The Miami Rail | Issue 15

M A R T I N E SY M S / A D R I A N A VA R E J Ã O / N A R I WA R D / K E V I N Y O U N G COBRA / BIMINI / CHICAGO / I STA N B U L / REVIEWS

Winter 2015

Organized by independent curator Jane Hart, this multi-venue exhibition includes over 160 South Florida artists ranging from internationally and nationally known, to established, mid-career, and emerging. Work in all media will be featured. [NAME] Publications will release a 220-page full color, hardcover book commemorating the exhibition, with texts by Erica Ando and Sandra Schulman.

Participating Venues 3900 North Miami Avenue, Miami Design District Bridge Red Studios, 12425 NE 13th Ave, North Miami Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, 158 NW 91th St, El Portal Design Sublime, 7102 NE 4th Ave, Miami Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Kenny Scharf Solo Exhibition), 1540 NE Miami Ct, Miami Girls’ Club Ft. Lauderdale, 117 NE 2nd St, Fort Lauderdale The Laundromat, 5900 NE 2nd Ave, Miami Obsolete Media Miami (O.M.M.), 5 NW 39th St, Miami Swampspace (The Machine Show), 3940 North Miami Ave, Miami Design District Art Fair Week Events Artists’ Receptions Tuesday, December 1, 7-10pm 3900 North Miami Ave and Swampspace Thursday, December 3, 9am-12pm 3900 North Miami Avenue Obsolete Media Miami (O.M.M.), Artists Open Studio Friday, December 4, 6-9pm Toast to South Florida Artists at Design Sublime Book Release Receptions Saturday, December 5 Girls’ Club Ft. Lauderdale, 11am-1pm and The Laundromat, 5-8pm All venues will be open during Art Fair week. For more information regarding open hours and to purchase [NAME] Publications 100+ Degrees in The Shade visit 100degreesintheshade.com.

IN THIS ISSUE V I S UA L A RT S

EXPRES S

5 WINTER 2015 VISITING WRITER Mark Tribe

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

8 NARI WARD with Nicole Smythe-Johnson 16 COBRA: BONNIE CLEARWATER AND ALISON M. GINGERAS 22 FRANKLIN SIRMANS with Hunter Braithwaite 26 MARTINE SYMS with Christy Gast

46 FROM POTTERY TO POPULATION DATA: THE DIVERSE INFLUENCES OF ADRIANA VAREJÃO Alina Cohen 50 A JOURNEY BETWEEN THE BOSPHOROUS AND THE SEA OF MARMARA: IMPRESSIONS OF THE INSTANBUL BIENNIAL Ombretta Agró Andruff

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS 66 MOVING IMAGE: SCREENDANCE IN MIAMI Catherine Annie Hollingsworth 69 “I’M HARRY SMITH AND I HATE YOU” Kevin Arrow

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REVIEWS

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B OOK REVIEW LOCA L 32 NO MORE SAND: THOUGHTS COMPOSED DISCURSIVELY ABOARD THE SUPERFAST GAMBLING BOAT SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MIAMI AND BIMINI Nick County 36 A LIST OF TRASH FROM LEGION PICNIC ISLAND (AND SURROUNDING) IN BISCAYNE BAY Franky Cruz

COVER Nari Ward, Sun Splashed, Listri Sulla soglia, 2013.

Chromogenic print, 167.6 x 124.5 cm.

Photographed

by Lee Jaffe.

Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua

42 OBSOLETE MEDIA MIAMI Monica Uszerowicz

facebook.com/themiamirail

ARCHITECTURE 54 ARCHITECTURE, CHICAGO-BORN Hunter Braithwaite

LITERATURE & POETRY 58 HEATHER DAVIS with Brittni Winkler and Danielle Damas 62 128-BIT PALMS: CRIMINALITY IN AND OUT OF VICE CITY Andrew Donovan 65 Kevin Young

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@themiamirail

EDITOR'S NOTE

PUBLISHER & FOUNDER Nina Johnson-Milewski MANAGING EDITOR Kara Pickman

The fifteenth issue of the Miami Rail marks my fourth as editor and, at the close of one year in this role, I am pleased to announce that the magazine’s editorial staff is growing. We welcome to the team Sarah Trudgeon as literature editor and Monica Uszerowicz as film and performing arts editor, and we welcome back the Rail’s founding editor, Hunter Braithwaite, as visual arts and architecture editor, as well as formalize Nathaniel Sandler’s role as Florida editor. P. Scott Cunningham, poetry editor since the Rail’s inception, introduces a new format with this issue, in which contemporary poets describe and define their processes and the form their work takes alongside the poems themselves.

The varied voices, perspectives, and extended communities that this group provides are invaluable. It is my goal to create an editorial framework for the Rail that is multifaceted and facilitates group discourse rather than speaks from a single platform. I am happy to share the fruits of this collaborative effort with our readers going forword, to better serve our goals of providing Miami arts and culture coverage for local and international audiences, and creating a historical record—in print and online—of the city’s changing cultural climate over time.

This issue also features Mark Tribe, a guest contributor as part of the ongoing Visiting Writer Program. As evidenced in his “Dear Reader” letter facing mine and his original drawing that follows, this program has brought to Miami a diverse group of creative people that fall within a broad definition of the term “writer”—including photographers, cultural critics, and artists such as Ben Davis, Coco Fusco, and David Levi Struass. We are grateful to Mark for his contribution and to the evolving nature of this program, which brings individuals working at the top of

PROGRAMS MANAGER Michelle Lisa Polissaint ARCHITECTURE AND VISUAL ARTS EDITOR Hunter Braithwaite FILM AND PERFORMING ARTS EDITOR Monica Uszerowicz FLORIDA EDITOR Nathaniel Sandler LITERARATURE EDITOR Sarah Trudgeon POETRY EDITOR P. Scott Cunningham DESIGN Jessalyn Santos-Hall INTERNS Melissa Demarziani Kathryn Garcia Josh Lewis Santino Sini BOARD Phong Bui Lauren Gnazzo Nina Johnson-Milewski John Joseph Lin Tommy Pace

of South Florida’s unique cultural community.

ADVISORY BOARD Matthew Abess Christy Gast Daniel Milewski

Kara Pickman

PRINTER Nupress, Miami

their fields to Miami to interact with local artists, writers, and creatives, and enables them to return to their home cities with a new understanding

MANAGING EDITOR

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

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

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VISITING WRITER

Mark Tribe is the Miami Rail’s Winter 2015 Visiting Writer. The Visiting Writer Program is generously supported by the John S. and the James L. Knight Foundation.

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THE MIAMI RAIL

WINTER 2015

OPPOSITE Nari Ward, Sun Splashed, Artin, 2013 (detail). Chromogenic print, 99 x 73.6 cm.

Photographed by Lee Jaffe. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua

NARI WARD

with Nicole Smythe-Johnson This winter, Pérez Art Museum Miami presents Nari Ward: Sun-Splashed, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. The mid-career survey includes a selection of two decades of diverse works from the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist. Jamaican curator and writer Nicole Smythe-Johnson sat down with Ward to talk about his prolific and varied practice, his audiences, his preoccupations, his connections to place—from Jamaica, to Europe, to becoming an American citizen—and his engagement with language, materials, and imagination.

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Nari Ward, Savior, 1996. Plastic garbage bags, cloth, bottles, shopping cart, metal fence, earth, wheel, mirror, chair, and clocks, 325.1 x 91.4 x 58.4 cm. Installation view: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas.

Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong

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NICOLE SMYTHE-JOHNSON (MIAMI RAIL): How would you describe your practice?

is what psychologists are always trying to mine. I think trying to have people look inward is a very rich space to investigate.

NARI WARD: My biggest challenge in being an artist is to reach and understand who my audience is. To understand why certain individuals that you may not think of as part of your audience may be interested in your work. How to find a way to speak to the person who has no interest in contemporary art, as well as the person indoctrinated in the ideologies of contemporary art. Bridging that space is what I’m really challenged by. How to work with material that can trigger interest, but then layer the possibilities within the object or material I’m working with.

And the use of craft, or some interest in how something’s made, what material processes apply to it, is all about trying to negotiate that dialogue between the person who needs to see the land and the labor, and the one who might have a more conceptual expectation.

RAIL: And it initiates a way of looking that can be applied generally, as well. If you start looking at objects and thinking about what they mean in broader ways, then it’s possible to turn that eye on anything, even things that are not identified as artwork per se.

RAIL: Why use found objects?

WARD: The viewer (whoever they are, wherever they are in society), they’ve already had some experience with the object and so it’s hijacking that, to take it somewhere unexpected for them, and maybe transform this thing into something symbolic, or even something intimate.

RAIL: So, you’re thinking about these materials as a means of seduction.

WARD: Yes, because that person has seen this thing before, and so they have a set of expectations for it based on their memory.

It’s really about trying to deal with those expectations, then insert other possible readings for the work or the object. All this is about using the familiar to point to a space of awakening. Because it’s really about the unknown. You try to do these strange conflations that somehow will lead somebody inward, into thinking about some aspect of themselves. The self is always this very shady space, right?

Because there’s a certain amount of knowing oneself and then there’s a lot of the unknown within that knowing. This

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WARD: Exactly. I think that’s kind of what all these artists, from [Andy] Warhol to [Joseph] Beuys—I’m not trying to oversimplify it—but it’s this idea that we’re all artists. Not that we all make things, but we all have the ability to ponder critically. I think that level of thought and actualization can be meaningful in lots of ways—in a social justice way, and it’s such a relevant time to address things of that nature, even in the contemporary art world. And then also just aesthetics, and the joy of looking at something. For me, it’s about finding a way to negotiate between those realities: the luxury of looking and the need to have a kind of activist mode within the thought process of the work.

RAIL: There are social justice considerations running throughout your work.

Is that deliberate? Is it based in a general feeling about how art should exist in society? Or is it more specific?

WARD: You know, you start with things that you question, right? So I’m always wondering: Why? Why are things the way they are? How can this material, that we all know as this specific thing, lead into these other sets of questions that might be about inequality, or police aggression, or the abuse of authority? All of these are things that I’m affected by and worry about. I also think about color and material, and the beauty of material.

My thing is not creating a hierarchy for them to exist. I just put them together and see what they become. If you want to talk about abuse, and you want to talk about the color blue, how do you bridge those two choices? And the decisions you make to bridge those two choices are going to affect what you started with. You can’t start with a palette of colors and then get

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to talking about social justice if you don’t already have that question, and vice versa.

I live in the art world. There’s a certain . . . I don’t want to say luxury, but privilege in it. Then I walk the streets of my neighborhood, and I see certain abuses and injustices that I want to negotiate and talk about, and give or find a perspective on. It’s a very personal engagement that I try to make accessible to somebody who doesn’t necessarily know about these personal engagements. Yet they can still have a dialogue with the work based on their own experiences.

RAIL: Your neighborhood is very significant to your practice.

WARD: Yes. I live in Harlem. I’ve been living there now since ’85. The middle of the ’90s was the worst time for Harlem, with crack and AIDS and just urban blight. And now we’re seeing a very different moment in the life cycle, with gentrification and this change that is good and bad. But it’s also a very interesting trajectory for a black neighborhood. They call it “Harlem, the big mango,” so it’s more this African diasporic neighborhood that is going through a sort of self-actualization, deciding what it needs to be, evolving. There’s no easy solution. The gentrification is good because it raises the tax base and services increase in the neighborhood; you can hire more police, have better restaurants.

But then there are the bad things, like the middle and lower income people getting pushed out of the neighborhood because they can’t afford to live there anymore. It really is this very strange monster to try to feed, and do that in a moral way.

RAIL: I guess it’s a similar process to asking people to engage with the found objects you work with in new ways, and in so doing, initiating this creative moment in thought.

WARD: Right, and question what and how they think about something. Even question the apparatus for thinking, and even me: Who is this artist? What’s he doing? What’s he thinking about? I feel like digging deeper and not taking things at face value is really important for anybody’s awareness, not just self-awareness, but awareness about

IT’S REALLY ABOUT TRYING TO DEAL WITH THOSE EXPECTATIONS, THEN INSERT OTHER POSSIBLE READINGS FOR THE WORK OR THE OBJECT. ALL THIS IS ABOUT USING THE FAMILIAR TO POINT TO A SPACE OF AWAKENING. BECAUSE IT’S REALLY ABOUT THE UNKNOWN. Nari Ward, Radha LiquorSoul, 2010. Metal and neon sign, PVC tube with artificial flowers, shoelaces, and shoe tips, 320 x 63.5 x 73.6 cm. Collection of Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann

how the media plays with you, family members, friends. How you’re being manipulated. I think questioning things is a very necessary survival mechanism.

RAIL: It’s also a different way of thinking about empowerment, because the ability to analyze, to question your own ideas and question how you’re being manipulated is this ephemeral form of empowerment, a kind you can utilize without a weapon.

WARD: Right, right. We do this in academia maybe more often than we should, but it’s this Socratic process of looking and contemplating and everybody talking about what their read is on something and learning from these different voices.

It’s really something that doesn’t happen enough in contemporary society. You see it happening on the street, this is how you get folklore coming up, and that, for me, is also really interesting. How things

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translate in popular culture and on the grassroots level. I think it was Spike Lee who did this documentary on Katrina [When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, 2006], but what I was fascinated with is how he mixed the authority of the voices of the politicians, the historians, the social scientists, and the guys on the street.

He got all their reads on what happened in the breakdown of the powers that be to handle that catastrophe. I thought it was

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Nari Ward, Mango Tourist, 2011.

Foam, battery canisters, Sprague Electric Company resistors and capacitors, and mango seeds, 3 figures, 304.8 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm each. In collaboration with MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

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very strange—the read from the street versus the authoritative dialogue, but then I realized that the combination of the two was the reality somehow. And it wasn’t a pure reality, but somewhere in this murky space where reality doesn’t become comfortable, but isn’t science.

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RAIL: This contrast between embodied experience and conceptual experience— the information that’s generated by the powers that be—I think there’s an interesting parallel there in what you’re talking about with material. As an artist, you have this engagement with the material in its

and innovation, because the balance isn’t necessarily fifty-fifty, it could be seventythirty. It’s all about trying to have it all there, but the metering of it is always very unexpected for me.

RAIL: Your work is often read through the lens of your Jamaican origins, is that how you see it?

embodied form—what does the material do, what does it feel like—but then you also bring in the conceptual weight and achieve a balance between those two spaces.

WARD: Right, but that balance is very delicate, an element of improvization

WARD: I’m very uncomfortable with being called a Jamaican artist, because I left there quite young. I go back periodically. And when I go back, it’s always inspiring because it triggers memories and ways of working with material that are quite unique. I’m inspired by that. But I can’t say I’m a Jamaican artist, because I see the artists in Jamaica who are there working on a regular basis. And when I go to Europe, it’s funny, because they see me as an American artist. So these labels are malleable, according to what people expect. I don’t invest a lot in them. When I talk about the work, it’s really about me evolving as a person, and part of that evolution is thinking back on the memories of Jamaica.

I also realize that those memories are not real. The older I get, the more they become almost sugar-coated. I had all these memories of the house I grew up in, and I had a chance to go back to the house.

This was after fifteen, maybe twenty years. I was shocked. I was, like, “this place is a dump, and so small.” In my memory, it felt so special and grandiose. So it’s a very strange realization, the reality of what was. I almost wish I didn’t go back, because it kind of shook me, you know?

It shook my sense of self in a strange way.

At the same time, at least two or three bodies of ideas have come about from my recalculating that reality. So I do feel like that experience of Jamaica is a part of me, but it’s not one I’m comfortable with using to say “I’m a Jamaican artist.” I’m an artist who references Jamaica, because it’s a very important place in my memory, and my development as a person.

RAIL: It connects with your general approach, working with objects from neighborhoods that are familiar to you. I guess, Jamaica is one of those neighborhoods, as much as Harlem is.

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WARD: But even more special because it’s a neighborhood I don’t have access to. I’ve become alienated from it, so it’s that much more patina-ed with a kind of richness.

Now it’s in a very special space—you can’t really access that space anymore, but it grows as you move away from it. It grows in a different way, you know? So the fiction of Jamaica, the fiction of being a Jamaican artist is probably what appeals to me more, because within that fiction is some element of reality.

I remember, I was there once doing a project at the National Gallery of Jamaica.

That was Curator’s Eye and Lowery Stokes Sims had invited me. It was the first time I went to do a show there. There was this young lady who was helping me, she was volunteering. And she says, “Mr. Ward, I’m an artist here in Jamaica, I just graduated. And I want to know what you think I should do to be successful.” I had a lot of guilt for this, but my first words for her were: “Get out.” I was just being very straightforward.

A couple of days later I was thinking about it, and I thought: “Maybe that was a bad thing to say to her, maybe she can’t get out.” But I didn’t know what else to tell her, because I didn’t build my career in Jamaica. I was just drawing on what I needed to do. I ended up being in touch with her, we were in a show together in Connecticut. She’s doing quite well now, she got out. It was Ebony Patterson. She’s teaching in Kentucky. So that was great.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to be an artist in Jamaica, and I think it’s because there’s no support in place for artists. There’s support for craft, but not for artists who are questioning everything.

RAIL: Yes, I know Ebony. She’s in Jamaica quite often, sometimes for several months at a time. I think lots of Jamaican artists are trying to negotiate wanting to be in Jamaica, but not having enough support to make their work here, particularly if they’re interested in more challenging interrogations. You lived in the United States for a long time before you decided to pursue American citizenship. At least two decades, right?

WARD: What’s interesting about going through the process of becoming a US

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citizen, I thought I would just blow through this ceremony. But it was actually very powerful, I was really impressed with how it affected me. I didn’t think it would have much effect, but they swear you in with a hundred and something people, and you see people crying, it was a really powerful moment. I couldn’t help but share this sense of gratitude about doing it.

RAIL: Quite a bit of work came out of that for you, as well.

WARD: Yes, everything affects the choices you make. And much more being an artist, it manifests itself in the material questions, comes through the material.

Liberties and Orders [2012] came around that time. That was three or four years ago, at my gallery Lehmann Maupin in New York.

RAIL: I was looking at that work, and I had to go back and look at the date. With everything that’s been happening over the last year with police brutality, it feels like a work that could have been made last month.

WARD: Right, it was precursor to all of that. And that show was well regarded when I did it, but the people who really got involved were the ACLU folks.

They came and had me speak to several students. It was real interesting, because I don’t really see myself as this kind of activist artist, but the questions being generated, because I was seeing the changes in the neighborhood, because of the policing policies that have now came to a head. But I was just trying to deal with the neighborhood.

I know the art audience, including my gallery, didn’t really know what to do with the work. I did about thirteen pieces, and they sold absolutely nothing in the show.

And it’s only now that people are coming back, and asking, “Is that work still available?” It’s very strange to see that happen, because it made me realize—I already knew it, but it reaffirmed the notion—that being successful has nothing to do with sales. I think that, even to date, it was one of my strongest shows because it was so important to do. And it was also one of my

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biggest financial bombs, because it was so important to do. So it was this very strange break in the market and this notion of what’s important.

RAIL: In Canned Smiles (2013), you made two cans—“Black Smiles” and “Jamaican Smiles.” Having gone to school in the United States myself, this really tapped into the tension I felt being a foreign black person in America, my relationship to African Americans, and the history of race in the United States. I wonder if it comes from a similar place for you?

WARD: I’m glad you triggered that, because that was one of the elements.

There are a bunch of elements in that piece that I wanted to engage. It was this idea of relating the African American minstrel character with the kind of happy Jamaican mento singer.

RAIL: “Jamaica, no problem,” and all that.

WARD: Right. And one of the triggers of that was my time in Rome, because I was thinking about [Piero] Manzoni’s shit cans, and the way he talked about addressing notions of value. It was more financial value, because his cans, if there was shit in them, were priced by weight and the value was correlated to the price of gold.

So it was about the notion of value as it relates to art practice.

Manzoni is one of my favorite artists, so I wanted to reference him. But I wanted to take it in a different direction and have this value element be more about faith— the faith in what’s inside. The cans all have mirrors inside, and then people smile into the cans. So I smile, my family smiled, and then we close it immediately. In theory, the smile is there, but the smile isn’t there if you open it. So you had to believe for it to really resonate. I’m really excited about the work existing on that kind of plane as well.

RAIL: Thinking about a place like Jamaica, and minstrelsy, these smiles are heavy.

WARD: But the other thing is not to victimize these individuals, because they’re not victims, they’re survivors. The smile was resilience, the smile was fortifying

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yourself, and going out there and making money for your family.

RAIL: We always want to have this very neat line between accommodation and resistance, but it’s never that simple, is it? You did a later version of that project in Harlem, where you were selling the cans for $10 and contributing to a building project.

WARD: The building was actually the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, and the organization that built the building, the Broadway Housing Communities, they do low-income housing. Part of their mandate is to have an art-education program for young children living in the low-income housing. I think it’s a great idea, incorporating visual art as a way to have them become critical at a very young age. Supporting the program within the new facility was what the cans were sold for. It’s the idea that smiles collected from the neighborhood will now benefit the young people who are going to be, hopefully, contributing to the neighborhood.

RAIL: And again, inscribing those smiles with agency, because you give up a smile and you get this great program for your neighborhood. Which gives it a different tone—not a situation of victimhood.

WARD: Yeah, for me that was the important thing. In all the work, I never wanted to get stuck in this kind of poverty tourism. It’s really trying to figure out how to give another position on one reality, because there are so many different ways to see something. To have that become as apparent to the viewer as possible. I think that’s why I gravitated toward the ambiguity of contemporary art, because it allows the viewer to finish the sentence.

RAIL: There are also these snowmen that keep recurring in your work. I’ve seen them in Blacktop Man [2006], Sub Mirage Lignum [2011], Sweet Sweat [2006], and Mango Tourists [2011]. What’s the snowman about?

WARD: [Laughs.] I thought it was a great form to complicate the island narrative. It

Nari Ward, We the People, 2011. Shoelaces, 243.8 x 823 cm. In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

was my pushback against this “Jamaican artist.” In a strange way, that snowman became this vehicle for content that would be unexpected. At the same time, it was this memory piece for me.

When my mom was trying to get us to the United States, she would talk about the winters, and ice in the street. You can imagine for a young kid, where ice is this kind of luxury in the tropics, to think about that. She would say: “You can make snowmen.” It was this very exotic memory that I wanted to figure out how to give life to again.

Also, on a very basic level, it was the body. An anthropomorphic reference, but anybody can do it. If I’m going to talk to the “everyday guy,” let’s use a form that they feel comfortable with. It’s primacy, I wanted to figure out how to engage with this primal nature. Then it was about using the material that it’s made of, to take it in different directions. For Mango Tourists, it’s made out of foam, and mango

seeds, and capacitors and conductors, which are analog electrical parts. That piece was really about power, and the title—titles are really important to me.

If you mined the title, it’s really talking about support, economic support, coming not from a local grid, but from a tourism grid. Power that’s not local, but coming from somewhere else. And the mango seed, I always thought the mango seed, when it dries up, looks like scrotum, this hairy sack. I always equated it with potentiality, this thing that is kind of dried up but also potential life. Then the electrical parts are all about this thing having all this potential and then in other ways being impotent. The weaving is about energizing the form. And it’s very present, that’s why I scaled it up, to make it very confrontational to the body. In the end, it’s just these things that get their power from you. The power is coming from your actualization—you’re physical engaging with them by looking at them more than

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them doing anything, and that part was about the notion of being a tourist.

Also, mango went to this idea, playing on a kind of Duchampian use of language, where it was also “man go.” So again, potentiality and movement. These things are just dormant, and they’re engaged with each other, but they can’t move themselves.

RAIL: Yeah, they have to be initiated through relation.

WARD: Right, and your imagination for them, more than anything else.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and curator living in and working from Kingston, Jamaica.

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Corneille, Fable païenne, 1949. Oil on canvas, 80 x 69.5 cm. Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen.

Purchased with the support of de BankGiro Loterij and the Municipality of Amstelveen. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Blum & Poe

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COBRA:

Bonnie Clearwater and Alison M. Gingeras A current spate of exhibitions across the country examine the origins and legacies of the Cobra group, so named for its founding, in 1948, by artists based in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

Cobra’s members rejected formalist approaches to art, and allied themselves instead with unconventional art practices, finding inspiration in works by mentally ill artists, folk artists, and child artists. Curator Alison M. Gingeras staged a bicoastal exhibition, The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy, at Blum &

MIAMI RAIL: Alison, the first section of your catalogue essay is titled a “(re)introduction” to Cobra. You quote Griselda Pollock saying that it’s not enough to resuscitate forgotten histories, but that we also need “to point the finger at what rendered these things invisible in the first place.” Could you expand?

ALISON M. GINGERAS: The prefix of “re-” is essential because Cobra is not completely unknown outside of United States, nor is it unconsidered in a more rarified academic or scholarly context. “Re-” is also crucial because I’ve been approaching this exhibition with a kind of urgency that is fueled by the group’s contemporary resonances, not just because of Cobra’s historical importance as such. My curatorial and writing practice for this show has not been from a “pure” museographic or encyclopedic approach—it takes liberties and makes arguments. As a result, certain artists who were part of Cobra are not part of this exhibition; it’s not an exhaustive overview of the movement. The argument foregrounds certain figures to counteract the amnesia of either present-day artistic practices,

Poe, New York (September 9–October 17, 2015) and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (November 5–December 23, 2015). Meanwhile, the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, which has the largest collection of Cobra works in the country, has mounted an examination of one of the group’s precursors, War Horses: Helhesten and the Danish Avant-Garde During World War II (May 17, 2015–February 7, 2016). Museum director and chief curator Bonnie Clearwater and Gingeras spoke to the Rail about the far-reaching avant-garde group.

or to foreground Cobra’s politics and sensibilities that are meaningful in terms of our contemporary moment.

In regards to the Griselda Pollock quote, Cobra’s relative invisibility (or more precisely, their deliberate exclusion) in an American context could be explained in a three-fold manner. The group’s unabashed embrace of Marxism from the late ’40s onward made them “difficult” for American institutions in the Cold War period. This is best embodied

by Asger Jorn’s continued political writings, his refusal of the Guggenheim Prize, and so on. Secondly, the artists’ insisted on the inseparability of their political, social, and aesthetic practices—hence making them difficult to “market” in a commercial context. And finally, numerous Cobra artists (at least in their official period) actively thwarted the celebration of individual artistic genius. The group— especially Jorn and Constant—worked tirelessly to deflate the mythology of the artist as a singular force or the maker of individual expression. In their eyes, art had a responsibility to explore collective social agency and commonalities that could bring on revolutionary change in

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society. The last thing they were concerned with was selling their paintings or securing solo museum shows to advance their individual careers.

BONNIE CLEARWATER: The point of entry for Cobra in America influenced our reception of the movement. For instance, when Frank Stella came to see our exhibition The Spirit of Cobra last year, I was surprised when he told me that he was introduced to Cobra while he was still in high school, at Phillips Academy. This would’ve been at exactly the same time Cobra was happening, in the early 1950s. He said that at the time he primarily knew Karel Appel’s painting and that he particularly liked the big globs of color, which was different from the minimal direction Stella followed, at least until his work of the 1990s.

Stella also remarked that Hans Hofmann was very big at his school at the time and Cobra was seen as a wilder version of Hofmann’s use of color, push-pull, and tactile approach. So Appel and all of Cobra were introduced in the United States from a formal point of view, rather than from a political, social, or theoretical

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point of view. Cobra’s other point of entry was when Appel was included in MoMA’s New Images of Man exhibition in 1959, organized by Peter Selz. The exhibition’s emphasis was on the persistence of the image and the figure in modern art at a time when abstract painting dominated the New York school.

GINGERAS: That first reception of Appel occurred via a narrative of existential crisis; that show specifically framed artists like Appel through the lens of the crisis of humanism after the war.

CLEARWATER: Stella also noted in our conversation that he considered the difference between the New York school and European artists to be that in Europe they could never give up the figure, whereas in the United States it was all about abstraction. I realized that this initial reception was why Cobra has been misunderstood in America and why we need to reinvestigate it.

GINGERAS: There are also new voices coming into the reconsideration of Cobra—a new generation of scholars from the United States, Belgium, and Denmark who’ve begun to translate important primary texts by Jorn and others as well as challenge the stilted narrative of Cobra as a Northern European style of painting. Through this new scholarship and writing, a fuller picture is beginning to emerge in terms of what Cobra was about, and has even begun to assert a new pantheon of the key protagonists.

Until recently, it was almost impossible for a non-Danish or non-German speaker to read the theoretical or philosophical writings of Jorn and others of his circle.

Recent publications, such as NSU’s War Horses: Helhesten and The Danish AvantGarde during World War II, or Karen Kurczynski’s The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, have thrown new light on the prolific, polymathic practice of Jorn—who is, for me, one of the eyes of the storm of this movement.

This gets back to one of the most important arguments I hope to make with our show, that Cobra is not just a three-year period that should be imprisoned in a reified ghetto of northern

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THROUGH THIS NEW SCHOLARSHIP AND WRITING, A FULLER PICTURE IS BEGINNING TO EMERGE IN TERMS OF WHAT COBRA WAS ABOUT, AND HAS EVEN BEGUN TO ASSERT A NEW PANTHEON OF THE KEY PROTAGONISTS.

Asger Jorn, Head, 1940. Oil on canvas. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; the Golda and Meyer Marks Cobra Collection, M-226 © 2015 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ billedkunst.dk

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European art. Instead, it’s probably one of the longest-spanning international avant-gardes—if you buy the argument that it begins with the Helhesten group in 1940 and ends with the deaths of Jorn in 1973 or Christian Dotremont in 1979.

Embracing this multitentacled, multinational movement across these decades through the central nexus of aesthetic experiments, socio-political values, and internationalism is the key to opening up the traditional definition of Cobra and expanding previously narrow understandings of the group.

CLEARWATER: Kerry Greaves, who curated the exhibition War Horses for our museum, pinpointed what I consider the fork in the road for post–World War II American and European art: at almost the same time Jorn promoted the idea that kitsch and everyday life were essential to art, Clement Greenberg wrote that there’s no place for everyday life and kitsch in art. Consequently, in America, artworks are seen as autonomous objects, rather than as part of the social experience of the art, whereas the attitude of the Cobra artists and subsequent experimental European artists eroded the boundaries between life and art right from the beginning.

RAIL: Bonnie, how did the museum come to have the largest collection of Cobra in the country?

CLEARWATER: The Miami collectors Dr. Meyer and Golda Marks were consumed

by Cobra, which they began collecting in 1958. They amassed one of the largest private collections of the movement and generously made their first donation to the museum in 1978 and subsequently made an additional gift in 1989, bringing their total gift to more than 3,000 works.

This gift formed one of the museum’s core collections. Two years ago, the museum embarked on a series of three exhibitions based on our Cobra collection, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, that has generated considerable new scholarship and built a wider awareness of this movement.

RAIL: Why is it important to look back at the movement right now?

GINGERAS: One way to answer this question is to propose Cobra’s legacy as an alternative genealogy for a range of practices that do not emerge from American postwar hegemony. There are numerous contemporary artists, such as Mark Flood or Bjarne Melgaard, who are frequently allied with “post-Pop” because they deal with “low culture,” but I would argue that in fact these practices emerge instead from Jorn’s politicized—dare I say—revolutionary ideas about art being a fundamental expression of human community.

When he wrote his essay “Intimate Banalities” for the Helhesten journal in the 1940s, Jorn celebrated the “anonymous artists, folk art, the Sunday painter” and he sought to glorify these expressions (non-ironically) as equally valuable as the great classical masterpieces of culture. When Mark Flood—an artist who, in my mind, is directly descended from the DNA of post-Cobra Situationists via the Houston punk scene—recuperates a tacky thrift-store painting and paints over it, he is not rehearsing American Pop or appropriation art. He is building on Jorn’s ideas of anti-classicism, of collective authorship, and celebrating the continuity of human culture from the bottom up. The parallels between Flood’s own writing and those of Jorn are uncanny—Flood’s idea of “Culturecide” to me is an American update on “Intimate Banalities.”

CLEARWATER: It also explains why the perception of Francis Picabia’s late kitsch paintings has changed as well. Although he was one of the first abstract painters in the early twentieth century, by the mid-1930s he appropriates kitsch and banal imagery in his painting. I think this gesture was to some extent his response to the Nazi regime’s “degenerate art” exhibition held in 1937 in Munich. After all, his very early abstract paintings and Dada work was denounced in this exhibition. At the same time, the Nazis were extolling what we consider a kind of kitschy figurative art. In this body of work, Picabia seemed to be questioning

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why his abstract and Dada work was considered degenerate while the Nazis hailed sentimental, figurative painting.

GINGERAS: Picabia was deliberately being antagonistic on both sides of the political spectrum!

CLEARWATER: Which, in a way, is how the Helhesten group—Danish artists who organized under German occupation— was able to create art that subverted the occupiers. Their situation was unlike that in most of Europe during World War II. Many of the artists in Germany and Paris during the late 1930s and early 1940s were forced to flee or perished, so there was a rupture in the continuity of modernism there, but the artists in Denmark were able to continue working because the Germans gave the whole country a certain amount of latitude under the first three years of occupation. Yet the Helhesten artists continued working in the modern modes of abstraction, Surrealism, and Expressionism as a form of protest and resistance. They not only continued to make these works, they actually organized public exhibitions, and wrote and distributed the Helhesten journal. Their first big show was presented in a circus tent, right next to the amusement park! So it looked from the outside as if it was just another form of amusement and not about art.

GINGERAS: I love the anecdote about how at the end of the war, Jorn and his Helhesten colleagues sent a portfolio to MoMA, with a long letter vindicating what they had been doing—and reaching out for international exchange between avant-gardes at the end of the war (something that seems banal today, but when you contextualize this gesture in terms of the animosity and devastation at the war’s end, was completely radical).

MoMA actually never acknowledged their letter or gift, and they never gave these works accession numbers, even though they received numerous original works of art from these artists. The story alone illustrates how it has taken this many decades for the complexity of Helhesten-Cobra’s internationalist project to be clear to us.

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RAIL: Can we talk more about how Cobra influenced the present moment?

CLEARWATER: Artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle were in Europe for their formative artistic years in the early ’70s and therefore had first-hand knowledge of the European avant-garde and they were friends with younger artists like German artist Albert Oehlen.

I learned to appreciate Cobra when I worked with Oehlen on a major solo exhibition in 2005. Oehlen makes it clear that his work comes out of Cobra through Jorn and the Situationists. And when I worked with Rita Ackermann on her solo exhibition in 2012, she also emphasized how her work came out of Cobra. These experiences opened up the narrative of modern art for me.

In the United States, the emphasis was on the individual artist with a signature image—Jackson Pollock’s drips, Barnett Newman’s zip, Frank Stella’s black stripe paintings, and so on.

The Cobra artists emphasized working as a collective, which continued to be reflected in the practice of subsequent generations of European artists: Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Jonathan Meese, and Ackermann, among others. Working collaboratively also subverts the commercial gallery system, as dealers find it difficult to market.

GINGERAS: In terms of Cobra’s contemporary legacy, it is impossible to make equivalencies because of the totalizing nature of today’s art market and the culture industry as a whole. Take for example again Bjarne Melgaard. He has commercial gallery representation and, to a certain extent, a recognizable style in terms of his paintings, but he very actively tries to subvert his own market by taking on very extreme subjects and by working collaboratively.

I’ve invited Bjarne to exhibit a series of works he made in collaboration with a group of schizophrenic patients. Titled Bellevue Survivors, Bjarne invited these artists to make their paintings on top of his own works. Then he created a whole environment around the resulting works.

To further connect to his direct descent from Cobra, Bjarne has augmented this

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project by remaking Karel Appel’s magnum opus, Psychopathological Notebook.

Bjarne has made a radically subversive gesture deliberately wrought with problems for his art dealers. But that’s what makes his work so great, and so relevant to the legacy of certain Cobra ideas.

CLEARWATER: The different ways modern art developed in Europe and the way it is generally understood to have developed in the United States reflects the underlying contrasting attitude Europeans and Americans held toward the concept of progress—the philosophical point of view of positivism. In America, especially through Clement Greenberg’s criticism, there’s the perception that art needs to progress and each progression is good, as it’s bringing it to an ultimate pure art. This progression consisted of the elimination of anything extraneous to pure painting or pure sculpture. By the 1970s, however, it is difficult to distinguish any difference between European and American art as artists on both sides of the Atlantic were creating conceptual or performative work. But there is a difference. In America, conceptual art was perceived as an inevitable step in this process of progress, whereas conceptual and performance-based work was already inherent in the work of Cobra artists right from the beginning. We can see how Martin Kippenberger’s statement “make your own life your work” connects with the roots of Cobra. For Kippenberger and contemporary artists grouped under the relational-aesthetics rubric that has defined much contemporary art since the early 1990s, the situation under which the work is experienced is the artwork; the object is just the remnant of that experience.

GINGERAS: The core of the Cobra group—and in terms of its contemporary resonance and legacy—is their insistence on experimentation. This experimentation was manifold and wasn’t limited to painting and sculpture, nor to the social and political. There is a whole wing, if you will, of Cobra that was grounded in the literary—this is an aspect that we’ve not covered in our conversation and is

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frequently glossed over, even within the specialist writing on Cobra. Especially on the Belgian contributions to Cobra, the act of writing, the practice of poetry, and the attempt to create the written word into a painterly form (the idea of peinture-mot) was at the center of their experimentation. Christian Dotremont— who was the glue that kept the various branches of Cobra together in the earliest years—was essentially a writer and literary figure. He edited their journals, he wrote incessantly on the artists and on their theoretical and political projects, he performed their manifestos at their first show in Amsterdam in 1949—just this one literary tentacle of the movement is overlooked in the bigger picture of Cobra.

CLEARWATER: What I find fascinating is this idea of inevitability in art that was pervasive in the US art world. By the ’70s there was the sense that conceptual art was the most obvious next step, and almost the endgame to modernism. That is why the 1980s generation of artists got such a tough rap, they were seen as being regressive, as if they were negating that whole concept of progress. Whereas Europe didn’t have this same attitude about progress. As French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has observed, Europe’s anti-positivist attitude was influenced by the way wars caused a rupture with the past. America did not experience this sense of rupture.

GINGERAS: Even if when you look at someone like Jorn, whose painting practice in the ’60s gravitates more toward abstraction, there’s a refusal to abide by those very narrow, categorical ideas.

Instead, Jorn was always about spontaneity, even after the formal dissolution of Cobra. So some of his pictures from the ’60s or early ’70s might resonate with gestural, American abstraction, but there are always little monsters, and faces that come through the abstract passages of the canvas. I think of that aspect of Jorn as a type of resistance to aesthetic hegemonies.

There was always an awareness in Jorn— there were so many narratives of art. He used to say that he was part of a continuum of “ten thousand years of Nordic Pop art” when he founded the Scandinavian

Institute for Comparative Vandalism. It’s only recently that we (in America) are learning to listen to these other parallel narratives and understand that they were equally—if not more—sophisticated or conceptually challenging.

CLEARWATER: It’s understandable why MoMA director Alfred Barr ignored the exhibition proposal he received from Cobra. He probably couldn’t distinguish Cobra art from what was happening before the war and he was looking for the next new art movement. But to go back to this idea of reintroduction, we have recently experienced a period in art historical research that has greatly raised awareness of the multiple narratives of modern art history and there are new art historians focusing on Cobra. This research has encouraged a new look at Cobra that appreciates it on its own terms, not as a parallel Abstract Expressionism, nor from the perspective of being about the figure versus abstraction.

RAIL: What’s your hope for the general public coming to see these exhibitions?

GINGERAS: I hope that the audience comes to learn about a group of artists that they probably don’t know. Maybe the visual or formal appreciation must come first. A few friends who have seen images of the show were quite surprised by how retinal and engaging the work is. When you say “Cobra,” cobwebs come up in some people’s minds, especially an older generation who was around in the ’60s and ’70s during the first wave of its reception. Datedness or misunderstanding has stuck to Cobra in the United States, because there have only been glimpses of it, like a late Appel painting.

Or in some cases, a viewer may have gone to some regional museum in the Benelux countries and seen one Cobrarelated show. I’m hoping that with these Cobra exhibitions a seduction happens, first on the level of the eye, and then gradually people become engaged in the

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deeper level of politics and discourse that was so central to the group—and seems essential to our present day. Cobra historically subverted market speculation, and maybe that is another reason why it’s engaging to think about this group now— since so much of the art we see today has been entirely hijacked by the market or is in direct service of market speculation. They were making murals for kindergartens. They were doing public, collaborative works.

CLEARWATER: I hope these shows help visitors to understand that Cobra works embody these artists’ optimism. The Cobra artists came through World War II believing that, through their work, they could actually make a better world, and could make people feel better, and happier.

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PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans with Arturo Herrera, When Alone Again III, 2001. Photo: Angel Valentin. Courtesy PĂŠrez Art Museum Miami

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THE MIAMI RAIL

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FRANKLIN SIRMANS

with Hunter Braithwaite This fall, Franklin Sirmans became the new director of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Prior to his appointment, he served as the curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and held curatorial positions at the Menil Collection in Houston and MoMA PS1 in Queens. He spoke with Hunter Braithwaite about his beginnings in art criticism, curating in Miami, and the role of the museum in the twenty-first century.

HUNTER BRAITHWAITE (MIAMI RAIL): You started your art career as a writer.

How did the way you approached contemporary art as a journalist at Flash Art, ArtAsiaPacific, and elsewhere inform how you look at art as a curator?

FRANKLIN SIRMANS: I think a lot of us use words and writing as tools for figuring stuff out. Writing can be a great bridge to ideas and—especially with art criticism—to learning about artists. In the most basic sense, writing was an introduction to curating because putting together different artists within the same frame, or article, is the same thing as curating. It’s not that revelatory—I used to talk to Francesco Bonami about this at Flash Art—it’s just a different kind of framing device.

When I was working on publications at Dia Center for the Arts in New York, and already thinking in that publications mode, I started writing for ARTnews and other New York underground papers and magazines that don’t exist anymore. It was a way to have an entrée into art, into other artists and other people, as opposed to just, you know, standing there. I was fortunate to have a system of support that let me write about art in places where there was no visual art coverage per se, like One Word (the precursor to Vibe), Ace, Downbeat, and Shade (copublished by Sheryl Huggins and Beverly Williams).

Because I was writing off the “art world” grid, I could say what I wanted and formulate my own ideas. And so, thinking about the idea of putting artists together in an article was a way of thinking about a group exhibition. You can go home and think of four artists and put them together for various reasons, but chances are, at a young age, most galleries or museums are not going to give you that opportunity.

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RAIL: It seems like accessibility was an important factor in the type of writing that you were doing then and in the type of writing that you were reading. Were there any specific writers who provided you with that entry point?

gallery show and we had several essays in there. That was the first time I did a really extensive interview with Fab Five Freddy and got to work on texts by Glenn O’Brien, Robert Farris Thompson, Jeffrey Deitch, and Francesco Pellizzi.

SIRMANS: Basically I was writing for readers who had not seen the show and probably would not see it and who probably didn’t know the artists being discussed. Perfect readers for art criticism.

I was reading and admiring others who were probably writing about music like Joan Morgan (at Wesleyan), Dream Hampton, Scott Poulson-Bryant, and perhaps most importantly Greg Tate.

Also Calvin Reid, he was at Publishers Weekly and had deep connections at Art in America. And Joshua Decter, who is a great scholar and critic. From Tate I learned how to, well, I can’t say I learned a damn thing, because all I tried to do at a certain point was emulate him and the rhythm of his writing. But Calvin and Josh gave me opportunities to write for publications they were affiliated with when they had no reason to do so, other than that I was young and kind of thirsty.

I read Peter Schjeldahl like it was the Bible, like everywhere. Seven Days and the Village Voice, of course. To me, a combination of him and Greg Tate was, like, the essence.

RAIL: Have you found yourself responding to different elements of Basquiat’s work over the years?

RAIL: You recently featured Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2014’s Prospect.3 in New Orleans, but this is far from the first time that you’ve worked with him. Some curators tend to bring an artist with them over the years, reapproaching the work in different ways, at different moments. Is he that artist for you?

SIRMANS: He’s definitely one of them. I wrote my thesis on him at Wesleyan, and I actually had the opportunity to expand on a chronology that I started with the thesis when the Whitney was doing the first retrospective in 1993, so I got to work with Richard Marshall in that capacity. And then in 2005 we co-curated the show at the Brooklyn Museum, but before that, in 1999, Tony Shafrazi did a really thick book to go along with his

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SIRMANS: I think there were two entry points. One was that I was exposed to some artists at an early age through my father. These were predominantly artists who worked with an abstract vocabulary.

So, in seeing Basquiat for the first time, it was like seeing your immediate peer, your generation, as opposed to a generation that was different and apart from you. And so the work spoke to me in a way that was very immediate, in a way that those older artists perhaps did not.

Secondly, here was this person combining words and images, coming very much from the point of view of poetry— which I was into—and bringing that into the conversation with images.

RAIL: Who were some of these older artists that you were exposed to?

know how much I can take for myself.

Coming from somebody who did big, amazing shows on Faith Ringgold, Renée Green, and Louise Bourgeois, I’m not surprised at some of our shared interests.

So yeah, it makes me blush, I guess. But in the context of now, as someone who has had so much directorial experience already, Thom, I am just thankful.

RAIL: How do you think these projects will function in Miami, a city that is traditionally outside or on the cusp of that Eurocentric canon?

SIRMANS: I think different people will always assign us as what they perceive, when the reality is almost always much broader. But to me, we’re PAMM, and we’re in Miami, so we have an allegiance to where we are, in the same way that LACMA functions in LA. Programming will certainly be reflective of the diversity of Miami. It already has been. I’m looking to build on that foundation.

RAIL: Are there any exhibitions or any specific artists that you’ve seen at PAMM that have signaled some sort of possibility or potential?

RAIL: PAMM’s former director Thomas Collins wrote in this magazine that you were one of the most talented curators of your generation and that many of your exhibitions and publications were “designed to redress the omissions of the Eurocentric modernist art-historical canon, telling the stories and presenting the artistic achievements of significant yet lesser-known women artists and artists of color from around the world.” How do you respond to that?

SIRMANS: There are tons. I think of somebody like Wifredo Lam. There’s a painting of his in the collection that takes us back to a modern mode, to a modern period, and gives us a foundation to move forward. There is the great Beatriz Milhazes exhibition. And the show that just opened of works by Teresita Fernández, who was born and raised in Miami and is someone I think is important to our trajectory. There’s a great work in the collection by her. There’s an extensive group of works from Purvis Young, who is somebody who is up on the walls at LACMA, and was also born and raised in Miami. And then, historically, going back to Lam, I think we can build a foundation around certain artists, like Gego, as well. I would throw her into that conversation as I would Carmen Herrera and, more recently, Doris Salcedo.

SIRMANS: Well, coming from Thom, I feel incredibly honored that he would say such a thing. That’s pretty big, I don’t

RAIL: Have you crossed paths with anybody from PAMM’s curatorial department before?

SIRMANS: Ed Clark, Al Loving. I worked for Ed Clark for a bit, cleaning up his studio when I was in college. Joe Overstreet—a bunch of guys showing with Kenkeleba House or June Kelly Gallery in New York. Nanette Carter— that was all part of that conversation.

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SIRMANS: I’ve known Tobias Ostrander’s work for a long time, and of his deep presence in Mexico. And Diana Nawi, we’ve known each other for a while and I was super aware of her work at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Her Iman Issa show was phenomenal. I can’t wait to see her Nari Ward show. René Morales was at the museum when my exhibition NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith traveled there in 2008–09, which was a way of thinking about art from Miami, including the Miami artist José Bedia, who’s up on the walls at PAMM right now. So I’ve known of Réne’s work, and his relationship to the institution’s history is phenomenal. And then María Elena Ortiz is doing great things in the region especially. She has a show on view now with Firelei Báez, who was in Prospect. What a great team to think about some of these ideas and about our relationship to the international art world from the home base of Miami.

RAIL: What are some of the challenges you’re expecting to face in this new role?

SIRMANS: It’s a transition. As excited as I am, and as much as I’m looking forward to it, I still have to recognize that it’s a transition, so I’ll have to concentrate on things in a different way in terms of fund-raising. As curators, we go out there and sell the show. Now it’s about selling the whole vision, getting people excited about the direction of the museum—the many things it has to offer as opposed to just your one show. The museum in the twenty-first century is not the museum of the twentieth. Can we bridge our viewers between those times? I think, yes!

SIRMANS: We have to recognize how museums have become a focal point for exactly that, the nexus between education and entertainment. In Los Angeles, you have so much art, and relationships to art, that have been cut out of school curriculums, so the museum is the only place where that happens. In Miami, we have an extensive program alongside initiatives that are part of the school systems. I think that’s a really important aspect of the twenty-first-century museum—what does it do for us as a tool of learning? Not just for kids, but for everybody.

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

RAIL: Exhibition programming aside, so much is going on there. The education initiatives are so important right now, since arts education has been eviscerated.

Girls’ Club Contemporary Art by Women Free & open to the public Hours: WED— FRI 1 – 5 pm & by appt.

Extended Hours during ABMB Week ABMB Brunch: SAT Dec 5, 9 am – 1 pm

The Female Image: Repeat, Reprint, Replay.

117 NE 2nd St. Ft. Lauderdale, FL 333O1 954. 828. 9151 girlsclubcollection.org

Works from the collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz

Groups welcome. Contact: info@girlsclubcollection.org Work by: TJ Ahearn, Ida Applebroog, John Baldessari, Rosemarie Chiarlone, Chitra Ganesh, Quisqueya Henriquez, Vivian Maier, Annette Messager, Jillian Mayer, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and others.

Curated by Micaela Giovannotti On View Nov 12, 2015 — Summer 2016

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MARTINE SYMS with Christy Gast

In advance of Martine Syms’s public project Nite Life, which will appear on buses throughout Miami this winter as part of Locust Projects’ Art on the Move program, Christy Gast met with her in her Los Angeles studio to discuss her research and creative practice. Syms, who considers herself a conceptual entrepreneur, has a background in graphic design and media art. She founded the small press Dominica, which publishes essays and poetry, and her influential text “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” was published by Rhizome in 2013. Her first solo exhibition was held at Bridget Donahue gallery in New York this past fall.

CHRISTY GAST (MIAMI RAIL): Let’s begin in Overtown, specifically at the corner of NW 10th Street and 2nd Avenue. You’re creating a series of posters for the backs of buses and bus shelters that point to that corner, the former home of the Harlem Square Club, which was a Chitlin’ Circuit venue where black musicians performed during the segregation era. Your source material includes posters designed by Clyde Killens, a promoter who brought acts like Patti LaBelle, Aretha Franklin, and B. B. King to Overtown.

MARTINE SYMS: The project is a continuation of my commission for the O, Miami Poetry Festival last April. I’m using the same title, Nite Life, which is the name of an Overtown entertainment newspaper from that era. A lot of my works deal with the idea of distribution shaping the form of work. My project for the New Museum Triennial was about the sitcom format, a narrative style and commercial constraint that produces a particular kind of storytelling. I also wrote a book-length essay about the film network that corresponded to the Chitlin’ Circuit, thinking about how those modes of circulation influence the form of the work that gets produced. For O, Miami, I focused on Sam Cooke’s album

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Live at the Harlem Square Club, which has been a reference point for me personally.

It’s an album that I listen to a lot, but I really became fascinated with its history because it was shelved for twenty years.

It was recorded in 1963 and not released until 1985. The recording is really raw. The two sound engineers were actually in the audience, so the recording really captures that time and place.

My interest in the album, and in what shifted socially in those twenty years, was my starting point. I used the transcriptions of Cooke’s onstage banter to create a poem, and there was a corresponding performance. As I was researching for that in the Black Archives at HistoryMiami, Clyde Killens kept coming up as a prominent figure. He was a club promoter at multiple clubs. Reading transcripts of interviews with him, you see that he was really a big part of why certain acts were coming to Miami. He was bringing the acts, and he took full responsibility for designing ads for them. His vernacular advertising style is very interesting to me, and I decided to continue working with it when Franklin Sirmans, who is guest curating the project for Locust Projects, approached me. I thought I would continue that site-specific line of inquiry. I’m referring to the

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advertisements as source material, and I’m reconstituting that and creating more, using the same typography to think about the way these identities circulated. Now they’ll be in proper advertising spaces, which is an interesting continuation of this circulation.

RAIL: There’s a lot to unpack, but I want to start with the Chitlin’ Circuit, venues during the segregation area where African American performers would perform in black communities.

SYMS: The Chitlin’ Circuit arose from hyper-segregated modes of distribution, which were distinct until the 1960s. In film, there was the Jewish market and the black market, which operated within the ghettos of those communities. So if you were making films for a Jewish audience, there was a set of venues where you would screen them. A lot of vaudeville comes out of the parallel histories of black and Jewish entertainment communities. The Chitlin’ Circuit is essentially like a black vaudeville network. There were specific movie theaters, specific venues, many of which are still around. The Apollo Theater in Harlem is probably the most famous one.

The movie theaters actually didn’t fare as

Installation view: Martine Syms: Vertical Elevated Oblique, Bridget Donahue, New York, 2015

well as the music venues after integration in film started. Venues primarily serving black audiences didn’t have any money anymore. Which is what happened in a lot of places, like in Overtown.

A lot of the people I talked to there, including Willie Clarke from Deep City Records, as well as Clyde Killens, said that integration partially took the economic engine out of the neighborhood. So that’s something that’s bittersweet. On the one hand, obviously racism has so many disastrous and negative effects. But because of it, you had businesses that were serving that community, were part of that community, and money was circulating within that community. The second that you didn’t have that restriction anymore, those businesses were at a disadvantage.

RAIL: In an interview I read with Killens, he spoke obliquely about what happened

in those twenty years after official segregation was ended, but didn’t name specific events. To me, the era is bookended by two events. In the 1960s, I-95 was built in the middle of Overtown, forcing homeowners out and fracturing the community. In 1980, residents rioted after an all-white jury acquitted four Miami police officers in the beating death of Arthur McDuffie.

These events provide a cultural background for the art that was being made at that time. During those twenty years, a lot of entertainers made the shift from the Chitlin’ Circuit to television. Redd Foxx, for example, whose sitcom Sanford and Son was broadcast in the 1980s.

SYMS: Yeah, Redd Foxx was a Moms Mabley protégé. He came very specifically from the black vaudeville tradition, but really got famous because he was recording party records. That popularity led to

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Sanford and Son, which I think he started in ’74. He wanted to translate that intimate and vernacular style of comedy to television. Richard Pryor was also a writer on Sanford and Son, as was Ilunga Adell, who later made the show My Brother and Me, which I watched on Nickelodeon growing up. Adell started with the Black Arts Movement as a playwright. So those were the kinds of writers that Redd Foxx hired to be on the show. He also had so many guest stars, from LaWanda Page who played his sister-in-law on the show, to various entertainers and guest stars who he knew from his vaudeville era.

There’s this great Killens billboard that’s just all of Redd Foxx’s party record covers. “Redd Foxx!” “Saturday/Sunday!”

He is an interesting figure because he bridged two different generations of entertainment. He played those Chitlin’ Circuit clubs, and the touring schedule

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I usually like to bracket work between two time frames. My background is in film; I approach a lot of things from that perspective. Specifically, I like the idea that the project of film is moving through time and space. Using these origin points to think about what’s been traversed in that time and that is happening now, I’m using it as more source material to draw another relationship from them to me now.

RAIL: Back to the source material, Killens’s posters: black background, simplified portraits, the focus on text. Cropping is a strategy you use a lot in your work.

Whether it’s sound, images, photos, or design elements, the way that they’re cropped is really important. How do these elements come together in Nite Life?

Martine Syms, image from Nite Life for Art on the Move. Courtesy the artist and Locust Projects, Miami

was really brutal. Even someone like Sam Cooke, who at that time was a big, big star, was still playing these clubs every single night and it was not that glamorous. That was the kind of showmanship they were used to.

RAIL: They lived to perform.

SYMS: Yeah, it was just constant performances from one place to the other, moving from one black community and then driving to the next one, in a time when they couldn’t really stop in other places. There were a lot of hotels and gas stations they couldn’t go to.

RAIL: And there was a lot of in-home family lodging because so many hotels were off-limits to African Americans. At that time, both black and white musicians would play late-night shows at Chitlin’ Circuit venues after shows in, say, Miami Beach. Performers from the Rat Pack would hang out and play all night at clubs in Overtown and Liberty City.

SYMS: Exactly. It was a really dynamic moment. Miami has such a great entertainment history that originates in Overtown in that mid-century moment.

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This is part of why I’m drawn to it. A lot of these influences, other popular media, intersected at that moment.

RAIL: One of the bus lines that will carry your posters originates in downtown Miami at the Government Center, where you researched in the archives. A little farther north it stops at the corner where the Harlem Square Club was, and then follows the trajectory of the riots up through Wynwood, and also the trajectory of where people moved after segregation—to neighborhoods farther north. It’s interesting to place that designbased expression of a historical moment on a geographic trajectory.

SYMS: That’s why I wanted them to start in Overtown and move outward in a similar way that a lot of the cultural expression was working. This was a place, like you’re saying, where you would find the craziest kind of combinations, like four giant stars all hanging out at this one nightclub together. I think that shows what the period was like, fruitful creative expression. I’m interested in how that circulated and, like you’re saying, what happened in the ensuing twenty years, between 1965 and '85.

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SYMS: Cropping has an aesthetic parallel in the idea of “close reading.” I’m isolating different elements to make an extreme focal point. Typographically, I’ve been thinking about the designer Rob Giampietro’s essay “Stereotypography,” in which he traces the lineage of two typefaces, Neuland and Lithos, which are so often used on, like, Native Sun remakes, the Lion King, or sitcoms like Martin and My Brother and Me. RAIL: Those fonts are used as a generic marker of “ethnic.” Neuland reminds me of Comic Sans.

SYMS: Yeah, it’s really not the nicest looking font. It doesn’t look sophisticated, and I think that’s the point, it looks kind of primitive. So I’m using that font again, combined with another typeface that is based on the heading for Nite Life magazine. I pulled text from Killens’s billboards, which always have some funny descriptions like “brilliant pianist and singer straight from the village gates, New York.” So I’m combining these phrases into “word poems”—and I’m using the word "poem," but I’m using that fairly loosely, because I don’t really know much about poetry. I’m using that word bank to write new text and take different elements from his designs, so I think that’s where the cropping comes into play. I’m isolating elements that I’m drawn to, the stroke of one of the borders, these phrases, the style of portraiture. It’s really thinking about looking as another way of reading.

RAIL: You’ve recently had your first solo exhibition in a gallery context at Bridget Donahue in New York, and I saw some things happening there that are really condensed in the Overtown project.

Cropping was important, as was the way you drew from language, both with words and gestures, to build figures. I saw those sculptures as bodies that express how people are represented through media, specifically black people.

SYMS: I would say, for starters, it’s scary to call them sculptures, but I do think I’m extremely interested in the figure and I’m fully owning that.

Part of my thinking about the show was that I wanted it to look like a film set, so as I was constructing those I was just thinking a lot about this idea of character, which I built on in the Notes on Gesture film. It’s based on an essay by Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” about film as a place that we store our gestures. I disagree, but I’m interested in the idea that movement and gesture are a core language of cinema. I was thinking of this in combination with a series of early Edison films that feature black women moving through the city, and thinking about this idea of subjectivity of the self and what constitutes that, especially in popular media, which is my primary subject matter. I just think it remains a discursive form where ideas and values circulate. I asked myself, “How can I create a character in gesture, and what does that person sound like and look like?”

I began researching acting techniques and found the book Chirologia: Or the Natural Language of the Hand by John Bulwer, which was published in 1644. It’s a guide of paralinguistic gestures in Shakespearean theater, which were rigidly coded to have certain effects. There was an emotional coding to it. The film creates an analogue to that, focusing on a black female body.

RAIL: The woodcuts in Chirologia encapsulate gestures with the most simplified image of a hand imaginable, which resonates with the big print of the hand with the tambourine in your Notes on Gesture film in the installation. The woman in that film performs short little gestures over and over in front of a bright purple screen: a short inhalation, a hand gesture, a head tilt

and laugh. Elsewhere in the space, a bright purple screen leans against the wall. It works as a minimalist sculpture, nodding to Charles Ray, but it also refers to the green or blue screens used for chroma keying. I thought about something that Coco Fusco said when she was putting together the ICP triennial, that photographic film wasn’t developed to or ever really capable of fully recording black skin. All those references were in that piece for me, and I wonder if that’s what was in it for you?

SYMS: Yes, I was definitely thinking about white balance, proper exposure, techniques for creating the correct image. I’m interested in shifting ideas of what that correct image is, and even what the right frame of

reference of that is. Even with the colors. I began to use purple in relationship to Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple and Oprah’s film adaptation of it. But then in a conversation with Noah Davis, a painter and friend who recently passed away, he said, “I’m so happy to see you using purple because I always use it for stuff.” And I said, “Purple is like the black person’s Yves Klein Blue.”

RAIL: Purple has such an interesting history. In the Roman era it was only available by milking the gland of a murex sea mollusk, and since then it’s been associated with wealth, power, and exclusivity.

SYMS: In addition to that, in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust she also

Martine Syms, A Certain Kind of Woman, 2015. Archival pigment print, 127 x 101.6 cm, edition of 3 plus 1 A.P.

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connects it to indigo harvesting. A motif in the film is everyone’s hands stained purple from the crops.

RAIL: The production of both murex and indigo require super visceral, physical labor that smells bad and stains the skin.

SYMS: Exactly. Conversely, in the book it operates as an indicator of—I think the quote is something to the effect of—“Purple is like God trying to show off,” so it indicates the supernatural in a secular space.

So I think it’s really like a confluence of those ideas for me, a stain that’s also this royal color. It’s like Arthur Jafa says about things that are “scuffed.” He has this idea of black visual inclination, one of them is the idea of things being scuffed.

RAIL: That’s interesting in relation to Michael Taussig’s book What Color Is the Sacred?, where he pulls each color from the spectrum and looks at how it figures into the realm of the sacred, but it’s missing the textural aspect.

SYMS: Everything is scuffed! Everything should be scuffed!

RAIL: Circling back to language and expression, Bridget Donahue was telling me that when people come into the gallery they say things like, “So, tell me about the color purple,” or “So, tell me about that Black Panther.” Those works manipulate the viewer into talking about things that aren’t part of the everyday discourse of a contemporary art gallery.

male, or a white person. I’ve been assuming that my viewer is not that. Especially with this work, I think. I’m talking to a black viewer in the way that, maybe, Clyde Killens was. He was talking to more than that, but that could be his presumed audience and I don’t think it’s a limitation.

It’s a way of operating. In the same way that we were talking about white balance in photography, as if you’re exposing for a different skin color.

RAIL: Black balance!

SYMS: It is really gratifying to me when people utter the phrase “the color purple” in the gallery, it’s like a direct reference to that book, which maybe they read or maybe they haven’t read. When I was shipping the work, one of the shippers who was helping me said, “Look, it’s a Black Panther.”

It’s a linguistic play, an object that is a text, an object that does things that text does, like refer and describe. I’m interested in that, and I’m also asking, “Who is the art viewer?” There’s the assumption that the viewer and oftentimes the artist is a white

SYMS: Yeah! Black balance, it gives you a different image, you know? It relates to this idea of this black visual inclination.

What does that aesthetically look like in a formal sense? Not even just conceptually, but what are some formal decisions that can be made in exploring that idea?

Christy Gast is an artist whose work across mediums reflects her interest in issues of economics and the environment.

MARTA CHILINDRON

TEMPORAL SYSTEMS November 19, 2015 February 5, 2016

ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY

2630 NW 2nd Ave, Miami, FL +1 305 438 0220

Available works by: Ricardo Alcaide, Amadeo Azar, Fabián Burgos, Matthew Deleget, Marcolina Dipierro, Danilo Dueñas, Juan Pablo Garza, Jaime Gili, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Artur Lescher, Russell Maltz, Marie Orensanz, Karina Peisajovich, Martin Pelenur, Teresa Pereda, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Luis Romero, Pablo Siquier, Ana Tiscornia, Sam Winston and other.

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C E L E B R AT I N G 3 5 Y E A R S THROUGH THE LENS OF THE FUTURE

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01 .0 9.1 6 | 7 PM Featuring performance vignettes by YoungArts alumni including Desmond Richardson, Dave Eggar and India Carney.

Directed by Tony Yazbeck YO U N G A RT S C A M P U S BAC KYA R D BA LL P RESENTING SP ON SOR

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NO MORE SAND:

Thoughts Composed Discursively aboard the SuperFast Gambling Boat Somewhere between Miami and Bimini N ICK CO UN TY

I remember the first time I saw it from the patio of PĂŠrez Art Museum Miami, resting in the port of Miami with an oily shine like a beautiful, sleep-deprived gambler. I knew then I would have to sail on this SuperFast Gambling Boat to Bimini. My imagination cascaded the possibilities of a vessel whose sole purpose was

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fulfilling the insatiable and idiosyncratic desires of gamblers—dark, narrow corridors leading to rooms where people pass around an old six-shooter; down the hall, a room where a serious-looking man in a gray suit and a gold pince-nez passes documents over a table to a Dostoyevskian type to sign in return for a future promise; rooms

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designated for gambling on Scottish curling, Canadian football, women’s boxing, the outcome of an election for the judge of an Appalachian county. What right-minded gambler wouldn’t want to spend a weekend aboard a ship like that?

I boarded on a Friday evening with my friend and editor as well as plenty of cash that I half-expected to never see again. The boat has an impressive exterior, lavish white with red lettering and a sleekness that suggests it will make good on its “SuperFast” promise. On the inside, it is less impressive, predictably cramped and hastily arranged as if, once inside, the jig is up, you have already come too far, and the trap has been sprung (“abandon all hope ye who enter here”). As it turns out, the SuperFast Gambling Boat to Bimini is not as gambling-centric as I imagined. Gambling is merely one way of spending time aboard the ship and certainly not the focal point. People gather at the outdoor bar, where a band of Malaysians crank out mild, mid-tempo, American summer jams of the ’70s and ’80s. On the roof, there are dance competitions and giveaways, with a hype man in a tropical shirt getting everyone into that loose, cruising spirit. There is bingo, which was very well

attended and maybe should be counted as gambling, although no one wants to think of his grandparents as degenerates.

The day was inauspiciously overcast, and it was no surprise when the skies opened and began pounding the land and water below with a furious rain. We retreated to the gambling floor, deep in the belly of the ship: a smallish room, as casinos go, with a low ceiling and hardly any space at all for non-gamblers. There were maybe two hundred people inside, but the gaming would have to wait until we hit international waters. We passed the time getting friendly with the blackjack dealer, who was setting up her station.

She asked us to guess where she was from, and I lost my first money of the trip when my editor was able to guess the Phillipines before I could. We spent the next few hours drifting between roulette and blackjack, not up or down any noteworthy amount.

Casinos are funny places. They come in many different forms: on boats, in buildings, in houses, on rivers, in oceans, and, if you want to be flexible with definition, in the convenience store, on the Internet, in alleyways, and anywhere money is changing hands through prospecting the unknown outcomes of the

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future—clandestine, illicit, completely legitimate, or somewhere vaguely in-between. Gamblers bet on games of chance, games of skill, on the stock market, on elections, on whether they can do a backflip, will get breast implants, can run a marathon in the desert heat, or if they can live in an Iowa town for a certain period of time without going completely insane. People are fond of talking about how traditional casinos pump oxygen into their atmosphere, how there are no clocks, how the exits are impossible to find, how the food is always too salty. What is often not talked about is how this constructed environment can nudge you into a different energy dimension, where concepts like time, oxygen, money, and escape cease to have any real meaning. When you arrive, you exchange your cash for chips. This transference is one of many, as you have to forgo all the trappings of logic and reality in the material world.

The bouncing balls and the flying dice, the endless drinks and the air of chain-smoke, the hypnotic quality of varying metallic sounds, fired off in regular intervals and mingling with the carnival lights—all these converge to create a quality of suspended belief that is absolutely essential to existence in the casino universe. This frenetic reality is improved when, intermittently, a notion materializes and reminds you that you are actually inside a very large boat that is, at this very moment, slicing through the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

People have been gambling on boats for centuries. The nautical gambling vessel conjures images of the mighty Mississippi River, the American South, and of the great Mark Twain. An avid gambler and poker player, Twain was also fond of depicting the hustlers, charlatans, swindlers, and cheaters who are as synonymous with gambling as the whiskey and the women and the dice and the decks. There’s a story that finds Twain and a few miscellaneous businessmen aboard the yacht of Congressman T. B. Reed traveling somewhere in the Caribbean, embroiled in a serious poker game.

Twain reports that at one point Reed won twenty-three pots in succession. After that, he says, they made no more stops. When the ship’s captain announced an approaching port, he was told, “Sail on and do not interrupt the game!”

One of the more colorful cultural landmarks in South Florida are the houses of “Stiltsville,” located a few miles offshore in Key Biscayne. The first of these stilted wooden shacks was built by “Crawfish” Eddie Walker at the tail end of Prohibition. Purposefully built beyond US waters, Eddie’s shack offered gambling, beer, crawfish chowder, and bait for fishermen. Al Capone, who spent his last years in Miami, was also rumored to have a gambling venue and bar somewhere among the shacks of Stiltsville. It’s easy to feel like the past offers up a more romantic tableau of our current vices, but the descendants of these pastimes are antiseptic, distilled, and mutated in a way that makes them more efficient in their pursuits.

Crawfish Eddie and Al Capone would be duly impressed with how their models have been scaled for maximum profitability.

These days, you don’t have to take a boat out to a suspicious shack in the middle of the bay to get a good gamble going. You can round up the kids and the wife and spin it off as a family vacation, complete with activities for everyone. While gambling on the boat, I met a middle-aged pharmacist whose sole aim of the trip, it seemed, was to make new friends. How quaint! Surely an improvement on sitting next to the drunk pirate on a shack in the open

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water who plans to rob you blind the second you attempt to traffic your winnings back to mainland.

When we finally put our feet down on Bahamian soil, my eight hundred new friends and I were herded into a big white tent with a DJ pumping dancehall calypso on the newly constructed asphalt dock. On the tram to the hotel, we were sandwiched between a blackout drunk FSU frat boy angrily imploring his girlfriend to “go hook up with someone else,” and a forty-something trio of swingers who were hardcore necking like it was four am in a European discotheque. Just across the way, in another tram, about a dozen girls decked out in bachelorette apparel wooed loudly, announcing, in reverse-siren fashion, the arrival of all the dumb Americans who were drunk and ready to spend their money.

This rich history of nautical gambling also has a place in Bimini, a small tropical island of nine square miles about fifty miles due east of Miami. It is the closest point in the Bahamas to mainland United States and has a population of around two thousand.

The SS Sapona is a concrete-hulled ship that was commissioned by Woodrow Wilson for WWI. When the war was over, it was decommissioned and sold for scrap to the visionary architect of Miami Beach, Carl Fisher. Sometime later, Fisher sold the Sapona to Bruce Bethel, a prohibition-era profiteer who used it to store alcohol off the cost of Bimini, as well as to house a brothel and a casino. During the great 1926 hurricane, it ran aground five miles off the coast of Bimini, and there it has sat for close to a century. By now it looks like a rotting train—rusted over, riddled with large, asymmetrical holes (the navy used it for target practice and training around WWII) and covered in wild graffiti. There is something ominous to this large, graffitied vessel of yesteryear, still standing tall and imposing in the middle of the ocean like some kind of atoll or dead volcano. To swim inside the boat, and imagine it full of people, drinking and drugging, gambling and fucking, as if the world could end tomorrow, made me a little sad at how sterile my experience on a gambling boat thus far had been. I can’t imagine that the SuperFast could ever be this kind of artifact for the hundred-years-from-now version of me, but maybe the global economy will crash and a terrible hurricane will place it at the bottom of the sea, where future gambling historians, very much alive, may dive deep and observe the ways we long-dead gamblers gambled one hundred years ago.

The casino on the island is small and it caters mostly to high-stakes gaming—out of the six blackjack tables they had set up when we arrived at one am, none had a lower stake than a one-hundred-dollar minimum per hand. The dealers on the island were all Bahamian, and were friendly at times, surly at others.

Only a couple of the tables had patrons—high-stakes-looking guys smoking cigars and drinking red wine, with blonde women in red lipstick and black cocktail dresses. As it turns out, there was a very famous ex-Miami Dolphin who was living it up all weekend in the high-rollers section. With little choice, we saddled up to the roulette tables, and donated a bit of our coin to the house.

We met a lot of characters gambling deep into the night at the resort. Many of the same faces, who were going hard on the boat, were mainstays on the island floor as well. The bachelorettes made an appearance at the roulette wheel, plunking down bets bloodlessly, as if obliging some perfunctory, unspoken regulation of

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casino visitation. The FSU frat boy reappeared as well; he seemed in better spirits, and his intoxication took a different, mellower hue.

A favorite of mine was a guy we called “Double Zero” for his favorite bet on the wheel. He was a talkative fellow, always insanely drunk, probably in his mid-fifties, with a New York swagger and plenty of crazy shit to say. He told us he was in the mob, that he’s killed many people, and that he hangs out in lesbian bars, where the women like him better. Every few minutes he would proclaim himself from a different place: “I’m from New Jersey,” “I’m from Hollywood,” “I’m from Miami.” At one point, apropos of nothing, I heard him whisper to himself, “I’m a lonely boy.”

Resorts Bimini World is a partnership between RAV Bahamas, a real estate development company located in Miami Beach, and Genting Group, the Malaysian mega-corporation that bought and controversially seeks to convert the former Miami Herald property into the largest casino in the world. Bimini World Resorts is a seven-hundred-fity-acre property, which comprises about a third of the North Bimini island. It is the speculation of some that the resort’s intention is to eventually absorb the rest of the island.

Clearly, this is a significant moment in the island’s history, and while colonialism and non-native benefaction is not new there, the severity of the looming future, where the island’s identity will be totalitarian in its pursuit of fun and relaxation, could very well erase much of the natural and cultural properties of the Bimini that existed in the pre-Genting era. With the influx of tourists from the SuperFast Gambling Boat, the island’s population roughly doubles, and it isn’t hard to pick out the ruddy, Midwestern-looking contingent that swarm around the T-shirt shops, conch shacks, and sweet-bread bakeries. If you ask a tourist about the Bimini locals, you are likely to get bubbly, enthusiastic answers about the warm and friendly people they have encountered. Sure enough, when we foolishly got our golf cart stuck in the sand, there were a few kind people who instantly appeared and gave us the much-needed aid to dislodge it. We had a quick laugh at how helpless we were and we were told, “No more sand!”

At night, the island’s peaceful tropical facade is veiled with a ghostly air familiar to Caribbean towns. We drove our golf cart down Kings Highway, the main thoroughfare that runs the length of North Bimini, and takes you to Alice Town, the commercial hub at the end of the island. There is certainly a magic to Bimini, and it isn’t hard to locate that ephemeral human feeling that can lead to thinking you have found the fountain of youth, as Ponce de León once thought while here, or the lost city of Atlantis, as many believed accounted for “Bimini Road,” a submerged formation of rectangular limestone blocks located off the coast. This is also the island where Martin Luther King was rumored to have composed part of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize and where Ernest Hemingway wrote much of To Have and Have Not, his book about running rum from Cuba to Key West and his only novel that takes place on American soil. There is a weight to Bimini that demands a consideration of the supernatural and the unknown quantities of the universe and the human imagination.

The first settlers of the Bahamas and Bimini are believed to be the Lucayans, who began exploring the island somewhere between 500 and 800 AD, paddling in dugout canoes from the islands of Cuba and/or Hispaniola. Many accounts of Bimini’s

history begin with the families who settled the island in the 1840s, and subsisted on some farming and fishing, but mostly on wrecking, an outdated practice of salvaging cargo from shipwrecked commercial vessels, sometimes involving intentionally luring the ships into doomed channels using false guiding lights.

Bimini was a hub for this activity, located on a particularly treacherous stretch of the Florida Straights and the Gulf Stream, making it a popular channel for merchant ships sailing to and from Cuba and the Caribbean. Bimini was also an important location for rum running, and other illicit prohibition-era activities, and later, for the drug trade.

It’s hard to argue with the job stimulation created by the resort, economically or otherwise. One Bahamian I spoke with who is employed through the resort held the opinion that anyone who wants to be employed can be, but many simply refuse to work.

The history of economical pursuits on the island is such that he reasoned it has created a culture in which working every day is not the norm. Rather, one could historically work for a few days to make enough money to subsist for the rest of the month. This plays into the island stereotype of easy, languid living, and there is no shortage of Bahamians kicking back under a shady tree, drinking beer, and socializing for the better part of the day. I don’t know if you can un-marry this relaxed facade and the soul of the island, where energy and time exist on their own plane and you can lose yourself behind the cemetery at the island’s end, where, if you walk over the grassy hill, you can see yet another rusted-out ship with the backdrop of electric-blue water that stretches on into the endless tropical horizon. There is a sincere feeling of peace you can find there, if you just stand still and look out into the water.

Bimini is a hell of a place to visit, and I can see why people want to get there, by hook or by crook. To take a gambling boat to a tropical location was a beautiful dream to me, and I’m glad I did it.

I hope the island can find a way to be everything to everyone and keep the parts of itself that make it what it is, as well as be a home to the people who live there. Many visions of paradise are manufactured realities. We need look no further than Miami Beach to remember that the sands of much of the island are imported from somewhere else. Carl Fisher was fond of his “tropical illusions” and it would appear that fifty miles away, some people are taking a page out of his book. Sometimes it’s hard to find the weight of the present, when there is so much past and history colliding, and it’s hard to see what is good and what is bad without the perspective of time and the lessons of the past. There is always collateral damage when changes are afoot and a nostalgia for what once was isn’t always fair or true. The future of Bimini is uncertain, and only the passage of time will reveal the winners and the losers of this super fast, high-stakes wager.

Nick County is a writer, gambler, and semi-retired country singer who lives on Normandy Isle with his wife and Chihuahua. You can listen to his latest album, “Nick County and the Big Texas Assholes: In the Valley of the Red Sun” at nickcounty.com.

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A LIST OF TRASH

from Legion Picnic Island (and Surrounding) in Biscayne Bay FRAN KY C R UZ

Blue half-shoe alongside what seems to be a piece of a dark-brown giraffe plush toy with clouds of synthetic fibers that float with the sticks and rocks as the background. A black rubber chancleta and Gatorade bottles (plastic) left behind by Christopher the kayak hobbyist explorer visitante from Spain.

Black oil bottle.

Green plastic from broken chair balances on a black lid (plastic). Metallic-blue plastic piece reflects the heart-shaped leaves of what seems to me to be from a Catalpa bignonioides tree.

Queen Osprey, our predatory eagle, leaves her six-week-old nest to fly above with eyes fixed on the fishy prize. I watch her pass on the reflection of a glass bottle with water, sand, pieces of floating turtle grass, the marine diatom Seminavis robusta (a diatom is a single-celled alga that has a cell wall of silica), and tiny, swimming krill: a type of biosphere like a terrarium.

SEA GRAPE FLOURISH HERE THE FRUIT IS EDIBLE AND I FIND THEM TASTY, so I ate one that fell safely onto a triangular piece of Styrofoam with a hole in it and in that hole was a beautiful, transparent red plastic bottle cap with a Coca-Cola logo on it and a blood-red ketchup packet, oxidized.

A chewed-on (by what it seems like some type of mammal) heel and knee of a faded salmon-colored plastic baby leg.

Plastic bottles here come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, more of them then I can count on my short visit. Plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic clear cups, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam cafecito cup.

Green rope in a knot that took five tries to learn five paces away from a fifty-five gallon white plastic bin 5 percent filled with more trash (McDonald’s cup, shoe rubber, transparent and green plastic bottles, old boot, plastic tub, blue lighter, gallon plastic, decomposing coconuts, another chancleta—broken).

Mop end suspended between branches pretends to be an octopus, points to a yellow flotation device on a mono filament line tangled with a sprouted seed.

Blue and purple fibers were once rope or maybe a clown’s wig.

Cerulean blue left-ear noise-canceling foam shape because the city’s too loud, and a toilet seat because the city’s too shitty. Wooden plank with old varnish already walked on.

Plastic rum bottle. A disposable cup from a night to remember on the other side of the bay, perhaps they had a good time.

Styrofoam rocks sink the rubber soul of the never-going-to-walk-again shoes on the other foot buried in decomposing coconut shells. Meal container.

Sea urchin with

red-and-yellow striped straws poking out of it. Suckers.

Rubber hose attached to brackets with a rust-green patina.

Turquoise-blue plastic coils among the mangroves. Balsa wood and resin very fishlike with glitter-reflecting floating lure, the big eyes to the prize (hooks have rusted away).

Plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plates and pieces range in size.

36 T H E M I A M I R A I L

WINTER 2015

A used-to-be-red-but-because-the-sun-has-now-faded-it pink lid from an ice cooler.

Plastic yellow buoy, long. Green floaty arm float, child size with instructions, safety precautions, and breath of the cautious parent still in it.

Two Ritz soda pop plastic bottles in a white bag with rusted Mason jar lid. The reflection of the sun sneaking in between the leaves, shines a holy luminescent white light onto the Styrofoam at the right moment, it will last forever.

Aluminum foil ball like meteor tangled with purple-indigo fabric or melted rubber hugs and grips rocks and fossils.

Black fibers with tar maybe for use in roofing next to necklacepod (Sophora tomentosa), a plant with yellow flowers all year; attractive foliage; seeds poisonous. Do not step on the rusted nails that penetrate through the treated wood.

A shit ton of plastic cups.

A delicious Pilon tin sans cafĂŠ.

One-liter milk jug with rancid milk inside.

Plastic bags that range from white to brown and yellow. I watched what used to be a white, now almond, and green plastic bag that was in the grips of this branch trapped for so long that it forgot what it was because it was swayed by the persuasive tide wave after wave after wave in perfect harmony.

Green baby iguana scurries through pieces of Styrofoam (Styrofoam plate tectonics) that float like bird shit in the high tide (good luck I guess), that while inspecting a tennis ball a fish eagle drops a four-and-a-quarter-inch fish smack splat on my shoulder promoting me to the rank of guts and two scales.

Organic food container from Whole Foods ($7.99), red lipstick in a blue (like the sky) plastic bag.

Condom wrapper from that first time we made sweet, sweet love under the full moonlight on the bay. Bae. Smartwater bottle next to a Smartfood Popcorn plastic bag.

Big white rope with decayed lynch knot.

A brown lizard on a yellow frisbee on white bleach bottle watches my every move.

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Chewed-up triangular piece of foam with hole has tiny plant sprouts in its craters. Plastic lawn chair reclines on a Sabal palmetto (also known as cabbage palm), the heart is edible, the flowers are sweet and can produce a dark amber honey, and fruits have a prune-like flavor.

Algae green Nike shoe. Green painted wood.

Another chancleta (sandal) with illustrated scene of a wind surfer with wave, palm tree (with coconuts), island, and birds.

Aluminum cans and metals. Rusted Razor. Tampon applicator. Majestic frigatebird glides above.

Indigo fabric comforts the tiny crack baggie. Orange and reflective barricade contrasts the lapis lazuli– blue dog toy.

A dark-green heavy glass wine bottle that at one time gave the gift of loosening the lips enough to spark an intense environmentally super conscientious debate.

Mud daubers are solitary wasps that prey on spiders for their larvae by paralyzing them with their venom and bringing them into their nests. They drink rainwater from halfbroken Fiji water bottle with paradise illustrated.

Black garbage bag with nothing in it.

Red and green plastic bottle caps complement each other.

Rusted metal cage with hexagon pattern.

Green triangular emerald tablet of green glass.

The guts of a potato chip bag gleaming chrome.

Plastic toy shovel used to dig a moat around the sandcastle to protect against an attack by the Sargassum brown seaweed (edible) monster.

Plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic, Styrofoam plastic.

Red bugs (Pyrrhocoridae) have an orgy on a scrap of Styrofoam; they are all over this island and don’t seem to mind the trash, almost serves as a set for the romantic gathering.

White plastic Cream cleaner bottle that has written on it the words framing an illustration of an octopus with painting supplies in all five of its tentacles with a big happy cartoon face saying “something to do it” and also contains no harsh abrasives.

Olde English 16-once can. Broken Keep Out sign. Pleather glass eye carrying case.

Chewing tobacco tin (plastic), fruit cup, tiny liquor bottle, red and white bobber that looks like a Pokémon ball, toothbrush (broken), Tic-Tac container, and a clear plastic bottle with hand-written message done with anger or lots of haste, 20 percent readable, all belonged to one man.

Ochre-yellow acrylic paint container. Random violent violet transparent plastic suffocates a bag of Famous Amos chocolate cookies. Bird bones, including skull of bird with a short curve at the end of a black beak, perhaps a raptor fish eater.

Rusted air horn probably left behind by a sexy duo of super heroic adventurous types that capsized in the bay losing their phones and life vests, floating holding on to half-sunken canoe and what was left of equipment for thirty minutes against the current only to be saved by two very skeptical angels on a red unicorn after a weird angle caused by the choppiest of wave combinations during a camera rescue mission back to Bird Key while singing and humming a remix of the theme song for the video game Zelda.

38 T H E M I A M I R A I L

WINTER 2015

Budweiser can of beer (seems vintage) Coconut water container, paper and plastic-lined with aluminum, imported from Thailand, surrounded by tons of coconuts.

Neon-orange glowing-in-the-sunlight plastic ball.

Yellow with pink polka dots triangle of plastic next to a bird leg bone.

Publix plastic bag with misc. trash inside suspended from tree.

Red-orange shopping cart fragment.

Hermit crab on top of blue-green plastic chair, half-buried.

Sea purslane (sesuvium portulacastrum), an edible ground covering plant is a salty snack that is a good source of protein, omega-3, and essential vitamins tangled and tied with two old shoelaces.

Paint roller . . . hard.

Legos in a beauty berry-purple cup and an orange Halloween-themed bucket with the bats from Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos tattooed on it.

Tire island with tree sprout.

Nickel bag empty (plastic).

Medicine bottle glows a luminescent orange on the ground and above my head seemingly floating creatures of the Nephila genus commonly called golden orb-weavers, giant wood spiders, and banana spiders patiently wait for an oncoming meal. While these spiders are mildly venomous, they aren’t a big threat to humans, as their venom isn’t overly potent.

Philly blunt wrapper, BRUT after shave, and 7-Eleven Slurpee cup.

Red ribbons helix-wrap themselves around mangrove roots and remind me of the irony that is that this ribbon probably made the most beautiful lady really happy attached to an ever-so-consumable balloon with the words “fuck me” on it.

Inflatable beach ball (with breath).

Blue deodorant that hides the civilized from smelling like the beasts.

Plywood.

Red mangroves grow out of PVC pipes.

Floating coffee cup, with plastic lid still on, rocks on waves.

Fantastic plastic blue bait bucket with fish still in it.

Plastic fantastic “thank you thank you” bags; consist of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is made from petroleum, which won’t break down. Ever.

Imitation Croc shoe (space-age rubber, black).

Disintegrating into the Earth is particle board.

A pillow, green and brown with little shrimp-like beings all over it.

Dirty wet algae with barnacles, teddy bear that once belonged to that little girl who would never let it go and couldn’t sleep at night without it.

Tin can lid.

A plastic water soaker ray gun to get the little ones ready for a journey into space.

Red shotgun shell, round Styrofoam next to sea urchin skeleton (broken).

A quarter of a blue cracked surfboard that will never ride another wave.

A recently deceased white heron and behind him an armada of our discards.

Plastic bottle of Moco de Gorila hair gel.

Franky Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist with a BFA from the New World School of the Arts who currently lives in Miami.

Orange club bracelet.

A foam Earth squeeze stress ball and a half of a blue shoe.

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THE PENTHOUSE

Life’s magnum opus.

FIVE BEDROOMS. SEVEN AND A HALF BATHS. PRIVATE SPA. MOVIE THEATRE. GAME ROOM. STAFF QUARTERS. ROOFTOP TERRACE POOL DECK.

Introducing The Penthouse at Regalia. Two floors plus rooftop pool deck as much at home in London’s Mayfair or New York’s fashionable Fifth Avenue as it is in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. This oceanfront masterpiece represents the finest bespoke materials sourced from around the world

by Design Director Charles Allem, of CAD International.

The Penthouse, the pinnacle of Limited Edition Living.

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Terraces + Rooftop 6,050 SF

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Oral representations cannot be relied upon as correctly stating representations of the developer. For correct representations, make reference to the documents required by Section 718.503, Florida statutes, to be furnished by a developer to a buyer or lessee. Prices, plans and specifications are subject change to without notice. Void in States where prohibited. Additional restrictions may apply. Artist’s conceptual rendering.

OBSOLETE MEDIA MIAMI MO N I CA U S Z E R OW I C Z

The cellulose acetate film degradation process begins with a release of acetic acid and ends sometime after liquid, bubbly deposits ooze and crystallize onto the emulsion. It is not so different than the decay of a more organic body, in both its staged progression and, most especially, its distinct scent—acetic acid is the key component of vinegar. Though there are ways to test for film degradation, one need only smell for it. It’s vinegary, yes, but also simultaneously sharp and musty, fresh and rotting. It’s a reminder: film is a living thing.

This—aging, vinegared history—is what it smelled like on an exceptionally sticky day in July at the headquarters of Obsolete Media Miami (O.M.M.) in the Design District, where O.M.M. cofounder, preservationist, and film archivist Barron Sherer was disposing of the culprit. (Vinegar syndrome, he explained, is contagious—to other rolls of film.) But it was not unpleasant; in fact, given the archive’s interior life, it was a little bit intoxicating. The sun was streaming inside and a NASA documentary screened on a projector while Kevin Arrow—artist, collector, art and collections manager at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, and O.M.M.’s other half—projected overlaying visuals, creating a living, moving collage. Though O.M.M.’s space is wide open, it is crammed with old slides, archived footage, vintage equipment, and found art, all organized tightly enough to feel streamlined but nonchalantly enough to recall an especially fun attic. It is all meant for perusing, browsing, and, for some visitors, utilization.

Sherer and Arrow developed O.M.M. as a research archive, though its origins—obsessive hobbyism, artistic practice, and an intense need to share it all—render the archives an experimental project. Currently nominated for a Knight Arts Challenge grant, O.M.M. is especially utilitarian in an era of digital technology: beyond just the current fetishization of analog media, developing new ways to work with it represents an important merging of ideologies and time. O.M.M. is interested in what Sherer and other archivists refer to as “the migration of content—we’re moving this analog material into the digital realm so people have easier access to it.”

This is happening in a rather literal sense through actual media transfer, but also more holistically through artistic collaboration. David Brieske, Richard Vergez, and Dim Past are a few

42 T H E M I A M I R A I L

musicians currently working with sounds found in the archive for new recordings; pop-up film screenings of archival material are planned throughout the Design District.

At the Miami International Airport, O.M.M., commissioned by Yolanda Sanchez—who manages the fine arts and cultural affairs division of the Miami-Dade aviation department—created a roving pop-up cinema in the concourse, featuring silent films and creating, as Arrow explains, “an antidote to Fox News and airport TV.” There, the typically clinical monotony of the airport terminal was interrupted by the comically strange: projected screenings of the 1920 film One Week, in which a slapstick Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely attempt to build a house in seven days, or vintage animated shorts featuring Disney characters tossing basketballs. For such a welcomed program, the guys of O.M.M. went surprisingly rogue. On each day of their residency, they circled the international departures terminal in a golf cart, looking for the areas most populated with dull expressions. Then, having already stored their equipment, they posted up shop with a projector, screen, and speakers, prompting laughter from children and curious pauses from suits, who stopped mid-wheely-suitcase-roll to snack on Versailles pastries and stare. The interaction transcended the space, at least momentarily, but also encourage travelers to engage with it.

That’s the essence of O.M.M.’s community presence: giving back by getting others involved. “Our careers have always been about public service, so now these artistic practices are lining up with that,” says Sherer. “It turns out all these nutty, DIY tactics we’ve used have value.” In June, as part of Locust Projects’ LAB (Locust Art Builders) program, a class of local high school students visited the archives and made prints using old slides and images; Sherer and Arrow are putting together a filmmaking workshop, featuring Super 8s gifted by the artist Julie Kahn. “When the kids from Locust came by, they started using Photoshop terminology without even realizing it,” says Arrow. “Instead of sandwiching the slides, they were making layers. Instead of hole-punching, they were deleting.” Hobbies are satisfying conduits for any particular interest—they allow room for constant growth and sometimes act as a medium themselves—but they are much better when they become less singular, more communicative. O.M.M. is satisfying for geeks and inspiring for artists, but it’s also a real

WINTER 2015

educational resource, hosting classes and allowing others to explore, rent, or somehow incorporate parts of the archive into their own work.

“I think practicing generosity is important,” Arrow explains. “The spirit of altruism runs through this whole project. Both Barron and I were friends with John Spire, who had an audio-visual company on 36th Street and 2nd Avenue; he passed away a few years ago. He was the most generous person in the world with his knowledge and his material. Anyone who shows an interest in this kind of stuff should be generous with their knowledge about it and helping people realize their projects. The volume of stuff that I have—I don’t think I can activate all this material in my lifetime.

It’s great to let others activate it for me.”

Adds Sherer: “It’s a post-Internet thing: you realize that people have the same interests that we do. Just sitting in your garage with your slides and film is one thing. Then you realize there’s this interest everywhere else.”

Monica Uszerowicz is a writer and photographer in Miami.

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MĂIASTRA

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

PART IV: SIRENS This is the gorge of the Iron Gates, where the blue Danube splits Romania from eastern Serbia. It was here across these waters that Emperor Trajan built the Bridge of Apollodoro. Trajan’s bridge, longest arch bridge in all of Europe, aided his army in conquering Dacia. This stretch of Danube is, or it once was, also home to the fortress isle of Ada Kaleh. [Note: more on the curious case of the water-logged smuggler’s den of Ada Kaleh on the way.] But the gorge’s most bizarre artifact has roots in neither the Roman nor Ottoman Empires.

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Carved into limestone cliffs high above the river is the face of the last ruler of Dacia: Decebal, who died while defending his land from the greatest conquering empire of all time. The statue measures near forty-three meters high, the largest stone sculpture in all of Europe. Up close, the large face looks like something primeval, the relic of some lost civilization. Primitive and ancient though it may seem to be, Decebal is only eleven years old. Commissioned in 1994 by Iosif Constantin Dragan, it’s a modern marvel. The stone head, which took twelve sculptors ten years to carve, cost Dragan upwards of one million dollars. [Note: Decebal’s human head was cut from its trunk and tossed down the Gemonian flight of stairs in Rome.] Dragan made his billions exporting petrol to Italian fascisti in World War II. In his more advanced years, he turned his attention to the rich history of his own country. And with his Decebal monument, he sought to repay his nation with an ode to its past.

In Greek myth, the sirens were mantic nymphs who preyed on any seafarer who dared pass their coast. They sang odes with “honeyed voices” to the triumphs of the men in order to lure them to shore. Those Greeks who in weakness succumb to the sounds of flattery were seduced, murdered and gutted. Above the rocky shores of Istros, Dacian for the Danube, another siren’s song rings out. 

Decebal has become a major icon of the pseudoscience of Protochronism: a brand of dubious cultural politics specific to

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modern-day Romania. It is revisionist history hewn from Dacology, the study of ancient Dacia. As a field of study, Dacology began with the works of Bogdan P. Hasdeu, bien sur. Hasdeu wrote verbose treatises about the non-Latin roots of Romanian culture. Ever the folklorist, Hasdeu “did not hesitate to infuse history, sometimes in defiance of the evidence, with the values in which he believed.” 1 [Note: for more on our esteemed national alchemist and the sad tale of his daughter, see Part II.] Nonetheless, his theories soon became the tools with which Protochronists “helped to construct a fictive mono-ethnic cultural heritage from the political reality of a multi-national state.” 2 Romania, remember, is the old chimera, torn by war and bandaged by protean borders. My father, born in the Carpathians, in Brasov, then Austro-Hungary, was in fact Magyar.

My mother’s hometown of Czernowitz is now in Ukraine, yet a Ukrainian she was not.

Origin stories of this country have always inspired more shame than pride in its people. It was this inferior feeling that spurred the Dacologists to try and alchemize the past. Dacia grew, in their minds, to be the spark that lit the flame of all human civilization.

[Note: if this is beginning to sound like that other European pseudoscience, you have a good ear.] Rome, to them, was, in fact, colonized by Dacian immigrants, and not the other way around. The language of proto-Dacia was the basis for Latin, for all tongues, preceding Sumer. Even the Christian faith is heir to Zalmoxianism, religion of proto-Dacia. Fiction, it seems, is a valley lush with low-hung distinction, ripened and ready for the pluck. “Dacomania,” as its known, found a new life under the Ceausescu Communist regime.

Ceausescu saw in Dacology a way in which to grow his cult of personality. He carved for himself a lineage leading back to the great Burebista, a Dacian ruler: “Burebista offered Ceausescu supreme legitimization, as the ancient king’s state prefigured in many ways (unitary, centralized, authoritarian, respected by the ‘others,’ etc.) his own Romania, as the dictator liked to imagine it.” 3 It is far easier to promise people a noble past than promise them a bright future. He filled his people with stories of heroic ancestors while he drained away their assets; while he razed sections of structural history to make way for new, ubiquitous bloc homes.

Ceausescu’s reign ended after the Revolution, but Protochronism remained. A new band of protochronies rose from the ash, led by our wealthiest citizen: Dragan. During Dej’s Communism, Dragan had been exiled for his ties to the old Iron Guard fascists. But Dragan found foothold in Mr. Ceausescu’s regime, and profited off of its ethos. The sculpture opened to the public in 2004, and inscribed below it, the words: DECEBALUS REX DRAGAN FECIT— King Decebal, Made By Dragan. The piece is, as he wrote, “aimed at reminding Romanians over time how great and glorious their past had been, what were their place and role in world history, and what was the basis of the nation’s present and future.” 4 Decebal

1 Lucian Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1997), 26.

2 Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaușescu’s Romania (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 206.

3 Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească, 52.

4

See www.decebalusrex.ro/en/history-of-the-monument.

was to be Dragan’s Mount Rushmore, and parallels drawn between the two are quite apt. Both attempt to whitewash the extant histories of their lands with chisel, dynamite and axe: Rushmore was carved from Six Grandfathers mountain in Dakota, robbed from the Lakota Sioux tribe; Decebal’s monument was built to rewrite the conquest of Dacia by the Roman Empire. [Note: and both of these regions, in response, gave the men who would scar their faces a hell of a time.] 

On myth and mischief in the world of Romanian cultural politics, Boia put it best: “Michael the Brave did indeed unite the Romanians, not in 1600, but posthumously in 1918.” 5 But the true genius of this mawkish siren’s song lies not in its message but in its matter. Stone is a guileless material, one we chose for its strength rather than its grace or beauty. We use stone so that the physical memories of our fathers will outlive our sons. Wood is a substance so mortal and composite, vital and rare it is utterly human. But wood splits and burns and so fails to conquer our childlike fear of death and immortal striving. And like wood, humans are delicate, betrayed by time and our decaying natural bodies. Even now, as I write, I can hear my aged voice grown hoarse from shouting: “Race straight past that coast! Soften some beeswax and stop your shipmates’ ears so none can hear.” 6 As I shout, the stone face of this gargantuan monument takes on the patina time brings. The false past he denotes appears more authentic to each new generation that sails by him. As an art historian concerned with memorial sculpture, this idea sends chills through my spine. This country simply can’t afford to look away from the truth of its past, not for one moment.

Yet there is one thought that consoles me, one small hope to wish for, though I may well be dead by then. During its construction, the sculptors ran into problems with Decebal’s enormous rock nose. Noses have always been, at this scale, famously delicate; just ask the Great Sphinx of Giza. Though they share similar densities, limestone lacks the compressed strength of Mt. Rushmore’s tough granite. Finding the limestone too porous to hold the nose, the sculptors patched it with concrete and rebar.

This technique of sculpting, while surely practical, is dodgy and not quite archival, really. The concrete adds pressure to the stone, creating hairline cracks into which foul weather can seep. One day the gigantic nose of our Dacian king will sheer off, collapsing into the river. In murky brown waters, we’ll find it, sunk like the relics of Trajan’s Bridge and Ada Kaleh. Then the King Decebal, noseless, will be transformed forever, more of a sphinx than a siren. And those who pass through the Iron Gates of Istros will hear not answers but questions in their ears.

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.

5 Boia, Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească, xxx.

6 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 198.

EXPRESS

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FROM

POTTERY TO

POPULATION DATA: The Diverse Influences of Adriana Varejão AL IN A CO HEN

Pedro Alonzo, adjunct curator of Dallas Contemporary, still vividly remembers meeting painter Adriana Varejão for the first time.

When he was in college, he worked for an art dealer. Together, they traveled to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), in Mexico, to view an exhibition of Latin and South American artists. Alonzo and his boss connected with dealers at the show. The next year, they journeyed throughout the region, speaking to the contacts they’d met. One dealer, Thomas Cohn, introduced the pair to the artist he claimed was the best he represented—Varejão.

“I was just sitting there, talking with her,” Alonzo says. They were at her home in Brazil. “She said, ’I want to keep working while we speak.’ She started stabbing a canvas, spreading it open. She was this very young woman with a knife. It was such a dramatic gesture.” And an inspiring one—since that first meeting, Alonzo has closely followed her practice. This fall, Alonzo opened Kindred Spirits at Dallas Contemporary, an exhibition of Varejão’s work that features a new series of paintings created specifically for the museum.

Like much of Varejão’s oeuvre, these new works explore cultural identity. The Kindred Spirits paintings, from which the exhibition takes its name, feature Varejão’s portraits overlaid with colorful shapes and symbols. In one, a yellow square with a dark outline covers Varejão’s nose and mouth. In others, feathers and earrings appear. In some, Varejão’s face is cut off, or markings and borders appear adjacent to it.

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It is easy to mistake the Kindred Spirits paintings for self-portraits. But the paintings were actually made by Chinese fabricators. Varejão sent photographs of herself to a studio in China that reproduced the images, raising questions about authorship and the multiplicity of sources required to create a work of art. Through the Kindred Spirits series, Varejão transforms reproduced photographic images manufactured by an anonymous foreign service into works worthy of an exhibition at an elite art institution.

Each painting contains its own unique references, a feat of both imagination and extensive research. The markings derive from two sources: American art history and Native American imagery. Varejão has typically focused on Brazil, her home country, as well as Portugal and China, countries to which Brazil’s colonial history is linked. This is the first show in which she explores North America.

Varejão uses elements of the works of seminal American artists, including Donald Judd, Agnes Martin (who also referenced Native American pottery in her own art), Georgia O’Keefe, and Llyn Foulkes. Markings taken from Native American face painting appear in other works. By interspersing these paintings along the wall, Varejão eliminates any hierarchy or distinction between Native American traditions and modern American art. In the gallery, the paintings are installed in a row, so that viewers must look at each, one by one. No single painting is given

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Adriana Varejão, Kindred Spirits, 2015. Oil on canvas, 52 x 45.5 cm. Courtesy Dallas Contemporary

a prominent position. Hanging the paintings at the same height eliminates any physical hierarchy or privileging of one over another. Additionally, none of the Kindred Spirits works carries a unique title. They’re each simply and impartially referred to as Kindred Spirits.

“It’s difficult to distinguish the exact references in the Kindred Spirits paintings,” said Alonzo. “When I first looked at them, I thought one referenced pottery when it was really Sol Lewitt.”

Alonzo highlights this confusion as the moment when he knew that Kindred Spirits was the correct name for the show. “I’m an expert and I was tricked!” he says. Minimalist Paintings was the original title, but Alonzo and Varejão realized that it was just too narrow. Artists such as O’Keefe and Foulkes certainly didn’t fit under the “minimalist” title, and the show was much more than a riff on a specific art historical movement. Instead, the show’s title emphasizes the connections among seemingly disparate artists and cultures. Native American pottery is of equal value within art discourse and the practice of art making itself.

There are echoes of similar themes in Varejão’s series of Mimbres paintings. Composed of oil and plaster on canvas, these works take their inspiration from the pottery of the Mimbres, a Native American tribe. Varejão describes them as “tri-dimensional.” Though they have a sculptural quality in their three-dimensionality, Varejão adamantly sees herself as a painter.

Alonzo recalls visiting the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural

History, in New Haven, Connecticut, with Varejão, where she first saw the Mimbres pottery. “We were looking at shards of pottery. Adriana said, ’What is that? Why are they shards?” Alonzo recalls. The answer was elusive. “The shards were found in tombs.

We don’t know what happened, but perhaps the vessels were destroyed to release spirits. There were these ’kill holes’ at the bottoms of the vessels.”

This idea stuck in Varejão’s mind. In her Mimbres paintings, the surfaces are cracked, lending them a three-dimensional, sculptural quality. Like an eggshell, the cracks seem to be the product of something internal trying to escape. There’s a suggestion of a spirit within the painting itself. Varejão’s paintings assume a mystical quality as they ask viewers to consider what’s behind the cracks and what emerges from a work of art.

Alonzo also emphasizes the size of the Mimbres paintings.

“They’re big,” he says. At five feet square, they’re much larger than the pottery shards that inspired them. They demand attention.

Varejão also painted the sides of the canvases; when visitors walk into the gallery, they see the detailing on the sides before the fronts of the works themselves. Literally and figuratively, there are many perspectives from which to view and interpret the work.

The Kindred Spirits paintings face the Mimbres paintings.

Varejão says that the organization of her works creates “good balance and rhythm.” With this set-up, each representation of Varejão confronts the Mimbres works. Varejão’s subtle smiles

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take on new meaning, perhaps of reverence and gratitude, when they appear directed toward the Mimbres series, representative of a tradition from the past that so inspired her.

On the wall in between these series hang the Polvo color wheels, for which Varejão examined a Brazilian government census from the 1970s that asked the population a non-traditional question: What color are you?

“The response was very Brazilian,” says Alonzo. Instead of conventional colors—red, brown, white, yellow—responses varied from “coffee with milk” to “kissed by the sun.” Varejão attempted to translate these lyrical responses into workable colors. She created thirty-three tubes of oil paint. With these new hues, she painted the Polvo color wheels. While they resemble tools from an art class, the context lends them a new political dimensions.

“What I love about the color wheels is that they could be demographic pie charts,” says Alonzo, “showing you how large the population of ’coffee with milk’ people are. They show how arbitrary these things are. The idea of racial purity is ridiculous. Humanity has been mixing since the dawn of time. Adriana is questioning ideas of purity and taxonomy of race and color.” As she does in Kindred Spirits, Varejão undermines hierarchies and preconceived cultural notions. In the color wheels, she also gives voice to individual Brazilian perspectives.

Justine Ludwig, the director of exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, notes the city’s positive reaction to Varejão’s work. “People see themselves in the show,” she says. “It echoes the diversity of Dallas.” The Polvo color wheels particularly appeal to art students. “They speak about color studies,” she says. Through the lens of race, a color wheel adopts new connotations. Many visitors, according to Ludwig, approach the Kindred Spirits works as a game, trying to guess the references Varejão used for each piece.

Varejão is quick to reject the association of an artist, or any individual, with the boundaries of a particular region. “It does not make sense to me to think of art in terms of geography,” she says. “Contemporary art is related to individuals.” She explains that “miscegenation,” links the Mimbres series, Kindred Spirits paintings, and color wheels that “in this specific group can either be cultural or racial.”

Alina Cohen is a Brooklyn-based arts and culture writer.

ABOVE Adriana Varejão, Polvo Color Wheel, 2015. Oil on canvas, three canvases, diam: 52 cm each.

Installation view: Kindred Spirits, Dallas Contemporary, 2015. Courtesy Dallas Contemporary LEFT Adriana Varejão, Tintas Polvo, 2013.

Wooden box with acrylic cover containing 33 aluminum oil paint tubes, 36 x 51 x 8 cm, edition 161/200 Adriana Varejão, Polvo Color Wheel, 2015. Oil on canvas, three canvases, diam: 52 cm each.

Installation view: Kindred Spirits, Dallas Contemporary, 2015. Courtesy Dallas Contemporary

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A BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT CENSUS FROM THE 1970S . . . ASKED THE POPULATION A NON-TRADITIONAL QUESTION: WHAT COLOR ARE YOU? “THE RESPONSE WAS VERY BRAZILIAN,” SAYS ALONZO. INSTEAD OF CONVENTIONAL COLORS—RED, BROWN, WHITE, YELLOW—RESPONSES VARIED FROM “COFFEE WITH MILK” TO “KISSED BY THE SUN.” EXPRESS

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A JOURNEY BETWEEN THE BOSPHORUS AND THE SEA OF MARMARA: Impressions from the Istanbul Biennial O MBRETTA AGRÓ AN DRUF F

More than twenty years have passed since my first visit to Istanbul, so I was thrilled when the opening of the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Saltwater: A Theory of Thoughts Forms, finally gave me the much-awaited excuse to travel again to the Turkish capital. The city, its ancient and recent history, its current political situation, and above all its surrounding waterways all played a major role in drafting the plan for the biennial’s ambitious undertaking. As Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the draftsperson (don’t call her the curator!) explained: “This citywide exhibition on the Bosphorus hovers around a material—salt water—and the contrasting images of knots and of waves. It looks for where to draw the line, to withdraw, to draw upon, and to draw out. It does so offshore, on the flat surfaces of our devices with our fingertips, but also in the depths, underwater, before the enfolded encoding unfolds.”

With exhibition venues on the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus, and as far as Kastellorizo, a Greek island two kilometers off the Turkish coast, the biennial presented over fifteen hundred artworks as well as materials and documents from disciplines as varied as oceanography, environmental studies, marine archeology, neuroscience, and mathematics. Projects were exhibited in museums and other official art venues, as well as in myriad temporary spaces on land and at sea, such as boats, hotels, former banks, garages, gardens, schools, shops, and private homes, including an underwater site near the island of Sivriada, where Pierre Huyghe built a concrete stage.

While at times this spatial fragmentation reinforced my view of the exhibition being disjointed and lacking a certain cohesive context, it also provided the thrill of discovery, encouraging audiences to visit parts of the city—and beyond—where the average tourist may not venture.

Istanbul Modern Most venues presented solo shows, but a few larger spaces offered visitors group exhibitions, where fascinating and at times unexpected pairings sparked intellectually and visually

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stimulating discourses among two or more artists or artifacts.

This was indeed the case for the exhibition at Istanbul Modern, the contemporary art museum housed in a former warehouse on the Bosphorus that opened to the public in 2004. The group exhibition on view there, “The Channel,” brought together object pairings such as drawings by Nobel laureate writer Orhan Pamuk and recordings by oceanographer Emin Özsoy; Fabio Mauri’s sculpture On the Liberty (1990) with Leon Trotsky’s 1929 book The Real Situation in Russia; and Ana Prvacki’s Zephyr, Debussy Erotic Score (2015) with sketches by Patrick Blanc, the Parisian botanist credited for inventing the vertical garden.

Among other highlights were The Prophets, an ongoing project started in 2013 in which Canadian artists Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens create whimsical 3-D renderings of economic charts, hundreds of which were positioned on a long, narrow table at the museum’s entrance; and Pillars (2015), fourteen totem-like concrete towers by Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui, which are reminiscent of bombed-out buildings that are yet still standing in their own macabre beauty, perhaps a metaphor for the resilience of the Lebanese people. The project Red/Red, by Turkish artist Asli Çavusoglu, showcased on a table and on the surrounding walls books and works on paper drawn with geometrical patterns using a specific red pigment extracted from the cochineal bug. Lastly, The Shelter (2015), an unsettling installation in which Ukrainian-born artist Nikita Kadan reconstructed, on the upper floor, the interior of a fictional museum inhabited by taxidermied animals partly buried in debris and car tires commonly utilized in barricades; while the lower floor was filled with metal bunk beds turned into nurseries for celery plants, reminiscent of those used in underground shelters. Once again, I saw here a clear metaphor for the ongoing war that is tearing apart the artist’s homeland.

Beyoglu Many of the biennial venues were dispersed throughout the neighborhood of Beyoglu, not far from the museum, so most of

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Nikita Kadan, The Shelter, 2015. Wood, rubber, metal, taxidermy, celery, and soil. Installation view: Istanbul Biennial, 2015. Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren

my first day was spent walking up and down the steep cobblestone alleys in search of the various sites. Many of these locations were not marked by any kind of signage, which left me relying on the fragmentary and often esoteric notes published in the biennial’s guidebook.

Nevertheless, I did manage to locate A Room of Rhythms— Otopark (2015), the installation and sound work of Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek, a rising star on the Turkish landscape, created in a former garage; and Francis Alÿs’s project The Silence of Ani (2015), a poetic video installation, presented at DEPO, a local, vibrant cultural center. The video portrays children playing among the rubble in the ruins of the ancient city of Ani, in

present-day Turkey. Once the site of a bustling city, the children’s bird calls—made with instruments they designed—highlight the now desolate surroundings.

Not far from DEPO, one of the largest and most interesting venues was housed in the Galata Greek Primary School, which featured projects by eight artists. American Andrew Yang presented IO-OX: A Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems (2015) in the attic, a multimedia installation that visualizes the natural history of the Bosphorus and includes watercolors of Jupiter’s moon Io painted with water extracted from the river; a sound installation created by mixing sounds recorded from Voyager 1 with the acoustics of Istanbul’s dolphins and ships; and

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a stunning installation made of hi-hat cymbals, semiotic signifiers of unmediated noise. One floor below, Chicago-based Michael Rakowitz took over several rooms with The Flesh is Yours, The Bones are Ours (2015), a project that draws attention to the peril of Turkey’s Armenian population in the early twentieth century. By covering entire walls with drawings of molding and friezes from the facades of Art Nouveau buildings in Istanbul and re-creating many of them in plaster fragments spread over the floor, Rakowitz pays homage to the legacy of Armenian plaster caster Garabet Cezayirliyan, responsible for many of the originals.

On the same floor, a large-scale wall drawing and two roomsize installations by Indian artist Rupali Patil are meditations on an oppressive education system. The work is most successful when rendered in three dimensions, using old-style wooden school desks combined with drawings and other sculptures, while the wall drawings alone are reminiscent in style and subject to those of William Kentridge, which were also included in the biennial.

Others presented at this site were Egyptian artist Anna Boghiguian with her The Salt Traders (2015), a massive installation in the school’s main hall; Turkish artist Emre Hüner, who exhibited Neochronophobiq (2015), a three-channel video installation exhibited alongside a series of sculptures; and Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian, who also touched on the long-standing yet troubled relationship between Turkish and Armenian cultures by collaborating with the Beyoglu Holy Trinity Armenian Church Choir performing a song by an Armenian-Turkish master.

which are well kept, while others have fallen into a state of total disrepair. With the exception of Kentridge, whose five-channel video installation O Sentimental Machine (2015) was installed in the upper lobby of the Hotel Splendid (the name could not be more apt!), the most intriguing works were presented in the abandoned old mansions that would provide a perfect setting for truly haunting ghost stories.

British artist Ed Atkins presented a brand new video titled Hisser, commissioned by the biennial and inspired by the terrifying story—familiar to

Balat I visited the only venue in Balat, a fascinating area in the old city, which was a much worthy detour. Küçük Mustafa Pasa Hamam, built in 1477, is one of the most prominent examples of Turkish baths in Istanbul, considering its unique plan, preservation, and dimensions. With a full restoration completed in 2011, this grand brick building, now used as a cultural venue, was the perfect counterpoint to Egyptian Wael Shawky’s contribution to the biennial, the video CABARET CRUSADES: THE SECRETS of KARBALA (2015). The the final chapter of the artist’s epic trilogy, it recounts the history of the Crusades from an Arab perspective, inspired by a book of essays by Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf. To “act” in his latest undertaking, the artist created incredibly elaborated, grotesque, and oddly beautiful glass marionettes in collaboration with glass artists from the Murano islands in northern Italy. The grand cupola and the spacious interior of the Hamam, furnished with Persian rugs and pillows spread across the floor, made viewing an exhilarating experience, certainly one of the most successful pairings of artwork and venue of the entire biennial.

Büyükada A similar success in combining hosting venues with exhibited artworks was achieved in most of the locations situated on the island of Büyükada in the Princes’ Islands archipelago. To reach the site I embarked on a gorgeous forty-minute boat ride that landed me in a peaceful hamlet that seemed to be worlds apart from the bustling streets of Istanbul. The island is inhabited by majestic mansions, many built at the turn of the century, some of

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Marwan Rechmaoui, Pillar Series, 2015. Fourteen pillars: concrete, metal, and mixed media. Installation view: Istanbul Biennial, 2015. Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren

many Floridians—of Jeffrey Bush, who in 2013 was swallowed by a sinkhole while asleep in his bedroom, and whose body was never recovered. The video, which shows a nondescript bedroom interior inhabited, at times, by the main character, was showcased on two large screens on two floors of the Rizzo Palace, an enormous wooden house abandoned since 2010. While I did not find this work as mesmerizing as others I have seen by the artist, the technical mastery, haunting soundtrack, and unique subject matter made the experience memorable. I was disappointed, on the other hand, by the contribution of another British artist, Susan Philipsz, whose innovative use of sound has enabled her to create striking installations over the last several years. The Mizzi Mansion, built as a private residence by a local tycoon in the late 1800s and used as the Hotel San Remo in the 1930s and 1940s (now abandoned for years), provided a unique setting that did not seem to be utilized to its full potential. In its interior, Philipsz created a minimal sound installation consisting of what seemed like the amplified sound of water droplets hitting a hard surface, along with a series of black and white prints of mechanical rooms and abandoned industrial interiors. The entire installation, Elettra (2015), was also created for the biennial and was inspired by

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LEFT Ed Atkins, Hisser, 2015. Two-channel video with multiple audio channels and mixed media.

Installation view: Istanbul Biennial, 2015.

Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren BELOW Wael Shawky, Cabaret Crusades, The Secrets of Karbala, 2015. Installation with projection of Cabaret Crusades, The Secrets of Karbala (HD video), liquid tar, clay, cement, wool, marble, and hand-blown Murano glass marionette.

Installation view: Istanbul Biennial, 2015. Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren

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Guglielmo Marconi’s belief that sounds, once generated, continue to reverberate ad infinitum.

My last stop on the island was to one of the largest installations of the entire biennial, Argentinean artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s bestiary extravaganza The Most Beautiful of All Mothers (2015). Comprising some twenty-nine life-size fiberglass animals, such as a gorilla with a lion perched on its back, a bear, a rhino carrying an elk, a hippo on top of a buffalo, two giraffes, and a huge elephant, to mention just a few, the work was installed on twenty concrete pedestals at the water’s edge.

This Noah’s Ark on steroids came into full view only after a short walk on a winding path through the overgrown gardens that were once part of the house where Leon Trotsky lived in exile, from 1929 to 1933. This was certainly one of the most talked about artworks and was a surprise to many, including myself, who are mostly familiar with the ephemeral nature of Villar Rojas’s works. However, many of the recurring themes and interests addressed by the artist through his anthropological approach, such as the use of organic and recycled material and the use of objects for their symbolic and metaphorical reading, can be found in what is probably the artist’s largest, most ambitious work to date.

A quiet seaside restaurant with fresh seafood and stunning views provided the perfect setting for a recap of sorts prior to my return to Istanbul. Having visited about 80 percent of the venues over the past three days, I still could not shake the feeling of the biennial being somehow disjointed and lacking a specific focus.

However, considering the previous curatorial endeavors of Christov-Bakargiev, I should not have been surprised by this approach. This open-ended attitude, which is always substantiated by rigorous research brought forth by the curator (draftsperson) and her many collaborators, stimulates by opening doors and asking more questions than providing answers, and in a year during which I visited biennales in Venice, Havana, and Budapest, this was one not to be missed.

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ARCHITECTURE, CHICAGO-BORN HUN TER BRAITHWAITE

My time in Chicago began on a bus out to Plano, Illinois, to see Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. For an hour and a half, we drove out of the Loop, out past Oak Park where Frank Lloyd Wright lived and worked, and out past the suburban development that rings every city in the country. Then we were

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in America, which is to say surrounded by cornfields, cornfields with mini-golf courses, and, much to one side of the bus’s amazement, a cornfield from which a waterpark erupted, sending shoots and slides skyward liked molded-plastic tickertape. Then finally, pure midcentury domesticity.

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In the Farnsworth House gift shop there were a series of postcards showing Mies’s house in all four seasons. It stood like a pure center of a clock on whose hands marked the passage of time—spring, summer, luminous fall, winter. There was, however, a missing view—that of the house totally flooded, inundated by the waters of the Fox River, which runs its course just one hundred feet away. The house has flooded regularly since 1954, when it was first breached by two feet of standing water. Though this wasn’t mentioned on our tour, ruin seems a valid entry point into the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which takes place in a city where much of the architectural innovation came after a devastating fire.

The sprawling theme of the biennial and its title, The State of the Art of Architecture, is a summation of conditions and ideas that resist all but the broadest narrative, yet will offer the future architectural historian a field guide into the hubris and anxieties of today. Though the biennial took place at eight venues throughout the city, most exhibitions were staged at the Chicago Cultural Center, an 1891 Beaux-Arts building of formidable history, both civic and aesthetic.

Perhaps it was too formidable, because the participants who attempted to alter the space largely fell short. Near the Randolph Street entrance, the Amsterdam-based firm RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances) presented The End of Sitting - Cut Out, a room-size structure with angular nooks cut out for humans to inhabit in a variety of positions—leaning, crouching, bending, but not sitting. The idea to keep the communal work and social space active is noble enough, though it came off like an overhyped standing desk. Similarly, heading upstairs via a long ramp, one passed through an expensive and elaborate structure of undulating steel studs. Initiated by New York’s SO-IL, the project asks “how we experience being on a ramp.” Again, an earnest goal drowned out by material bombast.

In the sealed courtyard, Tokyo’s Atelier Bow-Wow installed a whimsical latticework of ladders and swings, and bridges to nowhere—part Invisible Cities, part James and the Giant Peach.

That is not to say that inventiveness had no place in the biennial. Fantasy and speculation abounded, though in much more measured doses. Tomás Saraceno’s darkened room of spiderwebs was quite popular. For this he worked collaboratively with the arachnids, inverting containers in order to direct the pattern and structure of their webs. Putting aside for a moment the sheer beauty of the just-illuminated silk, Saraceno’s piece looked at a confluence of nature and architecture, as well as a different way of thinking about material.

As is often the case, the most poignant speculation came from moments in the past, which reveal the parallax between what could have been, and what is. The most exciting installation was a room full of old slides. Environmental Communications: Contact High is the first in-depth look at the work of the late-1960s media collective Environmental Communications. Noting the ascendency of the image, the group located the university slide library as the future command center for architectural thought. They began documenting the events of the ’60s—the inflatables, the communes, the domes— as well as the vernacular landscape of southern California and beyond, and then inserted the slides into libraries at a

far-reaching network of cultural institutions and architecture schools, in hopes that their slides would then influence the next generation. Another influential group from this time period, Ant Farm, collaborated with WORKac to synthesize three of the historic group’s projects from the early ’70s House of the Century, Convention City and Dolphin Embassy into a plan for a floating city. The model sharpens Ant Farm’s fantastic designs for a world defined by globalism and climate change.

Those two themes were omnipresent, most frequently coming together in the speculation about population surge and imperative search for affordable housing. Tatiana Bilbao offered a low-income house designed for the exigencies of Mexico, which is currently experiencing a shortage of nine million homes. On the other side of the world, Ho Chi Minh City’s Vo Trong Nghia Architects presented a house that costs less than four thousand dollars, could be assembled in three hours, and would last for thirty years. The floor plan is open to provide shade and ventilation.

The biennial scaled down global issues of housing and space to a local level. On the blighted south side of the city, Amanda Williams’s Color(ed) Theory called attention to colors of poverty.

Armed with a palette taken from products often marketed in African American communities (Cheetos, Ultra Sheen grease), the Chicago-based architect painted abandoned houses top to bottom. Within the Loop, where there is more than enough money, but not enough space, Port Urbanism proposed redirecting Lake Shore Drive to allow for two hundred twenty-five acres of new lakefront real estate.

On the actual lakefront was a series of four kiosks providing stylized shelter from the gnashing wind, but if you continued south, you eventually arrived at what could be a viable future for the biennial and its partnerships. Stony Island Arts Bank is the latest site that has been procured and revitalized by the Rebuild Foundation (headed up by artist and activist Theaster Gates). Down on the South Side, one felt the true potential of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. It has the funding, the participants, and the historical authority to rethink and permanently address the challenges of the American city, not just the great fires or the floodwaters.

ABOVE Amanda Williams, Color(ed) Theory, 2014–15. Latex Paint OPPOSITE Tatiana Bilbao S.C., Sustainable Housing, 2013–14. Wood, plywood, OSB panels, and drywall metallic screws

ARCHITECTURE

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IN DETROIT, WE BELIEVE MANUFACTURING MIGHT JUST BE AMERICA’S GREATEST ART FORM. NOW OPEN IN WYNWOOD

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Two people in a boat amid three million black plastic balls that help deflect UV rays from Ivanhoe Reservoir, Los Angeles, which contains high levels of bromate, a carcinogen formed when bromide and chlorine react with sunlight. Photo: Gerd Ludwig, National Geographic Creative

HEATHER DAVIS with Brittni Winkler and Danielle Damas H E AT H E R DAV I S

“Anthropocene” is the unofficial term for the most recent geological era, in which human beings are the major geological force, having warmed the planet, raised sea levels, eroded the ozone layer, and acidified the oceans. In a new collection of essays and projects edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), various artists, curators, theorists, and activists explore the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in this era of ecological crises. The book can be downloaded for free at openhumanitiespress.org.

Davis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, where she is working on a project that traces the ethology of plastic as the substrate of advanced capitalism. This summer, Davis led a course titled Queer Ecologies: Life and Art in a Generalized State of War and delivered the talk Toxic Progeny: the Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures at Cannonball Miami. She spoke with Brittni Winkler and Danielle Damas about Art in the Anthropocene, her thoughts on proactive steps to approach the environment, and what she envisions to be the future state of the Earth.

BRITTNI WINKLER (MIAMI RAIL): One of the issues with facing the realities of climate change is that people are afraid to confront it. How do you think individual agency can be encouraged, in place of this polarizing guilt?

HEATHER DAVIS: I think recentering these issues in the hands of the people who are causing the problems—and that would be industries, corporations, governments, and

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the one percent—to impact policy change is a first step. It’s not actually the average person who is causing the kinds of impacts that we’re seeing.

In terms of what to do, collective organizing around any kind of issue really helps to give people agency. It helps them realize that it’s not about the individual, but about the preset systems that we’re born into, and so our efforts should not be about our personal consumer habits, but about

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movement-building in order to change things at a much wider level. For example, for the problem of plastic waste, we need to make companies accountable. I certainly don’t go home and make plastic bottles and forks. Companies that benefit from the proliferation of plastic need to be responsible for the entire life cycle of materials.

I also believe that education, journalism, and art practices are excellent ways to raise awareness and to be able to engage with

these kinds of issues without becoming overwhelmingly depressed.

DANIELLE DAMAS (MIAMI RAIL): How do you think art and literature fit into the Anthropocene?

DAVIS: I think artistic practices can expand our sense of empathy and awareness in nuanced ways that operate beyond the level of information or

rationality. People can utilize storytelling and artworks to engage with subjects in a way that’s not moralizing. In a story or in an artwork, you can show the complexity of something and can hold contradictory things together at the same time.

For example, we are not just subject to systems, we are also creatures who have psychic lives, and in order to address that aspect of being a person in the face of ecological devastation, we need to be

L I T E R AT U R E & P O E T R Y

able to cultivate all types of different responses. Leaving out the psychic components is a mistake.

RAIL: Who do you think are inspirational, leading environmental artists? And do you find them influential in your more scientific practices?

DAVIS: There are so many! Helen and Newton Harrison, Mel Chin, Ant

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Farm—these are people who have been doing this kind of work for a very long time and have made incredible contributions to our understandings of what it is we can do with art as a proposition. Mel Chin’s work Revival Field (1991–present), for example, proved that bio-remediation with plants was possible through his studies with a scientist and their creation of a sculpture together. Bio-remediation went on to become a real field in biological systems, rehabilitating landscapes that had been extremely toxic mainly because of petrochemicals and heavy metals.

Today, there are so many fabulous people working in this area, and I think it’s growing. To name just a few, I love the work of Mary Mattingly, the Crochet Coral Reef Project, Amy Balkin, Terike Haapoja, Tejal Shah, Raqs Media Collective, Pinar Yoldas, Ho Tzu Nyen, A. Laurie Palmer, Marina Zurkow, and Oliver Kellhammer.

RAIL: Since we know the main reason for the invention of plastic was pure economic gain, what are some ways that we can respond to the present state of the environment with mindfulness and creativity?

DAVIS: One of the things imperative in a response is to come up with futures that are desirable while not ignoring what is actually happening. A lot of things are going to be damaged, but perhaps out of that damage we can create something far more interesting in terms of a way of life, a culture, a creative output, what it means to be a human, and how we interact with the creatures around us.

If we really want to see drastic change in the world, we need to make these future imaginaries more tangible to people because people are really scared of losing what they have and being left with nothing. But although they might lose their current way of life, maybe what they’ll gain is a lot more interesting and more valuable in the long run. Proposing imaginative work that does not seem scary is incredibly important to being able to mobilize people. We are usually governed by politics of fear and loss due to economic gain, and having one’s identity purely tied to relations of capital.

Insisting that there is a life, a good life, after capitalism is essential.

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RAIL: I wanted to ask you about the aesthetics of the LA Ivanhoe Reservoir “shade balls.” Over 80 million hollow black polyethylene orbs, similar to beach balls, were needed to cover the reservoirs to stop sunlight from triggering a potentially dangerous chemical reaction between bromide, which occurs naturally in groundwater, and the chlorine used to disinfect drinking water. What could have been better—visually or conceptually— than what was done there?

DAVIS: It’s funny that you ask that because it’s one site that reveals a whole history of assumptions and decisions. We could go back one hundred years and say, “Maybe we shouldn’t dam the Colorado River and maybe we should let it be a flood plane.

Maybe we shouldn’t divert all this water to Los Angeles. Maybe we should try to live within the ecological scale that is already part of that particular environment. Maybe our relationships to the use of water wouldn’t be so precarious if we didn’t have a notion of unending supply.” I think that moment in the Ivanhoe Reservoir’s history showed that life in the Anthropocene, in a diminished and damaged world, is one in which our primary relationship is an aesthetic one. The danger of the shade ball situation is that it becomes so beautiful and anesthetizing that this way of governing the world in terms of a visual imaginary becomes normalized.

RAIL: This brings us close to some of Donna Haraway’s texts in the book—the comparison of string figures and linear writings.

We should be constantly aware and reminded that there are things we can’t undo. People feel obligated to follow rules that fix one problem but ruin other things on a holistic scale.

DAVIS: A couple of people made particular decisions at a particular moment in time and other people refused to question that.

These infrastructures get put in place and it becomes difficult to remove them, for good and bad reasons. For instance, if you build infrastructure where it is difficult or unsafe to bike, then everyone is going to buy a car and drive, and it becomes difficult to then build infrastructure for bikes in a city built around cars. This is because

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of the investment in a previous infrastructure that is no longer working. The work that we need to do is a reimagining of how we want to live in this world, and how to rebuild.

RAIL: In your talks and texts on plastics, you make the connection between queer theory and plastics, with humanity moving in a more queer direction.

DAVIS: Queer ecologies specifically speak to how the disconnection between sex and gender is becoming increasingly apparent because of the kinds of petrochemicals that have saturated our environments.

This is being imposed on any creature that reproduces sexually, which also includes the proliferation of intersex creatures, and feminization of male fetuses. I don’t want to say that this is not a problem, but I would like to consider the fact that many animal species have members that are gay at least in some measure.

Petrochemicals do pose threats to the continuation of the species and reproductive futurity, and queerness does not. But let’s consider that maybe there is something interesting in those moments. If we look at the lives of queer people, we can identify with how they have been living and how the refusal of participation in a particular way of life is actually potentially the most valuable thing that we can bring forward into environmental and ecological worlds. Queer people have made families outside the normative parameters for generations, and perhaps this is a good model for rethinking questions of kin and attachment. Developing affective ties to other-than-humans, and familial relations beyond biology seems increasingly important in our world.

RAIL: You’ve said something that I found very interesting in reference to plastics along the lines of “some kind of life will definitely continue.” What do you think these forms of life look like? Is it fungal?

Microbial? Do they evolve?

DAVIS: The microbiologist of oceans Jeremy Jackson writes about what might happen in light of all the algae blooms and eutrophication of the oceans, and he predicts a bleak future, one that looks a lot like

the Precambrian era. In previous geologic times, when there were high concentrations of carbon dioxide, there was also a lot of cloud coverage, and because of that coverage, mushrooms were able to grow ten to twenty feet in the air. So, maybe we will have mushrooms the size of buildings, and all kinds of strange bacteria and microbes.

We are living through the sixth extinction, caused by anthropogenic pressures and occurring at a faster rate than any other extinction in geologic history. So while finding strange, unpredictable life forms and other beings fascinating, we should also be held accountable for what we are killing off.

RAIL: In your writings you mention nihilistic lust, and we see this in apocalyptic movies and the fascination with surviving an apocalypse. Despite present decay and destruction, why do you think this lust is outweighing the truth that we already know?

DAVIS: Again, it’s not the individual who is driving this. It’s more systematic: we continue to do these things in part because those are the infrastructures set in place.

If we want to think about how to have futures that are less devastating, we need to think of how to facilitate that in terms of human behavior, but there are far deeper ways in which this happens than the facile consumer choices that we are presented with. We need to reimagine and re-create our political, social, and economic relations.

RAIL: What is your imaginary future?

DAVIS: I imagine a future that has moved beyond the ravishes of capitalism, one where collective organizing lies at the heart of our political and social systems, where we are intrinsically bound to each other and made responsible for each other. We cannot survive in a world where so few are taking everything from everyone else.

I also think that we who are privileged and cloistered need to learn to be okay

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with death. I think we need to learn to understand that we are organisms that cycle through the world and are made of the Earth. Part of what has created all these problems is that we barricade ourselves against suffering and death. And those things are terrible, so I understand this barricading, but in doing so we have forgotten our relationship to the other people and creatures who inhabit this Earth, to our ancestors and to the future inhabitants of the Earth. I think we need to remember the species and elements that we are indebted to and will become.

Danielle Damas, based in Miami, is an MFA candidate at Florida International University and a leadership advisory board member at the Frost Art Museum.

Brittni Winkler is an MFA candidate in curatorial practice at Florida International University and is the coordinator and curator of the FIU Art + Art History Project Room at the Bakehouse Art Complex.

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128-BIT PALMS: Criminality In and Out of Vice City AN DREW DO N OVAN

I was seventeen years old, living in Lake County, Indiana, one of the many suburban conduits to Chicago, when Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was released for PC in 2003. My family and I had relocated from Inverness, Florida, in 1994 as my father chased what remaining work was left in the northern steel mills. Outlet malls, liquor stores, and filling stations characterize the landscape of northwest Indiana; it wasn’t and isn’t a locale game producers are anxious to recreate.

Vice City, on the other hand, exists in a fictional Floridian metropolis, and it represents a Scottish video game development studio’s approximation of Miami circa 1986. It has a described population of 1.8 million people, which is about the population of Miami-Dade County in the ’80s, but packed into a square mileage

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at least half that of Miami proper. Its denizens cling tightly to demographic zones. Haitian Creole is spoken within the limits of the game’s Little Haiti, and it’s difficult to find Spanish speakers outside Little Havana.

The game’s opening cinematic features the accoutrements of a Hollywood-driven crime fantasy: the Mafia sends a white guy south to “manage” their black and Hispanic contacts, and a cagey lawyer with a pastel-colored suit and a Jewish surname serves as a sort of subtropical Virgil to Vice City’s underworld, facilitating a star-crossed cocaine deal with the Columbians.

Following the game’s six-minute introduction (interminable by today’s gaming standards), the player is confronted with a choice between a boxy four-door sedan called the Admiral and a

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small scooter called the Faggio (allegedly pronounced fah-jee-oh).

In reality, the player can turn the corner and steal any vehicle his heart desires, but the previous cut-scene’s mise-en-scène favors this “decision.” Through the power of indirect control—a design force that compels the player to get the first good mushroom while avoiding the bad mushroom-like Goombas in Super Mario Bros.—the player will choose one of the two closest vehicles with a calculable degree of certainty. 

My father probably called me a fag on his way to a jail one Saturday. Within a five-year span in Indiana, he had accumulated as many DUIs, the last of which carried a sentence of intermittent jail time. Whether he uttered that particular slur or its variants depended on the number of Rolling Rocks he had the night before or the relative integrity of the potato chips in his packed lunch. At one time, the name might have been a betrayal. After all, I had gotten it at school. Freshman year seemed, in retrospect, like a series of unedited takes where some asshole swerved purposefully to slam me into a locker, shouting “faggot” as he passed. More than once, I imagined my father joining the ranks of this proto-fraternity.

The worst thing about it was my father’s lack of evidence. If he knew anything about my life or computer fundamentals, he could have dug up unfruitful experimentations with gay pornography and cyber sex chats with women (and probably, not that I cared to investigate, men) twice my age. He might have known that Mike, the son of my father’s foreman at the mill, was crashing on our couch because he had been disowned for coming out. It seemed like no amount of Army Surplus attire, Springsteen citation, or feigned interest in pawn shop guitars could yield immunity.

Having enough arcane knowledge about my father’s mercurial morning temperament to avoid a serious beating, I put the insult on simmer and retreated to faux Florida. My vehicle of choice, in an attempt to contest my father’s attempts to register my masculinity, was the sporty Faggio.

I’ll say it is a different thing when a video game calls you a fag. That initial choice between the Admiral and the Faggio goes beyond names. The slur is juvenile, to be sure, indicative of the Grand Theft Auto series’ nothing-is-sacred, everybody-should-beoffended philosophy, but the game possessed the intel my father didn’t. The game seemed to be saying to me, “This is Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, motherfucker, and you’re driving a Vespa.” 

Vice City, with its pixelated neon-laden art deco strips and 128-bit palms, wasn’t the first virtual world to which I’d escaped, but it was the most potent. I got to know every digital kilometer of the city, primarily on a Faggio, but sometimes in the Deloreanesque Deluxo. On the radio, a car commercial channeled Regan-era xenophobia: “This little girl’s going to starve to death, because you had to buy a cheap, fuel-efficient Maibatsu.” At its best, Grand Theft Auto exposes America’s worst traits by donning them as part of a caustic satire.

When a car flips onto its roof in Vice City, it catches fire and explodes almost instantly. I know this because I’ve flipped or

totaled no less than one hundred vehicles in the game. I once flew a helicopter into a building just as Michael Jackson reached the coda “Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah” in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” I’ve fired a rocket at a spandex-clad rollerblader on a simulated Miami Beach in a thin effort at literary connection to L’Étranger, which I must have been reading in school at the time.

I never did prostitution in the game, but I don’t consider this any sort of holier-than-thou achievement. My friends at school had mentioned it as an option, citing, with nervous grins, how it was “kind of fucked up” that you could “beat the shit out of a hooker” to get your money back. The developers of the game rest their case at, “Well, just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.” At the time, the whole idea just seemed banal and depressing. I had been beaten by my father at home, and I had witnessed him hit my mother and brothers. I was much more comfortable treating the game as a Rube Goldberg machine of impersonal, explosion-filled destruction rather than an ass-beating simulator. In later versions of Grand Theft Auto, the player has the ability to consume alcohol before getting behind the wheel of their legally owned car, which hit too close to home while also missing the mark. The trajectory of the series, to date, has been to shed its Wile E. Coyote qualities in favor of a grim descent into the uncanny valley.

I still remember traveling Vice City’s perimeter by speedboat as the sun set, really listening to the lyrics of Kool & The Gang’s “Summer Madness” for the first time. 

Later in 2003, when my father flipped his Nissan pick-up with my seven-year-old brother Joshua riding shotgun, I imagined the roof crumpled a bit; maybe the engine leaked a bit of oil as police officers aided the somehow unscathed pair from the wreck.

The officer who brought my brother home made a strange point of grilling me.

“Do you know your father was driving drunk?”

“I believe it.”

“Do you know this isn’t the first time this has happened?”

“I know.”

“Do you know this isn’t the first time I have personally arrested him?”

“OK.” “Mind if I take a look around?”

That wasn’t going to work. I had answered the door in the middle of a firefight with the Vice City Police Department. My brother, already adept at video games and unshaken by the accident, resumed the massacre for me. I’m sure the officer at the door could hear his VCPD peers shout, “We have you surrounded, asshole.” I’m sure he heard the bullet volleys, encroaching helicopter support, and eventual tank fire.

I worried about the state of the housekeeping. Letting anyone into our home, let alone a police officer, was allowed with trepidation, if not a fifteen-minute, too-little-too-late tidying session. Our kitchen floors stuck with the remnants of spilled sodas, and the

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blast-furnace coke-dust tracked in from my father’s boots proved impervious to a mop, if we even had one.

Perhaps between the sounds of escalated force and my father’s frequent arrests, the officer pegged us as an entire household afoul of the law. “Well, call us if you need us,” he said, retreating to his flashing squad car before I could answer.

“Are you alright?” I asked Joshua, shutting the door on a neighbor’s pity-filled gape.

“No, I died, but I almost killed all the cops,” he said, withdrawing from the computer.

“I mean the officer said you were in an accident with Dad. The truck flipped. In real life,” I said.

“Oh, that was kind of cool!” he replied. 

On December 21, 1979, ten days short of the reality of 1980s Miami, Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance salesman and former veteran, was murdered by four white police officers, his skull battered by clubs and flashlights for the crime of running a red light and driving on a suspended license. The court’s failure to convict any of the officers for the murder and subsequent cover-up resulted in one of the worst riots in American history, erupting in Overtown and Liberty City. On paper, eighteen people died and over $100 million dollars of property was destroyed; on television, a tire store smoldered as if it had been hit by a bomb.

Between 1997 and 2015, my father, a white pipe fitter, has accumulated nineteen court records in the state of Indiana.

The breakdown of criminality includes six DUIs, four seat belt infractions, three counts of speeding, two counts of disregarding a stop sign, two counts of driving with a suspended license, and one failure to stop for a train signal. My father’s black coworker, Byron, who my father let stay in our basement for a month, had once told my brothers and me, “Your dad’s been lucky to have you kids, man. Next time I get in trouble, I’m not going to weekend jail.” Even as a game-addled teenager, I suspected that whiteness was a much more important factor in Indiana’s courtroom lenience than having a wife and a few kids. One of my father’s infractions had originally been classified as a class D

felony; a charge of resisting arrest was dismissed, resulting in a more forgiving sentence.

Whether or not I wish he had served that time in a more substantial way is a source of internalized disquiet to this day.

My confidence in the reforming powers of Indiana’s corrections system is nonexistent, and my father’s infrequent kindnesses to friends like Byron cloud the issue. I can also cite his later willingness to let my brothers’ disowned or otherwise neglected friends stay in our home, but I usually end up wondering why the same altruistic acts couldn’t have been extended to my mother, brothers, and me more often. If it came down to it, I don’t know whether I would testify for or against him, and my life with him has often rendered me incapable of passing judgment when it counts. I only feel fit to describe the events as I remember them, and that often feels like my most significant delinquency.

The only time my father witnessed me play Vice City was upon returning from lockup one evening. I was engaging in the game’s namesake, commanding my Ray Liotta-voiced homunculus to steal a bright-yellow sports car. Its occupant, a woman in a bikini, yelled, “Why can’t you just ask nicely?” as I barreled down the street. A VCPD officer witnessing the incident entered his squad car, fired up the roof, and gave pursuit. These are the kinds of unscripted moments that made Grand Theft Auto both a household name and a congressional public enemy. The ability to project oneself into the game’s free-roaming narrative is its active ingredient.

My father saw himself in the situation, asking, “Oh, I guess that’s supposed to be funny? What is that, your old man running from the cops?” Before long, a VCPD squad car had driven me off the road, causing me to crash my car into a palm tree alongside a verisimilar Ocean Drive. An officer stormed up to the driver’s side door, gun drawn, and took me alive. “Busted” splashed across the screen in a large, neon-green font.

Andrew Donovan is a poet living in Gainesville, FL, where he still sometimes plays video games. He is a graduate of the University of Florida’s MFA program, and his work has most recently appeared in the Mondegreen, Cartridge Lit, and New Republic.

NO MAN’S LAND Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection 305.573.6090 info@rfc.museum www.rfc.museum

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WINTER 2015

KEVIN YOUNG “Strays” is one of several uncollected poems included in my forthcoming book Blue Laws:

STRAYS The moon of you I want to meet— faraway, waning.

Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015. Made up as the poem is of fragments and outtakes from my 2003 book, Jelly Roll: A Blues, the title “Strays” refers to its form, but may best describe the poem’s feeling.

Asleep in the sun of your arms

from three lines, to four, to five, and upward from

then cold when you’re gone.

there—the speaker’s relationship with the beloved

As the poem’s sections increase in length—going

seems to wane, to stray away.

You could call the leaps in the poem leaps of faith, filled with the speaker’s wishes—“I want your hands blurry / over me”—that don’t quite seem to work out.

In the dark where we can no longer see I want your hands blurry over me, reading the braille of my body.

Instead, the poem becomes a monument to what’s lost, admitting “only you / sleep somewhere else.”

The wish and half-rhyme (of “time” and “name”) is what remains.

—

Kevin Young is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, including Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for the National Book Award. Blue Laws is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2016. He is the Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English and the curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Your narcotic touch.

Your such & such makes me rush home through dark slick streets & hush to our bright too-hot house—only you sleep somewhere else.

I miss you like a monument misses its dead— the stone heads staring, the hands stiff, or still, half-eroded by time. Tell me & I’ll write what you want near my name

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TOP Production still from an untitled film by Rosie Herrera and Adam Reign, presented as part of Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret, 2009. Performer: “Geraldine� Pilatti. Photo: Adam Reign BOTTOM Production still from Ella, a film conceived and choreographed by Heather Maloney, directed by Carla Forte and Alexey Taran, produced by Inkub8 and Bistoury with original music by Omar Roque

MOVING IMAGE: Screendance in Miami CAT H E RIN E AN N IE HO L L IN GSWO RTH

Contemporary dance, like all creative disciplines, is continually subjected to forces of disintegration and hybridization. But next to other art forms, dance tends to be more conservative in its evolutions. Languages of dance are built up in slow developments over years, decades, sometimes even centuries, and passed directly from teacher to student. For any one individual performer or choreographer, it can take years to develop a level of mastery in any one style or conceptual framework.

And dance has some fixed variables. It is considered primarily a visceral form. Whether performers are professional dancers or untrained, the body is the primary focus and movements are determined largely by the performer’s capacity for movement. Physicality also places economic demands on producers. Between rehearsal and theater space, marketing, permits, and the cost of paying performers, the undertaking of a live performance can be costly.

In response to both the practical challenges of dance and the availability of new technologies, a novel genre has gained momentum over the last three or four decades. Depending on the time period, region, or exact definition of the form, it is variously called dance on camera, video dance, cinedance, kinodance, or screendance. In general, this is film or video featuring dance (or, more generally, movement) as opposed to dialogue or music.

The dancers and audience are no longer in the physical space of the theater. Movement can be edited and composed so that the choreographers and filmmakers control exactly what is seen, and from which angle. Viewers might see performers’ eyes, skin, and emotions up close, with performers now unbound by real time or space. Actually, movement may not even be body-based. Some projects use animation or choreography set on objects.

The marriage of film and dance is as old as the moving image itself and has been a subject of continual investigation, especially at its more experimental edges. The Lumière brothers and Edison Studios made films in the 1890s of the serpentine dance, a spectacle of movement and light created through manipulation

of a dancer’s costume. Fifty years later, most of filmmaker Maya Deren’s work had movement as a primary element; both A Study for Choreography for Camera (1945) and The Very Eye of Night (1958) are explicitly dance/film mash-ups. Later decades saw film works by choreographer Yvonne Rainer, including Hand Movie (1966), as well as Trio A (staged for film in 1978). Rainer and others, including choreographer Merce Cunningham, collaborated with TV producers in the ’70s to stage performances explicitly for broadcast. And more recently, Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theater reset live performance pieces as long compositions designed for the camera’s eye. His The Cost of Living (for stage 2003 and film 2004) and Enter Achilles (1995) are both considered exemplary dance on camera works.

In the last few decades, video cameras and editing tools have become ever more accessible, leading to an explosion in the production and distribution of dance on camera. This is true around the world, and in the microcosm of Miami’s dance community, where video components often appear in live performances or, vice-versa, performances might be produced exclusively for the camera. In 2009, local choreographer Rosie Herrera presented an untitled video piece produced with photographer and filmmaker Adam Reign as part of Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret. This piece stands as one of the earliest and most visible local dance on camera productions. Since then, almost all of Miami’s notable choreographers, including some who have since left town, have produced at least one dance on camera work. For a creative community that embraces collaboration not only between dancers and choreographers, but also crossing into visual art and film practitioners, the genre is a natural fit.

Dance on camera has become something of a bandwagon, with its low entry investment of time, skill, and money. But this is also its virtue, making it a fertile ground for new work that invites play and experimentation. Multiple Miami choreographers have described the ease of producing dance on camera in contrast to the blood, sweat, and tears of a live show. When

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pieces are set in outdoor locations, as is often the case, they are typically done “guerilla-style,” with just the dancers and the filmmakers, and without permits. They may even be improvisational, with participants composing on the fly and editing later.

Works can be set in locations that would be difficult or impossible to use for live performances: by the ocean (as is common in Miami productions), out in the street, in overgrown natural spaces, or abandoned buildings.

Noting the increase in moving image work coming out of the local dance community, Tigertail Production’s Mary Luft came up with the idea for a festival devoted explicitly to the hybrid form, and ScreenDance Miami was born. Marissa Alma Nick, a local choreographer, was chosen to direct the festival. In 2013, Tigertail posted an open call for the first annual ScreenDance Miami, and the festival’s third annual program will be screened in January.

ScreenDance Miami was conceived with multiple intentions.

First, it recognizes and provides a venue for the type of work already being made in Miami. Second, it gives local producers an opportunity to have their work seen by an expanded audience.

Screenings will be held at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami Beach Cinematheque, and Mana Wynwood, opening up the program to visual art, film, and more general audiences. And third, it creates an opportunity for dialogue with other creators around the country and internationally as a means of stimulating intellectual and artistic growth locally. To this end, the festival accepts submissions from Miami-based artists and those producing elsewhere.

Tigertail has also partnered with Cinedans, a more established festival in Amsterdam, and ScreenDance Miami 2016 will include some Cinedans programming for the second year in a row.

Luft is specific about the term “screendance.” As she explains it, the larger category of “dance on camera” might include work that is more documentary, or more about dance and less about the camera. Luft describes screendance as a subset of dance on camera, work that can only exist in its on-screen form. Since the genre straddles traditional categories, ScreenDance Miami is open to choreographers as well as performance artists, visual artists, filmmakers, animators, and anyone else producing movement-based film or video.

Luft observed that the accessibility of digital tools has rapidly changed the type of work being created, and that younger artists are naturally inclined to adopt new technology and run with it: You can get a GoPro and put it on your wrist and choreograph or dance with it, or put it on your head. Or put it on your boat, your bicycle, et cetera. It’s an inexpensive small camera, and you can edit really easily. Young people are moving into new technology incredibly fast. They’re picking it up and using it, and playing with it. In the past something like that was not available. It was very expensive, it was too difficult and too time-consuming.

Yet a tension remains between the pace of invention produced by technological change and the long-term investment required to master either film or dance. On the subject of screendance, Miami-based choreographer Pioneer Winter, along with choreographer Alexey Taran and his creative partner and filmmaker Carla Forte, foreground the importance of high-level collaboration. They each describe the better examples of screendance as those with sophisticated camera work that has been

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integrated with the dance component. Usually this equates to the invested input of a cinematographer, not just a dancer who picked up a camera. Winter argues that experience is indispensable. “I could give a $3000 camera to an amateur and what they come up with might be a hell of a lot worse than a real filmmaker who’s just doing something with their phone. I think it’s one part technology and two parts skill.”

Forte agrees. “I think that right now, a lot of people think that they can make films. Or dance on camera films. I’m not disappointed by that, because you can do whatever you want. But you have to be more informed about it.” Her recent screendance project with Taran and Miami choreographer Heather Maloney, Ella (2015), was made over the course of Maloney’s pregnancy, and we see Maloney’s physical and emotional transformation up close in the space of about fifteen minutes. Ella displays a collaboration between multiple individuals each accomplished in his or her own arena.

The potentials and pitfalls of screendance illustrate larger dynamics in multidisciplinary work generally. Some would argue that it no longer makes sense to consider oneself a sculptor, or a dancer, or even more generally a visual artist, claiming these medium- and genre-based definitions as obsolete. Taran describes why his company, Bistoury Physical Theater, uses both live performance and film: If you walk in the street and you close your eyes or you open your eyes and you aren’t thinking about your problems, and you start to focus on what’s happening around you, you can have here in this side of the wall, a shop with a lot of televisions. And they have Telemundo here, or they have MTV here, they have something here.

You have the homeless on the street sitting, you have a woman dancing there. You have some music that is coming from here. You have a bus passing you.

Film and dance in combination, then, are a more complete reflection of daily life, where multimedia information is inseparable from our physical lived experience.

Certainly, opportunities grow from the dissolution of stagnant ideas and hardened boundaries. With the possibilities for dance on camera seemingly infinite and largely unexplored, the genre holds promise as a relevant contemporary form. This is particularly true in Miami, where cultures, languages, and multiple art histories and practices are in constant negotiation; artists and residents live sometimes here and elsewhere; and the output of the creative community depends on interchange beyond our local geography. A danger on the flip side is a loss of quality. When a lifetime of dedication to one medium, whether film, painting, dance, music, or even graphic design is replaced with dabbling by beginners who have easy access to tools but no training or sophistication, the field gets diluted.

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

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“I’M HARRY SMITH

AND I HATE YOU!” KEVI N AR R OW

Harry Smith with this “brain drawings” (ca. 1950). Photo: Hy Hirsh, courtesy of Harry Smith Archives

Stories surrounding Harry Smith (1923–1991) are the stuff of legend. He was a painter, filmmaker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, and alchemist ordained in the Ordo Templi Orientis founded by occult “magus” Aleister Crowley. He was also a slight, disheveled, cantankerous genius with poor eyesight and a lifelong relationship with alcohol, marijuana, speed, esoteric books, and filmmaking.

He was known to spend years working on a single labor-intensive film only to unspool it down Second Avenue in New York’s Lower East Side in an alcohol-fueled temper tantrum.

Artworks and collections have been given away or lost as he was evicted from the various hotel apartments he inhabited during the decades he lived in New York. He survived by selling, trading, and bartering his artwork for food and rent.

Toward the end of his life, Smith was the “Shaman-inResidence” at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Tibetan meditation master and teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. At the Naropa Institute, Smith taught classes on alchemy, Native American cosmologies, and the rationality of namelessness, and was supported by a grant provided to him by the Grateful Dead organization.

I first encountered the name Harry Smith in the late 1980s in obscure music and enthused culture zines like Chemical Imbalance and Forced Exposure. These were two important outlets for learning about music, literature, visual art, and film in

the pre-Internet era and Smith was always written about with a sense of awe and reverence.

Early Life Harry Smith claimed to be either the lost son of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, daughter of the last Russian tsar who escaped assassination during the Russian Revolution, or the orphan of British occultist Aleister Crowley, depending on who he was talking to. Public records indicate that was actually born in Portland, Oregon. He was brought up in the Pacific Northwest by parents who were practicing Theosophists. Smith became interested in anthropology, music, and art at an early age. The Kwakiutl, Lummi, and Samish American Indian cultures permeated this region of the United States and by the age of fifteen he had already begun recording their songs and rituals and gained fluency in their spoken languages. During this time, Smith developed a taste for adventure, drinking, and mind expansion and spent a short amount of time in jail. He befriended Native Americans who, in 1964, invited him to record their songs and rituals, released by Folkways Records as a three-LP box set, The Kiowa Peyote Meeting (1973).

Around the same time that I first read about Smith, I found my first Bell & Howell 16 mm Film-O-Sound projector and discovered that the Miami-Dade Public Library’s main branch in downtown Miami housed an extensive collection of avantgarde films curated by Don Chauncey, then head film librarian.

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Harry Smith, Film #18 Mahagonny: A mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass expressed in terms of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1970–80. 16mm film, 2 hours, 21 minutes. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives, New York

Among the impressive holdings was a print of Smith’s Early Abstractions, which includes the shorts films 1–5, 7, and 10 (1946–57). I screened it privately and publically countless times.

Early Abstractions is compilation of short and medium-length hand-painted abstract exercises created using methods still not fully understood. They were made at the height of the San Francisco renaissance of the late 1940s and ’50s, when Smith began his lifetime obsession with fusing painting with enthused filmmaking. Surrounded by the masters of abstract cinema at the time, Smith was watching the films of Jordan Belson, James and John Whitney, Hy Hirsh, and Oskar Fischinger and he participated in the legendary Art in Cinema programs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized by Frank Stauffacher. Art in Cinema’s programs were crucial to the emergence of the Bay area as one of the centers of independent filmmaking between 1946 and 1954.

New York Transition It was around this time that his work caught the attention of Hilla Rebay, curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, which later became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Smith was awarded one of the first Guggenheim Fellowships, which he used to relocate to New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1951, finding the city to be a perfect environment to support his creative and intellectual life. He continued amassing his legendary collection of arcane and esoteric literature, pop-up books, Tarot cards, Ukrainian painted eggs, Seminole Indian patchwork, string figures, and found paper airplanes. At the time of his death, the collections were distributed among various museums and private collections, while his papers are housed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles thanks to Rani Singh, one of his last assistants. A collection of approximately two hundred fifty paper airplanes

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Smith found in the streets of New York over a roughly twenty-year period was donated by Smith to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies. The collections of paper airplanes and string figures are the subjects of two recent catalogues raisonné edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert and published by J&L Books and the Anthology Film Archives (2015).

Smith became a scholar of numerous subjects and was skilled at conversing at length while intertwining compound topics. Many visitors reported that Smith’s room at the Chelsea Hotel was a Wünderkammer, neatly stacked floor-to-ceiling with his books, art supplies, and collections. Early in his career, he began collecting thousands of American folk, popular songs, and race records when early shellac recordings were being recycled for the United States war effort. Smith understood the importance of these recordings and hid them away. It was in 1953 that Moe Asch of Folkways Records released the important three-volume set Anthology of American Folk Music coordinated and curiously annotated by Smith. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Anthology fell into the hands of many musicians, which helped spark the folk music revival during that time. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Jerry Garcia all claimed to have learned songs from the Folkway’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

These musicians went on to help change American culture and Smith said, in his acceptance speech for a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award the year he died, “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true—I saw America changed through music.”

Harry Smith’s Magnum Opus Smith’s most ambitious and enigmatic project, Film no. 18, Mahagonny (“A mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, expressed in terms of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”) took ten years to complete and runs for two hours and twenty-one minutes. Mahagonny can best be described as abstract cinematic poetry that was made to be displayed with four separate 16 mm projectors onto a single screen or onto two billiard tables suspended over a boxing ring. Smith took years to dissect and study The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a dark, political, and satirical opera composed by Weill to a German libretto by Brecht. It was one of Smith’s most rarely screened films due to the complexity of its timing and sequencing. It took two very patient and skilled projectionists to carry out the complicated presentation. It was only screened six times in 1980 at the Anthology Film Archives. The time-consuming and heroic effort to restore the film was spearheaded by the Harry Smith Archives. It had to be painstakingly pieced together and synchronized following complex notes and ephemeral materials left behind by Smith.

I have read about it over the years and have only seen random film stills, so when I heard that there was a series of Harry Smith screenings planned at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, I immediately booked a flight.

Some of the most beautiful passages of Mahagonny occur when Smith’s hands appear in the frame, manipulating various objects. Most often his hands are painted in a curious manner,

with what appears to be red and green paint, and they are further enhanced by the effect of colored light. Other mesmerizing passages include when Kathy Elbaum, a colleague of Smith’s who had recently returned from a research expedition to Canada, appears on camera skillfully demonstrating various Inuit string figures and tricks, one after another in fluid succession.

All the actors in the film were friends of Harry’s that happened to be in the Chelsea Hotel. It is easy to identify Allen Ginsberg sitting in a chair, reading, while bathed in New York early-1970s sunlight, Mekas as a younger man, and a youthful and innocent-looking Patti Smith. These are epic cameos.

The film also shows reoccurring faces who can perhaps be stand-ins for the characters in the Mahogonny opera: Fatty the Bookkeeper, Trinity Moses, Leocadia Begbick, Bank Account Billy, and Alaska Wolf Joe, or they represent numeric equations referencing The Large Glass.

Mahagonny can be watched while considering that Smith was perhaps constructing a precise mathematical and poetic analysis of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny that he believed to be the most important piece of music and cultural criticism of the twentieth century.

Jonas Mekas While in New York, I met with Jonas Mekas, the ninetythree-year-old filmmaker and founder of the Anthology Film Archives at his studio in Brooklyn to discuss Smith, Mahagonny, and the scene surrounding Smith at the time. Mekas has been watching films, writing about films, making films, and living films for longer that you can imagine. He was living and breathing and filming in the midst of the Velvet Underground’s first appearance, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater, the birth of Fluxus, Andy Warhol’s Factory, John and Yoko’s bed-in for peace, Cunningham, Cage, and Kerouac. It was as the founder of the Filmmaker’s Co-Op and Anthology Film Archives that Mekas first encountered Smith. He was once asked about their first meeting and, as I recall from the account in the book American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, Mekas described it as something like this: Harry Smith walked in—I had never met him before, this was in 1962—I thought that he was sixty or seventy years old. ’I am Harry Smith and I hate you!’ he said. I said, ’Harry, you don’t know me—do you know what it means?

You are saying that you hate somebody?’ And I looked straight at him and said again, ’You know what you are saying?’ He looked at me, turned around, and walked out.

Smith proved himself to be irresistible to Mekas for the remainder of his life. Harry Smith practiced magic.

I sat down with Mekas to discuss all this further.

KEVIN ARROW (MIAMI RAIL): The whole idea of Marcel Duchamp, mathematics, and The Large Glass sideswipes everything—I was trying to wrap my head around Brecht and Weill and was then trying to decipher the Duchamp reference and I don’t even know where to begin.

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JONAS MEKAS: That’s Harry! That film is pure Harry. Don’t ask me about meanings!

RAIL: Did Harry ever say much about his films after they were made?

MEKAS: Whatever he had to say is in the Filmmaker’s Cooperative Handbook, he wrote the film capsules and didn’t talk much about his films.

RAIL: Is it true that people may have been intimidated to organize events with him to show his films?

MEKAS: He refused to go. I don’t know a single case when he would have accepted to appear after a film, but his room was always full of friends at the Chelsea Hotel.

RAIL: So he was good in informal sessions—would impart his knowledge to people?

MEKAS: No, he wouldn’t talk much, he would usually just insult them—he was not lecturing. He was a man of few words and would easily snap. They are a few recorded interviews with P. Adams Sitney.

He also wrote a lot and he left behind a lot of scribbles.

RAIL: Regarding the film restoration project, who instigated the process?

MEKAS: The Anthology Film Archive has all his films, we are the only ones doing it, and not everything is preserved, because of money limitations.

RAIL: Apparently the right date and time and combination of factors arose and investors appeared?

MEKAS: Yes, but unfortunately they did not want to spend money preserving the individual films [of Mahagonny]. They wanted to put it onto one film, which was the wrong idea, but it’s OK. RAIL: Are there additional films out there awaiting this same kind of a treatment?

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MEKAS: They are all preserved except for the original materials for Mahagonny, we would need close to one hundred thousand dollars to do that.

RAIL: It does seem as if someone ought to do a frame-by-frame analysis of Mahagonny, if that is even possible.

MEKAS: Yes, that is the future.

RAIL: There is a 16 mm print of Early Abstractions in the Miami Dade Public Library, which I have watched countless times, and I have the Mystic Fire VHS tape as well. I am fascinated by the methods Smith employed to screen these films publically, in which he used slide projectors and was manipulating the images with crystals…

MEKAS: And colored gels.

RAIL: I understand that he used large lanternslides, some of which are reproduced in the book Experimental Animation Origins of New Art, by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr.

MEKAS: Yes, that projection instrument machine Harry destroyed. He made it himself. It was a contraption that you could take apart and put together and place a projector inside of and there was another place for different sized and shaped gels, and as you project you could do all those tricks. This was made especially for the film Heaven and Earth Magic (1962). Not for Early Abstractions, which was always shown straight, with no manipulation.

RAIL: I have Heaven and Earth Magic as released by Mystic Fire on VHS and it’s only in black and white. So when Smith presented this live, there were colored passages?

MEKAS: Yes. And you know, his paintings have yet to been seen and exhibited. We are currently trying to build a library, performance space, and a Heaven and Earth Cafe on the roof of the Anthology Film Archives. It will be for books, periodicals, and documentation and a lot of Harry’s art and paintings.

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RAIL: So this is material that didn’t go to the Getty?

MEKAS: Most of his materials that have to do with music are at the Getty, and some of the paintings that came from individuals, but most of his paintings he left with me, which I deposited at the Anthology, but since we are not a museum and cannot care for them, we are selling them to build the library. We have forty Smith paintings, which we are selling for ten million dollars, which I consider to be the cost of one second-rate Warhol! With forty paintings from Harry Smith, we will build the library and the café, because we are really suffering right now and half of our paper materials are in boxes and we have more coming in, and since we are operating on a deficit, the café will help us break even, at least. So, I am forced to sell the paintings to build the library. The paintings have to be purchased and kept together—some foundation should buy them and deposit them in a well-established museum.

RAIL: I often tell people that Harry is the most important twentieth-century artist that you have never heard of.

MEKAS: Some people who know Harry’s work, like Henry Geldzahler, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he thought he was a much more important artist than Warhol, as a painter.

RAIL: I am sure Harry would have something to say about time cycles and that there needed to be this much time to pass before people would wake up and pay attention.

MEKAS: That is exactly what Henry told me, that he has to die and then people will eventually understand his work and he will be evaluated in the right way.

Kevin Arrow is an artist and museum professional living in Miami Beach.

REVIEWS Robert Huff: 47 Years MDC MUSEUM OF ART + DESIGN SEPTEMBER 4–NOVEMBER 8, 2015

MON I CA U S Z E R OW I C Z “Teach your hands to see, and your eyes to feel,” a potter once told me. I’d wandered into a ceramics workshop at a flea market, and my unfamiliarity with the craft left me thinking of the phrase as advice intended for metaphorical applicability. That wasn’t really necessary—its simple meaning is special enough, especially in practice.

The late Robert Huff embodied this notion of the interchangeable nature of feeling and seeing, of working between disciplines to create something whole from seemingly disparate parts. His death in 2014 left behind a kind and incomparable legacy—as a sculpture professor at Miami Dade College and chairman of its art department, he inspired and worked with some of Miami’s best artists, integrating with the earliest incarnations of the city’s arts community itself. Huff’s retrospective at MDC Museum of Art + Design (MDC MOA+D) is actually surrounded by works he selected while helping the museum establish its collection; currently, MDC MOA+D is a matryoshka doll of a gallery, Huff’s influence increasing with each step throughout.

The artist and his family were involved in the construction business—he was a budding builder before he relocated from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to study at the University of South Florida. After receiving a degree in fine art, Huff remained a polymath, combining the tools of his former trade with his artistic practice: an arresting amalgamation of sculpture and painting.

And something else. All that pine and bronze, the pulleys and aluminum, display Huff’s love affair with structure and architectural form, the outline and feel of it, but also its capacity for mutability.

There’s the trademark of someone who works sturdily with his hands permeating

Robert Huff, Miami Windows/Miami, 1982. Pencil and acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 182.9 cm. Photo: Francesco Casale/Letter16 Press

every piece, yet it’s fluid—playful. As a maker, Huff also happily dismantled and abstracted anew. He knew how to observe and rebuild his environment, but it’s more important that he was fascinated by it.

The landscapes he traversed, and the shape of the cities therein, feel ever-present. Clinch River (2012), an oriented strand board, is adorned with thick swaths of blue paint and sketched funnel shapes that recall smokestacks. Titan (2010), a towering pine maquette of a building, is gridlike—look through the slats and you’ll see bronze, steel, a city in miniature. The pulley in Pete’s Pulley (1996) consumes a wall, and is then swallowed by bright canvas on either side. We might be looking at landscapes each time—sky and steel, natural and oppressive—or something else entirely. The works’ individual parts meld together the way palm and cloud begin to sit comfortably alongside a well-lit skyline.

Tennis Match (1970), a set of colorful found objects arranged as delicately as the wiring of some instrument and encased in a Plexiglas cube, is not the first piece you see, nor the most prominent

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(nor is there any conceivable depiction of tennis). But it’s remarkable. Peering inside the theoretical diorama, the figures contain imaginative lives of their own. In referencing the environment so abstractly, Huff does a supreme job of remapping a new one.

Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern THE WOLFSONIAN–FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 16, 2015–FEBRUARY 28, 2016

ERICA AN DO We often speak of people migrating across cultures, lands, and time. Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern traces the journey, from Central and South America to Europe and North America, of what we know today as common houseplants. Philodendrons, recognizable for their curvy, heart-shaped-leaf

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varieties, have been widely integrated into art and design, quietly infiltrating our visual consciousness. The exhibition spans four centuries and three continents, and includes approximately one hundred fifty objects, including visual art, design, mass media images, and scientific artifacts. Rather than simply tracing the plant’s migration, curator Christian Larsen questions why philodendrons captured pan-cultural imaginations and how they have been used to play out representations of the self and the other. Ubiquitous in the United States during and immediately after World War II, philodendrons are revealed to mirror shifting national, cultural, and sexual identities. Within this narrative, Miami emerges as a theater of cross-cultural negotiations in which philodendrons play a large role.

Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, indigenous people used philodendrons for material and medicinal purposes. A simple green and red feather headband made with philodendron fibers by the Amazon’s Karajá people shows a nonaesthetic application of the plant.

Nations trying to wrest themselves from the influences of colonization adopted philodendrons as romanticized symbols of their natural origins. The 1883 official portrait of Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, photographed in a studio surrounded by tropical plants—rather than, for instance, sitting on a throne—identifies him with his native land.

Despite Enlightenment obsessions with collecting and classifying, it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that the means existed to transport and then sustain the heat- and humidity-loving plants in European collections. The technological ability to exhibit live tropical plants established a sense of mastery over primitive cultures and their land. At the same time, the concept of the noble savage proliferated, as illustrated in the French wallpaper panel Incas (1818) that depicts the primitive other, uncorrupted by civilization and surrounded by a lush forest of exotic plants.

While the philodendron symbolized the primitive, it also stood in for the female.

Henri Matisse was captivated by philodendrons, which the exhibition suggests had more to do with his fascination for exotic women and locales than with his stated

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Roberto Burle Marx, Still Life with Philodendron I, 1943. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Paula and Jones Bergamin Collection

interest in the plant’s curvilinear forms. In his etching Intérieur au feuillage (Interior with Leaves, 1935), round-edged philodendrons appear to overtake the composition.

The tropics suggested untamed female sexuality, not only in fine arts, but also in popular culture. The cover of a racy paperback, Tropical Passions (1955), depicts a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy, embraced by a tanned, naked man in a tropical jungle.

It’s no coincidence that tropical plants and philodendron motifs pervaded American homes during World War II. The craze for things Latin American was

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propelled by diplomatic efforts to create strong “Good Neighbor” ties with the region. Characterizing Latin America as pre-modern and idyllic, cultural exchanges sponsored by the Roosevelt administration imported notions of primitive art and craft, and with them, philodendrons. In the postwar years, as the American middle class gained wealth and the dream of homeownership became reality, architecture and home décor magazines promoted images of stylish modern homes decorated with potted philodendrons. In Julius Shulman’s photographs of modern southern California residences, the uncanny repeated

appearance of philodendrons perpetuates a casual yet glamorous image. The postwar years found women tied to this domestic realm as they assumed happy housewife roles, with philodendrons symbolizing the paradox of women’s identity—natural and sexual, but denatured and domesticated.

Much of the American rage for philodendrons originated in Florida, and particularly, Miami. David Fairchild, a prolific plant explorer for the US Department of Agriculture, settled in Coconut Grove and contributed to the cultivation of the area’s tropical image. Miami’s iconic architecture announced the city’s role as gateway to Latin America through integrated philodendron motifs. Francisco Brennand’s designs for the blue-and-white tiled facade of the former Bacardi Imports headquarters (1962) utilized stylized philodendron forms. Morris Lapidus’s famous hotels, Fontainebleau and Eden Roc, incorporated live plants and philodendron patterns in their interiors to announce Miami’s tropical status to sun-hungry tourists.

Contemporary visual artists—particularly Miami artists—use philodendrons and their layered meanings to examine cultural and sexual identities. For example, Cesar Trasobares’s Malanga (Top View) (1982), a portrait of the artist covered with large philodendron leaves, subverts the gendered expectations of Latin men. Commissioned installations by Pepe Mar, whose The Somnambulist’s Garden (2015) critiques the myths of primitivism and the noble savage, and Naomi Fisher, whose works explore women’s roles within the nature-culture dichotomy, exemplify the ways artists currently use philodendrons to address centuries-long stereotypes.

The Wolfsonian’s lobby is transformed into a philodendron jungle by Mauricio del Valle and Veronika Schunk’s Forest for the Trees (2015), with some of the plants raised from David Fairchild’s 1930s Caribbean expedition findings. We enter and leave the exhibition through this cultivated jungle, the full circle of discovery, exploration, and propagation beginning and ending with live philodendrons.

Second Nature JENIELIFT OCTOBER 10–NOVEMBER 21, 2015

L AU RA RAN DAL L Every day at 8395 NE 2nd Ave, a group of local residents congregate inside a hot and barren commercial building in Little Haiti for worship. Inside, it is as if the desecration and destruction of the Reformation just carried over, but without the fresh paint—no pews coming later, just a strikingly bleak room for worship. They gather inside a tight, non-air-conditioned room fitted with a few old sofas and folding chairs. The largely Creole-speaking laity have been working around and talking with the new tenants in their building, artists Marla Rosen and Eddie Negron for several months now.

“They didn’t like Eddie at first,” Marla tells me at their most recent opening at their gallery, Jenielift. She and Eddie opened the new alternative exhibition space in July. There are no signs for the gallery; the door is marked out front by its neighbor (with whom they share a vestibule), the Missionary Baptist Church.

Nestled between Mindy Solomon Gallery and Guccivuitton, Jenielift has positioned itself as a discreet but poignant feature on the block.

Second Nature, a solo show by José Luis Falconi, makes clear Jenielift’s aim to challenge the traditional role of the gallery or contemporary project space. Falconi has transformed the four-hundred-square-foot gallery into a more aestheticized contemporary space we don’t often see in Miami. The walls are covered in a sleek digital print of ethereal clouds and bright blue skies, which hover over freshly laid St. Augustine grass.

The perfectly manicured lawn and sweeping sky evoke images of suburban life, a democratic emblem that belies its roots in the aristocratic gardens of the 18th century, yet here it provides a brief respite from the largely dilapidated block.

The name Jenielift was borrowed from the machinery museum staff and artists use to install large works and technical lighting. The gallery plans to continue exploring the veiled properties contained within objects and habits of daily life. The next show will feature Sergio Vega, whose artwork explores the physical traces of a prelapsarian world along the Amazon through archival documentation, multimedia installations, and photography. At first, Missionary Baptist Church was skeptical of how their new neighbors had reconfigured their shared space, but after seeing the juxtaposition of heaven and earth in Falconi’s work, they came to embrace what Rosen and Negron have created.

José Luis Falconi, Second Nature, 2015. Grass, digital print, and wood. Photo: Christian Hernandez.

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term “transformed,” and I think certainly it has shaped me. I’m sure if I had another profession, such as pilot or scientist, for example, that would have generated also other ways to interact with art. The chance to build relationships with colleagues and to be so close to their work and ideas, generates a fruitful dialogue and confronts us as artists.

RAIL: With some of your pieces, like Lego-Ego and the Parcial series, you used materials leftover from previous works.

Luis Romero, Dependientes, 2015. Lithographic ink monotype on paper, 60 x 60 cm each. Courtesy Alejandra von Hartz Gallery

Luis Romero: Borderline ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY SEPTEMBER 10–NOVEMBER 13, 2015

THEO R OD I N O At the Alejandra Von Hartz Gallery, Luis Romero’s use of unassuming arrangements of materials and mediums across a varied body of works—developed in distinct series—brings the viewer into a multifaceted dialogue. The Parcial series—dark, ominous, an opaque vision annulled—features amorphous black globules confined to strictly defined cells, from which one can’t help but think they are trying to break free.

Each work featuring concentric polygons in the Dependientes series has a juxtaposed partner in the related Independientes series. This partnership among the works plays with matters of perception and creates a narrative that touches on the artist’s unique iconography, systems of geometry, and the tension between word and image. As the title might suggest, one series cannot live without the other, while the latter is fully capable of sovereignty.

Romero expressed to me his desire to create a meta-language and nowhere else in this show is that more apparent.

THEO RODINO (MIAMI RAIL): Does the show have a thematic focus, on form and balance?

LUIS ROMERO: The exhibition in general, despite the formality of the works, has no speech on topics such as balance. It’s not so much about forms, but meta-language, or an analogy in order to describe personal relationships.

RAIL: Do you feel the series aspect of some of your work adds to its overall impact?

ROMERO: I think that often a theme or idea does not end with a single image or series, and as an artist I’m interested in exploring the many opportunities that the works hand to you—and their consequences. I think, for example, that in the Dependientes and Independientes series this feature is very important. There, the sequence or communication between each of the pieces brings us balance and tension—perhaps in this one piece this will be noticed.

RAIL: How has your work as director of Oficina no. 1, the contemporary art space in Caracas, changed the way you approach your own art?

ROMERO: I differ on the term that you used: “change.” Instead, I rather prefer to use the

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ROMERO: At the beginning I kept those remains of previous works as purely an act of love for the forms contained in them. But once I start to build a body of work, and talking in particular, for example, about the Parcial series, that initial fire was transformed in the process of the construction of the work. I began to understand that I was working with items that have a memory.

When I began to understand this, I also came to realize that the components of the Parcial series are charged with a memory, which now in another context deals with the issue of mind and its inability to be contained within any physical or mental structure.

Intersections (after Lautréamont) CIFO SEPTEMBER 3–NOVEMBER 1, 2015

L AURA RAN DAL L Intersections (after Lautréamont) is the thirteenth edition of CIFO’s Grants and Commissions Program. Each year, the foundation selects ten emerging and mid-career Latin American artists to produce newly commissioned works; this year, the selection is Iván Argote, Adrián Balseca, Domingo Castillo, Javier Castro, Nascimento/Lovera, Alice Miceli, Naufus Ramírez, Silvia Gruner, Pablo Vargas Lugo, and Leandro Katz.

Although his writing garnered little recognition in his lifetime, Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, 1846– 1870) was later revered by the Surrealists.

French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of one of this works in a Paris bookshop in 1917 and introduced it to the

Surrealists, who went on to draw inspiration from Lautréamont’s poetry for its prophetic ability to challenge perceptions through its dark imagery.

The first work seen on entering the space is Miami artist Castillo’s visually enticing, trancelike installation Posthumous.

The installation is highly attuned to Design District–style aesthetics, including low, sleek pastel benches, tables, books, and two monitors playing two very different digital videos.

One video is a virtual reality tour through a 3D model of a Miami high-rise building and the other is a string of videos depicting flowing orange juice and facts about the fruit’s consumption globally. The second video compares the unique way Americans have become so removed from the original fruit— the peeling process, juicing, and its mass production for consumption—compared to other countries where the fruit is cultivated and consumed. The fast-paced rhythm of the video is intense and the loud; the atonal

music that accompanies it commands the entire gallery. The linear history of the fruit and story of its commodification can be applied similarly to other elements in the room—to how we relax, decorate, and process our notions of lifestyle through imagery.

The cultural imagination that pervades Miami vis-à-vis Castillo’s installation stretches beyond the contemporary in an untitled installation by the collective Nascimento/Lovera (Daniela Lovera and Juan Nascimento). The installation is filled with architectural images set in vitrines along the wall, in a formula that borrows from museum methods of display, setting up an archival system that separates narratives of style along a linear continuum. The work includes imagery from Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World, the Epcot globe, structures related to city planning, Mayan temples, and Panopticon prisons.

In Castro’s Coliseo (Coliseum), a cluster of monitors on the floor and wall depict a

recording of a street fight that is an everyday scene in the artist’s native Cuba. The men in the videos place bets and fight for money, and, as uncomfortable as the scene may inherently be, the confrontational, up-close angles of Castro’s camera (so close that it seems like you can almost feel the fighters’ breath) only exacerbate it.

There is a significant difference in the way these ten artists respond to Lautréamont compared to how the Surrealists once did. The sounds may be loud, but the tone of these artworks feels muted. Rather than acting as agents of revolt, the artworks at CIFO respond with the environment rather than against it. With the number of multimedia-based works that capture sound and video on view, alongside photographs that document place, the artists need not conjure up something eerie, they simply push play.

Javier Castro, Coliseo (Coliseum), 2015. Acrylic, aluminum, and color video, with 20 min., dimensions variable. Photo: Oriol Tarridas. Courtesy CIFO

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Residential Properties THE FOUNTAINHEAD RESIDENCY SEPTEMBER 13–OCTOBER 16, 2015

LORI K E LLY Deep in the gated glens of Morningside, Felice Grodin built a temporary outpost of installations, conversations, and interactions.

Fourteen local artists, authors, filmmakers, architects, and industrial designers came together to explore the relationships among place, commerce, and home.

A substantial bench made of real estate signs from the collective LMNOQ digs its heels into the green lawn of the Fountainhead Residency across from Bhakti Baxter’s precarious Primitive Shelter Structure, like a condo owner drinking coffee on her miniscule balcony while the sidewalk sleepers roll up their homes.

Inside, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova’s two-by-four construction manspreads across the couch, while Frances Trombly’s drapes along the loveseat, the collaborative duo's work so easily identifiable that it replicates the artists’ bodies and claims their space.

Ernesto Oroza's Tabloid 32 serves as wallpaper as well as reading material. Playing with the many meanings of efficiency, he describes the flow of value from illegal studios in Hialeah back home to Havana.

Architectural theory, policing of difference, networks of attachment to place and displacement, all the complexities of Orozo are there, but mixed into an engaging and accessibly readable fiction.

Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, by contrast, disappeared into Working Title. At first glance, it seems the work consists of paintings framing the bathroom mirror. But Carlisle had redesigned and resurfaced the entire bathroom, as a gift to future artists of the residency.

The “paintings” are working studies for the redesign; foregrounding the invisible, female-identified gift economy of the domestic over the art object.

Barron Sherer transformed vintage Florida real estate footage into domestic wallpaper by installing a constant loop in the ubiquitous top-of-the-refrigerator TV. George Sanchez-Calderon shrunk the Turkish ruins of Gobekli Teppe into flattened fridge magnets and encircled the ISISthreatened archeological treasure of Urfa

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in the kitchen clock. Time ticks away. The monuments crumble.

This precarity infuses much of the dialogue around the installation. Market forces, gentrification, bombs, and exile all imperil our sense of home. So where do we draw the line? What makes a place worth saving, what makes it home? Is it possible to develop a more permanent, sustainable “otherwise”?

Elizabeth Povinelli describes an analytical process of place/people making in her archive project Karrabing. In longtime collaboration with aboriginal friends and family, Povinelli engaged in an experimental practice of making an intentional otherwise: living biologically in a particular space, so that geology becomes biology. She calls this process “geontology,” an activity that produces bodily substances that build a landscape and develop and recompose the materiality of obligation. Shit becomes soil becomes food becomes us. People become obligated to a place. They cannot forget it because it made them. But how does this process work when we are precarious on the land?

It was in this framework that I wanted to think about the process of making this group show. Grodin corralled fourteen disparate people into one space, repainted the walls, charted together multiple show lists, organized two lecture and discussion series, and hosted a damn generous bar in the garage. An investment of over a year of labor, the sacrifice of other paid job opportunities, and yet, none of the collaborators in the show can afford to live in a neighborhood like Morningside. As an experiment in real property, this show was spectacularly unsuccessful.

We are priced out, gentrified out, and, even if we can scrape together the cost of a house, sea level rise will float us out of this geological space. But if we think the materiality of obligation to others, in addition to place, if we think a geontological commitment, we are getting to my Miami.

There are people who I have worked with, people whose work I recognize as part of this place. They may be here; they may be exiled from here. But the geontological process of working together, contributing sweat in this place, has formed a community of obligation.

An otherwise home.

WINTER 2015

BOOK REVIEW Dinner CÉSAR AIRA NEW DIRECTIONS, 96 PP.

SEBASTIAN BO EN SCH Dinner is the most recent of César Aira’s strange little novels to appear in English (translated—gorgeously—by Katherine Silver). At its center is a zombie story, but one unlike any other I have ever encountered.

The book’s narrator is an unnamed sixty-something bachelor living in Coronel Pringles, a small town (Aira’s hometown) in the vast flatness of the Pampas. This bachelor is, by his own account, a failure.

He is bankrupt, alone, and of necessity has moved in with his elderly mother. In the book’s first section, the bachelor and his mother eat dinner at the home of the bachelor’s only remaining friend, a successful building contractor. After dinner, the friend shows the mother and the bachelor his collection of children’s toys, in particular his antique windup toys.

In the book’s second section, the bachelor and his mother return home, where the bachelor settles in on the couch. His mother goes to bed, but before she does, there is a devastating moment—just a moment—in which she tells her son, “Don’t go to bed too late,” and he responds, pathetically, “It’s early. And tomorrow is Sunday.” On TV is a strange sort of live news broadcast.

Following this, the story of Pringles’ invasion by the undead begins. The bachelor narrates the invasion as if via the newscast, but the perspective has become inexplicably omniscient.

The third section begins on the following morning. The bachelor wakes early and depressed. He squabbles with his mother.

She goes out. Home alone, the bachelor wonders what the town looks like in the wake of the invasion. He calls his friend.

During their conversation, the bachelor

Nina Surel: Sailing to Byzantium November 14, 2015 – January 24, 2016 In Sailing to Byzantium, Nina Surel translates William Butler Yeats’ poetic allegory of aging into an imaginary physical and spiritual journey using sculpture, installation, sound, and video.

Also showing

   

Oliver Wasow: Studio Portraits Santiago Rubino: Light Out of Darkness Michael Namkung: Levitation and Gravitas Gustavo Oviedo: The New Past

Extend your arts outing in Downtown Hollywood: view dynamic outdoor murals, indie films at Cinema Paradiso, galleries, and the beautiful ArtsPark at Young Circle. Choose from more than two dozen restaurants.

Visit ArtAndCultureCenter.org/welcome for more information!

1650 Harrison Street Hollywood, FL 33020 954. 921. 3274 ArtAndCultureCenter.org

This exhibition season is supported by Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau. The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported in part by its members, admissions, private entities, the City of Hollywood; the Broward County Board of County as recommended by the Broward Cultural Council; and the State of Florida, Department R E VCommissioners IEWS MIAM I R A I L . OofR G State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture. We welcome donations from all members of the community who wish to support our work. Image: Nina Surel, Sailing to Byzantium, 2015, Digital photograph, 90 x 45 in

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casually mentions the previous night’s zombie invasion, but his friend thinks he must be referring to a movie. They talk past each other. The ambiguity is not resolved.

The book ends.

From this unpromising material Aira has crafted a beautiful, unclassifiable, funny, and deeply unsettling book. The difficulty is explaining how Aira has succeeded in doing so, and also in explaining the nature of his achievement. The longest section of Dinner is an action-driven zombie story, in some respects a familiar story, with a plot that repeatedly answers the question, “And then?”

The sections that bookend it have, in contrast, no real plot, but instead rely on implication, portent. They whisper that nothing is as it should be, that a consciousness, or perhaps even a whole world, is crumbling in its foundations. The miracle of Dinner is how well its disparate elements cohere. Where Aira leaves gaps, the reader fills them in himself, as if he were interpreting a dream—his own, the bachelor’s, or Aira’s.

Consistent throughout is the quality of Aira’s thought and prose. His descriptions of the risen dead are continuous marvels. The zombies crawl from their niches in the cemetery “like ‘the spider dead,’ otherworldly greyhounds oozing slime.” They move “like insects or ostriches,” “their goose steps modified by a thousand limps”; in the moonlight, their “legions [swarm] in the silvery glow through which their passage left a green, pink, and violet wake.” One zombie’s hands are “bones poorly gloved with strips of purple flesh.” Another has “green-splotched tibias with ornate bunches of dried innards hanging down and shaking like the tails of a frock coat.” In one of the invasion’s most memorable scenes, an unsuspecting bride walks through a church toward what she, in the dim light, perceives to be a statue of Christ standing over the altar: It was a Christ crucified, suffering, expressionistic, twisted, frankly putrefied—the work, one might say, of an insane imagination that had melded the concept of Calvary with that of Auschwitz and the aftermath of a nuclear or bacteriological apocalypse.

Insane imagination, indeed.

But perhaps what makes Dinner most

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in the palm of a hand. A blind old woman lies in its bed. When the friend winds the toy, a coffin-like door in one of the bedroom walls opens, and a fat young man enters and begins to sing the tango.

The old woman on the bed also moved, though very discreetly and almost imperceptibly: she shook her head from side to side. . . . You could tell that she was picking crumbs or fuzz off the bedcover with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. It was a true miracle of precision mechanics. . . . I had once heard that this action of picking imaginary crumbs was typical of the dying.

remarkable is that, of its three sections, the zombie section is the most conventionally told. The zombie narrative is in a sense far more logical and certainly more linear in its unfolding than what comes before and after, and is much less haunting. If the zombie section follows the logic of action, the others follow the associative logic of memory and dream.

On page five, the friend shows a windup toy to the bachelor and his mother, but we do not read any description of it until page eleven. Interceding are a string of the bachelor’s memories, all portentous, and all unreliable, even to him, such as his childhood memory of the house where two seamstresses lived, “the entire room one great big pit, very deep, with dark gullies full of crumbling dirt and rocks, and water at the bottom,” and the finger of one of the seamstresses, “a finger that was hard and stiff like wood.” Interceding also are the picturesque memories of the friend—for example, the story of an eighty-eight-yearold dwarf bricklayer—which the friend himself takes as unremarkable.

And how to summarize the description of the first windup toy, and the bachelor’s attempt to get at the meaning of its mechanical play, which together require four pages?

A description that is both concrete and also as fantastical as anything in the zombie section, and far more uncanny? The toy is the miniature of a bedroom, so small it fits

WINTER 2015

Large white birds, “cranes and storks, very white,” crawl out from under the bed flapping their wings, more and more of them, until they fill the miniature bedroom.

It has been observed that it is his digressions, as much as anything else, that make Aira’s books what they are. Aira has said, “To be a writer one also has to know how to paint doors. One has to know how insects live. The writer has to be the universal man. . . . To write a novel one doesn’t have to know everything in an academic sense, but you do need to have a notion of everything that goes on in the world.” It is this notion— what the author knows or can convincingly dissemble about Argentine real-estate law, or the greater need of the poor for “active endorphins,” or the toxicity of marble dust, or the operations of antique windup toys— that gives Dinner its life.

Florida Atlantic University

Biennial Faculty Exhibition through January 23, 2016

UNIVERSITY GALLERIES

DIRT: Yuta Suelo Udongo Tè curated by Onajide Shabaka January 22 – March 5, 2016

Jay Critchley, Incorporated February 5 – April 2, 2016

University Galleries, School of the Arts Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431 561.297.2661 • www.fau.edu/galleries

Jay Critchley, Miss Tampon Liberty, (circa 1985) performance view, 2000, Race Point Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore. photograph by Vincent DeWitt.

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WINTER 2015

OV E R 6 0 B O U T I Q U E S N OW O P E N .

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

On view Dec 1 through Jan 31, 2016 Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

The Van (Redux)*

icamiami.org

Alex Bag, The Van, 2001. Video, color, sound; 12:55. Courtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York. *The Van (Redux) is presented in association with The Leroy LeLoup Corporation, a licensed subsidiary of Blood Oath Holding Company LLC.

Alex Bag