects, have been shaped to form the symbol (actually, the logogram) for the phrase “and per se and,” which over time became simply “and,” with a snippy and recognizable shape. This form-object acts as a mechanical joiner for language, uniting disparate words or ideas. The sculptural object forces the viewer to question what the object might be joining—two spaces, perhaps, or the meeting of viewer and sculpture, or the viewer and the space alone. There’s an openness shared among language, form, and execution. Using such basic materials, Ebner created what she terms an “anti-monument.” Modular by nature, Ebner also executed ampersand sculptures in Los Angeles and at the Venice Biennale (both in 2011). Sculptures enter and reside in space very differently than photography, allowing Ebner to explore locality in her practice.

Photography can transcend that imposed physicality, and Black Box Collision A found an extrapolated, temporal footing in a project Ebner produced in collaboration with David Reinfurt for New York’s High Line Park. Photographs of singular A’s were wheat-pasted across the rapidly changing landscape of neighborhoods transforming into luxurious cultural enclaves, only to be taken down by passersby or the vagaries of the weather. Each image became autonomous from the series, but simultaneously contingent on its environment. Experienced individually against massive construction sites or ad campaigns, the black-and-white photographs appeared like last, graphic grasps at unique, hand-painted forms of language. The High Line project injected temporality and movement into a series that otherwise suppresses the actions of the artist in favor of the resulting material lexicon. Situating it within a site of tourist and art-world activity highlights the searching and movement behind the finality and solidity of each A. Ebner’s practice is not concerned with finding poetry in the mundane forms of language, but rather in creating it, via photography, sculpture, and unique projects that often begin with poems but end in videos, installations, or even flashing highway signs. Auto Body Collision (2014) was exhibited at the Fondazione Memmo in Rome the year of its making. Amid the palatial galleries, Ebner set up precariously placed, six-foot-tall cardboard letters, physically constructing a poem between the galleries. The words appear to be borrowed from auto body shop signage: “CENTER,” “FIRST,” “CLASS AUTO,” often ruptured by a replacement of certain letters with symbols, like a forward slash and twelve-pointed asterisk. Interspersed among the concretized poem were small abstract forms in cardboard and sumptuous black-and-white photography of crushed-up junkyard cars. The photographs carry the trace of destruction, following moments in which machines and human bodies collide. The word auto also carries a decidedly un-automotive second meaning, as “self” in Greek. The collision of the self and the body is the subtext of the poem, which combines discarded and found language in odd, recombinant phrases. Unbound from the page—the usual ground

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for poetry—and paired with the black-and-white, nearly documentarian photographs of junkyards and graffiti street directions, the poem feels unfixed, undone, and dodges easy reading.

In our daily digital lives, reading is easy: scrolling, linking, opening new tabs. Photography is easy, too, as cameras are always at the ready to capture our selves, our bodies, and our surroundings in dozens of shots, until the right one is found.

Surrounded by an over-saturation of images—and, truth be told,

an over-saturated art world—Ebner’s focus is to provide her viewers with their own task, to read between the reading and truly think about the forms that comprise each image-poem.

The simplicity of language itself is thwarted, uncovered for its undercurrents of construction, mediation, and experience.

Carmen Hermo is an assistant curator for the collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Shannon Ebner, USA (2003), from Dead Democracy Letters (2002–06). Chromogenic print, 80 x 101.3 cm.

Courtesy the artist

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THOMAS LAWSON with Hunter Braithwaite

For three and a half decades, Thomas Lawson has remained one of the most articulate voices in the field of a painting. Both an artist and a writer, he is also editor-in-chief of East of Borneo and the Dean of California Institute of the Arts.

On the occasion of Last Exit: Painting at the Bakehouse Art Complex, which was curated by CalArts alum Justin H. Long in response to Lawson’s seminal 1981 essay of the same name, Hunter Braithwaite speaks to Lawson about painting— its current state, how it can be approached through writing, and its ability to capture the “vagaries of the moment.”

HUNTER BRAITHWAITE (MIAMI RAIL): In addition to painting, writing, and teaching, you’re the editor-in-chief of East of Borneo. How has that publication affected the LA scene?

East of Borneo is we encourage our readers to become collaborators, to work with us on developing a user-friendly archive of Los Angeles art and its history.

RAIL: Is East of Borneo updated regularly?

THOMAS LAWSON: East of Borneo grew out of an earlier project called Afterall, which was a collaboration with a publication in London. When I started, it was quite difficult to find writers in Los Angeles who were interested in contemporary art. This was around 2000 or 2001. Since then, a whole new generation of writers has appeared, which is great.

They’ve come out of the art schools— the writing programs at Art Center and CalArts. I think the best-known is Michael Ned Holte, but there’s also Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Jennifer Krasinski, Andrew Berardini, and Travis Diehl.

They’re part of the scene, they’re in the social networks, they go to the openings and hang out in people’s studios. They’re participating in the whole dialogue, and I like to think that by giving them a local platform we have helped to grow that.

And something that’s unique about

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LAWSON: We’re online, so there isn’t a monthly issue in the old print sense, but yes, we publish commissioned essays on a regular basis and have a fuller program of uploads to the collaborative archive.

Actually, in the last few weeks we’ve just posted two pieces. One was an interview that Rita Gonzalez did with Kerry Tribe discussing a recent work that was shown at 365 Mission Road. And the other was a piece that Jonathan Griffin wrote about Roger Brown, who’s mostly associated with Chicago, but lived out here for a while during the last years of his life, built a house and studio in a funky little beach town up the coast, just north of Ventura. Jonathan has a nice piece about that.

We’ve just moved into a new office down in the city, off campus. The campus is kind of at the edge of the city, so it’s not

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really well connected. Now we’re renting a space from the Women’s Collective for Creative Work. We’ve only been there a couple of weeks, but already people have been dropping by, coming in with suggestions, so it’s feeling like a good move. It feels more like we’re in the middle of things.

RAIL: If you Google “painting” today, almost every article deals with the market, collecting, and flipping. Just what is it that makes today’s paintings so marketable?

LAWSON: That’s actually never been my particular experience. [Laughs.] I’ve always found it quite possible to make paintings that are not market-friendly.

I came of age during the first wave of slagging off on painting because it was something that was just marketable.

The deep irony of that moment in the ‘70s is that it was the beginning of the marketing triumph of the Conceptual movement, which was engineered entirely by a group of who we would now call gallerists and museum directors.

There is an amazing academic study

Thomas Lawson, Disastrous, 2015.

Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 101.6 cm.

Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Thomas Lawson, Untitled/Orange, Pink, Green, 2006.

Oil on canvas, 60.9 x 91.4 cm. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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I THINK NOW WE NEED TO LOOK AT ARTISTS AND THINK ABOUT HOW THE COMBINATION OF TECHNOLOGIES THAT THEY’RE EMPLOYING DELIVER WHAT THEY’RE TRYING TO DELIVER. THAT’S THE TEST, NOT WHETHER IT’S WORLD-HISTORICAL. IS IT COMING ACROSS, DOES AN AUDIENCE GET INTO IT AND SEE WHAT IT IS?

Thomas Lawson, Portrait of New York, 1989/91. Industrial sign paint on plywood, 15 panels, 243.8 x 243.8 cm each. Originally installed at Manhattan Municipal Building, New York. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

by Sophie Richard that lays it all out.1 What Richard does is track very carefully 1 Sophie Richard, Unconcealed, The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967–77: Dealers, Exhibitions and Public Collections (London: Ridinghouse, 2009).

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how a select group of artists were placed in significant exhibitions and given gallery representation even as these very artists were protesting that they were doing nothing like that, that they were against the idea of career and market

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success. They did the standard career building that any artist would do, but they were doing it in the name of a group that claimed they weren’t doing it. To say it’s cynical is too strong, but they did what they had to do to make their art

visible, and it’s just kind of ironic because part of the rhetoric was claiming that the generation of artists before them or even some of their peer group, like Brice Marden, were pandering to the market.

For them to call the kettle black always struck me as deeply suspect. The market is a characteristic of contemporary art, you can’t pin it to one particular medium.

RAIL: Can you give me an example of someone’s practice that attempts to slow down this process?

LAWSON: In terms of old dead guys, Sigmar Polke is a classic exemplar. He was willing to experiment with the material and experience in a way to upset expectations.

deliver what they’re trying to deliver.

That’s the test, not whether it’s worldhistorical. Is it coming across, does an audience get into it and see what it is? In my case, I use technology in the process, but the end result is hand-painted. For me that’s important because I value that sort of individual mark making with all the error-prone, dysfunctional aspects.

RAIL: Was this one of the first death knells for painting?

RAIL: Have you seen anything interesting lately?

RAIL: How do you use technology in your paintings?

LAWSON: The first calls for the death of painting were back in the nineteenth century when photography happened.

In the contemporary world, it’s the late sixties—the dematerialization of the art object and the privileging of process over product. There are funny and ironic things [from this period], like Mel Bochner making these deconstructions of painting by arranging newspaper on the floor and adding some color, or scattering things around based on an arithmetical model. Now he’s a painter, doing sort of interesting work with language in paint.

And it’s like, yeah, of course, because that’s what art is, you use what you have to use to get the effect you want. Any given artist may focus on one singular medium, but describing art and valuing art through medium choices is just the wrong way to frame the argument.

Painting is just a way of making art and it’s a way that I find satisfying, because it allows for personal intervention that is subject to the vagaries of the moment. What strikes me as the enemy is the spectacular, seamless illusion, the unbelievably well-crafted media flooding our consciousness just to sell crap. That’s the nightmare that envelops us. And the art that I respond to takes issue with that. It finds ways to contest it, or ignore it, or gather around it in some way.

Some strategies to do that are classically conceptualist, some more performative, and some are painting. That’s where I stand with that. I like painting because I’ve always liked painting. I like images. I like translating images from one place to another and seeing what happens, and in doing that finding ways to open up thought.

LAWSON: I went to the William Pope.L show at MOCA during its last weekend at the end of June. It was a fantastic show and I was feeling kind of stupid for not having seen it sooner. The centerpiece was an installation of a gigantic American flag with one extra star. It was being blown by these huge special effects fans—the kind the movies use to create a storm scene or something. Over the course of the show, the wind generated had been so fierce that it had ripped the flag. So it was shredded and very dramatically lit. It was an impressive image and we saw it like a week after the tragedy in South Carolina and then the long-overdue recognition that the Confederate flag represents racist-inflamed treason. There was something about the resonance of the flag that just seemed particularly strong. It was a great piece.

LAWSON: Not in the production, but in the overall process. I always start with found materials. Images are gathered and manipulated, fiddled with and thought about on the screen, and then at a certain point I leave the screen and get onto the canvas. So part of the work gets done in that digital space, but most of it is done by hand and eye. I wouldn’t make any claims to being at the forefront of technology, but we’re in a world where it’s there, and it’s a really handy tool, and you use it.

RAIL: Siebren Versteeg, one of the artists in the exhibition at the Bakehouse, has used algorithms to randomly “paint,” either on a constantly evolving screen, or a physical surface. What do you think about artists using technology to such a degree?

LAWSON: Wade Guyton has done some pretty spectacular things with the computer and the printer. That’s definitely an avenue, but to me it depends on what the actual individual is trying to do. Here’s a difference in my thinking since 1981.

“Last Exit: Painting” uses the theoretical framework of the Frankfurt school to make claims for history. I don’t really buy that so much anymore. I think it’s too generalized to be all that helpful.

I think now we need to look at artists and think about how the combination of technologies that they’re employing

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RAIL: You exhibited work in 2014 at the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas. In one room, there was a close-up portrait of a boy’s face, a grid of nine figures in space, and then a person holding a decapitated head. Can you tell me a little bit about this room? What is this body of work?

LAWSON: That show was sort of a mini-retrospective, so the works are from different periods. The grid of drawings is actually from 1977, when I was still a very young artist. I was thinking about a certain kind of psychologized space— interiors fractured by reflections. Before making the drawings, I used to build little models with pieces of mirror, cardboard, and toys. So that was definitely pre-technology. [Laughs.]

RAIL: And the face?

LAWSON: That’s from the period of “Last Exit: Painting.” At that time, the New York Post did a lot of front-page stories about crimes that were targeted at young people. They would print a photograph of some victim—most often it seemed to come from high school yearbooks, some sort of weird non-picture picture—along

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with an inflammatory headline. So my process was to go down in the afternoon and buy the paper and see if there was something I could use. If there was, I’d start making a painting. They were square monochromes, and I was thinking of them in some kind of dialogue with the paradigm structures of minimalism.

The one with the severed head is more recent, from shortly after the invasion of Iraq. It’s an image from the Internet of a jihadi who beheaded somebody. At that point, I was working with two kinds of images, often placed together. One set of paintings were based on images of world maps, images that were not the usual Western view of the globe with the Atlantic in the middle, but from different perspectives. I did a show at LAXART [History/Painting, 2007] with these works juxtaposed with a group of smaller images of various decapitations. Some of them were basically news images and some were based on Baroque paintings of John the Baptist. I was thinking about geographical and historical continuity. The Middle East has had this sort of terror fascination with decapitations since biblical times. It’s about the erasure of consciousness: when you are engaged in an ideological battle it’s not enough to kill your enemy, you actually have to remove his mind. It’s a pretty astonishing thing. I didn’t install that show [at the Goss-Michael Foundation], but I did like

that wall, because it outlined the way my thinking had changed, in part because of changes in technology—from building an imaginary space in the real space of my desktop, to finding information in the newspapers on the streets of New York, to finding information on my computer screen, in the Internet space.

LAWSON: You know, I’m going to do a painting seminar next spring, and that show is going to be my starting point.

It was an interesting show, but it was a frustrating show. Part of the frustration had to do with how badly installed it was.

RAIL: Having just seen the Sarah Charlesworth show at the New Museum, I can’t help make a connection between your grid of figures floating in space and her series Stills, of people falling.

LAWSON: It was just crowded. The previous time I’d been to New York, I saw the Whitney Biennial and it was also badly installed and also featured some of the same painters. I thought, “God, these poor people are getting all this attention, but at the same time they’re being jammed up one against each other in this way that seems very unfriendly.”

For me it was a kind of painting that was more about the processes of material, which never seems quite enough. This is just for me personally. I feel that imagery is usually an important aspect. So I always find that for more abstract forms of art making, while it’s interesting, and I can get the point, I feel a little bit left wanting.

Someone like Barnett Newman does it for me, but it’s because of the transcendence and that’s not really possible anymore.

LAWSON: That’s a good analogy. We were working at the same time, thinking about similar ideas.

RAIL: Were you friends?

LAWSON: Friends is maybe too strong, but acquaintances. At that time, she was married to Joseph Kosuth, who was very sociable. He used to have parties in their loft, and he would invite people out to Mickey Ruskin’s bar, and pay for dinner.

So, yeah. [Laughs.]

RAIL: You mentioned painting’s ability to capture the vagaries of the moment.

Speaking of painting and the vagaries of this moment, did you see Forever Now at MoMA?

DB14, Dallas Biennial, 2014, Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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RAIL: They were kind of crammed in there.

RAIL: Is that why you’ve always stuck to the figuration in your work?

LAWSON: I’m a member of the Pictures generation. My whole process begins with looking at pictures. I’m enthralled with what is being depicted, what’s been chosen, the way it’s been presented, thinking about what it’s intended to mean, and what it maybe unconsciously means. These are all things that generate my activity. When I’m starting a new series of work, I collect a certain kind of image. That’s just where I start. I think someone who is more process-oriented is doing something, going back to that phrase you used, more in the moment.

They’re experimenting with something materially and I get that, I’m just not particularly into it.

RAIL: In an essay about Laura Owens, you wrote, “every artist faces the dual problem of ends and means, what to do and how best to do it.” How does this apply to the art writer?

you want to be accurate and honest. And because it’s not my primary activity, I need to feel like I’m getting something out of it, too—learning something. That’s how I think of it at this point. I’m in my mid-sixties, so I’ve gone through a lot of different kinds of experiences about how you think and how you make. I tend to be much more reflective now than at the beginning, when I was being very proactive. It’s an interesting question, with a shifting answer.

RAIL: You’ve written about how, because of numerous social conditions, California has had a different relationship to painting than New York and northern Europe. Do you believe these geographical distinctions are still in place, or has the globalization of the art world and the ease of moving from place to place created more of a homogeneous relationship with the medium?

Thomas Lawson, Endurance, 2012. Oil on canvas, 182.9 x 213.4 cm. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

LAWSON: You know, I have this analytic mind sometimes, and sometimes I don’t.

Writing requires a different concentration from painting, and they’re not always in sync. I do find that I want to know why something is compelling. So I start writing about it and doing research into where things might have come from.

Sometimes I look at other people’s work for clues. It’s part of the larger process of thinking through the work. When I was younger, not so much anymore, it was also about claiming a space for the work. There was a certain polemic to it. Particularly the reviews in Artforum back in the early ‘80s were pretty combative about declaring space. “This is interesting; this is not,” that kind of thing.

Following in the tradition of Donald Judd, or something like that.

RAIL: Do you find that it shifts from artist to artist, like what we were talking about earlier, abandoning the world-historical scope of a Frankfurt school type of critique, focusing instead on a case-by-case basis?

LAWSON: When I started writing it was for art magazines and what I wrote was a combination of polemics and the beginnings of trying to figure out where my own thinking was. Now I’m more of an elder statesman and I’m asked to write catalogue essays to give some perspective on another artist, usually a younger one.

That’s a different task, I now try to understand what that other person is doing, obviously within the limitations of what I’m thinking about at any given time. I’m not doing the polemical thing anymore, which is why these bigger world-historical questions don’t really have to come up.

RAIL: In the same essay, you list three expectations the writer encounters: the expectation of the artist you’re writing about, the curator involved, and the reader. Is there a hierarchy of loyalty? Is there someone you write the essay for more than for anyone else?

LAWSON: You’re writing for the readership. You want to be clear and you want to be persuasive, so there’s that. But you’re also writing for the artist, because

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LAWSON: I think there are still geographic specificities that control things.

When you think about the history of modern art from a New York perspective, there is a history about painting or antagonism to painting. Painting is a major feature of it. But when you think about the history in LA, its not. It’s about more diverse kinds of practices with an almost literary aspect, a way of performing out a proposal, like Wallace Berman or Mike Kelley or Chris Burden. That’s what has given solidity and seriousness to the project out here. Painting is just one option out of many, which I think is a good place for it to be. Someone like Laura Owens doesn’t ever think about the death of painting. It’s just not a useful kind of thinking for her, so she’s just not engaged in that and doesn’t need to be. I think it’s been liberating. So yeah, I do think that there are significant differences. I have an idea of a book that would explore, from a historical perspective, this idea of LA being more theoretically grounded and experimental. I have a box full of notes for this book, but it’s such a lot of work, I don’t know if I’ll ever get to it.

Hunter Braithwaite is a writer and editor based in Memphis, Tennessee.

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NEW WORK

Attractive Figure, 2015. Oil on canvas, 182.8 x 182.8 cm. Courtesy the artist

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MAURICIO GONZALEZ

Getting Ready, 2015. Oil on canvas, 182.8 x 182.8 cm. Courtesy the artist

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NEW WORK

Zebra Sausages, 2015. Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 182.8 cm. Courtesy the artist

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MAURICIO GONZALEZ

Got Fish? NO, 2015. Oil on canvas, 142.4 x 142.4 cm. Courtesy the artist

Mauricio Gonzalez was born in 1978 in Havana and arrived in the United States in 2000. Predominately a painter, his work reflects an integrated practice of autobiographical origin that challenges and demystifies painting. Gonzalez received a BFA in painting from New World School of Arts, Miami. His recent solo exhibitions include Show me your Ballerinas at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2015), Incommensurability Studies at Cardi Black Box Gallery, Milan, and Speed of Life, at Fredric Snitzer Gallery (both 2012). Recent group exhibitions include Last Exit: Paiting, Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami (2015); VOX III, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia (2013); and Merzbau-Now, Fredric Snitzer Gallery (2011). Gonzalezâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has been acquired by the Martin Margulies Collection, Miami, and by the Cohen Family Collection, New York, among others. He is represented by Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami, where he lives and works.

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ANDY SWEET:

New Year’s Eve Parties on the Old South Beach GARY M O N RO E

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All Andy Sweet photographs are courtesy Lisa Stone Arts

My friend Andy Sweet and I were collaborators on the South Beach Photographic Project, which we initiated in 1977 shortly after completing graduate school and worked on together until his death in 1982. The South Beach of the sixties, seventies, and halfway through the eighties was culturally and historically significant. It wasn’t as “blighted” as has been claimed (and accepted as gospel), though a building moratorium did throw hotels, apartments, and storefronts into disrepair. But what existed there then was the opposite of blight, unless you were a politician or developer whose interests lay only in real estate and not in the people. The residents and seasonal visitors during this period

lived life fully and vivaciously.

My barometer for the strength and vibrancy of the elderly South Beach community during this time was measured by the New Year’s Eve parties that just about every hotelier threw for his guests each season. In the mid-1970s, when Andy and I photographed these parties for the first time, they were otherworldly to us twentysomethings. Hotels up and down Ocean Drive, Washington Avenue, and Collins Avenue were alive and vivid. Old people were living it up! We’d walk from one hotel lobby to the next, perhaps going to twenty-five parties in one night. There must have been more than one hundred,

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maybe two hundred in all, and these old people danced like young people. It’s true that the parties started at five pm and often ended before the ball dropped in Times Square, but this is inconsequential. What mattered most was that these seventy and eighty-year-olds celebrated life with varying degrees of abandon. There’s a lesson here.

With the influx of Cuban refugees from the Mariel boatlift, the efforts to redevelop South Beach, and the campaign to secure recognition of the area’s art deco buildings by the National Register of Historic Places, South Beach was inexorably changing. These external forces beat attrition. Those New Year’s Eve parties began trailing off in the early ’80s, and by 1987 there were just two, and these were lackluster. By this time, hotels were being renovated, bars were added, clubs were opening, Lincoln Road was coming back, and the rest is history.

This most remarkable chapter of history centered on these elderly people, who were so inconsequential to popular culture and the media that they seemed to have vanished as if they never existed, as if their community was never there. Andy and I knew, even in the moment, that this unique cultural outpost mattered, that there was something remarkable about the time, the place, and the people. We were too young to fully comprehend our own history. Having both been born and raised in Miami Beach, we were too close to it to get it, to realize that the lives of these funny old people were actually deadly serious, that they were the last of a lineage whose roots extend back to the Polish shtetels; many bore tattooed numbers on their forearms evidencing their survival of the Holocaust. They arrived in America through Ellis Island, where they were greeted by the Statue of Liberty, and made New York and the northeast their homes. But they dreamed of sunshine. And when they retired, they made South Beach theirs, the last resort. It was where they came not to forget, but to remember, to maintain their roots, identity, and rare ethos. America’s never really been a melting pot, and in South Beach these Jewish men and women lived out their lives not just in paradisiac Miami Beach, but together, in accord with their beliefs—and that was beautiful. And it was what Andy and I photographed. 

Miami Beach was still a community when Andy was murdered in 1982. Mourners filled Temple Emanu-El; in fact, many people couldn’t get inside, so they paid their respects from the steps and the sidewalks.

Andy was not organized and didn’t pay attention to ensuring his archive. So when he died, there were boxes of negatives, work prints (7 inches square) and large final prints (15 inches square), but no notes or, needless to say, instructions. I, perhaps too soon after his death, submitted a plan to conserve and forward his life’s work, starting with putting the material in acid-free storage boxes. But at the time, his family was understandably emotionally crippled and nothing happened. Not for years, which turned into decades. Plans were eventually made for Andy’s archive to be turned over to the University of Miami, but the family was not content with the terms and, still, could not let go.

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Then the unimaginable happened, again: Miami’s highestend art storage facility, where the family had placed the material for safekeeping, lost most of it, including the negatives.

Extant large prints had faded terribly (a curse of color photographic emulsion), and we all thought that was the end of it.

But instead it was call to action: Andy’s sister and close friend of mine, Ellen Moss, and her significant other, Stan Hughes, stepped up to the plate to undertake resurrecting Andy’s legacy.

For a while it seemed fruitless, but Stan is a skilled graphic designer with fine instincts and after pursing Andy’s work and talking with me, among other things, he was very empathetic and began treating Andy’s work like his own. Stan scanned the work prints, which made 80 percent of Andy’s choice images available, and color-corrected these in accordance with Andy’s sensibilities. Andy was a meticulous craftsman and Stan reestablished a lost treasure. He, Ellen, and Andy’s other sister Nancy are having estate prints made, which are exquisite, reminiscent of Andy’s originals, and given the precision of digital technology, are, to me, as fine to finer. Now family and friends are promoting Andy Sweet’s photography, so, at last, it can be appreciated on many levels. 

My work complemented Andy’s and vice-versa. His, being colorful and irreverent, was most appealing to the masses, more so than my black-and-white interpretations. Andy’s photographs echoed the vivaciousness of the people, without any artifice or interference or theory. He followed no rules, happily photographing in midday light. He was not given to deliberation; he didn’t need to be, as he was certain, trusting his instincts each time he released his Hasselblad’s shutter.

Andy’s approach was consistent: he would walk up to a stranger, raise his camera to his eyes, quickly focus, and take the picture. We did have an advantage: we, Jewish too, were a half-century younger than the people we were among and we were sort of surrogates for their grandchildren up north. But Andy’s snapshot-like images are deceptively simple. The photographs are formally perfect and philosophically dense, eliciting each viewer’s own interpretation. That is, they give nothing away; they show, albeit subjectively, what a fraction of a second looked like within a cordoned-off space. The meanings of these pictures—the lives of the individuals, the social setting they occupied, and the history they’ve made—rest on the shoulders of the viewers.

After Andy’s death, I continued our South Beach Photographic Project through 1987, by which time the elderly Jewish population that had characterized South Beach was so far gone that there was almost nothing left of it. The many who have discovered South Beach, or Miami for that matter, after this time might not know that for decades the southern tip of the island of Miami Beach, from Government Cut to Lincoln Road, was a refuge for old world Jewish people, a community that was unified by their religious mores and a unique lifestyle.

The clubs and bars in the hotel lobbies of today were makeshift synagogues just a generation ago, where orthodox Jewish men

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THE PHOTOGRAPHS GIVE NOTHING AWAY; THEY SHOW, ALBEIT SUBJECTIVELY, WHAT A FRACTION OF A SECOND LOOKED LIKE WITHIN A CORDONED-OFF SPACE.

prayed twice daily. I could go on, but suffice it to say that during those years, I could have any parking space along Ocean Drive, day or night.

Gary Monroe has photographed South Beach’s old world Jewry, nearly every part of Florida, and throughout Haiti, among other destinations worldwide. He is the author of The Highwaymen: Florida’s African American Landscape Painters and other books about Outsider art in Florida.

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GIANT-SIZE MAN-THING NAT H AN I E L S AN DL E R

Reality: Plato found it in the shadowy confines of a cave—Descartes, in a syllogism . . . Cogito ergo sum . . . “I think, therefore I am.” They blew it—both of them.

—STEVE GERBER, Adventure into Fear #19 (December 1973) FALLING THROUGH TIME AND SPACE may sound terrifying, but for space demons and interplanetary warlords, it’s really just an end to a means. Earth appears a pretty easy place to conquer if you’ve got super-villain powers and certainly worth the sniff of a forked-tongue-fire-breathing-winged-devil. Us God-fearing earthlings would like to think the proper authorities are monitoring all cross-dimensional wormholes, but the government is mostly unaware of one right in our own backyard. The Nexus of All Realities is located in the Florida Everglades and as the name suggests, it’s a portal to every single current or possible reality.

Basically down the street, this discomforting gateway to the infinite existences of a vast multiverse hovers over the wilting sawgrass, a few angry gators, and even fewer confused swamp rats. It’s one of those thresholds you probably don’t want to pass through, not to mention greet any visitors from the other side.

A FICTIONAL DEUS EX MACHINA, the Nexus of All Realities from the Marvel Comics continuity is guarded by a soggy swamp monster known as the Man-Thing. Countless absurd things come through the Nexus in the creature’s chronicles—most famously the alien Howard the Duck (of the later, notorious 1986 washout film). The Nexus is primarily used as a plot device for bizarre netherworld beasts and incongruous deep-space enemies, who all somehow plopped themselves in

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the boggy waters of the Everglades. Accidentally opened by a member of a cult that worships a prophetess who foretold the demise of Atlantis, the Nexus is also an attractive force for the behavior of peculiar humans.

Man-Thing is a muck monster and effectively unkillable, due to his body composition of sticks and slime alongside his ability to reform itself after maiming. He was once a military scientist named Ted Sallis who lived in the swamp with his wife Ellen Brandt, working on recreating the super soldier serum that enhanced Captain America. In Sallis’s origin story, terrorists try to steal the formula, Ellen betrays him, and during a desperate getaway, his car plunges into a marsh as he stabs himself with the serum. He rises from the abysmal sludge changed, a Man-Thing unable to speak and barely sentient. Empathy is the creature’s only form of communication. Wandering the swamp, defending good from evil while understanding nothing but the emotions of other beings: love, hate, rage, and, most importantly, fear. Lovecraft would have been proud.

THE MOTIF OF THE SWAMP MONSTER isn’t a hugely new concept and wasn’t in the 1970s, either, when the great Stan Lee and Roy Thomas created him. Two months after Man-Thing’s first appearance (Adventure into Fear #10, October 1972), the more famously named Swamp Thing of Detective Comics hit newsstands (House of Secrets #92, July 1971). Strangely, the writers who launched the two characters—Gerry Conway (MT) and Len Wein (ST)—were roommates at the time. It’s hard to imagine two roommate comic book writers not spit-balling over their respective and basically identical projects, but neither publisher decided on legal action, most likely due to similarities to another

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character named the Heap from the 1940s. Copyrighting, litigating, or claiming ownership of the concept of a swamp monster is for some reason not feasibleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;nebulous like the beasts themselves.

Virtually unknown outside of the sphere of hardcore comic book nerds, Man-Thing is one of the more eccentric and thought-provoking stories of South Florida ever created. Though the miry character has had a few iterations since its first appearance, the iconic original series ran in color from January 1974

to October 1975 and was written entirely by Gerber, a relatively unknown scribe who took to comics because he hated the drudgery of advertising. For thirty-nine issues, Gerber crafted one of the most legendary runs of comic book writing youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll ever encounter.

Through the muck and the hardwood, his macabre Man-Thing fought demons and real estate developers, but never once speaks, severely limiting a medium based half on words.

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The Miami Rail would like to thank

for their continued support.

blur. Chaos, struggle, and the unknown are constant, much like the landscape of the Everglades itself. Man-Thing embodies the terrain emotionally, a literal and figurative sponge and, like the swamp, his story can only be told by the constantly rotating cast of people who interact with it.

ABSURDITY IS WELCOME in this environment, but also understood when your comic book title is a childish synonym for a penis. Lee came up with the name and had to have known.

Apparently, double meanings were not lost on either the fans or the creators, since there were five issues of GiantSize Man-Thing (“Giant-Size” being an occasional bonus feature indicating more pages). The humor doesn’t stop there; the beast falls trying to take the stairs and in one issue he’s caught and placed in a museum, where he awkwardly bumps into the walls, confused. And damn it, he’s actually kind of cute.

BUT HE IS GOOD. It is good. He saves an abandoned baby, a wayward radio DJ, damsels in distress, and numerous people the reader identifies as good. Probably a testament to the era’s attitude toward reptiles, Man-Thing also seems to really hate alligators and sometimes flings about snakes. Archetypes of evil physically burn at the touch of his branch-like appendages. Sensing fear, he scalds the skin of his frightened enemies for “whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing’s touch,” an oft-repeated line. Lumbering constantly—wet and fighting emotional onslaught—Man-Thing battles demons as well as evil men. For several issues,

the main antagonist is a man named F. A. Schist, who is dead-set on draining the swamp to build an airport. Developers, even in fantasy, remain a looming threat to the imagined purity of South Florida.

Another fantasy is that Schist does not succeed.

Red-eyed and endlessly weary, Man-Thing actually looks like Cthulhu the Lovecraftian sea monster and deity that inflicts untold mental horrors onto those who behold it. Mentally, the former sentience of Sallis burgeons through recognizing objects or feelings that are human, but the slime-crawler’s sanity is all but erased and memory is an endless

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ALL OF THIS IS GERBER’S WAY of reminding us through the lens of a swamp monster that human existence is absurd and deeply existential. His message seems progressive in nature, particularly with his portrayals of strong female characters, and in giving a voice (albeit, somewhat crudely) to the Native Americans in their fight with the developer Schist. Gerber, who died in 2008, actually writes himself into the final issue of his own run of ManThing (#22), claiming all of it was true and he was merely recounting the stories told to him by a wizard who crossed through the Nexus of All Realities. We suspend belief yet again, only to purposefully wonder at the unanswered questions that Man-Thing cannot ask and cannot mindfully choose to help or destroy. The battle against demons is not in our control.

Reality vulnerably bends while fate is cruelly left to a mindless pile of mud and branches.

We must find solace in the fact that he is good. It is good.

Nathaniel Sandler is a writer and the founding director of Bookleggers Library and will gladly spend any amount of time talking about swamp monsters with you.

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MĂIASTRA

A History of Romanian Sculpture in Twenty-Four Parts IGO R GYAL AKUTHY

PART III: PROTEUS There is hunger in my walk this morning. As I make my way south through Dorobanti, I pass by a few interwar statuary memorials standing languidly in the late morning sun. Their presence along my route heralds the masterpieces of Romanian sculpture I will find waiting for me in the modern wing of the National Museum.

The National Museum of Romanian Art, or the MNAR, is housed inside the old Royal Palace on Revolution Square in Bucharest. The museum is divided into two large wings: the European gallery and the Romanian, the latter of which is divided again between medieval and modern art. With notable exceptions, the European gallery is a gaudy mess of lovely, unimportant paintings by the Old Masters. The modern wing in the Romanian gallery, however, is a vast, comprehensive collection of the surviving remnants of a once-teeming pool of Romanian and Hungarian artists driven by competition and camaraderie to the forefront of European art. The golden age of Romanian sculpture, presented simply in a chronological sequence of well-lit, well-curated galleries, is a story of fathers and sons (and in many, far too often overlooked cases, daughters). [Note: This relationship also serves as a metaphor for the Romanian Academy’s filial admiration of the French school of sculpture in the early twentieth century.]

Represented in these galleries are the fathers: elders Karl Storck, Paul Fosaeneanu, Wladimir Hegel, Stefan IonescuValbudea, and Ion Georgescu; and their sons: Frederic and Carol Storck; Oscar Späthe, Constantin Brancusi (our mighty Hephaestus), and Dimitrie Paciurea (our Proteus, le vilain petit canard). These sons, students of their elders’ work, quickly became fathers themselves, teachers to a new generation of sons: the romantic Oscar Han, the sentimental Filip Marin; the indestructible Ion Jalea, and the interminable Ion Irimescu; the socialist realist Boris Caragea and the realistic socialist Constantin Baraschi; and man of the people Géza Vida. And the daughters: Milita Petrascu, the Turkish spy; Parisian ex-pats Irina Codreanu, Céline Emilian, and Margareta Cossaceanu; and professor Zoe Baicoianu, once my colleague and friend.

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Among my favorite pieces are Ionescu-Valbudea’s Michael the Fool, a smirking example of the Renaissance trope of anatomy as allegory, exhibited first in Paris in 1885 and now seated restlessly in the courtyard of the large palace; Gheorghe Anghel’s The Prayer, a bronze statuette of a rural nun in traditional habit, which, despite what I consider to be Anghel’s occasional inconsistency, is certainly one of the finest pieces in the entire collection; and Milita Petrascu’s Angel, a primitive, abstract form carved from wood and placed atop a marble base, which bears a strong stylistic resemblance to the work of her mentor Brancusi.

The National Gallery’s Brancusi room holds a number of the master’s early works, as well as some studies for later ones. Like Brancusi’s best pieces, however, the room is defined by its absences, namely those sculptures housed in the artist’s old atelier in Paris.

Selon moi, a more appropriate exhibition of this particular artist’s oeuvre would be a single white millstone plunked down in the center of an empty white room, though it is certainly fascinating to see evidence of his more representational origins. The Paciurea room of the National Gallery, however, is one of the finest displays of Romanian sculpture in the world. If Brancusi’s intent was to strip classical statuary of what Umberto Boccioni referred to in 1912 as its “barbarism and lumpishness,” Paciurea made these mythological encrustations his singular focus.

Sculpted mainly in the 1920s, after World War I and the tragic death of his fiancée in 1919, and inspired by Gustave Moreau’s paintings and poet Mihai Eminescu’s dark odes to the changeling beasts, Paciurea’s chimera sculptures were initially poorly received. Many scholars and critics lamented that they were a waste of a talent almost universally acknowledged as masterful. [Note: Paciurea’s gifts were first recognized after he exhibited the public work Giant in 1906, one of Bucharest’s “wandering rocks.” See Part I.] Paciurea’s obsessive preoccupation with the chimera seemed to some an attempt by the troubled sculptor to transform himself into the elemental forces each of his monsters represented: the night, the sky, the earth, and the air. [Note: This is a preoccupation he and I share. See Part II.] A solemn and solitary man, Paciurea’s enigmatic reputation among the cultural elite of Bucharest cast him as a figure simultaneously stimulated and tormented by his fantastical mind, and

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rather immune to the trappings of reality. The poet Ion Minulescu wrote of him in 1932: “He spoke little, he spoke rarely, he spoke slowly, he spoke like he was lost somewhere, deep in a dream, he spoke as for himself and his sentences were very much like his Chimeras.” 1 The distance between artist and subject, between Paciurea and his chimerae, is approximately the same distance as that between art historian and artist. The temporary shortening of this distance has sated the hunger of my morning.

Leaving the museum, I cross the busy Calea Victoriei and walk south. I sit down at a once-bustling café. Before she passed, my wife and I would come here in the early evenings to take an aperitif and share department gossip with those admittedly few colleagues of mine she found sympathiques. Now the café has lost its caché, which is fine by me, as its lack of customers affords a bit of peace as I note some loose thoughts. I order a drink from the young waiter, and start at the sound of what I realize only now are the first spoken words of my day. I let my mind wander over the works I have just enjoyed. As usual, I return to Paciurea’s chimera sculptures: rich, strange objects impossible to comprehend 1 Ion Minulescu, “Dupa inmormantarea sculptorului Paciurea,” Adevarul, no. 14894 (July 26, 1932): 2.

without imagining the dark, roiling interior of the artist’s mind.

At the Official Salon in Bucharest in 1927, Paciurea won the National Prize for his Chimera of the Air, the most majestic of all his chimera works. The Salon’s decision was a controversial one, leaving many questioning how this bizarre form qualified as a masterpiece of contemporary sculpture. A human head sits atop a long and winding neck that bifurcates downward into three equally sinuous gypsum streams, each flowing to form the creature’s various parts: rigid goat legs with cloven hooves below, a serpentine tail behind, and a pair of delicate, angelic wings ascending in the space above. The Chimera of the Air is perched lordotically on a molten and striated peak, and resembles the enormous Deco hood ornament of some great, grumbling American automobile of the 1940s. She is hurtling forward through time, while her creator fumbles along somewhere far behind her.

Later that night I find myself at a concert of Bucharest’s George Enescu Symphony, the glowing red heart of this city’s cultural scene, housed in the domed Ateneul Român concert hall, exquisitely designed by Frenchman Albert Galleron in 1888. The main salle is an ornate and intimate room in the round, its walls covered with garish yet fascinating frescos depicting Romania’s history from the Dacians on through World War I. [Note: This is a history we will be dissecting more carefully in future installments.] Romanian classical musicians are some of the most talented in Europe; this evening they are playing Dvorak and the Bohemians with grace amid the sleepy awe of an older and urbane audience. When the show is finished, not wishing to mill about and make light conversation, I duck out into the warm, dark night and walk south.

Paciurea used to walk the streets of Bucharest at night, “hugging the walls,” as Oscar Han wrote in 1933, “to preserve the distance between him and his fellow human beings,” a distance I’ve been attempting to shrink all day.2 Solitary though he was, however, he may not have been entirely alone. Chimera of the Night, sculpted in 1928, is a large, bronze owl with a childish face and inconsequential breasts. Unlike most of the other chimerae, she is at rest. I imagine her watching over Paciurea during his evening strolls through the Romani neighborhoods, hugging the walls and stopping only for the occasional contemptuous piss in an alleyway.

As I hug the walls of the dilapidated villas myself, a stray dog barks at me violently, interrupting the quiet of Bucharest’s side streets with her anguished howls. I am walking in the melancholic wake of a satisfying day. In front of me is Paciurea, along with all the sons and daughters of Romanian sculpture, whose voies I follow dutifully, as they are all mothers and fathers to me.

In our solitude we commune, and once again await the hunger of the morning.

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 ClujNapoca with his Lakeland terrier Bausa.

2 Oscar Han, “D. Paciurea,” Arta (January 1933), reprinted in Dalti si pensule (Bucharest, Ed. Minerva, 1970), 14.

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Participants at the Bodily Algorithms workshop, April 4, 2011, Ian Potter Sculpture Court at Monash University Museum of Art, hosted by Tim Schork, Charles Anderson, and Gideon Obarzanek

TARA McDOWELL with Camila Marambio

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his conversation took place on two different occasions at the same restaurant in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in February and early March 2015. The curiosity that sparked this exchange is the recent move by the art historian and curator Tara McDowell to Australia in the capacity of Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at MADA, Monash University of Art, Design & Architecture.

— CAMILA MARAMBIO (MIAMI RAIL): Tara, you have what seems like a very sincere commitment to novel ways of furthering curatorial writing and practice and have written about the particularities of recent artistic and curatorial shifts. Could you describe what informs your thinking in creating and directing one of the few Ph.D. programs in curatorial practice?

voice organizing exhibitions. This critique felt so reactionary, so pointless, and perhaps not where we should be putting our energies. There was just a sense of exhaustion with this debate and a sense that we are all simply creative or cultural workers—or this other kind of emergent creative worker class that people have called “the cognitariat.”

TARA McDOWELL: I cofounded The Exhibitionist journal and worked for several years as the editor, so I was in the very privileged position of having a flood of curatorial writing coming to me by really talented practitioners. When you have, let’s say, fifteen to twenty writers per issue, you begin to notice certain emerging themes, common interests, or common questions. For one issue, there were a number of people who were generally feeling very tired of the debate about whether artists were acting like curators or curators were acting like artists. It was in the wake of the polemic around Anton Vidokle’s essay “Art Without Artists?,” which criticized of the auteur curator who instrumentalizes art and acts as an artistic

RAIL: I read that issue and remember sharing the feeling of exhaustion with that line of thinking—that it only breached a sense of solidarity among creative workers.

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McDOWELL: In response I wrote a text called “The Postoccupational Condition,” in which I attempt to map this shared situation onto debates around precarity and labor, trying to understand what it means when we no longer identify with a specific kind of labor or occupation. Does it mean that solidarity is no longer possible? Suddenly it seems like a situation where we’re all laboring, like freelancers, on creative projects with no support, no pay, no infrastructure, and no accountability, not even a job

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description. Rather than insisting on the dichotomy between artist and curator, I wanted to question how this emergent, hybridized, independent project-based person survives. What are his or her labor issues? There is a term, the precariat, which combines the proletariat and precarious and perhaps best defines this shared experience. There are strong, optimistic arguments for what the emergent class can do (if it coheres in any way) and there are very negative, pessimistic responses about atomization. That is the real concern: every person becomes an island when creative work becomes project-based. You fund-raise for every project, you are willing to accept so little, and you are never not working, but

you do it because you care and you’ve invested so much of yourself.

RAIL: I wonder if you know a body of work by the artist Cecilia Vicuña that she calls Lo Precario or “The Precarious,” in which she expresses the impermanent, fluid, and all-encompassing nature of artistic activity through poetry, image, and performance. She reflects specifically on how precariousness is gendered and specifically “southern.”

McDOWELL: I’m also beginning to understand how precarity is gendered, and “southern.” I feel the precariat is not the freelancer—who we usually think of a as a white, upper-class, upwardly mobile

Western worker (designer, ad man, or otherwise)—but instead the housewife, who is the ultimate figure of multitasking. Housewives have an unending labor activity that do because of care and emotional investment. There is no “office,” of course; the work happens in the home, but it also happens everywhere and all the time. The housewife is meant to be a bit of a provocation, a nod to an imbalance in the art world. Most well-paid positions, such as museum directors, are filled by men. But if you were to take a cross-section of the volunteer labor of a museum, such as the interns, mostly women do this kind of work. Even the vast majority of assistant curators or emerging curators are women: hungry, ambitious women who

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are willing to do things for free and often don’t organize or have a sense of shared standards. When labor organizes, you are able to establish standard artists fees (what the New York-based activist organization W.A.G.E. is working toward) and curatorial fees. Any time a curator organizes a project, the first thing to go is her fee: she will insist that the artist is paid before she is. The move away from defined labels or defined roles toward a looser definition of a cultural worker needs to be interrogated in light of these labor issues.

I’ve also been thinking about what Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “Epistemologies of the South” and what it means to insist on the value of speaking from a specific,

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ANY TIME A CURATOR ORGANIZES A PROJECT, THE FIRST THING TO GO IS HER FEE: SHE WILL INSIST THAT THE ARTIST IS PAID BEFORE SHE IS. THE MOVE AWAY FROM DEFINED LABELS OR DEFINED ROLES TOWARD A LOOSER DEFINITION OF A CULTURAL WORKER NEEDS TO BE INTERROGATED IN LIGHT OF THESE LABOR ISSUES.

Emily Floyd, This place will always be open, 2012. Ian Potter Sculpture Court at Monash University Museum of Art. Photo: John Brash

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southern or indigenous position, which is complex in Australia—a place that is geographically south but politically north.

Haiti is farther north geographically, but is south if we follow De Sousa Santo’s argument, so it’s a socio-political-economical distinction rather than a geographical distinction. But I do feel that Australia suffers from an occasional sense that everything from outside matters very much, but that what you are doing here doesn’t matter as much. Paradoxically, of course, it is such an incredibly well-resourced country and with such important histories and traditions of its own. I’ve noticed a kind of identity crisis in which a constant negotiating of one’s position with the global contemporary coexists with an insistent localism, an intensely unapologetic local position that refuses to care what the outside thinks.

So, there is a range of different people adopting one or the other position or something in between.

RAIL: Does your interest in founding a curatorial practice Ph.D. program have to do with the need to create a set of standards for the well being of practicing curators?

McDOWELL: Well, before I started this program I traveled around and talked to as many people as I could who were involved in curatorial education, because even though I worked as a curator I’ve never had any formal curatorial education myself. I did my undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. in art history, so I’m coming at it from another perspective. But there are very good things that come when you are slightly displaced from your professional activity. After my study tour, I decided that I didn’t want to add to the literature on curating, which often feels tedious and narrow and too self-referential. It speaks of how expansive the world is and how expansive curatorial practice is, but the writing itself is so narrow. So the idea of a writing retreat came about as a form for the program, an anti-conference. I thought about the biennial as a format and perhaps making a biennial retreat, but only in that the retreat happens every two years!

[Laughs.] And I thought the retreat should also be off-center, which Australia already is, but because of the difficulty of getting

interesting curators to come teach so far away, it would be more useful to have the retreat be related to a major art event. That way my students would have a meaningful encounter outside of Australia.

I had also been thinking a lot about the German theorist and artist Stephan Dillemuth. We were at the first Tbilisi Triennial together, where he spoke about “bohemian research,” or that no artistic research ever truly happens in institutions. Everything interesting happens outside of institutions. An institution brings people together, but essentially you need to carve out space outside of institutions, you need to have skepticism or to prod some distance between yourself and the institution. Artists have the studio as such a space, but curators rarely have space outside the institution because they are always working on institutional projects and have little time for speculative thinking, wild thinking, thinking outside productivity or outcomes. I decided that it might be useful for curators to have this.

I don’t believe in any space totally outside of art institutions, but the goal was to create some space or retreat from that position, and that it would involve intense hospitality and conviviality.

RAIL: Five years ago, I was asking myself the same sort of question: How do I create a space where I and other colleagues can think and act aimlessly, uselessly even, outside of institutional constraints and pressures. It was a perfect coincidence that around that same time I traveled to Tierra del Fuego and discovered a place that understands its profound difference; a place so remote and ultimately so “southern” that it is almost physically absent from the world—though it exists so extensively in peoples’ imaginations—that it offered me a residency away from the art institution. However, already during the first residency period that I organized there, Tierra del Fuego revealed itself as a place of such complicated positions and geopolitics that it requires an evolving relationship to interests and positions, which ultimately involves much more work than if I was working for an institution! I suppose that the model of the retreat as opposed to the residency allows for a sort of withdrawal from the context

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that can truly afford one the time and space to delve into a single task.

McDOWELL: Yes, the retreat is a more speculative format. Carolyn ChristovBakargiev made use of the retreat as one of the positions explored by Documenta 13, but I was also thinking about Banff, in Canada (as was she), and about how the residency is so common for artists, but much less common for curators. Until a few years ago, it was almost unheard of that a curator could do a residency—all spaces of escape, or nonprofessional, nonproductive spaces of activity felt much less accessible for curators than for artists, whom I think of as actually coming from that space and then stepping into the space of institutions and then again retreating to the studio. Whereas the curator has nowhere to retreat to.

I have seven Ph.D. students. Of those seven, three are independent and four are embedded in institutions, but even those who are independent have been at some point in their lives at institutions and only left them to come to the program. Being in an institution is the default position for the curator, but not for the artist.

Sure, the art world and the exhibition are institutions, but I’m speaking about where you go every day, a daily institutional life. The retreat is a political gesture in the hyper-production, hyper-activity of the curatorial, a belief that we can create a space for other types of thinking.

Curatorial discourse feels to me very circular, over-determined, and self-referential, and it can be difficult to get outside of that model and language. Latitudes, which is two curators from Barcelona, emailed me that at a curatorial master’s program yesterday, the students were shocked because they had spoken about art—the students told them, “we never get to talk about art anymore.” This is the extreme situation we are in.

The retreat is co-organized with the curatorial collective Vessel and set in Bari, Italy, just after the opening of the Venice Biennale, and we decided to concentrate on curatorial writing. Since several of the members of Vessel are writing dissertations in English, which is not their first language, and raises issues around translation as well. I think there is an incredible

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frustration in that dual displacement: first being displaced from your primary language and then being displaced into the language of academia. It’s a double alienation that happens both on the part of the writer and on the part of the reader because academic writing can be very alienating. There’s not as much pleasure in the act of writing or reading in this dual displacement, so we began to think about how you could own those mistranslations.

People who are non-native speakers use English in an incredibly beautiful way that is often evocative in an entirely different way than a native speaker would be capable of, and we hoped to find ways to bring that into the writing.

RAIL: But there is also a dangerous process of mimicry that occurs with non-native and native speakers alike, which is ultimately an adaptive tool that creates an art speak or shared vocabulary that in turn creates a homogenization of contemporary art writing. I just have this sense that there is this latching on to terms at the detriment of all the possible other ways in which we could think to describe the world or what we are doing.

Like you said, writing, for so many curators, is somewhat of an expediency and this is precisely why your idea of retreat seems to me so very poignant. To retreat into the realm of language sounds like a precise form to go deeper. We all want to go deeper into our understanding of the world and of our place in it. When I started working with scientists in Tierra del Fuego, it was because of this thirst. So, at first I strove to grasp every bit of knowledge that the scientists were sharing with me, but in doing so I lost my footing. The stumbling made me realize that rather than try to apprehend all their information, what I had to do was strengthen my position so that when we would converse it would each be from our from our own depths, and this would lead each of us to stay vigilant to one another’s reactions. It is in that shared space that we could actually break through our shallow bottoms.

McDOWELL: Sometimes, in terms of the idea of going deeper, I think of how contemporary art is a constant accrual.

There is always so much more—with every

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biennial, there are forty artists I have never heard of. I can’t imagine another body of knowledge that is so constantly replenishing or so constantly acquiring layers. If you are a historian of pre-Colombian art or the Renaissance, it is a set body of knowledge.

I’m sure there are depths that you can discover, but you certainly don’t have the sense that, “Oh my God, my area of study is constantly growing and growing.” So pressures arise to remain nimble or to remain skimming, treading water on the surface [laughs]—counter-pressures to going deep.

RAIL: How do you deal with the realization and concurrent disillusion that the Eurocentric art world or art system disarms depth and potentially the political agency of artistic and curatorial practices?

McDOWELL: I think you have to believe in the propositional. To me, art is just a space for the propositional. You have to believe in the power of that or of modeling that. Last year, during the Biennale of Sydney, there were a number of calls to boycott the biennial. It was very blackand-white for the activists, you simply do not participate in this event, but it was much more gray for the artists involved.

I felt their pain and agony over this decision and how radically different the decision was for activist and artists. The artists received a fair amount of pressure to withdraw, especially the artists with political practices or socially engaged practices, because for the activists, there would simply be no possibility for any intervention in that space. The only response was nonintervention or boycott.

It was really interesting to see that divide.

It felt like a chasm, artists on one side and activists on the other, and I had never felt that, I had always felt like there was much more of a common ground. I could imagine some artists asking themselves during that event whether they would cross over to the other side.

RAIL: In what way do you envision curatorial Ph.D.’s will change the future? Not only of the field, but beyond it too?

McDOWELL: The MA in curatorial practice has become widespread in the past twenty years, but when I began looking

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for models for the Ph.D. program I was founding in Australia, I found very few existed. It felt like being at the vanguard of something, and that there was a real possibility to shape this new situation.

That it comes out of Melbourne is very exciting because the first of something is not happening in New York or Europe, which means we’re not repeating the same paradigms. There is a kind of provincializing of the centers that is happening, so we can be at the forefront of something from Melbourne. It’s happening in Melbourne because this city has several extremely successful fine art Ph.D. programs, so there’s a phenomenon of artists getting Ph.D.’s, which is not the case in, say, the United States. My feeling about curatorial practice is that there is almost always some kind of artistic precursor to it, so I’m not surprised that’s the case here. The fine art Ph.D. developed in Australia and the United Kingdom and remains a very fraught area—there are plenty of people who will tell you that it is not good for artists and not good for the arts community.

Yet here artists can be supported by the university. If not the university, and not the market (not in Melbourne), where else will they find support? We need artists to be able to afford rent, to raise children, and to have retirement—they deserve that just as much as any participating member of society. As for the new curatorial practice Ph.D., it’s hard to know what the impact will be. The Ph.D. process asks you to be ready to test, defend, and revise your thinking, and then do it all over again.

It’s daunting but also deeply generative.

I hope it gives curators more time, and makes curators more thoughtful and considered, but also more daring.

Camila Marambio is the founder and director of Ensayos, a nomadic research residency program that considers Tierra del Fuego the center of the world. She received an MA in modern art: critical studies at Columbia University and Master of Experiments in Art and Politics at Science Po in Paris; attended the Curatorial Programme at de Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam; and has been curator-in-residence at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and Gertrude Contemporary in Australia.

2015 Vessel/MADA International Curatorial Retreat, Monopoli, Italy. Photos: Tara McDowell

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Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Photo: Yuri Palmin © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

HUN TE R BR AI TH WA I T E

In June 2015, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art moved into its permanent home in Gorky Park in Moscow, in a Rem Koolhaas–designed building constructed around the derelict ruins of a Sovietera restaurant. The opening spate of exhibitions pulled from different segments of contemporary art, providing a moving case for its relevance in today’s Russia.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomorrow is the Question, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Seasons of the World

Ping-Pong Diplomacy

Generosity results in waste, Rem Koolhaas told me over a multicourse lunch served in a closed restaurant. But waste can be reused. The core of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was completed in 1968, surely one of the most generous and wasteful years. It was designed to seat 1,200 people. A generic building to begin with, years of political tumult eroded the restaurant into what Koolhaas said was an exceptional relic.

To stretch this tendon of specificity, his firm excavated such period-specific details—green glass tiles and a striking Soviet mosaic that depicts a woman floating into joyously colored space, complete with a sunburst and a soaring dove—but then clad the entire structure in generic materials like polycarbonate, and used plywood on the interior. Besides the mosaic, what will be remembered most are the two eleven-meter-wide sections of the facade that can be raised or lowered on a whim, offering visual and physical access into the inside of the building. In a society of extreme wealth disparity, this gesture of generosity does more than pay lip service to egalitarian ideals. Inside, the museum takes over two stories, and includes galleries, an education center, and an archive. The open floor plan offers a clear perambulation, even as the translucent exterior walls distort the views of surrounding Gorky Park to a blurred glow.

The criticisms were that this is a billionaire’s museum.

Thank Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club and Eclipse, one of the largest yachts in the world. He is the husband of Garage founder Dasha Zhukova, and the world won’t let her forget it. In the press conference with Zhukova, Koolhaas, and museum director Anton Belov, someone from the Russian media had a question for her. “What was your actual involvement in this museum, and what designer are you wearing?” She demurred, but Koolhaas jumped in, chastising the journalist for the “extremely inappropriate” affront. Koolhaas is always intimidating, and this was no different. You could hear a pin drop. But instead of the light prick of a plummeting needle, we only heard plop, and then, plop plop plop. Ping-Pong balls were falling from the sky, or at least the second floor. Rirkrit Tiravanija had installed a dozen or so Ping-Pong tables, as well as a T-shirt printing shop and a food station where pelminis (Russian dumplings) were made and served. The tables were in response to the conceptual artist Július Koller, for whom table tennis was a motif, and whose works were also on display in the museum. That said, the striking connection wasn’t to art history, but to the public. Or, to put it another way, the piece wasn’t just relational, it was relatable. If table tennis could be used to spur

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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING SPREAD Field Research: A Progress Report, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Photo: Egor Slizyak, Denis Sinyakov © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

détente between the United States and Beijing in 1971, it could also present contemporary art as something more than an asset class, and a museum as something more than a vault.

To Create History These three words are printed on the Garage’s tote bags, such is their centrality to the museum’s mission. Since history has a way of being effaced, or rewritten, the Garage has the first public resource of postwar art history in the country. The Garage Archive Collection and Library comprises articles from local and international media, artist texts, correspondence, photographs and film footage, and more. Leading this landmark effort is Sasha Obukhova, the head of the Garage’s research department. Though the archive’s effects will be most felt in future research about Russian contemporary art, its presence was visible during the opening week through the exhibition The Family Tree of Russian Contemporary Art. At the center of the exhibition is a giant wall diagram charting the major and minor points of Russian art history over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. (In Russian, modern and contemporary are the same word, so the terms modern art and contemporary art are used interchangeably). Artists, writers, musicians, exhibitions, and spaces are all connected through an exhaustive web,

applying the logic of a social network to the field of contemporary art. Key figures like the Lianozovo group and Ilya Kabakov are given equal footing with long-forgotten artists. The effort is important, Obukhova told me, “because not everyone is taken to the future.”

Death is a Mistake That is one of the beliefs of Nikolai Fyodorov, the founder of Russian cosmism, a nineteenth-century school of thought that inspired Anton Vidokle’s striking film This Is Cosmos! (2014).

Shot in cemeteries, fields, and museums throughout Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Crimea—and set to the radiant (and irradiating) drone of John Cale’s 1964-66 album Sun Blindness Music—the film explores the philosophy that strove toward mankind’s common cause: immortality. Death is a mistake; life, like energy, is indestructible. Immortality was to be achieved by using our genetic material to resurrect our parents, who would then do the same, and then the same, stretching back until the dawn of humanity. “Museums should be moved to cemeteries,” the film’s narrator says, “Libraries should become nurseries for the resuscitation of writers.” The process would take thousands of years, which makes it imperative to start immediately. That was a century ago, and it’s tempting to dismiss these ideas as mystic relics,

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but then the narrator states that the whole Soviet experiment was indeed an applied cosmism. They’re of the same time; one left off where the other began. As the camera lingers over a man and a dog bathing in a swift-moving stream, he asks, “What was behind that strange energy that realized such a radical social experiment? The energy that enabled a modernization so rapid a new society that rivaled the most advanced capitalist states, propelling humanity into cosmos?” And if all energy is truly indestructible, where is that energy now? Somewhere toward the middle of the film there’s a shot of an apartment-building-sized mosaic showing a cosmonaut falling through space.

Black Vitrine In 2006, Taryn Simon began a series of photographs of perturbing subject matter against a black field measuring 80 centimeters square, the exact dimensions of Kazimir Malevich’s iconic 1915 painting Black Square. Among the photographed objects are a macaw that has pulled out its feathers due to boredom, a 3-D printed handgun, and a bit of office correspondence rejecting George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Placed within Malevich’s field, they seem to come from the void. For the opening of the Garage, Simon debuted yet another homage to the artist, Black Square XVII (2015). For her first sculptural response to the piece, she took a cubic amount of nuclear slurry from a power plant in Kursk and had it vitrified. The cube, which is solid, is placed underground until it is no longer radioactive.

Only then will it be displayed in the museum, placed inside a now empty section of wall near the bookshop. The process takes one thousand years. While it’s disconcerting to imagine how this relic will compare to the contemporary art of 3015, cultures prone to thousand-year gestures usually run afoul.

Simon surely knows this, so we must consider the piece never being installed—in the words of Sasha Ubukhova, not taken to the future.

LEFT Katharina Grosse, yes no why later, 2015.

Acrylic on fabric, soil and trees, 550 x 4400 x 1800 cm © Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2015. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan/ Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna and Johann König, Berlin. Photo: Ilya Ivanov

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yes no why later There are two possibly entwined traditions that we can attach to Katharina Grosse: the nineteenth-century Romantic landscape and the potential for physical annihilation caused by some sublime avalanche; and then the automatic annihilation of the waking mind central to Abstract Expressionism. Her exhibition yes no why later was on view in the Garage Pavilion, a temporary space designed by Shigeru Ban. One enters the building through a cardboard colonnade, the material already beginning to show its age, even though it was opened in 2012. Inside, three uprooted trees lay in a valley of craggy canvas peaks, further turned into a landscape by the truckloads of soil reflooring the gallery. The

entire thing was covered in paint. Grosseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s landscapes expand outward from the immersed viewer, a whole environment of vicious, oceanic gestures. She paints with the help of an industrial appendage, like Ellen Ripley in Aliens, extending the reach of her limbs, but also obscuring it. I bring up Ripley because if you venture into the underside of the canvas, you arrive on an extraterrestrial plane. On rough soil you walk, seeing the reduced bleed-through of painting, of environment, of the human touch, mediated by technological distance. Perhaps this is what art will look like from the vantage point of one thousand years.

Hunter Braithwaite is a writer and editor based in Memphis, Tennessee.

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ON COPS RO B GOYAN ES

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We would rather sleep than talk: we know what belongs to a watch.

—DOGBERRY, Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

Early colonial policing in the northern United States looked a lot like British policing. Composed of “watches,” the groups were able-enough-bodied volunteers or conscripts designated with making the rounds, usually at night. They watched for fires, kept up sanitation standards, had an eye out for witches, and delivered the “hue and cry”—the alarm system for criminal activity (yelling, mostly).

They were often drunk, and when things weren’t dangerous, they were probably bored. Some watches, though, took the job more seriously and with ethical import. These nobler types pursued violent culprits, and they let you know when the British were near.

Things were different in the Southern states. Besides the common watchmen of countryside hamlets and towns, slave patrols were developed to exercise control over the vast geo-socioeconomic swath of institutionalized slavery. These patrols maintained the spatial order of the day: the monitoring, trafficking, and bondage of minorities. They busted up slave meetings, apprehended runaways, and acted as highway authorities on the rural roads and waters of the antebellum.

During the New Deal era, the Federal Writers’ Project sent out unemployed writers to collect the narratives of 2,300 former slaves. It was an effort to capture the stories before they were lost, and a seventeen-volume folk history was produced. W. L. Bost was a North Carolinian slave, who was eighty-eight years old and semi-free when a woman named Marjorie Jones interviewed him in 1937: Lord child, I remember when I was a little boy, ’bout ten years, the speculators come through Newton with droves of slaves. They always stay at our place. The poor critters nearly froze to death. . . . Us poor niggers never ‘lowed to learn anything. All the readin’ they ever hear was when they was carried through the big Bible. The Massa say that keep the slaves in they places. They was one nigger boy in Newton who was terrible smart. He learn to read an’ write. He take other colored children out in the fields and teach ‘em about the Bible, but they forgit it ‘fore the nex’ Sunday…

Then the paddyrollers, they keep close watch on the poor niggers so they have no chance to do anything or go anywhere. They jes’ like policemen, only worser—‘cause they never let the niggers go anywhere without a pass from his massa.

The slave patrols that Bost described existed before the development of a centralized, bureaucratically organized police force in the United States. These patrols, inherited in part from the codified rules of Barbadian slave law, are contrary to the standard view of the singular slave owner reigning over his plantation.

Slave patrols are perhaps the earliest instance of modern American policing: well-organized tactical units for controlling entire populations, with a high dependence on records and documentation to enforce the moral systems of the day.

Though the differences are vast between today’s cop and the early slave patrol, the parallels are very much worth considering. Systemic violence against blacks and other minorities, legacies of hatred and prejudice, imbalance of power and resources, the struggle—it’s useful to pull this historical thread.

It’s important to note, too, that police, throughout the global history of their existence, spend most of their time regulating traffic, whether it’s by foot, hoof, or wheel.2

1

The number of cops in the United States is approaching one milliion and Cops is the longest-running program in United States television history.

The abstract notion of the contemporary cop didn’t become standard until the start of the twentieth century. The professional cop, the one with the uniform who reports to his precinct and is paid with citizen taxes, didn’t appear until the early mid-1800s with the arrival of mass industrial capitalism and the bloom of urban populations. The first police force was formed in Boston in 1835, the second in Albany in 1845.

The reasons for this appearance are not necessarily rooted in an increase in crime, but rather are a result of technological and cultural changes. New advances in firearms, the arrival of the telephone and automobile, and the rise of the city lead to this new form of policing. Increasing economic striation—both job specialization as a principle and the need to police increasing amounts of wealth and private property—also shaped today’s cop. Alongside these technological and economic changes came a biopolitical rationalism (the logic of population measurement and control) that started dominating social and political theory.

However, the heart of policing remained the same: maintaining social order, no matter what it is.

A new model of professional policing emerged in the 1930s while the United States was in the throes of its Great Depression.

Besides staggering unemployment, it was also widely reported that a crime wave was sweeping the nation, though this fact is disputed. 3 The federal government started to get more deeply embedded in the process of policing as a result—as the perceived threat of crime grew (in tandem with other real and perceived threats of the time), so did the tools and means with which to fight it.

Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was founded, and policing was forever changed to include centralized reporting systems such as fingerprint files, forensic laboratories, and bureaucratized specializations.

1 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9-11.

2

Mark Greif, Seeing Through Police, n+1 22 (Spring 2015).

3 Samuel A. Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), 3-10.

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Hoover, in his bid for power, labeled criminals “vermin of the worst type” who needed to be found out and eradicated. These developments helped lead to a new typology for policing, one aimed at sanitizing society of vile, villainous elements (a new typology for criminals, too). And in the pre-civil rights/Jim Crow era, this led to deeper divides between minorities and police.

This new conception of policing, combined with prevailing attitudes about gender, propagated the idea of police as hypermasculine agents for good, heroes who maintained the straightness of society, who rescued kitties, and fought crime. It was a utopic view of the police, rooted in a deep fear about the direction of society, and in the understanding that we cannot defend ourselves always at all times against violence and wrongdoing.

Trust in this model of policing was shaken by the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, when the veil was removed and police were exposed as agents for protecting the interests of the powerful. Since then, reform has become the standard model for police, which calls for ranks to be diverse and integrated into communities, periodically cleansed of corrupt elements, and dedicated to protecting and serving citizens.

The beating of Rodney King in 1991 was the first mass-distributed footage of police brutality. It brought into question the policing of black communities and the violent treatment of minorities. Nearly a quarter century later, in 2015, ubiquitous cameras and social media has laid bare the rampant use of excessive force and racial prejudice by many police, doubly disconcerting at a time of their increasing militarization. Serious (see: radical) reform is clearly needed—minorities, particularly young black men, are being murdered not only now, but have been for a very long time.

Right here in Miami, where historic Overtown was originally Colored Town, the land deeds spelled out segregation when they were drafted in 1896 at the time of incorporation.

Southern black men and women and Caribbean men and women came to lay down Henry Flagler’s railroads, and this community was policed harshly by Dade County cops and routinely terrorized by the military that were based nearby. A “dual system of justice” was in effect, one that tolerated crimes against blacks committed by the police. 4 This dual system still exists today, except that now it incarcerates millions of young black men based on mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession.

For many, the police are a feeling. They’re a twinge in the stomach as the red and blue hits the iris, a real or imagined breathlessness at the approach of uniform. If the police are meant to protect the citizens, then a lot of these cops need some serious policing.

There are, of course, police who do good work, those who prevent and solve crimes that are of a serious public interest to everyone. Those who proclaim that All Cops Are Bastard probably don’t have a solution to the still-fundamental problem of security in a violent society—after all, not only cops are

bastards. Citizens across categories also continue to arm themselves, so that what we have effectively is an arms race in this country, a multivalent civil war.

Still, as the videos will continue to illustrate for a long time to come, many cops are acting on a historical tendency embedded in American police culture: treat non-white males as inferior, and thus, as the enemy.

If a cop asks you out, say yes. Here’s Why: 1. Who doesn’t love a man (or woman) in uniform?

—“15 Reasons to Date a Police Officer,” eHarmony.com My friends James and Barbara own an old Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. You can see where the signage POLICE used to be on the trunk of the car. We were in Key Largo recently and went to a bar where a drunken patron bumped into me, who thereupon bought me another Corona with a lime in it. As I sat in the backseat on the way home, I remembered when I was fifteen years old riding my bike in downtown Miami, dressed all in black and watching the cops do these big group bike riding exercises (it was in advance of the Federal Trade Agreement of the Americas summit and the concomitant protests).

As I stood across the street from them, I snapped photos, catching the too-obvious symbolic implications of a big group of police in front of a Starbucks. One of them came over to me. And then a dozen came over to me. They took my camera and went through the photos, asked me questions about whether I was associated with any of the local anarchist organizations, ran my name in their name-running machine. They all lined up in front of me, though I didn’t feel too intimidated, since some of them were laughing and seemed generally in a good mood. I was, after all, only dressed in black.

One of the cops went through my backpack, and started to look through my notebook. It makes me cringe to think of what he saw—vague poetic musings on the state of the world, the state of my own godless teenaged self, assumptions about his position of power and of authority in general. After leafing through the pages, he told me that I still had time to seek help for the dark things I was thinking and feeling.

Indeed, the totality by which a social order is maintained is a great rainbow of human activity. And I am lucky to be on a certain side of it.

Rob Goyanes has work forthcoming in the Paris Review Daily and Interview magazine. He is still building a book about a paper airplane.

4 Paul S. George, Policing Early Miami’s Black Community (Cocoa: Florida Historical Society, 1974), 434–37.

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Not to boast, but Loulou can hear a butter-knife scraping the surface of a piece of dry toast from any room in the house. Little pom-poms of smell bop his Pomeranian nose.

This one he files under the category Homey.

The master and Georgette partake of the same breakfast six times a week with different spreads atop the gently burnt breads: Sour cherry. Blackcurrant. Elderberry. Marmalade.

Fig. Repeat then vary, vary then repeat.

The master always gives Loulou a morsel of each. The three of them read the newspaper, Georgette starting with the front page, Magritte with the funnies, Loulou the classifieds. It is of interest when someone is selling a pet. Even as they get more money from the master’s sales, they keep their routine. In the painting, the man and his paper vanish, but in life he remains: a beautiful dailiness like that of the sky. A quiet form of subversion to stay this reliable. Letting oneself go with the crowd in some ways makes sure one saves energy for other things. On Saturdays, the toast gets honey. On Sunday, they have sausage and eggs.

Try to stuff the bowl with tobacco then why don’t you? Loulou the Pomeranian wants to suggest to those who claim they don’t get the meaning. Some humans assume that because he’s a dog, he’s dumb. But not the master, who understands Loulou. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Of course it’s not. How could it be? Who’d take a burning match and attempt to light it? Marks on paper mean more to Loulou than they do to some people. A pipe can make a prisoner of its very own smoker; reality can make those it oppresses defend it.

Loulou apprehends the treachery of images as well as anyone. The non-pipe floats in a non-field the thick-pale color of heavy cream.

There is simply no sky in this particular image. But then again there’s no sky in any of them, really.

The tree is young, and so is the moon: a waxing crescent. Waxy, too, maybe, for it’s caught in the branches. Like playing fetch when the ball gets stuck, thinks Loulou the Pomeranian. Moon of strangeness, tree of protection, tree too beautiful ever to lift a leg to.

Once, their friend Suzi, an American painter, came to stay with Georgette and the master to work on a book she was writing about Magritte. “Why September 16?” she asked of this canvas, Loulou looking on from between their feet. “Pushing up from the earth towards the sun, the tree is an image of certain happiness,” said the master. Suzi said, “What?”

And the master said, “To perceive this image we must be still like the tree. When we are in motion, it’s the tree who becomes the spectator.” “Go on,” said Suzi, and the master answered, “It is witness, equally, in the shape of a chair, a table, a door, to the more or less agitated spectacle of our lives.” Suzi said, “I suppose that’s right.” And the master said, “The tree, having become a coffin, disappears into the earth.” Then Loulou added, “And when it has transformed into flames, it vanishes into the air.” Suzi scooped him up gently and said, “So true, Loulou,” then scratching between his ears she said, “Now I see.”

The sky shines that velvet shade of pre-darkness, like when he and the master embark on their last walk of each night. The violet hour, some call it. Others l’heure bleue. Loulou, color-blindish, thinks of it just as twilight.

L’HOMME AU JOURNAL

LA TRAHISON DES IMAGES

LE 16 SEPTEMBRE

P O E M S b y K AT H L E E N R O O N E Y

T. WHEELER CASTILLO AND EMILE MILGRIM with Monica Uszerowicz

Those who’ve been fortunate enough to witness a sunset in Miami are privy to what feels like a slowly darkening and expanding rainbow, a gradient of colors effortlessly stretched, like a blanket, across a mostly flat landscape. It’s a vision that cannot be conveyed properly (not really) without bearing witness. Like most Floridian phenomena—beautiful or bizarre—it is equal parts magnificent and strange, and you have to see it to believe in it.

It is with slightly less sentimental underpinnings that Emile Milgrim, musician and founder of the record label Other Electricities, and artist and Turn-Based Press co-director T. (Thom) Wheeler Castillo, created Archival Feedback, an aural and visual project documenting Florida’s unique landscape: its sounds, its feel, and the kaleidoscopic interpretations thereof.

Supported by the Knight Foundation, Archival Feedback has been in development for a long while, even in ways unbeknownst to its makers. Both grew up in Florida, then lived and studied in Portland, Oregon, where they found themselves unwittingly influenced by the warm feelings of their home, the colors and memories weaving their way into their respective crafts. Archival Feedback might be a sonic map, but it is also an unintentional love letter, a manifestation of the inherently resolved act of coming home.

The record’s A side features field recordings—a Biscayne Bay drainpipe, an ice cream truck in Little Haiti, the clinking

MONICA USZEROWICZ (MIAMI RAIL): How did you select the spaces and places for the field recordings?

EMILE MILGRIM: Some were intentional and some were found by happenstance.

We had dozens of ideas and took hundreds of recordings, with different mics and angles and at different times of day.

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of seashells in Sanibel—with its F side (“Feedback”) showcasing the work of Floridian sound artists who addressed the field recordings as they saw fit: remixing, reworking, responding. The five prints included with the record are each a personal project themselves: for example, Terrazzo, made up of several layers of color, is designed to invoke the memory, shared by so many Floridian children, of cooling the body on the cookie-patterned floor; Field Notes, a composite “landscape,” showcases a series of dates, including the record’s release, the first airdate of Captain Planet and the Planeteers, and the year Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked in the Florida Keys.

Suspended In…, the most whimsical of the set, references engraver Theodor De Bry’s sixteenth-century Grand Voyages.

De Bry’s documentation of the Timucua tribe’s “third sex” is pejorative in nature; in Suspended In…, an androgynous or trans body, having been subject to interpretation by white colonialism, is set free, dancing and floating. It is through this same process that Milgrim and Castillo document Florida, both transforming and archiving it for future generations’ own understanding and retelling.

In a round-table discussion in Little River, during which the sun set and filtered through a melodramatically lush foliage surrounding Castillo’s house, the two discussed the means by which the project’s audio and visual components were created.

Sometimes weather was a determining variable in the end result. We wanted the recordings to be as immersive as possible, to the point where the listener would feel soothed, anxious, disoriented, or curious if they listened with headphones—this is especially true of the binaural approach used on two of the final tracks.

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RAIL: In an interview with Liz Tracy, she says that Thom found that the most “‘in-depth way’” to convey Miami was through sound. Why is this true?

MILGRIM: Some people remember through sound and some are triggered by it in a seemingly unconscious way. Others are more selective listeners. Then you

kind of implying how easy it will be to colonize them.

The engraving that moved me the most was Employment of the Hermaphrodites, an image of the Timucua tribe. I did find a few queer writers who wrote about them, because they’re clearly queer figures or representative of a way these people dealt with those who did not identify as male or female. We know that various tribes in the Americas had this place in their society. Some were positive, some weren’t so positive.

RAIL: And I know you selected these images because of printmaking history, and for numerous other reasons, as well.

T. Wheeler Castillo, Terrazzo, 2014. Screenprint, 28 x 28 cm. Printed by Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo at Turn-Based Press

have voracious, active listeners, like me and Thom, which is why this approach made sense to us. Some of the sounds we captured were intended to stimulate and interest the aforementioned types of alternate, nonlisteners. For example, the dominoes recording is something I’ve heard in my neighborhood almost every day for the past three years. I know it drives some neighbors crazy, and I know others tune it out or don’t notice it. I was really interested in the intensity, the jagged rhythms and patterns of that aural experience. Listening to that recording out of context—in headphones in a gallery, for example—has revealed the further complexities of those sounds.

RAIL: I want to talk about some of the images with you, especially Suspended In… T. WHEELER CASTILLO: Theodor De Bry published Grand Voyages in 1556. It was the first book published in Europe

documenting the discovery of the Americas. Maps had been discovered, but not images of the people inhabiting the country. De Bry never set foot in the Americas. He based it off of someone’s journals—a guy named Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who didn’t even talk to De Bry. De Bry went to his widow and bought the journals.

RAIL: It’s like a game of telephone.

CASTILLO: It’s totally telephone. Not only did De Bry not have any firsthand interactions with the natives, he also had to fill in a lot of gaps, because there were so many unanswered questions. You know he improvised, because these images are supposed to be taken from Florida, and look at how hilly it is. A lot of it seems very Protestant. He says, “the Indians come to an agreement among themselves which illustrates the harmony that exists among them”—totally projecting, and also

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS

CASTILLO: After living in Portland, I moved back to Miami to a house that was right off the bay. I grew up on the west side of US-1, completely disconnected from the ocean. I couldn’t wait to leave Miami. But while I was in Oregon, so much of the visual work I was doing referenced qualities of Florida. I was in a gray place, and all of my work was about light, or open spaces—at least this is what people were reading from the work. I was speaking a vocabulary unfamiliar to people from the Pacific Northwest.

I moved back and was curious about this unconscious expression of the landscape. Around 2012, when I told Emile we should make a record, it was also the beginning rumblings of this five hundredth anniversary of Florida, of the Spanish Conquest—a myth, because Ponce De Leon barely touched it. It felt like it was more PR than an important date to celebrate. In that reaction, I came across Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda’s memoir. When Fontaneda was traveling from Cuba back to Spain, he was shipwrecked in the Keys; everyone on the ship died except him and his brother. They were enslaved and he spent seventeen years living among various different tribes. I think the most beautiful part about reading his memoir is the first line of the second memoir (he actually wrote the memoir twice): “Memoir of the things, the shore, and the Indians of Florida, to describe which, none of the many persons who have coasted that country know how to describe it.”

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Theodor de Bry, Bringing in Wild Animals, Fish, and Other Stores from Philadelphia

But De Bry capitalizes on the pop culture of the day—the New World. There is a language indicating how they treat the third sex, something they don’t understand. Emile and I knew we wanted to use the “hermaphrodite” imagery, but I wanted to have a clear reason. I wanted to give this secondary character his or her own story, own space. We isolated the figure and it became a graceful dance move; the title, Suspended In… comes from the Kate Bush song “Suspended In Gaffa.” We were writing a choreography for this figure.

ABOVE T. Wheeler Castillo, Natives Only, 2014. Screenprint, 28 x 28 cm. Printed by Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo at Turn-Based Press LEFT T. Wheeler Castillo, Suspended in..., 2015. Screenprint, 30 x 25 cm. Printed

by Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo at Turn-Based Press

RAIL: There is a unification happening with the terrazzo print, the freed figure, the blue of “Raga.”

MILGRIM: It was a lot of back and forth, talking about these things, which is not something I was used to in creating. I usually work with sound and I work alone, or in a group with a very straightforward context. It’s very methodical—a numbers thing or a puzzles thing. This was a different experience; it was challenging, but very evocative and helpful in being able to break out of a methodical way of working. It was far more conceptual than what I’m used to.

RAIL: It’s probably harder to work in a way that allows for unfolding and movement.

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CASTILLO: I might get in trouble for this, but I think that’s tied to a way a lot of printmakers work. Because what we do takes a lot of steps, we have to prepare—there is a clear method. We cut all this paper by hand; we mixed the colors.

Sometimes I would mix the colors and not be happy with it, initially.

RAIL: Was making the record like that, too?

MILGRIM: I didn’t think the recording and capturing process was like that, but a lot of the editing was: having to go back and listen to things and make selections and, once those final selections were made, pulling out the pieces that were going to be on the record and further editing those down for fidelity’s sake. I never want to hear those field recordings again. Like the Everglades one—I probably listened to it three hundred times trying to get these little distorted wind pieces out of it. I felt insane.

RAIL: Everyone is going to experience Archival Feedback differently. Forgive me if this is redundant, but what is your own read on the project itself?

MILGRIM: I’ve always experienced things sonically. A lot of the memories I have are tied to sound. There are so many sounds in this place that aren’t day-today sounds elsewhere. Like the different types of water: rain sounds, bay sounds, river sounds, ocean sounds, flooded street sounds. There are other, culturally derived sounds—the dominoes are a big example. There aren’t a ton of cities in the United States where you can go multiple places and hear people playing dominoes, speaking different languages. It’s normal to us because we’re around it all the time, but I tell people the story about how my neighbors play dominoes every single night for four hours, and they’re like, “That’s not a thing.”

It becomes a part of your memory and your experience, even if it isn’t your culture, which is also really interesting to me. I didn’t grow up around that in my immediate environment; it’s always been peripheral. But there are those peripheral sounds that resonate with me, and when I was living in Oregon for so long, I noticed

their absence. It was weird. Capturing that was a way of me remembering but also further exploring it, and being able to show it to people.

CASTILLO: Also, did you get to hear the single “11th Street Train Whistle”? We’ve been selling it as a tape; it’s not on the record. At the 11th Street Metromover stop, there’s a metal sign drilled into the fencing with just enough space, so when the wind is fast enough, a whistle happens. This was the one I would’ve felt like a failure for not being able to document. One day, the wind was strong enough for us to get it, but once it’s over nineteen miles per hour and it’s rainy, the platform becomes really dangerous. The guy who responded to the recording is my buddy Nick Ortrotasce, who is also from Florida, who lives in Sarasota. He lived in Oregon for a few years and then moved back—it’s another Floridian perspective. Every single artist on that record, on the F side, is from Florida.

MILGRIM: We assigned these things, not entirely arbitrarily, but with David FontNavarrete [io.ko], I gave him these domino sounds, and it turns out, fifteen years ago, he lived in the same neighborhood and made a very similar recording. We gave David Brieske [Fsik Huvnx] the traffic sounds and he was like, “I’ve been making these same exact traffic recordings for years now.” It was really cosmic, the way these things worked out.

RAIL: It feels Floridians have been, more than ever, addressing our relationship with the land, due to problematic issues.

This work has nothing to do with the landscape in that capacity, but I am wondering if such ideas ever came up as conceptual concerns.

CASTILLO: We did say, in another statement about the project, that it was an attempt to document this ever-changing landscape. We were thinking about past, present, and future—this idea that we should go back and, every single year, attempt to record these same recordings and see the difference. That would be true fieldwork. And maybe that will happen.

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MILGRIM: There’s a whole other project in the works.

CASTILLO: There’s a Phase III—Phase I was the record, Phase II was the production of all of this, and Phase III is creating an archive of sound that anybody can access, as well. I love anything that promotes a form of productivity. This attempt to document something that is constantly shifting and changing isn’t an alarmist reaction.

This is more like accepting of and maybe being influenced by this impending change. I’ve accepted the sea level rising.

MILGRIM: Isn’t it like most things, at least growing up down here? I’ve always felt like there is a dichotomy—people who notice and care, and people who are like, “What’s happening? I drive my car five billion miles and blast my AC even in the winter and I don’t recycle.” Like, “More BMWs now!” A lot of that stuff isn’t even people who are from here. But some people from here aren’t saying no—they’re not voting, they’re not caring. They want to be as comfortable as possible and it ends there.

CASTILLO: Who were the first anthropologists? They were documenting cultures that were perceived as “dying.”

That’s its problematic history—but the fieldwork and going out and collecting, that has an influence on me. There was another recording that didn’t make it onto the record; it will hopefully live in the archives, on the Internet. It was taken at Ten Thousand Islands; I went camping with Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, and another artist, Packard Jennings, and we slept maybe one hundred feet from the dome homes on Cape Romano. I have recordings of that shore. Those submerged homes. . .

MILGRIM: An apocalyptic utopia.

CASTILLO: I can’t wait for it, honestly.

Everyone is going to live in boats and the corals are going to take over.

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer and photographer in Miami.

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PIONEER WINTER: IN PROCESS CAT H E R IN E AN N IE HO L L IN GSWO RTH

As of this writing, Miami choreographer Pioneer Winter is in the generation phase of a new dance work for his MFA thesis at Jacksonville University. The project will premiere in two parts, with Part I showing in October 2015 and Part II coming later, in spring 2016.

Winterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s investigation is tentatively titled Host. As in: host of a party, guest, or disease. The title implies a dynamic

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relationship between a self and other(s), with one often imposing its will on another. According to Winter, a primary conceptual foundation of Host is that of the panopticon, the imagined prison architecture proposed by British social and political reformer Jeremy Bentham and later appropriated by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe a mechanism of social control in which individuals self-censor because they

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Pioneer Winter in rehearsal with sandbags, 2015

believe they are under constant surveillance. In this context, “host” might describe the bodies of governed subjects that have been invaded by systems of authority.

Winter’s references to the panopticon are loose. In discussing his choreographic process, he talks about separate seeds of ideas he calls “images.” For him, this primarily visual mode connects in some way to the panopticon, which functions specifically through lines of sight. Thus far, many of the images also involve one body interacting with and/or controlling another body. In theory, he is looking at social systems through bodily relationships, asking how control is applied and enforced.

In our recent phone conversation, Winter described one of his first images of Host, an exercise between two dancers:

Other images are less about control and more about relationships, described through bodily negotiations:

First, I took two women and I gave them both different directives. I told one woman, “Move across the room.” And I told the other woman, “Don’t move, don’t allow yourself to move.” So two people with conflicting goals are basically trying to outmaneuver each other physically.

Imagine yourself standing in front of someone. You may be a foot apart from the other person, and your eyes are closed.

And you can only move when you feel the other person moving and they can only move when they feel you about to move. And you move centimeters at a time because that

Another similar image involves the application of physical weight: I took four twenty-five-pound sandbags and I strapped them to different parts of my body. And I tried to move with the same fluidity. How do I find the ease in this discomfort? How do I negotiate this new weight? Can I shift all one hundred pounds to my right arm so that my left arm and my left leg can be completely free? Do I switch it to my left foot so that my arms and my right leg are completely free, but I’m just planted and I can’t move?

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Pioneer Winter’s choreographic notes for Host

is the desired behavior, that you don’t move until you feel the acquiescence of the other person. And you sort of go through this progression until you’re touching. And you get closer and closer until you’re in a sort of embrace.

Each image is subjected to an excavation that Winter calls “image weathering,” in which he approaches the feeling state of each image as a way to uncover its core. He works on multiple images simultaneously rather than progressing through one image at a time, describing his vision of the final product as a viewfinder, with multiple lenses or slides. Alternately, he imagines a kind of collage of disparate elements that have been cut and pasted, rotated, or layered, with themes formed mostly by spatial or temporal association.

Some of his images have turned out to be impossible to replicate in physical space. He describes an experiment in which a dancer was supposed to control him with her feet. But in reality, they could find no bodily relationship that would allow for this particular form of control, unless the controlling dancer was exceedingly short. In another image, Winter asked a dancer to move him by any means necessary, while he was supposed to resist. He found that he could not actually be controlled because he retained the ability to choose whether or not to be influenced by her movement.

Winter currently considers Host as a critique of the panopticon, which he describes as a faulty system of governance because it imposes on the mind but ultimately fails to act upon the body: My argument is that since the body at its flesh state, mechanical state, emblematic state, is unconscious of the restrictions placed upon it by the panopticon, only our mind is really aware of our restrictions. . . . You could argue that the body is free of the instrumentation of the panopticon.

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This statement describes a mind/body split, claiming that control can operate on one aspect of human embodiment without the other. But overall, in its sketch form, Host contains multiple and sometimes conflicting articulations of control over mind or body. In some images, control might be applied directly from one dancer’s body to another, mimicking brute force. Other images rely on verbal cues aimed at the mind, or emotional state of the performer, duplicating systems of control that manipulate subjects without any reliance on physical enforcement.

Similar questions are also surfacing in the choreographic process itself. Winter asserts that his dancers are more than just technically proficient bodies. They are creative collaborators who tap into and move from their own autoethnographic experience under his direction. His cues are intended to recreate the feeling state contained in the images, within their bodies. He also uses choreographic methods that call on dancers to access their own memories of people or places, and to respond physically.

Simultaneously, he claims that dancers do not use their bodies, they are their bodies, and they are at their best when they can embody their personal stories beyond the reach of the mind.

At each level of investigation, it seems impossible to really separate the mind or the body as a target for control. Further, systems of control appear to be ever-present, even in the choreographer-dancer relationship. Winter is aware of the ambiguities embedded in Host, observing: “I’m critiquing the panopticon and the way it makes certain assumptions about human beings. But I’m doing that with the scenography myself.

I think it’s systemic.” As a dance work, Host need not resolve questions of control. The key is whether his audience can engage with the ideas at play.

Catherine Annie Hollingsworth is a Miami-based dance and performance writer.

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REVIEWS Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin Aru Kuxipa: Sacred Secret THYSSEN-BOMEMISZA ART CONTEMPORARY, VIENNA JUNE 25–OCTOBER 25, 2015

CH R I STY GAST As dusk descended on a cool summer night in Vienna’s baroque Augarten park, an extraordinary seminar commenced on the lawn adjacent to Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. The gallery was exhibiting work from a three-location retrospective of Ernesto Neto, the Brazilian artist known for weblike installations of stretched nylon filled with saffron, seeds, and other fragrant matter.

As attendees filled benches and blankets on the lawn, a group of presenters filed past Carsten Höller’s resinous blow-up of a psychedelic mushroom and onto a wooden stage. Resplendent in traditional woven robes and iridescent macaw feather headdresses, this delegation of Huni Kuin pajes (aritsts and plant healers) from the Brazilian rain forest were Neto’s collaborators, and they had come to share their knowledge of Amazonian plant medicine with the Western world.

The reader should be forgiven a momentary discomfort with the specter of indigenous people on stage in manicured gardens for “educational purposes,” as it has been practiced since the dawn of the colonial era with disastrous consequences for those on view. Pocahontas was presented before the British monarchy in the sixteenth century and did not live through the return passage; Ota Benga, taken from the Belgian Congo in 1904, was presented in a primate enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. He died by his own hand ten years later.

However, this evening in Vienna, nine Huni Kuin took the stage with an assemblage of presenters from several nations and disciplines, and one by one

Ernesto Neto, CanoeKeneJaguarPataLampLight (CanoaKeneOnÇaPawLampadaLuz), 2015. Wood, cotton, lavendar, glass, crystal, and candles, dimensios variable

began matter-of-factly to relate a series of recipes for physiological and spiritual healing using Amazonian plants, including ayahuasca, a DMT-containing brew known for its hallucinogenic effect. They were there as artists, healers, and experts, and this was the audience’s introduction to the new Livro da Cura (Book of Healing), an encyclopedia of plant-based

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medicine that was published last year in Portugese and the Haxta Kui language and is now being released in English.

Organized by a team from the Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro, who left field notebooks at secluded settlements along the Jordao River where the Huni Kuin annotated and illustrated each cure as it was performed, the Livro da Cura both

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shares and protects this spiritual and medical knowledge as the community’s intellectual property.

The Huni Kuin’s decision that now is the time to protect their right to live in and with the forest, by publicly claiming the use and knowledge of specific plants’ chemical compounds as their cultural patrimony, is in line with recent attempts to codify and protect indigenous knowledge as intellectual property. Written and published in a standardized form, these oral traditions become a tangible commodity, a book that stakes claim and gives value to forest-based knowledge in a form that can both limit deforestation and require that credit and compensation be given when those plant compounds are transformed into conventional pharmaceutical treatments.

Sharing the knowledge contained in the Livro da Cura is also the central focus of the installations inside of ThyssenBornemisza’s three large galleries. Neto is known for works that envelop the viewer in a way that is indebted to his Brazilian compatriot Lygia Clark, whose Máscaras sensoriais are experienced individually from the inside out, and to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, whose notion of “total installation” thrusts the viewer into an artwork’s pictorial space. Here Neto moves beyond the Western canon, presenting a major new installation produced in collaboration with the pajés from Rio Jordao.

The exhibition is anchored by CanoeKeneJaguarPataLampLight (2015), a dimly lit ritualistic space in a large central gallery that combines Neto’s biomorphic forms with the architectural impact of a spiritual center. A rooflike structure of crocheted nylon is suspended from the ceiling, arching down gracefully from a central chimney form. Beneath the chimney hangs a bulbous netted chandelier, which meets a marble altar below via a ladder of snakes. The low light filtering through the netted roof brings to mind a gothic cathedral or a dense forest—and, in fact, Neto and his collaborators are making use of the space with a series of events throughout the summer. By inviting social interaction both within the exhibition and around its central ideas, Neto and the Huni Kuin offer the viewer the chance to absorb the

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raison d’être for the work itself, a cultural and spiritual forest-based literacy that can only be unlocked through a focused accretion of time and knowledge.

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four, Composition Six, 2013. Archival inkjet print, 127 x 101.6 cm

DCG Summer Show DAVID CASTILLO GALLERY JUNE 10–AUGUST 31, 2015

A M A NDA SAN F IL IP P O Is a group show a matter of taste? Just as one would in a home, the work in the annual DCG summer group show betrays the trace of the curator’s intrigue. There is a pleasingly consistent color palette among the works—aqua, black and white, neutral, and tropical pops of color. An established Miami tradition, this iteration highlights artists from the gallery’s roster alongside guests and includes some newcomers, notably Kelley Johnson, and a special section dedicated to Xaviera Simmons’s Index series.

From a purely formal standpoint, the cool, lush blues of Gamaliel Rodríguez’s ballpoint pen drawing/painting/smudge of a Soviet-style structure riffs off the cobalt tones of Johnson’s work. His Josef Albers– esque geometric lines snake out and off the wall (as if hallucinatory) and onto the floor, where they recall the watery volumes of an Olympic pool or the geometries demarking a basketball court. The vertical,

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rectilinear pair face each other in a chilly, monumental stand-off. Susan Lee Chun’s heavy medallions, oozing with petroleum products, seem to suck the light out of the room. Stinging the space, the deep rich black of Chun’s wall pieces zing with the charcoal notes in Adler Guerrier’s and the Bethany Collins’s works. Simmons’s wild, intellectually heavy identity politics series chimes with three blissfully unencumbered works by Pepe Mar, sharing their lusty exoticism.

The extended Simmons selection mirrors the artist’s work on view in the current group exhibition Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim in New York. This body of work features figures who have raised their own skirts over their heads, creating an indeterminate hourglass. Under the voluminous, ballooning skirts, the figures reveal a gangly collection of objects and talismans hanging from their waists.

The effect is both strangely erotic and heavily loaded with semi-anthropological nuance. Among the objects making up this undercarriage are images (some of other artworks), flyers, and photographic portraits tacked on with laundry pins, vegetation, ceremonial masks, braids of hair, and dangling utilitarian objects such as tin cans and clay pots. The ensembles have a sense of weight, such as a tool belt/loincloth that carries all its baggage.

In this case, items are sentimental—tied to memory and emotions—as well as practical. Some are identifiably cultural/ traditional, while others are universally modern. Some reveal the subject’s legs emerging from the accoutrement, parted in an aggressive stance. There is a sense of plumage and pomp, but also of the weight of diaspora, of taking everything from the place one is from to the places one goes. In a reversal of roles, the burgeoning figure imposes itself on the viewer, despite of what is ichnographically a gesture of submission. To hold up one’s skirt, and in doing so literally block one’s face, disavowing the potential to return the gaze, is not a position of power.

Yet, there is assertiveness in this gesture, the kind of self-amused exhibitionism that a young girl might delight in while she runs around her fifth birthday party. It seems to say, “here is everything I am.”

Installation view: Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Agency, during Objects of Desire, a group exhibition featuring the work of O’neal Barton, Luis Colina, Emma del Rey, Genevieve Lacroix, Jessica Martin, Jon Millan, Richard Spit, and Joshua Veasey

Cristina Lei Rodriguez: Agency GUCCIVUITTON APRIL 25–JUNE 6, 2015

SAN TI N O S I N I According to Cristina Lei Rodriguez, agencies are entities that make things happen.

The term also carries distinctive definitions within different fields. In sociology, “agency” is defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and employ free will; in philosophy, it is the capacity of an entity to act in any particular environment; and in commerce, it is a business or other organization providing a specific service. These separate forms of agency all serve to make things happen in different capacities.

The exploration of these capacities is implicit in Rodriguez’s Agency. The artist displayed furniture pieces and prints, held workshops, and lead discussions that all aimed at exploring agency in our particular environment. Within the exhibition and its programming, there were geologic processes at work: things shifting, metamorphosing, the lines between artifice and nature becoming skewed.

Plastic, grout, silver leafing, and pigment became blue hemimorphite. Metallic vinyl printed with layered, abstract photography became prismatic terrain scattered with gold and silver deposits.

My perceptions also fluctuated between objects that are more commonplace.

What was a foot-tall block of green emerald became a slab of slimy cellophane. A marble table with pink veins became a wrinkled white bedsheet. A massive opal

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daybed became a mudslide.

Functionality was implicit throughout the exhibition. A desk, a shelf, a table, and a chest must be just as fitting in a gallery as in a home or a business, must pose the same possibilities to a child as an adult. As a means to create a functional, versatile environment, the artist held a series of workshops and discussions focused on bringing unique visitors into the space and allowing the works to be used. One of the most successful was a flower arrangement workshop. Offering pastel blooms mimicking the color palate of Rodriguez’s displays, the simple idea created a creative space simultaneously accessible and interactive.

A visiting installation, Materials In Process by Emanuel Ribas + Leslie Abraham, instructed the public on papermaking. Ribas and Abraham utilized

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recycled materials, including cardboard and local sugarcane pulp (bagasse) along with simple tools: a household blender, bucket, and drying tray. The pair showcased their small and large-scale creations: a collection of houses—like children’s toys along a shelf—and walls adorned with large-scale works like preserved hides.

Agency: Objects of Desire offered gallery space to artists under the instruction of Rodriguez (although she refrained from calling students) for one-day exhibitions. Rodriguez stressed the importance of such support within communities. Though a given event was only physically present in the gallery for one day, the results are archived online.

Other events ranged from a clothing swap to a presentation from the Miami Mineralogical and Lapidary Guild.

I attended Agency on the closing day of the show, when Rodriguez’s works were joined by those of Brian Booth, a craftsman and painter featured in the exhibition Guccivuitton at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Booth has a history of boat building, furniture design, and chickee hut building, which especially enthused Rodriguez. His traditionally inspired wood and rope furniture seemed aesthetically opposed to Rodriguez’s work, but shared conceptual similarities.

Designed in stackable elements, many of his creations are deconstructable. In several pieces, differing cuts of long, slender bits of wood are layered to create something that is organic, but polished, with wooden elements interlocking along the seams like teeth.

Agency: Defining Possibilities, this joint exhibition/discussion between Booth and Rodriguez, aimed to form a dialogue between artists and craftspeople about artistic power and self-sustainability. Two disparate groups with differing economies were represented: artists who are typically featured in a gallery setting and craftspeople whose work does not necessarily fit into the gallery. The event demonstrated an important aspect to Rodriguez’s work: that incongruities often only support connection. In Miami, where the only rock is bleached coral, her geological forms are out of place. But similarities are present in the rectilinear

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jutting of glass skyscrapers; the pink, blue, and yellow confetti bursts of neighborhoods; and the neon-strewn clubs, sports cars, and glittering jewelry—these only artificial elaborations of tropical avian and piscine colorations, blooming foliage, and ocean waves.

Like metallic vinyl wallpaper bearing simultaneous resemblance to an ocean shipwreck and an elaborate prismatic terrain, Agency is a matter of imagining possibilities. If we return to the sociological definition of the word, reflexivity is the ability of an agent to recognize social norms, customs, and ideologies and to alter their position depending on this information. An agent that is supremely reflexive becomes autonomous, capable of making sovereign, uncoerced decisions. Rodriguez’s Agency aims to develop creative autonomy. And as most aspects of Agency at first seem incongruous, the key to creating this autonomy involves community discourse. This work between disciplines, branching out to the larger community, and exploring various economies all serve to create more power for the artist, more creative free will, more reflexivity, and more opportunities to make things happen.

Florida Prize in Contemporary Art Exhibition ORLANDO MUSEUM OF ART JUNE 12–SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

G R E G G P ERKIN S What’s most evident in the selection of Florida artists on view in the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art Exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art is that each is simultaneously aware of his or her place within an art historical framework and that, culturally, we are squarely in the post-historical age of eternal appropriation, recombination, and mash-up.

The general sense of this cultural remix unfolds more or less brilliantly throughout the expansive three-gallery show.

This year’s prizewinner is Farley Aguilar, whose paintings evoke the works

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of James Ensor as much as Jean-Michel Basquiat, but with a decidedly monster movie–like tone. The aggressively painted canvases and textual elements take their source from found photographs of American life, and the figures inhabit these scenes with a palpable sense of dread. This foreboding derives from historical instances of social injustices found within the original images. For example, in Patriarchy (2015), a zombielike figure clad in a butler’s uniform has the word “servant” scrawled across his sickly green forehead. Farley’s counterpart in the show is Michael Covello’s installation of abstract works, including The Forest Ravenous (2015), which ranges across styles from process painting to minimalism. Two black monochromatic paintings are fixed in front of a matrix of neon webs of paint applied directly to the wall, as if icons of twentieth-century abstraction hovering uneasily above a chaotic jungle of biomorphic forms.

Jennifer Kaczmarek’s ongoing photography project Love for Alyssa documents Alyssa Hagstrom struggling with the crippling disease Arthrogryposis.

These portraits depict Hagstrom intimately, in times of suffering but also with a cherubic and, at times, comical levity. The Spiderman Challenge (2011), for example, depicts the slight Hagstrom in a Spiderman outfit blocking the way of another child’s bike; unclear if this is an arrest or not, we’re left seeing subtle nuances within the relationship between photographer and her beloved subject.

Cesar Corjejo’s architectural installation Puno MoCA Pavilion at the Orlando Museum of Art (2015) is a stand-alone museum within the gallery and points to a project in his native Peru where, in renovating rooms for citizens of Puno, they exchange the spaces to become galleries, thereby fusing architecture, renovation, and community engagement through his poignant lens of situational art making.

Working along political lines, Rob Durane approaches an unseemly political narrative in Lost #2 (2015); a complex video projection of news clips about US drone strikes is reflected on a sculptural elevation map of Pakistan in relief, including names of each individual killed in these attacks. The obscured image produced

comments on how information about these strikes is made public.

In a gallery space to themselves, the works of Bhakti Baxter and Nicolas Lobo compliment one another through their varied employment of conceptual and minimal strategies to differing effects.

Baxter presents a crisp and playful set of works that obliquely nod to Marcel Duchamp through a trippy Rotorelief-like wall painting Circle Spiral for OMA (Relax your Gaze) (2015). On a darker trajectory, Lobo’s Napalm Stone (Nexcite Version No. 1) (2014) presents biomorphic Dada-like forms comprised of a caustic set of materials. The base material is play-dough that has been carved with petroleum, a constituent element within Napalm, and colored with the neon-blue Swedish power drink Nexcite. Both visceral and toxic, these forms, placed on terrazzo bases, feel like post-historical ghosts of modernist sculptures.

Also drawing on minimalist materials and post-minimalist artistic strategies, Alex Trimino’s Totem Feast (2015) is a bright installation comprised of vertically aligned sculptures incorporating neon and florescent lights, fabric, tree stumps, and a score of other materials. But here the industrial materials such as neon and florescent are playfully transformed; the overall effect is that of being in a tweaked electrical forest, knit together with the familiarity everyday materials.

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s multimedia work embodies a bold, in-your-face, comical, but ultimately dead-serious look at American otherness as a Latina. Wall drawings such as This is My Crown (You May Not Touch It) (2015) embody this ethos squarely. Similarly, in the comical Ask Chuleta videos, Raimundi-Oritz’s emphatically elucidates aspects the contemporary art world through the character Chuelta.

In #17 The Hustle, 2012 Raimundi-Ortiz, donning a Warhol wig, both explains and calls the the art world out on its equivocating relationship to the art market.

More strictly a performance work, Antonia Wright’s trio of video projects on view survey her experimentations in which she places herself in vulnerable or downright hazardous scenarios to acute aesthetic effect. In Suddenly We Jumped (1) (2014), we see the artist’s nude figure

Farley Aguilar, Patriarchy, 2015. Oil on linen, 175.3 x 236.2 cm. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. © 2015 Farley Aguilar.

Image courtesy the artist and Spinello Projects, Miami

slowly rising in out of the dark, abruptly shattering through a sheet of plate glass as she ascends toward the camera, then receding back into the void below. Titled after a line from Futurism’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Suddenly We Jumped sends up the Futurist ban on nudity while also asserting both the elegant and fierce power of a female figure in motion.

The Summer of ’68: Photographing the Black Panthers NORTON MUSEUM OF ART JULY 30–NOVEMBER 29, 2015

E RI CA AN DO Earlier this year, the death of a black man resulting from police-inflicted injuries provoked uprisings in Baltimore. The mass media gave us few images of black people protesting peacefully, focusing our attention, instead, on rioting, looting, and the possibility of gang violence. More than forty-five years ago, husband-andwife art photographers Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones resisted similar demonizations of black protest. Their sympathetic portrayals of Black Panther Party members clashed with damaging images that filled the news. Twenty-two black-and-white photographs from their original photographic essay comprise The Summer of ’68: Photographing the Black Panthers.

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In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the revolutionary socialist Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to challenge police brutality against the black community. Panther patrols carried loaded guns and asserted their right to revolution, distinguishing the group from pacifist Black Power movements and earning them a reputation for organized thuggery—a reputation propagated by the media and the FBI. The popular press failed to mention the Panthers’ demand for education and decent housing or their community-based initiatives such as Free Breakfast for Children.

Baruch, a member of the left-wing Peace and Freedom Party, shared the Panthers’ commitment to social justice and sought to correct their distorted image. A German-born Jew, she had experienced prejudice first-hand, while her husband never forgot his father’s horrific descriptions of lynchings in the South.

The couple’s social consciousness coincided with heightened political awareness throughout America in the late 1960s.

The two had met at the California School of Fine Arts (today the San Francisco Art Institute) as the first students in the first fine art photography program in the United States, founded by Ansel Adams in 1945. Their community of California art photographers included Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and Minor White. However, the classicist Adams did not support the couple’s socially conscious work. The long-time teacher and friend tried to dissuade them from working on the Black Panther project.

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TOP Pirkle Jones, Black Panther demonstration, Alameda Co. Court House, Oakland, CA, during Huey Newton’s trial, 1968. Gelatin silver print (selenium toned). Norton Museum of Art, Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2013.41 Ruth-Marion Baruch, Mother and child, De Fremery Park, Oakland, CA, 1968. Gelatin silver print (selenium toned). Norton Museum of Art, Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2013.73

Baruch and Jones first photographed the Panthers at a Free Huey Rally in the summer of 1968. Unable to get close to well-guarded Panther leaders, they turned their lenses to the audience. In Jones’s Audience, Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, CA (1968), crowd members gaze openly, arms crossed, hands shoved into front pockets, each expressing a different emotion—hope,

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suspicion, seriousness, disbelief, defiance.

Baruch’s Black Panther Feeding Son, Free Huey Rally, De Fremery Park, Oakland, CA (1968) exposes a young father’s tenderness as his arms and bowed head encircle his toddler son. The De Fremery Park photographs convinced leader Eldridge Cleaver to grant the couple access to the Panthers’ inner circle. He asked them, “Why do your photos have

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ABOVE Ruth-Marion Baruch, Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, Editor of The Black Panther, Author of Soul on Ice, at Free Huey Rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, CA, 1968. Gelatin silver print (selenium toned). Norton Museum of Art, Gift of the Pirkle Jones Foundation, 2013.81

feeling, when none of the work I’ve seen by other photographers, have?”

Panther communications secretary Kathleen Cleaver also recognized the potent visual imagery in Baruch and Jones’s work. Their photographs appear in numerous issues of the Black Panther

newspaper, which are displayed in the exhibition. Many photographs portray Panther leaders close up, including cofounder Newton, who the couple photographed in jail the day before his sentencing and whose gentle features belie his reputation as a violent criminal.

Other photographs depict young couples and families, such as Baruch’s Mother and Child, De Fremery Park, Oakland, CA (1968), signifying the Panthers’ dedication to the community and its future. In fact, what is striking about all the images is the obvious youth of the Panther members and their supporters, a reminder that their struggles were rooted in a generational awakening that was taking place across America.

Baruch and Jones’s works exemplify how street-level social awareness began to infiltrate the rarified world of art photography in the late 1960s. Their photographs capture nuances of human expression, but just as importantly, they convey those nuances through craft. The photographers applied Adams’s lessons of creating richly toned and textured images to highlight beauty and form, thereby accentuating the drama of human experience.

The Summer of ’68 shows us the importance of untold counternarratives.

Today, the ease of snapping a photograph and disseminating it instantly makes these alternative narratives more accessible. The more of them we see, the less they’ll be considered alternative.

BOOK REVIEW The Givenness of Things: Essays MARILYNNE ROBINSON FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 304 PP.

E D W I NSTEAD Where she stands is never a question.

Even the title of Marilynne Robinson’s new essay collection, The Givenness of Things, stakes out teleological ground.

John Calvin, John Wycliffe, Jonathan Edwards (the preacher, not the other one), William Shakespeare: good.

Neuroscientists, faddism, fear, the Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere, the 17th—nineteen more go unremarked upon): bad.

Imagine as substitutes for the colons in these last sentences an array of digressions, confessions, and meditations. The real pleasure in these essays is in the process, as egregious a cliché as any, but one I keep finding to be true (as with—recently, sadly, gnawingly—baking). So if there is no payoff, there is at least some pleasure.

Forgive me if this is kind of snippy.

I’m feeling defensive. I may be the only person who has ever—even accidentally—listened to a full episode of NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and doesn’t love Robinson’s work, up to and including the President of the United States. But as I wouldn’t enlist in the Italian Navy, so I have trouble taking moral direction from a writer without an apparent sense of humor. Set that aside, though. This is an essay collection, and I am compelled first to survey.

Contents: “Humanism,” “Reformation,” “Grace,” “Servanthood,” “Givenness,” “Awakening,” “Decline,” “Fear,” “Proofs,” “Memory,” “Value,” “Metaphysics,” “Theology,” “Experience,” “Son of Adam, Son of Man,” “Limitation,” “Realism.”

The gist of this project, and the volume of thought that’s led to it, should be clear now. Robinson is a powerful thinker. These essays are more or less what they sound like. She ranges

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widely—theology, physics, historiography—but it is to Calvin, her “saint,” that she most frequently returns. A happy match, as Calvin was as rigorous a theologian as any we’ve had.

He is the focus of “Reformation,” which traces the movement’s course, its legacy in contemporary America, and the vernacularizing of the Bible. He appears again in “Grace,” which, in part, aims to correct impressions of Puritanism’s distaste for the arts. In “Servanthood,” she considers his relationship to Wycliffe, and his influence on the English, Shakespeare in particular. “Givenness” finds him in the context of Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist himself, and, in “Fear,” in the midst of a sort of Richard Hofstadter meditation on American political impulses.

These summaries are the barest of sketches, and there’s much else besides.

“Awakening” covers the “Great” American iterations of same, “Decline” the American love of fatalism, “Realism” our cynical bent, “Theology” theology, “Metaphysics” metaphysics. And there is also, despite this great breadth, despite the many things

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to recommend these essays (and I’m sure plenty of exhortations are in the pipeline even as I write this, so I’ll defer), something that, as I sit and think about The Givenness of Things, grates.

I suppose what I take issue with is the notion of earnestness. No writer working in America today seems to have so plush a mantle of it about their public figure.

We are to take this book, to take all of Robinson’s books, as pure exegesis—no hint of the grease, the slight-of-hand of back-from-heaven hucksters or twofaced televangelists. And Robinson is not of that sorry bunch. But neither is she earnest in this fact-finding, record-straightening endeavor of hers.

We get the suppression of Puritan texts by the censors of Charles II after the Restoration, but not the elimination of all news media but a state-run propaganda press under Oliver Cromwell.

We get Calvin the saint, the theologian, the progenitor of the many admirable movements and modes of thought that have followed from his work. We don’t see Calvin the theocrat, nor the witchburner, nor the dogmatist for whom the commandment against adultery was taken to extend to immodest dress.

Most jarring is a passage in “Memory,” in which Robinson dismisses the role of Christianity in Confederate justifications of slavery, contrasting it with the biblical denunciations issuing from abolitionists. “If there are southern equivalents of Henry Ward Beecher or Lydia Maria Child,” she writes, “I haven’t found them.”

I have a distinct impression, given the obscurity of some of the texts she digs up elsewhere, that she wasn’t trying very hard. For the sake of brevity, let’s set aside entirely the destruction that Christian evangelism wrought on traditional cultures and religions of Africa, both there and among the slaves kidnapped to the Americas. Consider instead that the defense of slavery is the sole reason for the existence of the Southern Baptist Convention. Consider Frederick Dalcho, John Weems, Richard Furman, James Henry Hammond, Thornton Stringfellow, and, most prominently, James Henley Thornwell. Consider the volumes of newspaper editorials, speeches, and letters making explicit

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an entire constellation of pro-slavery apologetics. That we don’t remember them fondly, if we remember them at all, should be no surprise, but that they existed should not be one either.

Robinson, in her frequent critiques of the “New Atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and so on (who will get little defense from me, by the way), takes to task (though these particular words are taken from an essay not included here) their “closed ontology.” It’s at the crux of her argument in “Humanism”—directed in that case at the contemporary state of neuroscience, though the point recurs throughout The Givenness of Things—this frustration with a scientific positivism that is so reductionist as to become, and be treated as, a metaphysic. This has been a thrust in her nonfiction for some time. For all the effort Robinson has put into skewering popular caricatures of Calvin and others, you’d think she’d be more careful. To go from the valleys to the peaks of her charity might give you vertigo. Plus, hers is an ontology as hermetic as any.

I’ll take, for the title alone, a couple of lines from “Proofs”: “The attributes of Wisdom are utter plenitude and perfect grace.” “Our very transience means that we partake of a reality infinitely greater than ourselves in the fact of our understanding.” Or here, from “Son of Adam, Son of Man”: “Existence is remarkable, actually incredible.” If this is not nonsense, I have been laboring under some potent misconceptions.

“I am drawn,” Robinson writes, “to Calvin’s description of this world as a theater, with the implication that a strong and particular intention is expressed in it, that its limits, its boundedness, are meant to let meaning be isolated out of the indecipherable weather of the universe at large.” The self as stagecraft. I don’t mean it to be pejorative, but there’s some mysticism in this conception of the world that borders on flippant. Wires and pulleys can work magic from a certain angle, but why that’s preferable to any other view I do not understand. My experiences are my own and I don’t deny them. To dress up the old cliché a bit, beauty needs only observation, not design. To be, in the most reductive formulation, a soft, wet,

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accidental machine is an idea Robinson detests. She would rather we were mimes, hands out, pressing on ether under the lights. But it’s the former, we’re told in The Givenness of Things, that does not take the human experience seriously.

Vo r t e x , 2 0 1 4 b y 2 x 4 , I n c . Ve r m e l h a c h a i r b y F e r n a n d o & H u m b e r t o C a m p a n a a t L u m i n a i r e L a b .

MIAMI’S STYLISH & C R E AT I V E S H O P P I N G D E S T I N AT I O N

M I A M I D E S I G N D I S T R I C T. N E T

SHANNON EBNER

A Public Character

Shannon Ebner, Black Box Collision (10), 2013. Archival pigment print, 63 3/4 x 47 x 2 1/8 in. Copyright: The Artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

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Opening October 8 2015 Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami