The Miami Rail | Issue 18

FALL 2016

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

V I SUA L A RT S

EXPRES S

4 FRAMING, OR, WHAT ARE THE STAKES: (BLACK) ARTISTS, (BLACK) AUDIENCES Rujeko Hockley

30 MÄ‚IASTRA: A HISTORY OF ROMANIAN SCULPTURE IN TWENTY-FOUR PARTS Igor Gyalakuthy

10 HAVANA, RUINED? Emmett Moore 16 SARAH OPPENHEIMER'S UNIQUE BRAND OF INFRASTRUCTURAL FRICTION AT PAMM Courtney Malick 20 NO RETURN TICKET: DANIEL BUREN IN MIAMI Gean Moreno

LOCA L 26 THE GREETING KISS: BIOGRAPHY OF A MIAMI GESTURE Rob Goyanes COVER Daniel Buren / Miami, 2015-2016, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York.

GUEST EDITOR, VISUAL ARTS Courtney Malick

MANAGING EDITOR Nathaniel Sandler

LITERATURE EDITOR Sarah Trudgeon

PROGRAMS MANAGER Michelle Lisa Polissaint

POETRY EDITOR P. Scott Cunningham

DESIGNER Jessalyn Santos-Hall

INTERNS Elyse Marrero Ana Paz

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32 JEANGUY SAINTUS: CONTRETEMPS Catherine Annie Hollingsworth 36 GHOST IN THE SPRAWL Timothy Stanley 40 MIAMI'S SILENT FILM INDUSTRY (1910-1926) Monica Uszerowicz & Domingo Castillo

44 CHASE JOYNT RL Goldberg 48 THE SITWELLS ORGANIZE A ROYAL POETRY BENEFIT FOR THE FREE FRENCH WITH: EDMUND BLUNDEN, GORDON BOTTOMLEY, H.D., WALTER DE LA MARE, T.S. ELIOT, JOHN MASEFIELD, EDITH AND OSBERT SITWELL, WALTER TURNER, ARTHUR WALEY, LADY WELLESLEY, AND VITA SACKVILLE WEST George Green

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B OOK REV I E WS

28 AQUAFAIR Drew Lerman

PUBLISHER & FOUNDER Nina Johnson-Milewski

FILM AND PERFORMING ARTS EDITOR Monica Uszerowicz

FILM & PERFORMING ARTS

LITERATURE & POETRY

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BOARD James L. Bodnar Phong Bui Lauren Gnazzo Nina Johnson-Milewski Viviane de Kuyper John Joseph Lin Leslie Lott Tommy Pace

PRINTER Nupress, Miami CONTACT advertising@miamirail.org editor@miamirail.org info@miamirail.org

SPECIAL THANKS The Brooklyn Rail

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FRAMING, OR, WHAT ARE THE STAKES?: (Black) Artists, (Black) Audiences RUJEKO HO CKL EY

Imagine that you are a person. A person indelibly marked by history, which is to say, a black person. A person who, regardless of age, gender, class, or disposition, cannot enter a room, open your mouth, watch a movie, read a book, buy an outfit, drive a car, reach into your pocket, have emotions, or stroll down the street without history preceding you, which is to say, a person living while black. A person who can’t do any of those things without history preceding them, but who still likely can’t imagine ever wanting to be white. 1 If you are this person, or if you are attempting to imagine yourself as this person, now imagine walking into L&M Arts, a blue-chip gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, in early 2007. It is a brisk day. Icy blue skies overhead, harsh winter sunshine, 1 Here indebted to Daniel Joseph Martinez’s I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to be White (1993), an interactive piece included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial wherein visitors were given admission pins to wear that read fragments of the phrase “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.”

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Photos: Tom Powel Imaging. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery.

not a cloud in sight. You are here for David & Chie Hammons.2 You enter a large, empty front room, with an imposing staircase spiraling upward on the left. In the next room, you find five fulllength fur coats settled on headless dress forms. They are opulent, plush, expensive: mink, fox, chinchilla. Upstairs, a sixth: the lone wolf. They wear the mark of the artists, their strike, singe, paint, stain, dye, burn, and sear. These luxurious pelts have been sullied, their affect thrown into question. Marked as such, they become hostile, accusatory. Don’t they? Suddenly, they are more than

coats, more than commodities on display. They are spring-loaded barbs, aiming for a throat. Any throat? No, probably not. Not any throat. Whose throat, then, you wonder? (Figs. 1-4.)

The transmutation of coat into painting achieved through these physical gestures activates something larger than the action itself: audience specificity.3 Who you are when you walk into that gallery, or any gallery, impacts your understanding of, and relationship to, what you see there, as does who you perceive yourself to be—or are perceived to be—in relation to that gallery

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The exhibition was on view January 18-March 10, 2007.

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Jerry Saltz, “Fur What It’s Worth,” The Village Voice, February 27, 2007.

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and what it represents. Similarly, as who you are affects these relations of understanding and affinity, so too does who the artist is.4 This is self-evident and always true. Audiences—and artists—are a messy bunch; there is no singular audience or viewer identity, just as there is no singular artist identity. However, the construction of these categories has often occurred in collusion with the constructions of certain other categories—race, class, and gender, for example. Hence, the “typical” gallery attendee, and presumed audience for a work in that gallery, has traditionally been constructed as white and wealthy—gender not necessarily specified. The “typical” artist has traditionally been constructed as white and male—class not necessarily specified. What happens, then, when the viewer and/ or artist do not fit this schematic? When, perhaps, his or her race, class, and/or gender diverge from this perceived norm? When he or she is a person, marked by history, not only living, but art-making and art-viewing, while black?

Until fairly recently in the history of art, this has not been an issue that the discipline has felt the need to contend with, despite the continued existence of black artists and audiences.5 Emerging in tandem with broader struggles for black liberation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, AfricanAmerican artists and audiences have persistently agitated for representation and inclusion, as well as acknowledgment of their contributions to American culture at large. The pursuit of the twinned goals of representation and inclusion, meant to produce equality of both presence and consideration, has somewhat produced the former, but has been deficient for the latter. These goals have also been pursued beyond the arts, with similarly inadequate results. The mere fact of increased numbers (i.e. representation) within flawed structures (i.e. inclusion) has not, and cannot, produce the substantive societal change desired. At all levels, these goals have proven to be simultaneously empty and loaded—a truly double-edged sword. In the larger context, their pursuit and co-opting by both liberal and neoliberal ideologies have left us in a desolate cul-de-sac where multiculturalism and diversity, color-blindness and post-raciality, are” the buzz words of our national discussions and negotiations around race, yet by almost all measures Americans remain “two societies, separate and unequal,” neither color-blind 4 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Open University/ SAGE Publications, 1997).

5 See, for example, David C. Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art (New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976).

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nor post-race.6 Representation and inclusion are now largely deflated, hollow signifiers, serving to elide and conceal structural inequalities. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh describes this impasse, “Race now means racism, especially when it is used to define or defend the interests of a minority community.”7 There is little space for real, paradigm-shifting conversations around race beyond the binary; any articulation of that lack, or the still evident lacks in American society, is deemed divisive and a distraction by dominant culture.

Though, at first glance, this conversation may not seem particularly germane to art or art history, in fact, representation and inclusion, and negotiations concerning them, have been central to the experience of many African-American artists. Consider Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), the first African-American artist to gain international renown. He emigrated permanently to France, in response to both the overt racism he encountered in America, and its shadow— the intimation that his skill was a racial anomaly, recognition always qualified by and tied to his race.

This is to say that he would always be an exceptional entity: a black artist, never an artist.8 The condition of his inclusion and elevation was that he both represent his race, and be representative of his race, leaving no room for his own individual desires and intentions as an artist. This conundrum has impacted the careers and choices of many African-American artists, and it has certainly influenced the development of a critical discourse around the work such artists have produced—work sometimes described as “black art.”

Many scholars9 have addressed the tendency for critics and audiences to focus exclusively on 6 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission), Report (New York: Bantam, 1968). Quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is A Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5.

7

Singh, 10.

8 Rexford Stead, “Introduction,” Two Centuries of Black American Art, 9.

9 See for example: Naomi Beckwith, 30 Seconds Off An Inch (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2009); Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007); Darby English, “Ralph Ellison’s Romare Bearden,” Romare Bearden: American Modernist, eds. Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2011), 11-25; Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions on Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 233-58; Kobena Mercer, “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde,” Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: Iniva/ MIT Press, 2007), 136-59;Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” The Black Feminist Reader, eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 24-56; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

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WHAT HAPPENS, THEN, WHEN THE VIEWER AND/OR ARTIST DO NOT FIT THIS SCHEMATIC? WHEN, PERHAPS, HIS OR HER RACE, CLASS, AND/ OR GENDER DIVERGE FROM THIS PERCEIVED NORM? WHEN HE OR SHE IS A PERSON, MARKED BY HISTORY, NOT ONLY LIVING, BUT ART-MAKING AND ARTVIEWING, WHILE BLACK?

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the “biopolitical ‘fact of blackness’”10 in discussing the work of black artists, a tendency that, according to art historian Darby English, inhibits our understanding of “black art” and “limit[s] the significance of works assignable to black artists to what can be illuminated by reference to a work’s purportedly racial character.”11 In discussing the work of Romare Bearden , English asks, “In what ways might the fact of Romare Bearden’s blackness, aided by numerous readings whose combined effect suggests that the visual reproduction of blackness was his unchanging goal, have bent our vision of his art?”12 Using her own literary work as an example, Toni Morrison asks, “Other than melanin or subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity—what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American?”13 These questions guide us toward the conclusion that an artist’s “biopolitical ‘fact of blackness’” alone cannot and does not automatically tell us anything about the work he or she produces, either stylistically or conceptually. Although it is fairly obvious, it does not go without saying that any work created by any black artist will be “subsumed by an enforcing Afro-American presence,” though some is, and purposefully so.14 The questions posed by English and Morrison are ones of interpretation and comprehension, but also, critically, of omission: what have we—artists, historians, and audiences politically and aesthetically committed to the expansion of art histories and to the rightful inclusion of under-appreciated artists in “the canon”—missed, or ignored, in the work of black artists in the name of representation? Under what conditions and with what expectations have black artists been incorporated into “the canon” and what impact has the dangled carrot of inclusion had on the types of work produced by black artists, particularly at expectant and transformative historical moments? These are not matters of idle speculation, or even of redressing perceived wrongs. As Morrison tells us, “Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature and range . . . is the clash of cultures. And all the interests are vested.”15 Accepting that, indeed, all the interests are vested, I am concerned with how expectations of an appropriately racial mode of working may affect the work and careers of artists like David Hammons and Senga Nengudi. Starting in the late 1960s, each produced work deemed somehow inappropriate or antagonistic to social and political community-oriented goals, at the very moment that the cultural nationalist Black Arts Movement was flourishing. These black avant-garde artists moved in similar circles but had diverse practices and were received differently by their contemporaries. Committed to a practice of aesthetic,

material experimentation both conceptual and political, they diverged significantly from the more prominent Black Arts Movement, whose adherents promoted a representational “black aesthetic” whose primary goal was the “generation of empowering, radicalizing images of Blackness that could counter the racism of the mass media and the mainstream institutions of arts and cultural criticism.”16 To be sure, this was, and is, immensely necessary work, and it raises important questions about the role and function of art and the artist in the world. Additionally, the efforts and achievements of the Black Arts Movement were in many ways integral to the building of the “cultural confidence” necessary for experimentation. I wholeheartedly agree with critic Greg Tate’s assessment that “avant-garde black art . . . owes a debt to the [cultural nationalists] for making so much noise about the mythic beauties of blackness that these artists could traffic in the ugly and mundane sides with just as much ardor,”17 but I can also see how such a prescriptive and utilitarian aesthetic might easily become repressive and stifling. While Maulana Karenga and other Black Arts Movement figures were correct to question the primacy of the “false doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake,’” and were perhaps fair in deeming only revolutionary black art that was (according to their view) “functional, collective, and committing,” their demand that “all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution” and their subsequent conclusion that “any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid” were hasty and narrow.18 In dictating that black artists may have freedom to do as they wished only insofar as that freedom did not infringe upon the ability of black people to be protected from “negative” content, they placed an undue burden on black artists, gave short shrift to the multiple and overlapping contexts occupied by both artists and audiences, and, by fiat, appointed themselves arbiters of culture, both “positive and negative.”

There was not, and is not, any singular method for the accomplishment of the Black Arts Movement’s goals, and more pressingly, these are not the only appropriate goals for the creation of art. Speaking to art historian Kellie Jones about this period and the reception of Nengudi and her work, Hammons has said, “This was the Sixties. No one would even speak to her because we were all doing political art. She couldn’t relate. She wouldn’t even show around other Black artists her work was so ‘outrageously’ abstract. Senga came to New York and still no one would deal with her because she wasn’t doing ‘Black Art.’”19 This comment is illustrative of the dominant mindset of the period and the concrete issues of career-development and exposure it

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17 Greg Tate, “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke,” Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 200.

Beckwith, 9.

11 English, How to See..., 6.

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12

English, “Ralph Ellison’s Romare Bearden,” 13.

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Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken...,” 42.

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Ibid, 42.

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Ibid, 31.

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16 Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 22.

18 Ron Karenga, “Black Cultural Nationalism,” The Black Aesthetic, ed.

Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971), 31-37.

19 Quoted in Kellie Jones, “Black West: Thoughts on Art in Los Angeles,” EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 447.

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could create for some artists. The rejection of Nengudi for her “outrageously” abstract and nonrepresentational tendencies is evidence of a strain of conservatism in the ways black artists, and especially black female artists, were encouraged or discouraged by the tastemakers of the day to be radical in their creative practice. According to literary critic Addison Gayle, the salient question for the black critic of 1971 was not how beautiful a work of art was, but “how much more beautiful [the work of art had] made the life of a single black man? How far [had] the work gone in transforming an American Negro into an AfricanAmerican or black man?”20 The black woman does not enter the conversation, and neither does the notion that black men are not monoliths. Nengudi’s work—for example, the Water Composition series (1970), described as pedestals topped with “colored water in plastic bags,”21 and the R.S.V.P. series (1975-ongoing), biomorphic sculptures made from discarded pantyhose—is conceptually rigorous, informed by the junk art or assemblage aesthetic more common among her black contemporaries, the material and temporal experimentations of Minimalist and Conceptual artists such as Eva Hesse and Allan Kaprow, and community-based practices and goals. (Figs. 5-7.) And while Hammons’s work, particularly in early pieces like Injustice Case (1970), does often align with the “black aesthetic,” it just as often does not, though this has not hindered his success. (Fig. 8.) If Nengudi is rejected, while Hammons is embraced, how, then, does the idea that there are appropriate and inappropriate sources of inspiration, modes of working, and objects of concern for black artists affect these artists and their work, and how does it affect the development of a critical discourse around avant-garde black art?

In 1934, Romare Bearden harshly criticized black artists for their “timidity,” “mere rehashings,” and “hackneyed and uninspired” work, concluding that their development had been hindered by a lack of valid and engaged criticism, supportive institutions, a guiding ideology or social philosophy, and most importantly, an “appreciative critical audience.”22 He could also have added that they were hindered by the double bind of their role and position in American culture. First articulated as “double consciousness” (though clearly not first felt or acknowledged) by W.E.B. Du Bois, variations on this metaphor of duality tend to appear frequently in discussions of blackness. In a fundamental sense, this notion of the unreconciled, and sometimes irreconcilable, “two-ness” inherent to the experience of being both African and American is a thread running through much subsequent scholarship and creative production relating to the black experience in America.23 It is discernible, albeit taken up in varying guises and manners, in discussions of black particularity, black representation and inclusion/exclusion, the retention of signs of

Africa across the diaspora, post-raciality, etc. It is no great surprise that this metaphor has proven so resonant; it is particularly evocative in part because it is so successful in capturing one of the greatest contradictions of the black experience in America— namely, in but not of. This contradiction is clearly evident in the experience of black artists, particularly those working “outrageously.” The crux of the issue is the oscillation between black particularity and black desires for inclusion in the mainstream.

By this I mean, for example, the embrace and/or rejection of the labeling of art made by black artists as “black art,” or the attempt to situate “white” aesthetic practices as belonging equally to black artists, while still maintaining a positive sense of separateness.24 These negotiations have generally been framed as a binary: either we are past or “against race,”25 or we are essentialist cultural nationalists. Neither position is productive; neither adequately serves the interests and needs of black artists or their work.

Similarly, the restriction of acceptable modes of working based on the race of artist and audience is both counterproductive and counterintuitive. It reduces us, artist and audience, negates our critical capacity, our “aesthetic incarnate.” New methodologies are needed, ones that work simultaneously against critical (mis) readings of works of art by black artists informed solely by their race, particularly in regard to artists like Hammons and Nengudi whose work exceeds the bounds of “acceptable” modes of working, and the suggestion that discussions of race are either passé or inappropriate either to art history or the culture at large. As curator Naomi Beckwith asks, “If we re-situate work by black artists within a history of art rather than a social history, how could this reconfigure our understanding of the aesthetic and social dimensions of life?” To return to the gallery with Hammons and his furs, what else can be added to the somewhat facile reading of these pieces as a hostile and accusatory gesture, a barb aimed at a soft, white, wealthy throat by a black artist, a “bad guy”?

Well, to pick just one possibility, perhaps the history of American abstract painting. They are abstract paintings, unusual in media and installation perhaps, but utterly and completely that. They are certainly hostile to the art market and its characters, as evidenced in the organization of the exhibition, but they are also a subtle experiment in material and form, and deeply engaged with art history. And if there was any doubt that this is an accurate reading of both these works and Hammons’s intentions, it was dispelled by a second exhibition at L&M Arts in early 2011, and a third at Mnuchin Gallery (formerly L&M Arts) in 2016 (Figs. 9-10.)

Whose throat are the barbs aimed at, then? Maybe everyone’s.

20 Addison Gayle, “Introduction,” The Black Aesthetic, xxii. (Emphasis mine.)

24 As discussed by Daniel Widener, these ideological positions and oscillations, as well as the notion of an avant-garde, are marked by class and speak to long-running fissures along socioeconomic lines within black (art) communities. Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.

21

Quoted in Jones, “Black West...” EyeMinded, 447.

22 Romare Bearden, “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Journal of Negro Life, December 1934, 371-72. Quoted in Driskell, Two Centuries..., 67.

23

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903).

Rujeko Hockley is the assistant curator of contemporary art a the Brooklyn Museum.

25 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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HAVANA, RUINED? EM M ETT M O O RE

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n the summer of 2008 I made my first trip to Cuba. I was scheduled to start summer school the following week, and I knew that if I skipped it I would likely have to complete it later, so whatever I did to blow off my academic obligations had to be worthwhile. Growing up in Miami, Cuba had always seemed totally off-limits. The stories that local Cubans told began fondly, but were always tainted with disdain for the Castro regime. At first, my buddy Charlie and I just played with the idea of going, but when we realized it was an actual possibility, we decided to take the next step. We bought one-way tickets to Cancun and shortly after landing there, bought tickets to Havana while still in the airport. It was exhilarating—and also totally illegal.

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MUCH OF THE CONVERSATION ABOUT CUBA TODAY SUGGESTS THAT IT WILL BE “RUINED” BY AMERICAN TOURISTS. THE USE OF THAT PARTICULAR WORD, “RUINED,” IS A SOMEWHAT IRONIC WAY TO DESCRIBE ITS CURRENT STATE, BECAUSE MUCH OF HAVANA HAS FOR A LONG TIME, IN FACT, BEEN IN RUINS. When Charlie and I first arrived in Havana, we instantly felt welcome. The old American cars were familiar, although they reeked of gasoline and looked as though they had been painted by brush. Locals were excited to meet American tourists because we had defied our laws to make the trip, but also because virtually everyone that we met had a cousin living in Miami. We made friends quickly and wound up hanging out with some locals, spending hours every day wandering the streets of Havana. Their economic reality meant no disposable income. One night we ended up going to an all-night rave on the beach that felt more like a Christian retreat due to the noticeable lack of drugs and alcohol.

Everything in Havana seemed like home but a

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little bit off and all clouded by a lingering revolutionary presence. After having spent one day at the beach of Pinar del Rio, Charlie and I passed through an armed military checkpoint on our way back to the city. Our taxi driver, noticeably anxious, leaned back and said, “If they ask, tell them you’re my cousin.” I can tell you without a doubt no one would mistake me as such. The rest of our visit, we stayed in rented rooms in homes and dilapidated apartment buildings. It was at once beautiful and incredibly sad. Everything was in some degree of advanced disrepair, but still, it felt like an abstract version of Miami—the accents, the food, the music, all reassuringly familiar.

While the idea of Americans in Cuba seems new, prior to the revolution, Havana was actually, more or

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less, seen as an extension of the US. Much of the infrastructure of the entertainment industry was put into place there with the help of American developers before the revolution ended.

Fifth Avenue in Havana is purportedly named after the famous New York City thoroughfare, and the Tropicana in Las Vegas is named after the world famous cabaret in Havana. Sitting in the Tropicana now, it isn’t hard to picture 1940’s era American mobsters lounging in furniture custom-designed by Charles and Ray Eames, watching Nat King Cole open up the stage. The decadence of the era never left. Upon entering, patrons are handed a Cohiba Cigar and a bottle of rum.

In contrast, much of the conversation about Cuba today suggests that it will be “ruined” by American tourists. The use of that particular word, “ruined,” is a somewhat ironic way to describe its current state, because much of Havana has for a long time, in fact, been in ruins. While traveling there this summer, I met a local who told me that buildings fall down every day in Havana. He might have been exaggerating a bit, but living conditions are certainly not ideal. Even some of the graffiti that I had noticed eight years earlier was still visible on the walls that lined the streets, albeit a bit faded. Since the country’s 1959 revolution, things have been in a constant state of decline, even with some outside help from the Soviet Union—the US’s primary nemesis at the time. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba entered its so-called “special period.” Resources were at an all-time low, and the people were on the verge of starvation and revolt once again. This culminated in a major protest in 1994 that put significant pressure on the government.

In 1997, as a way of boosting the economy, the Cuban government loosened restrictions on private business and allowed certain people to rent out rooms in their homes. These homes became known as “Casas Particulares.” During my month-long exploration of the island with Charlie back in 2008, we stayed only in these houses. The proprietors often treated us like we were their own sons, telling us not to stay out late and making sure we didn’t leave the house without eating. We found them by word of mouth—each one referring us to the next. The government also allowed for the operation of private restaurants known as “paladares.” They are often found on the rooftops of residential buildings or converted penthouses, and make the perfect place to enjoy a cool sea breeze and take in an excellent view.

This shift toward a free market economy also ushered in a black market that was fueled by Cuba’s only financial driving force: tourism. This industrial isolation and economic turmoil led to clever new forms of resourcefulness among Cuban communities. A lack of resources immediately post-revolution necessitated the development of everyday skills like mechanics and carpentry.

The proof is everywhere; all it takes is to pop the hood of one of the 1950’s Chevys cruising around town. Nowadays local Cubans operating in the black market will try to hustle anything from bootleg Cohiba Cigars to Manatee flank steaks (both illegal). Any local you run into on the street will have friends with rooms for rent, friends with cars, and recommendations for restaurants that in turn give kickbacks for bringing tourists by for a meal. We met a guy on the street who offered to exchange money for us at no cost. After racking my brain trying to figure out how exactly

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we were being scammed, I realized his only goal was to make American friends to whom he could then offer more services.

This precarious situation has allowed local artists and artisans to prosper with the help of foreign money. The average local Cuban makes about 20 dollars a month, but if you can sell one painting to a foreigner, you’re set for a while. With surges of foreign investors in Miami, there has also been an uptick in housing prices, which has in turn meant more funding for the arts and the construction of a number of new cultural institutions. This has allowed many local cultural producers to grow within their country, rather than having to move elsewhere for better career opportunities. More traditional professions don’t have the same ‘freelance’ possibilities—imagine a local judge trying to make an extra buck. The government also allows people in creative industries to travel more freely in hopes of spreading Cuban culture throughout the world. Unlike almost everywhere else, the creative class has become uniquely elite. While on the one hand, Cuban artists have fared better than those with more traditional jobs, Cuban culture, on the other, is still their main export. Dancers, artists, and musicians have found it easy to leave the island, though many end up choosing to return.

Many of the buildings have not changed, apart from a fresh coat of paint (or not), but Cuba was never frozen in time. The people of the country have been steadily evolving and adapting to its limited conditions to make it work for them. In fact, in some ways their dire situation has proven to be relatively advantageous. In the area of ecological conservation, for example, Cuba has had a sixty-year head start, despite being hampered by a lack of resources. Problems that seem easy to solve in the US tend to become serious issues in Cuba. Two main concerns that I heard about involved an errant cow trampling seedlings in a protected area and someone dropping an anchor directly on top of a coral reef. The coral reefs are nearly untouched, and biodiversity on the island rivals that of the Amazon. Happily, it seems that the government is intent on keeping it this way. The American embargo is still in effect, and it is still illegal for foreigners to own land or businesses; nonetheless, there are plenty of companies vying to invest. However, the Cuban government is reluctant to relinquish control to outsiders. They have already turned down a number of large projects, including a bid from Google to install Wi-Fi across the entire island at no charge.

There will come a time when foreign business will be allowed in more easily and the question will be whether or not Cuba can maintain that which makes it unique. It is clear that in Miami, Cuban culture is overwhelming and has infused every aspect of life, including food, nightlife, art, and politics. Our last six mayors have been Cuban. Given the profound effect Cuban culture has had on Miami, the idea that American culture could in some way replace Cuban culture on their home turf seems unlikely. The relationships between American industrialism and that of Cuba are manifold. Our history within Cuba is as long as our history without, and our pasts and futures are therefore inextricably linked.

Emmett Moore is a Miami-based artist and sailor, and he is a terrible sailor.

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SARAH OPPENHEIMER’S Unique Brand of Infrastructural Friction at PAMM COURTN E Y M ALI CK

To intervene in the physical (and conceptual) space of the white cube is every artists’ job. Their work can otherwise be thought of as a usually temporary imprint upon the structure or interior in question. In that sense, every exhibition is to some extent site-specific, even if it travels in the same formation to multiple venues. However, the notion of “the white cube” and the mysteries or mysticism of what can happen therein, is a topic of artistic interest of which we have recently seen much less. In favor instead, is work that has sprung from an artist’s unique perspective, challenges, or agitations of systemic realities that exist and affect life outside of the white cube. The function of the exhibition space today more often takes on the role of the telescope rather than of the incubator.

Architecturally-minded artist Sarah Oppenheimer came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s when the agenda of the white cube was shifting from an introverted to an extroverted point of view, which began with visual manifestations of social-centric theories like identity politics and relational aesthetics. Art of that time began to override the singular importance, primacy, or preciousness of the art object that had prevailed throughout the 1960s and ’70s with its focus on painting and sculpture. Placing Oppenheimer within this transitional context, we see that, aptly, her work often takes the structure of the exhibiting institution as both its intellectual jumping off point and its logistical parameters.

This fall Oppenheimer brings her sensitivity to the nuances that simultaneously define and differentiate individual and collective perspectives to Perez Art Museum Miami with a new, site-specific commission, rather blandly titled, S-281913. To be bland, it should in fairness be noted, is often to be institutional, and in this way Oppenheimer’s project for PAMM is fittingly named. However, those fortunate enough to have visited the museum know that it appears much more like a tropical resort than an insular, hard-edged building that delineates between interior and exterior. When asked about her approach to this uniquely expansive environment, as opposed to the isolation of

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the traditional white cube, Oppenheimer made it clear that she understands how PAMM is special, “the uniqueness of the [Perez] building largely results from its relationship to site.” However, she also points out that “the sameness of the building speaks to [its] less visible, but no less significant, features: [for example,] the uncontained air transfer in the floor plenum and the overhead lighting grid.” Though we know that S-281913 will be unique to PAMM and therefore fit into it somewhat seamlessly (even as it may complicate or confuse the building’s architectural framework or how visitors thus move within it), there is also a neutralizing factor at work that speaks not just individually to PAMM, but to the larger formulations, expectations, and demands of all art institutions.

From this set-up, it is clear that there is an air of Institutional Critique lingering within Oppenheimer’s project. Institutional Critique, we should remember, is now mostly considered a historical term, referring to a certain grouping of artists, such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Martha Rosler, and Andrea Fraser, to name a few, whose practices were jump-started in the late 1960s with somewhat unsavory or uninvited institutional interventions that questioned or blatantly criticized the very forums within which they operated. When confronted with the harkening to Institutional Critique that one might likewise read into S-281913, Oppenheimer is somewhat reluctant, claiming, “I prefer the term infrastructural friction to institutional critique. . . . While [Institutional Critique] has greatly influenced my thinking, architectural and institutional strategies have changed [significantly] over time. These merit a new engagement and perhaps a new language.” Nonetheless, there is a sociological aspect to any museum that cannot be denied, and within any sociological schema there is also a question of status; to this Oppenheimer continues, “Notably, the tools that generate these buildings, the developers that finance [them], and the mediums that represent [them], are increasingly the same in different urban centers. These shared design tools and distribution platforms have an effect. Given the proliferation

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Sarah Oppenheimer, 33-D, 2014. Aluminum, glass, and architecture.

Dimensions variable.

Installation view: Kunsthaus Baselland.

Courtesy of the artist and von Bartha Photo by Serge Hasenbรถhler.

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LEFT Sarah Oppenheimer, W-120301, 2012.

Aluminum, glass, and existing architecture.

Dimensions variable.

Installation view: Baltimore Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo by James Ewing RIGHT Sarah Oppenheimer, 33-D, 2014. Aluminum, glass and architecture. Total dimensions variable.

Installation view: Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, 2014

of globally shared spatial strategies, it may be possible to generate work that creates friction with these conditions.”

With S-281913, Oppenheimer, not unlike some key artists to have employed Institutional Critique in the past, attempts to move the attention of PAMM visitors away from the skeletal or essential pillars of the museum’s architecture, and instead highlights its underbelly of miniscule, often invisible inner-workings. For Oppenheimer, their invisibility and the lack of attention paid to them on a daily basis is key. In a text-based outline for the project, she breaks down her focus on the complex ballet of mechanics that are constantly at work within such a structure, bringing together thresholds (doors, hinges, windows, latches, and locks) and shifts (elevators, revolving doors, escalators, air conditioners, light dimmers, boilers, and generators). All of these very small pieces make up the whole of the puzzle that manifests itself into an enclosed space within which we interact with objects, programs, and various forms of stimuli in general. These miniscule facets thus begin the cranking process of the whole system that allows for the movement of people, air, water, waste, and electricity, all of which are intricately mediated by timers, triggers, sensors, and logistics.

By utilizing and re-contextualizing PAMM’s oft-underappreciated systemic components, S-281913 also becomes another example of what Oppenheimer’s compendium text, “The Array,” initially published in Art in America in the spring of 2014, claims.

In this text the artist reiterates the fundamentals of architecture and the factual underpinnings that turn creativity into sustainable reality: namely that a built space is made up of physical (walls, doorways, stairs, and ground) and immaterial (sightlines, sunlight, and crowding) components, and that variables such as distance, temperature, speed, and direction quantify how such limits affect the people that inhabit a space. In this way, the work cleverly utilizes the air chamber space beneath the gallery’s floor plane, in

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which S-281913 will essentially be hidden.

Additionally the insertion of a large beam positioned in between the concrete and the metal decking that supports the space’s floor will complicate the viewer’s point of view and experiential orientation. Through this architectural reshuffling, the work creates the illusion of a binary at play, while the exhibition space remains technically undivided. From this perspective, S-281913 operates like a switch of sorts.

In Oppenheimer’s text, the minute particles that allow all of these elements to synchronize with one another are understood as “The Array.” When discussing S-281913, Oppenheimer expands upon her conception of the social role of a building and therefore of The Array, stating, “I am interested in how the programmatic agenda of museums is intertwined with the political requirements of a city. . . . In this context, architecture offers institutions a branding opportunity. The branding of the building seems to emphasize the significance of the architecture and the architect, while flattening the building both conceptually and spatially. My work aims to counteract the tendency towards spatial flattening and sameness.”

With “sameness” in mind, PAMM itself describes Oppenheimer’s intervention via S-281913 as one that, again, calls to action two implemental switches that rotate the glass elements that connote transparency in contrast to lighting conditions within the exhibition space of the second floor of the museum.

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The result of this inversion alters and complicates one’s viewing position and likewise his or her impressions of what other works of art are on view. While all of this seems deeply tethered to the museum itself, and the presence of the people that occupy it and make it a worthwhile endeavor, it is interesting to consider the language Oppenheimer uses in “The Array,” in which she describes the aforementioned as “simultaneous and suspended, continuous and discrete.” Perhaps in her attempt to truly remain site-specific,

Oppenheimer takes on not only the logistics of the PAMM building, but more intuitively, its mood, which undeniably aims to blur distinctions, rendering the visitor more lost than found.

Courtney Malick is a curator, writer and editor whose exhibition and text-based work focuses on contemporary art that parses sociological issues and behavioral tendencies through media such as video, sculpture, performance, installation and the intersections therein.

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Daniel Buren / Miami, 2015-2016, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York.

GEAN M O REN O

As part of New York-based gallery Bortolami's new program, Artist/City, which will develop site-specific installations throughout the US, veering away from the New York-Los Angeles axis, Daniel Buren is presenting Passage Aller-Retour (2016) at the M Building in Miami. Passage Aller-Retour is comprised of a large mirror and five free-standing architectural elements—porticos—that bisect the exhibition space.

Painted in Buren’s usual primary-to-garish colors, these porticos generate a virtual corridor across the gallery, which is “extended” as a reflection on the large mirror that sits at one end of the room. That these elements reproduce the dimension of the actual threshold one crosses to enter the room—which is recoded as both the source of the objects and as one of them—only reinforces the idea of a hallway, and in so doing, fuses Buren’s free-standing additions to the building’s architectural substance. Paradoxically, the space of the gallery itself, even with this new corridor, is empty of any architectural elements that are external to it. The viewer is not able to reach for any outside reference in order to explain these porticos. The place of presentation determines the elements presented. As Buren likes to say, “the site prompts the work.”

Passage Aller-Retour, in fact, functions around architectural echoes— through physical, dimensional, and optical reproduction. The porticos echo one another as well as the entrance to the gallery. The mirror echoes the space, visually elongating the corridor as it also reproduces the image of the viewer. The mirror itself could also be understood to produce an echo of

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BUREN’S PROCESS HAS PROVEN TO BE SO FLEXIBLE, SO IMPOSSIBLE TO ENCLOSE OR DELIMIT (IT CAN LITERALLY WORK WITHIN ANY SITE), THAT ITS MUTATIONAL INSTABILITY, ITS CAPACITY TO ADJUST TO ANY LOCATION, IS DIVESTED OF SOME OF ITS FORCE. REPETITION OVERRIDES DIFFERENCE. CONTINGENCY IS STRIPPED OF ITS EDGE.

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a more historical kind, by allegorizing the “indefinite extensibility” of the Buren stripe, which is here placed on the sides of the free-standing architectural elements. This reading of the work inevitably surfaces as the exhibition is being billed as a celebration of 50 years of Buren’s employment of the 8.7 cm-wide stripe.

Finally, the colors, changing from portico to portico, render the experience of traversing the corridor at once textured and repetitive. Insomuch, the porticos’ chromatic arrangements modulate as one gazes upon them from different points in along the way, while a recurring modularity is nonetheless retained throughout.

A clear distinction is established between how the physical elements should be crossed in contrast to a standpoint outside of it—both physically and conceptually—from where it can be viewed. In generating this condition of exteriority to the work (within the work itself, in the dialectical transactions that emerge), Buren stages the very notion of perception, and therein foregrounds Passage Aller-Retour’s own mechanism of meaning-making as its very meaning. All this, in the complexity it achieves, cannot help but challenge the general ambient injunction across contemporary culture and everyday life to simplify at all costs for effortless consumption. Beyond generating this tight logic of interaction, superimposing new circulation itineraries on the exhibition space, and consequently, opening a de-naturalizing “location” of self-awareness for the viewer, it is hard to say what the gesture of reproducing the architectural elements of a site—of having a “site prompt the work”—really does. This again names our problem and gives it a generative dimension. It is what still makes thinking of—or around—Buren’s work interesting as more than just hagiography. Whatever radicality there was in working in the manner in which Buren does, seems drained by canonization and the perpetuation of irresolvable contradiction. Buren himself has said, “These phenomena against which the artist struggles are epiphenomena or, more precisely, these are only the superstructures compared to the foundation, which conditions art. . . . Art is the most beautiful ornament of society as it is now, and not a warning signal for society as it should be—never that.” At this point, Buren’s process has proven to be so flexible, so impossible to enclose or delimit (it can literally work within any site), that its mutational instability, its capacity to adjust to any location, is divested of some of its force. Repetition overrides difference. Contingency is stripped of its edge.

Reproducing a gesture that Buren has been deploying for decades (highlighted in the commemorative intent of the show), Passage Aller-Retour seems most useful in its ability to conceptually underline the presence of Buren himself within all of this.

Five porticos and a mirror utilized as a machine to reemphasize the value of Buren-the-brand. Here “brand” can be understood not as a pejorative term, but instead, as the name of a structure of production wherein the semiotic dimension of a product or practice accrues value through its self-perpetuation with the actual products or practice ceasing to be of primary importance.

From this perspective, Buren’s work serves as a prism through which to think again about his foundational gesture as an artist: the militancy of abandoning the studio and working exclusively in situ. And to think, furthermore, what this has to do with our contemporary moment.

The prompt for this kind of reflection, beyond merely looking at the objects on display, lies in the fact that Passage Aller-Retour is the second of what will eventually be three projects by Buren at the M Building in Miami, collectively titled Daniel Buren/Miami.

This trio allows for a complicating of the M Building as a site that exceeds this current exhibition. The first of these installations included paintings originally produced in the mid-1960s when the artist still retained a studio and had yet to fully move into the mode of working exclusively site-specifically. The juxtaposition of the paintings and the porticos “prompted by the site” warrants revisiting the moment that marks the differences between them.

Interestingly, this can also be considered a signaling of the fundamental scission that opened the possibility for the emergence of a future negotiation between Buren-the-critical-artist and the implacable materialist, in contrast to Buren-the-brand, the value-producing semiotic machine—two modalities that reflect our current dichotomic condition. Here we see a schematic that on the one hand favors critical agency, and that on the other, is geared toward involuntary modulation, which the current social dynamic thus opens for or imprints upon individual subjectivity.

One of the arguments that has been put forth to highlight the significance of Buren’s in- situ methodology is that it rigorously cuts itself from the need for any external information.

The meaning of the work is determined by the site in which it is presented, and what it demands from viewers is the application of knowledge that they already have on some level, or that they can develop through their engagement with the work itself. Guy Lelong posits the irremediable difference between Buren and an artist like Donald Judd, for instance, in that the definitive crux of the practice of the latter relied on an already accepted theory—namely that of Clement Greenberg's staunch take on Modernism—in order for Judd's attempt to reconceptualize sculpture to be effective. The demonstration of this divide between the two artists’ site-specific modes of working may have its most emblematic moment in Buren’s censure at the Guggenheim in 1971, which was in part imposed upon him due to Judd’s complaints. Buren, unlike Judd, relies on depositing all of the necessary information into the work itself. Or, perhaps more accurately, all that constitutes the meaning of the work can be found in—or maybe as—the dialectic that is established through the exchange of site and work. This inversion is then subsequently enveloped into a further dialectical relationship between this exchange and the knowing perspective of the viewer.

But it is here where an interesting conundrum emerges. As Buren places it all in the work, making the work self-contained in an extreme way, the production of value on the social sphere is shifting from the discreet unit—whether the intellectual object or, more generally, the commodity—to the performance of the producer." This is not to propose that the critical intent of Buren’s practice is fraudulent or fantastical. Even as early as 1972 with his intervention in Documenta V, in which he placed his work beyond the spaces allotted to him in order to unearth the arbitrary core that often plagues curatorial practice, you can see his work taking up a trenchant critique of exhibition making even as we continue to develop it today. His unveiling of frames and containers are a benchmark in the history of critical artistic

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production, its perceived shortcomings and contradictions, often underlined by Buren himself, notwithstanding. His attack on the problem of exchange and other challenges to the “parade of art” are all valid and valuable. The issue at hand, instead, is that aside from this critical activity, there was something happening simultaneously—the consolidation of a value-producing structure that was swelling in importance beyond the works that it generated— through the performance of this activity.

The social ontology developed by French sociologists, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their research from the 1990s on the changing conditions of contemporary capitalism with the emergence of entrepreneurial ideology, may serve as a lens through which to think of this displacement of the locus of value production. For them, the social dynamic is determined on two separate planes. On one, there is a series of normative fulcra through which we determine our actions; in other words, there is a series of beliefs and commitments that we use to justify our activities. On another plane, there is a series of forces, unleashed into our historical conjuncture by structural changes in capitalism, that modulate us in particular ways. Both spheres are equally real in the sense that they both constitute the social dynamic, but from their simultaneity it does not follow that at all times their power to determine social relations will be identical or unchanging. To schematically lay the grid of this ontology over Buren’s production, one could say that his critical production belongs to the first plane and that his performance’s accumulation of value is determined by the forces that comprise the second plane.

Awareness of the emergence of post-war cybernetic and communications technologies aids in understanding the structural changes that we continue to see in our capitalist system's forms of value-production vitality. Through these shifts we have

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seen that production itself has spilled past the edges of the sites for which an earlier stage of our economic configuration had been exclusively designated. What the theorist and activist Mario Tronti called the “social factory,” is nothing other than the historical reality that the entire plane of the social, particularly as it becomes entwined in massive computational and media infrastructures, increasingly sustains only capitalized life. We are as good as the value that we create and the profit that can be turned, based on our activities and capacities. Such capacities are then set to work through the ways that we are diagrammed into particular positions, confusing leisure and labor, and affective and material production. In this way, we end up tangling together the differentiated spheres of production, circulation, and consumption. Consequentially, our affective and performative dimensions matter even more. Now, this is most easily discerned on some of the media platforms and networks that we use, but nonetheless, they are merely the immediate manifestations of the grid of social relations that organize our lives. The vectors through which capitalism overcomes its limitations cut right through us.

Buren's original gesture of abandoning the studio found the full force of its power at a time when the agential dimension of the social dynamic was robust and healthy. While this is not to imply that structural forces were not ferociously at work in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Buren's practice began, it is to say that there was a moment in which deliberate critical production had repercussions in the world and its institutions that we do not see now. This justifies the high regard in which Buren’s early gestures and texts are still held. These texts and gestures, and their repercussions at the moment of their emergence, are also the basis for cementing a convincing critical practice as a way to mine for symbolic value down the road. It will be a change in the social dynamic itself, a strengthening of the plane of structural forces, that will shift the locus of value in Buren from his actual production to the performance of his practice.

In some sense, Buren didn’t change. There is a kind of rectitude and coherence in his work that is undeniable. But the conditions in which he works did change. And in their alteration they shifted the place where value is produced within his practice, and with absolute disregard of the intentions that organize that practice. In some ways, the emergence of Buren-the-brand has nothing to do with the artist himself and has everything to do with the grid of relations in which his practice continues to unfold. It is not so much that the site prompts the work, but that the socioeconomic conditions surrounding both, end up determining how an artistic practice produces value.

In light of these changes in our social dynamic, what are we to make of Buren’s post-studio mode of production today? If we

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return to the question of the studio at this juncture in contemporary art, it is because the studio—having one or not—no longer happens in relation to critical agency. It happens, instead, as a “response” to structural forces. Art historian Lane Relyea is right when he states, “No longer does the studio appear as an ideological frame that mystifies production . . . as belonging to a ‘system’ such as Buren described, as a space characterized by boxlike structures, of ‘frames and limits,’ each assigned a discreet place in some rigid, stable, and all-determining structure or order. What system or structure does exist today is more properly described as a network.” The metaphor of the network invites a whole series of adjacent metaphors—including the horizontal, the democratic and the de-centralized—into the unending conversation of what an artist us these days. Such ongoing versions of this metaphor ultimately come together to displace the integrated subject or the critical agent rendered operationally ineffective under current conditions, and in its place, erect a stage for the artist with a practice.

This ambiguous term—a practice—on the face of it makes things seem more quotidian, more down-to-earth and relatable, while on another tier speaks to the place of value production as it can be read within the performance of being an artist, or, more precisely, of how it can be read through the practice of an artist whose particular social, commercial, and discursive networks tend to be strategically connected to one another. The studio “is

all exterior,” Relyea concludes. “It offers a purely negative difference based on sameness, places the artist as a like item within an integrative inventory of database, gives the artist a mailing address and a doorstep, thus providing the means for one to show up within the network.” But it is a situation of mutually reinforcing elements: the network generates an artist that must perform in it a practice that is not beholden to critical agency as a way to find value and visibility, while the performance of being networked perpetuates the condition of the studio as a node in a network, responsive to what current determining conditions demand.

Thinking of the way that the problem of the studio has been divested of a critical dimension reinforces what we are proposing here, which is that to think about Buren in any significant way, and to think about the social conditions in which we now live, we have to focus on where value is generated. In Buren, it is Buren himself. He seems to exist as a floating signifier that continues to matter as such, independent in some way of any material production, regardless of the careful ways in which he has crafted a practice, which, despite rigorous control of presentation and documentation, and despite the production of consequential discourse and action, has become a practice. And this may just say everything we need to know about the intolerable order of things that we are stuck with.

Gean Moreno is curator of programs at ICA Miami.

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THE

GREETING KISS: Biography of a Miami Gesture RO B GOYAN ES

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The greeting kiss is a Miami move. Ritual pucker, it’s placed upon the cheek when first meeting, or when greeting friends and family again. Sometimes, only the cheeks make contact, and the kiss is sent floating in the air.

Haptic gesture, the cheek kiss (or air kiss) is not universally practiced. Certain humans in the southwestern hemisphere—Miami and Latin America—perform its permutations. Many Europe do it too. In Miami, the greeting is standard between males and females, and amongst females. It is rarely seen between heterosexual/normative males. These same configurations of sexes do it in New York too, maybe because of the heavy Latin and European influence, and there are certainly pockets of cheek kissers in other places within and outside the U.S. too—apparently, Tahitians do the greeting cheek kiss—but the scope of our observation here is largescale cultural phenomenon.

The greeting kiss is like any other gesture: repeated over and over, composite marker of a speech community, something humans just do. Yet, it’s also unlike any other: the cheeks and lips are erogenous zones, so the greeting is often thought of as more intimate than a handshake, though it is determinedly un-sexual. And like any speech act or non-verbal communication, the greeting kiss contains immense potential for misinterpretation. If you’re from Miami, chances are you’ve had that awkward moment when you go in for a kiss when first meeting someone, and are instead met with a reeling, sidelong glance of horror.

So, if a gesture is a social sculpture we make of the space between us, then the greeting kiss contains a multitude of history and culture. Where does this ritual come from?

A quick list of other forms of greeting from around the world: handshaking, hugging, fistbumping, nose-on-nose rubbing, raising your eyebrows, breath smelling, arm grabbing, double cheek kissing, waving, feet touching, sticking your tongue out, bowing, saluting, hat tipping, Namaste-ing, triple cheek kissing, etc.

Without a definitive text to turn to, the story of the greeting kiss must originate somewhere in the endlessly layered histories of romantic and parental lip kissing. There are different schools of thought regarding the development of kissing; some say it’s encoded in our genes since many apes engage in kissing rituals. Then there’s the other school, which argues that kissing is not simply natural and inevitable, but that it has changed over time and place, and means different things depending on context.

Though there isn’t much cross-cultural ethnographic research into the history of kissing, it seems that even the romantic lip kiss is not universal, or even near universal today. According to the journal American

Anthropologist, ethnographers working in several forager and horticultural societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea and the Amazon reported no signs of the romantic or erotic kiss, and members of these groups said that the romantic kiss did not occur (though parental kissing was prevalent).

One of the earliest recorded kissing rituals was the act of blowing kisses in Mesopotamia, which signified “a means to gain the favor of the gods,” writes Marcel Danesi, professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto and author of The History of the Kiss! He claims that the kiss is not universal, nor is it rooted in our DNA. Instead, he locates the origin of the romantic kiss elsewhere: “It surfaced in the society of the medieval period as an act of betrayal and carnality, as opposed to the sacred act of breathing into the spouse’s mouth as an act of fidelity and spirituality.”

Though Danesi claims the first identifiable accounts of romantic lip kissing emerged in medieval poetry and prose, many other kissing acts crop up throughout history: in Ancient Vedic literature, Egyptian love poetry, and in the Old Testament.

Rather than attempting to trace the origins, perhaps the important takeaway is that with the first spasms of modernism, social relations (and thus gestures) started to change, take on new meanings, and spread.

There is definitely something hegemonic about the image of two lovers kissing, the implication that they are in a pure state of love.

Colonialism might have a lot to do with the development of the contemporary greeting kiss. Prevalent

"JUST GO TO THE AIRPORT IN MIAMI WHEN THEY HAVE SHIFT CHANGE. YOU SEE BEHAVIORS THERE YOU DON’T SEE ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD." —JOE NAVARRO, former FBI agent and author of numerous books about body language in Spain, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe, the greeting ritual seems to have traveled to the Americas during the expansion of global European empires.

“It’s really the Mediterranean countries that favor the air kiss,” says former FBI agent Joe Navarro, a Cuban American who grew up in Miami and the author of numerous books about body language. “In the UK you see very little of it. You see it in France, but not the Netherlands or Belgium, at least among

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strangers. You only see that with people who grew up together.

When you get into Sweden or Denmark, there’s much less touching and fewer public displays of affection. So you see a similar thing in the American Midwest, which was settled by the Danes, Swedes, and so forth.” If the romantic kiss was introduced to Latin America while the less touchy cultures settled North America, perhaps this explains the geographic scattering of the greeting.

“Just go to the airport in Miami when they have shift change,” Navarro says, referring to the greeting kisses amongst staff at MIA. “You see behaviors there you don’t see anywhere else in the world.” Navarro, who came to Miami at the age of eight shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, spent his career in counterintelligence, developing behavioral analysis methods for the agency. This is the result of a Gordian cultural knot—a long arc of rituals moving and meshing. “Many Italians settled into Argentina, the Portuguese settled in Brazil, and there’s tremendous Spanish influence across the region. Look at the Moors who spent 500 years in Spain—Spain has many of those behaviors because of the Moorish influence,” Navarro says. (In Spain, it’s customary for men who are close friends and family to kiss on the lips, as it is in some places in the Arab world.)

It appears that kissing has a biological basis. When we kiss, “We release all these chemicals that bind us together,” the former FBI agent told me. Our lips, being highly sensitive receptors, are physiologically capable of triggering much stimulation. Navarro goes on to ask, “What’s the efficacy of the kiss? Or the abrazo?”

Part of the efficacy comes from how we’re raised. “All primates have greeting behaviors that engage the hands, arms, and face rubbing. Primates are all very tactile, which has something to do with the fact that they all spend a lot of time in child rearing. There’s a lot of intimacy between mother and child, a lot of closeness,” he says. “With the cheek-to-cheek touch, we have that magical effect we experience when our parents kiss us at a young age.”

This psychoanalytic side to kissing that’s indebted to family is important, but if we’re to map the gesture, culture is the reason we engage in kissing in the way we do.

“Lip-to-lip kissing, not necessarily the greeting, as a romantic gesture, is distinctly European,” says Dr. Pamela Geller, professor of anthropology at the University of Miami. “When it was brought into non-European places through colonialism it was regarded by natives and indigenous—for the most part—with a bit of revulsion.” The mouth, after all, is a great transmitter of disease. Perhaps part of the reason that widespread erotic kissing didn’t occur till the Middle Ages was the prevalence of poor

dental care technologies and habits.

Though there are many instances of primates kissing, and though kissing rituals exist across cultures, some believe that this sets up a false epistemological claim for kissing’s naturalness. “A lot of the problems that you see in the popular literature are that evolutionary psychologists and people with a biological tilt in the research are making the argument that there’s this universal way by which we show emotion—that the sexual, romantic kiss on the lips is universal,” Geller says. A lot of these arguments rest on the idea that primates engage in kissing behaviors, but as Geller states, “Chimpanzees do it for a very different reason.”

Geller, whose research lens is feminist and queer studies, notes the fact that throughout history, these greeting rituals are imbued with relations of power.

“If you look at the classic period of Greece or Rome, greeting with kissing is more hierarchical than anything. Men of equal rank kissed on the lips, and men of lower rank kiss on the cheek,” says Geller. Other parts of the body were kissed to establish hierarchy—subjects would kiss a king’s hands or robes, or the floor beneath him.

Unlike the old kingdoms, today’s cosmopolis is a glut of cultural gestures, signals that often get crossed and misinterpreted. “It gets awkward when the situation is asymmetrical, if you’re thinking one thing and the person you’re going to greet is thinking something else,” Geller says. “As someone from New Jersey, the whole greeting kiss in Miami was a cultural shift for me. It seemed very European here. We don’t kiss on the cheek in New Jersey.”

With the greeting kiss today, placed on the cheek or sent in the air, the hierarchy is a bit more horizontal than in feudal times. In the United States, it means to say, We are of very close ilk, or, I’m from Miami. Indeed, the gesture is a source of pride for Miamians, who fancy it as a sign of intimacy over the formal, vanilla handshake. Though there is perhaps some truth in this assertion, the greeting kiss on the cheek is like any gesture: simply a code that gets reproduced, a ritual perpetuated simply because other people do it. For within that kiss on the cheek— whether it’s for your abuela or a friend’s friend you’re meeting for the first time—there lies every kiss in history.

Rob Goyanes is an essayist, poet, and critic from Miami, Florida currently living in New York. His writing has appeared in The Miami Herald, VICE, Interview, Jai Alai Magazine, Dazed Digital, Temporary Art Review, The Miami Rail, and elsewhere.

AQUAFAIR BY DREW LERMAN — In the cutthroat world of Cold War-era Miami amusement parks, Aquafair reigned supreme, run by the wily Mr. Rooks and his protégé Lafe. But this season, a new park across the street has been giving Aquafair a run for its money. Rooks and Lafe's best efforts to sabotage their competition have ended in failure and humiliation.

Now, as Christmas draws near, Mr. Rooks is called away for a family emergency, leaving the park in Lafe's hands . . .

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MĂIASTRA:

A History of Romanian Sculpture in Twenty-Four Parts

IGO R GYAL AKUT HY

PART VII: APOSTILLES × What was the purpose of your visit to Israel? + To conduct research on the village of Ein Hod, an artist commune on the coastal hills near Haifa, built in 1953 by the Romanian artist and architect Marcel Iancu. × Did anyone help you to pack your luggage? + No. × And your bag has been in your care all morning? + Yes. × And how long was your stay in Israel? + Four days. × Who guided you? + I came by myself. × Do you not think it is suspicious, a man of your age traveling alone in Israel? + At my age, everything I do is suspicious. × And what was the nature of your research in Israel? + To view the later work of a major figure of Romanian art history, to better understand the effects of anti-Semitism and the consequent aliyah on the Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Romania in the 20th century, and to track the reach of Romanian art throughout the world.

Marcel Iancu, Autoportret (Self-Portrait).

From Contimporanul issue 25 (6 Jan. 1923): cover

+ And what did you discover? × I found seated among the olive trees and desert hills a village made of modest stone where artists and their families live in relative peace. + And what is the meaning of art?

OPPOSITE PAGE Marcel Iancu, Ein Hod. Oil on canvas, 1954

× What is the meaning of life?

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for hours, where in bright daylight street sweepers choke up people in dust, everything is unpredictable, everything is fortuitous, an accident.” 1 + Then why come to Israel? Surely, there is nothing of that here.

+ To live according to G-d’s will, and to worship Him. × Yes, of course.

× Iancu fled with his family to British Palestine after the pogrom in Bucharest in 1941. The initial impetus was to travel far away from the growing fascist sentiments and anti-Semitic violence, but on arriving in Israel, Iancu saw an opportunity to figure majorly in the construction of a modern state, one free from the chains of insidious histories that were choking the nations of Europe.

+ And with whom did you stay during your visit?

+ In what way was he peerless?

× A Mme. Iuster, widow of the late Romanian-Israeli sculptor Tuvia Iuster, a student of Marcel Iancu and the once talisman of the village of Ein Hod.

+ My family and my faith.

× Answer me this: what is it that you care about?

× What else?

+ Describe this Yuster.

+ My community.

× A fat-fisted Tolstoyan muzhik, jovial and mischievous. Not an innovator like his mentor Iancu, more of a Brancusi acolyte, but a true “Sculptor,” with a corporeal mastery over stone and wood. [Note: there is a rumor that Iuster served as the model for Boris Caragea’s infamous statue of Lenin, which was torn down during the Romanian Revolution of 1989. See Part I.]

× And your work?

+ And this Janco, who was he? × A Romanian cubist painter and Constructivist architect from Bucharest, responsible for the creation of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916, and of Contimporanul in 1922, a literary journal around which the art nebula in Romania swirled. [Note: untangling the narrative thread of the myriad artistic sub-movements in the post-war Romania is a task for another time.] After Zurich, Iancu found inspiration in the chaos of Bucharest and his mind moved from painting to city planning and building. + Inspiration in chaos? That is a funny notion. × “In a city where a hay wagon moving lethargically hinders the way,” wrote Iancu, “a whole borough pulsates, a city where a horse-drawn tram in a ceaseless idiotic derailment shakes traffic wheels

+… × Well, what if instead of that ill-hidden ambivalence towards your profession, you were on the contrary filled with love for it. + That would be something. × Exactement! In Dada, there were the Nothings and there were the Somethings.

This was the rift between Tzara and Iancu.

If Tristan Tzara was the nihilistic enfant terrible, Iancu saw himself more as a uniting father figure. [Note: in this light, the name of the Janco-Dada Museum in Ein Hod feels like a Dadaist pun.] Iancu saw in art a structure around which a community could build itself without the dogma of religion or politics. “Art will once again belong to all, and contact between art and people will never again be infected by any art critic’s discourse, but will always be infused with life by beautiful proportions, by painted cities, and by the social conscience with which the artist will build.” 2

1 Marcel Iancu. “The Bucharest of Accidents.” Contimporanul issue 45, November 1926 2 Marcel Iancu. “Cablegram. The Dialogue between a Dead Bourgeois and the Apostle of New Living.” Punct issue 11, 1925

EXPRESS

+ But is that not your profession? A critic of art? Is it not your discourse that is the infection? × I am a historian of art. + Same thing. × Nothing is the same. Things are different, not only from one another, but from the things that came before them and from the things to come. + That is not the case in Israel. × So I noticed. + Then is there nothing of Dada in Ein Hod? × I did see something. In the basement of the Janco-Dada Museum is a playroom called the Dadalab filled with toys, books, costumes, and doodads, where young Jewish children come to draw and doodle, to dress up in costumes, and perform on a stage in the round. This is Dada! Not the sacred white walls of the museum above but the profane, childish absurdity of the cabaret below. + But if Ein Hod is a society built on a structure of thought, be it art, religion, or political affiliation, is it not subject to the same tyranny of thought that is generated by any shared ethos? × Precisely. We end up worshiping the upside-down urinal as an objet when we should be finding a new way to piss into it. + But always best to start fresh, as Janco did? To build something beautiful… × As Iancu wrote: “The beautiful in art is prejudice.” + Intelligent? × “Intelligence is a negative analytic factor...” + To build something from nothing, then. × Nothing? My understanding is that the Ein Hod was built on the ruins of an old Arab village. That its residents were taken prisoner during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and when released, returned to their village only to find it… + Well, there’s never nothing. × On that, my boy, we agree.

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JEANGUY SAINTUS: CONTRETEMPS CATH E R I NE A NNI E H O L L I NG SWO RTH

Ayikodans at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 2016, photo by Daniel Azoulay

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hile speaking to Haitian choreographer Jeanguy Saintus about his work, one senses that he spends a lot of time fending off other people’s attempts to categorize and reshape him. As an artist based primarily in Haiti, his devotion to dance is often beset by financial and practical struggles.

Yet he has maintained a dance school in Port-au-Prince, Artcho Danse, with a scholarship program for young, talented dancers, and his company Ayikodans consistently produces world-class work that defies expectation. Honored with the prestigious Prince Claus award in 2008, Saintus has been acknowledged at home and abroad for his outstanding creative work and cultural contributions.

In Miami, we’re fortunate to get a first look at most of his work. Ayikodans has maintained an ongoing partnership with the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, and the company performs here annually. Saintus typically offers a master class

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SAINTUS’S USE OF MUSIC, SPIRITUALITY, AND TRADITIONAL FORMS IS OUT OF ALIGNMENT WITH THE U.S. AND EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY DANCE ESTABLISHMENT, WHERE MUSIC HAS BECOME AN ACCESSORY AND RHYTHM HAS BEEN STRIPPED AWAY. for local dancers. From this vantage point, as a student in the dance studio, the details of his choreographic approach come into focus: he obsesses over hands, feet, and eyes while expecting performance of the highest order from the dancers and drummers who travel with him. Saintus’s way of holding space in the studio is strikingly elegant, and his work is an uncommon blend reflecting his training: classical ballet, modern technique, contemporary, and what he consciously calls “traditional” dance.

“I’m lucky enough to know my traditional dances, the rhythm, and the lwa [the spirits of Haitian vodoun],” he says. “Fortunately or unfortunately, our traditional dances are related with the religion.”

For Saintus, the word “traditional” makes a precise statement, positioning him in a specific orientation within Haitian dance culture.

The more commonly used word for Haitian traditional dance is “folklore.” Outside the orbit of Haitian dance, folklore refers to storytelling—but where Saintus is from, “Haitian folklore” is the generic term for the dances that come from Africa and have been handed down in both religious and performative zones.

In a way, Haitian folklore is storytelling through movement.

It represents the lwa and histories of tribal culture, slave rebellion, revolution, and celebration. The dances and corresponding rhythms of folklore are taught in dance schools around the world, and students of the form know them by their individual names: yanvalou, nago, banda. On stage, the folkloric dances and rhythms are often intentionally separated from ritual meaning, transforming them into secularized representations of Haitian culture. Saintus sees folklore more as entertainment than art. “They always ask you to smile. People don’t always smile in our dances because it’s a ritual, a connection to the spirit. But when you are dancing for an audience, like a touristic audience, you want to show that you are happy.”

Because “traditional” describes something so distinct in Saintus’s lexicon, it refers to movement that relates to Haiti’s spiritual practices and culture, the creative work of an individual choreographer like himself—reflective of the traditions, but not imitative. “Staying true to myself and showing respect to the ritual and spirituality in the dance would be my take on ‘tradition.’”

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His work has been questioned both inside and outside of Haiti. Sometimes, he says, “they are more comfortable with déjà vu. They want you to use flowers, colors and fake props to claim your blackness, your Africanism, or Caribbean soul.” He has been told that what he does is great, but “sometimes they decide what I’m doing is not Haitian enough, it’s not authentic.” The more authentic dancer, in such a person’s perspective, is the one closer to the source who remembers and re-transmits the original steps. There’s a song belonging to the dance and rhythm of ibo that communicates this sentiment: sim te la lè grann mwen te la, li ta montrem danse ibo. (If I was alive when my grandma was alive, she would have taught me how to dance ibo.)

Saintus has found that the Haitian dance community in Miami is particularly resistant to his pioneering approach. “What I see is that people are just comfortable with what they know.” In Miami, he says, “they left Haiti in 1957 or later, and they think here [in Haiti] we didn’t move. Everything stayed where they left it. But music, even in the ceremony, is evolving with time.”

He takes liberties with tradition, using music idiosyncratically.

The rhythm for one dance may be paired with the movement of another. And sometimes he matches movements with drumbeats in an unconventional pattern. He refers to this approach as contretemps, a term borrowed from classical ballet. Contretemps translates literally from French as “against time.” According to Saintus, in contretemps “you don’t go exactly on the beat… you will find the rhythm at the end.” He uses stripped down isolations that draw from traditional forms without reproducing them in full: maybe he utilizes just the undulations of the arms in yanvalou, or only the pelvic winding from banda.

If Saintus is met friction as an artist drawing from Haitian tradition, a counterforce is applied from the contemporary sphere.

Though Ayikodans is celebrated, they are just as often relegated to an ethnic category or urged to adapt. Saintus’s use of music,

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Ayikodans rehearsing at Artcho Danse in Port au Prince, Haiti, photo

by Roberto Stephenson

spirituality, and traditional forms is out of alignment with the U.S. and European contemporary dance establishment, where music has become an accessory and rhythm has been stripped away.

Even the physicality of dance technique can fall outside the lines of contemporary conventions.

While contemporary dance is held as a kind of freedom from the confines of the past, it can be an ossified form with its regimented rule of no rules, or its sometimes rigid insistence on the conceptual. Saintus is not interested in conforming. “I’m here with you in 2016, very aware of everything going on around me, aware of everything that this body has in it,” he says. “How can I explain that this step is traditional and this step is contemporary?”

He recalls a workshop focused on moving in the dark. “I remember telling the guy I could stay in the hotel because I am from Haiti, where there was no electricity since I was young. I know how to move in the dark; I didn’t have to come all the way here to learn it.”

Saintus also talks about choreographed falling in contemporary dance as something embedded in Haitian spiritual tradition. “In the trance [of vodoun ceremonies], fall and rebound is part of the process. When you feel the trance is coming, you let it go and you break it, you go into that fall and rebound process.” As Haitians, he

says, “we find ourselves sometimes in studios learning things that we have in our traditional dances, as contemporary.” From Saintus’s perspective, US and European measures set the mark for what is new and what is not, serving as cultural validator.

The influence of dominant cultural standards can be measured in funding and performance opportunities. “They have theaters, huge networks in Europe. They even find their way to South America.” But Saintus holds firm. “I need the money, the tour, but I won’t sell my soul and be ashamed of my work.” Others may not be so willing to resist the pressure, not just in Haiti, but in other countries like Cuba where artists may see their craft as an opportunity to escape current circumstances. “Nowadays I am seeing lots of young Caribbean dancers entering the game just to get out,” he says. As for his own work, he prefers not to offer any categorical description. “I use my arms the way I feel; I don’t use them because this is the way they should be. I want you to feel your arms, to let them go... I think this is based on the liberty that we have to use our bodies the way we want. This is contemporary dance for me.”

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

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Ghost in the Sprawl TIMOTH Y STAN LE Y

W

hen the sun rose on July 5th, a day after one of the more somber and ominous Independence Days in recent memory, I watched it come up. I hadn’t slept well, and by the time artist and musician Daniel Milewski picked me up in his Ford F150, there was enough coffee in me to ensure the entire day would be spent in a state of jittery, existential agitation.

We were heading to Miramar, a small suburban city north of Miami, where, despite its name, you cannot see the sea. What you can see are miles of big box stores, tract housing, strip malls and car dealerships. Hidden somewhere in all that sprawl is the home of

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Goin’ Ghost, a new indie music label created by musicians Jason Mavila, Ian Mercel, and Juan Ledesma, and visual artist Krista Merrell. The label is currently producing Milewski’s forthcoming album, “Quarry,” and Daniel was going up to Miramar to lay down some new tracks in their recording studio.

My tossing and turning the night before was the work of a particularly vivid nightmare I’d had. In my dream, professional wrestler John Cena is walking down a flag-lined Main Street in Anytown, USA while lecturing me on the beauty of ethnic and gender diversity in this country. “To love America,” Cena reminds me, “is to love all Americans.” The shame of being scolded for intolerance by a member of the WWE is nothing compared to the shame of deserving it so thoroughly, and Cena’s “slamsplaining” jolted me awake. As we drove east across the city, my tired eyes glazing over the freeway noise barriers etched with decorative bas-reliefs of soaring birds of prey, I reminded myself that it was all just a bad dream.

When we finally pulled into the sunny, suburban driveway, the Ghosts were waiting for us. I was kindly offered a beer and sank into a couch in the studio to listen to them play. A couple minutes into the first take of “All My People” and my nerves began to settle. Milewski’s brand of spacious, balladic country is comforting, and more than happy to simply transmit a familiar feeling rather than reinvent any wheels. Part Polish, part French-Canadian from a suburb of working-class Worcester, Massachusetts, Milewski sings with that Northeastern, Springsteen gravel, which, when paired with his southern-style guitar, unites north and south in a kind of idealized American sound. “As if you took the Grand Canyon and put it in a cathedral,” was how he explained it to me.

“As though the sound was excavated.”

Milewski sang and played his ’76 Les Paul Custom. Ledesma followed along on bass. Mavila ran back and forth from the drum set to the mixing room. Ian Mercel, the team’s master technician, wasn’t there that day, so Mavila had to do double duty as a session

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WATCHING THE PERUVIAN LEDESMA, AND MAVILA, THE SON OF PERUVIAN AND CUBAN IMMIGRANTS, KEEPING TIME TO THE POLISH-AMERICAN MILEWSKI’S COUNTRY FOLK IN A GARAGE IN SUBURBAN FLORIDA, IT’S TEMPTING TO BELIEVE IN JOHN CENA’S VISION OF AMERICA.

musician and engineer—not that he seemed to be having any less fun.

The name Goin’ Ghost is an affectionate nod to the two years Mavila fell off the grid and out of communication. Though “ghosting,” he was not idle, and spent the time transforming the garage of his parent’s Miramar home into a fully functioning recording studio. From his years working in live music, he inherited an impressive cache of instruments and high-end recording equipment, and without his father’s pale yellow workbench or the overhead door tracks bolted to the stucco ceiling, you’d never know you were in a garage.

Daniel Milewski’s album, Goin’ Ghost’s second as a label, will be released on cassette, with digital versions of the songs to be distributed for free online. The choice to put out cassette tapes in 2016 is bound to roll some eyes, but tapes have always made for great objects, and Merrell’s colorful design of GG’s first release, a two-song EP of Ledesma’s solo project under the greased-up American stage name Johnny Ledez, is fantastic.

For lunch we drove to a nearby Chick-Fil-A. Walking in, I tried to remember whether this was the American fast food chain that hated black people, hated gay people, snuck Bible verses onto burger wrappers, or regularly served its customers horsemeat. It felt like a good time to talk expectations.

As we ate, I asked the guys about their hopes for Goin’ Ghost.

Each of them mentioned the pleasure of creating something that belonged to them, that gave them “a feeling of productivity,” as Mavila put it, and served as a relief from the frustrations of their respective day jobs. Mavila and Mercel are both professional sound engineers who work for commercial labels and venues.

Merrell does graphic design for a jewelry company. Ledesma is an art handler working for museums and galleries around the city.

And apart from being the father of two young boys, Milewski is a visual artist for whom music has been, to this point, a secondary focus. The “brass ring” for all of them seems to be no shinier than

the opportunity to make music, their music, full-time.

But the nostalgic, DIY vibe of Goin’ Ghost isn’t entirely a romantic, for-love-of-the-game decision. It’s also a punkish break for the industry’s back door, and an appeal to America’s sole soft spot: an underdog story. Despite their youthful ambition, the Ghosts seem committed to keeping the project small, and to agreeing unanimously on the music they record and the ways in which they release it. If it works, it will be because they’re talented and because their enthusiasm for music, not just the playing but also the recording of it, is contagious. If it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t really matter. Goin’ Ghost, however humble of one, is a check in America’s “plus” column, and these days, I’ll take all of those I can get.

Back in the studio, everyone gathered around the command center as Mavila played back the day’s recordings. Ledesma lay on the ground and stared up at the ceiling, trying to pick out the differences in his bass lines from take to take. Milewski gave notes, and both Mavila and Ledesma acquiesced to their artist with the graceful patience of industry vets. I was in the throes of a gauzy, pink-and-sea-foam-green daydream brought on by the beers, the heat, and the music.

On the wall by the door, mounted above a pair of conga drums, is a poster of John Lennon holding up a peace sign while standing in front of the Statue of Liberty. I’ll admit, watching the Peruvian Ledesma, and Mavila, the son of Peruvian and Cuban immigrants, keeping time to the Polish-American Milewski’s country folk in a garage in suburban Florida, it’s tempting to believe in John Cena’s vision of America. What began as an omen conjured by my subconscious to fill me with a murky dread had transformed into a hopeful reminder: you may not be able to see the ocean from Miramar, but you can see a bit of the country.

Once home, I played some of Milewski’s songs as I jotted down notes about my day. At that moment, the music felt to me like the perfect soundtrack for the last scene of the series finale of America. As the credits rolled, and the sun set on the West, I finally fell asleep.

Timothy Stanley is an artist and writer from NYC.

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MIAMI’S SILENT FILM INDUSTRY 1910-1926

M O NI CA U SZEROW ICZ & DO M IN GO CASTIL LO

“The Hindu Temple,” as it’s known around town, is the only artifact left from The Jungle Trail, Richard Stanton’s 1919 film.

Starring William Farnum and Anna Luther and set in a nameless Zulu village, the movie was partly filmed in Miami’s Spring Garden neighborhood. An elaborate temple was erected as part of the set, just as the neighborhood itself was nearing completion; German-born Miami merchant John Seybold, who’d envisioned the neighborhood’s layout, thought Spring Garden looked even lovelier with the temple. In the midst of promoting the new neighborhood and enticing potential residents, Seybold invited locals to attend the movie’s filming.

Later, after shooting was complete and all the sets were destroyed, he would commission architect August Geiger to design a home infusing the architectural visions provided by The Jungle Trail with heightened fetishized exoticism. Once built, the

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house gave so much character to Spring Garden that even the 12th Avenue bridge’s tender structures emulated the same domelike qualities the home displayed. Designated a sight of historical significance, the Hindu Temple is located at 870 NW 11th Street.

Regarding The Jungle Trail: There’s no way to see the temple in its first incarnation. Films were shot and reprinted on nitrate film stock until the early 1950s, and you’ll find a pretty apocalyptic description of the material on Kodak’s website. In short, it can become a fire hazard in large quantities. If the film can is sealed, it can spontaneously combust, and off-gassing might attack nearby acetate and polyester base films, essentially obliterating itself and taking others with it. Even if these filmmakers wanted to keep their films, the material itself was against them. By astonishingly catching on fire, the film expressed the attitudes of many directors—to make the most spectacular production at any cost.

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*** In some Yoruban mythologies, Obatala—the Sky Father, the creator of land and of bodies—plants the palm nut that sprouts into the first palm tree. It’s the earliest sign of life on Ife, a city in southwestern Nigeria, and the holy sight of the world’s origins.

Palm trees lend themselves well to myth: they’re luscious enough to decorate a landscape, thin enough to reveal what’s behind it, resilient enough to withstand hurricanes. Traveler’s palms, stretching like limbs, look like archways to the sky. They sway like hair.

Palm trees were arguably the first lure used to inveigle tourists and filmmakers alike to Florida. The coda of a 1910 film, A Honeymoon Through Snow to Sunshine, featured sequences of palm trees shot in Miami and Palm Beach, solidifying both places’ warmth, exoticism, and usefulness as a stand-in for the South Seas. “As early as 1910, the area was typecast,” says Richard Alan Nelson in his essay, “Palm Trees, Public Relations, and Promoters: Boosting Southeast Florida as a Motion Picture Empire, 19101930.” Honeymoon was produced by the Lubin Manufacturing Company, a Philadelphia-based production company; Arthur Hotaling, a director working with Lubin, announced his intentions to bring a group of actors to Miami and make comedy films.

In what would become the first in a series of failures related to the city’s silent film industry, Hotaling did not make good on his claim. He went to Jacksonville instead, where an industry was already thriving.

Later attempts at establishing local film enterprises were just as fleeting, characterized by smooth talkers and emphasizing image and promise over substance. The believability of Miami as a viable location for the industry was contingent, it seemed,

on the moods of its purveyors and the city’s weather. Plenty of moneyed businessmen were eager to make movies or dole out cash in hopes of massive returns, but few stayed. They cited the weather, production delays, and a general lack of professionalism as deterrents.

In 1914, following a deal with local businessman J.D. Dill, Charles C. Field, president of New York’s Prismatic Film Company, arrived in Miami in his personal railroad car with a crew of cameramen and actors. He detailed to newscasters plans to permanently move the company to Miami, and promptly began production on their first local film, The Magic City of the South.

Two days after the film finally premiered, Field declared they’d be moving to Los Angeles. The weather, he explained, was better there. Yet he returned just two years later (one wonders what happened in California) and established the Field Feature Films Company, building a studio on South Miami Avenue at 25th Street with the help of Dade County’s “tomato king,” Thomas Peters. The catch: The Field Feature Films Company would have to produce a documentary of Peters’ farming techniques. The company’s first film, starring Irva Ross, was The Human Orchid. Directed by Field himself, it’s about a girl whose life resembles that of a flower’s.

The concept is dreamy, the reality dreamier still. [Authors' note: we were unable to locate the film.] *** Several studios would crop up in the area throughout the early 1920s, but it was Miami Studios, Inc.—also known as Hialeah Studios—that would solidify Miami’s reputation in the silent film industry, if only temporarily. The space was the brainchild of Everest George Sewell, the president of the Miami Chamber

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of Commerce and later the city’s mayor. To bring it to fruition, Sewell partnered with Glenn Curtiss—the aviation pioneer and founder of Opa-locka and Miami Springs, and co-founder of Hialeah—and Miami Herald publisher Frank Shutts. Promotional films showcasing the city’s beauty, combined with the ramifications of Prohibition, helped make the studio's development possible. People couldn’t drink, but they were happy to watch movies showcasing intrepid protagonists in hot climes.

According to a later issue of The Miami Herald, Miami Studios was located on a massive lot purchased from the Bright Brothers Farms, at the northwest intersection of West 9th Street and West 2nd Avenue in Hialeah. A 1921 article in The Miami Metropolis states: “Each building will be 80 by 250 feet in size, each stage will be 60 by 125 feet [. . .] The best workmen only are employed in moving picture studios.” It was 250 feet by 60 feet, large enough for several movies to be filmed at once; Ted Bevis, a director and studio designer, stated in the same article that he intended to “have every facility for the making of pictures that the best studios in the country afford.”

Upon receiving word of the studios’ construction, David Llewelyn Wark “D.W.” Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation and the man whose name became weirdly synonymous with Hollywood itself, wrote Sewell a letter detailing his enthusiasm and caveats in equal parts: We understand you’re about to establish a motion picture studio near Miami, Florida. Certainly Miami needs one [. . .]

Florida has a great many advantages in picture making, but primitive conditions there compared to the very modern facilities in California argue against Florida. Despite very crude and unpleasant handicaps, picture makers have repeatedly gone to Florida, and we believe their visits would be materially increased, were there adequate and reasonable studio facilities.

His ominous note would become prophetic in just a few years’ time, but Griffith was speaking from previous experience: he’d filmed The Idol Dancer in Nassau, Bahamas and Fort Lauderdale in 1919; the crew’s boat trip from Miami to Nassau was perilous.

Despite this, once the studios were established, Griffith also shot part of his 1923 film The White Rose in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

Unable to work with a landscape that was becoming increasingly developed, he left to finish the film in Louisiana.

in to help. This move is mentioned in the Film Year Book, 1922-23, stating “John Brunton to head to Miami Studios, Inc. Life work of Thomas A. Edison to be filmed.” There is no trace of the Edison film, if it was ever made. Brunton hoped to make Miami Studios an independent company that also supplied studio space to others, in addition to making films in-house so the company could guarantee its stability two-fold.

To ensure this happened, Brunton helped establish agreements with various financiers around Florida, forming several smaller production companies, all of whom could borrow resources from each other. It was a self-supported ecosystem that cost an awful lot of money. Brunton went on to oversee the first film produced in-house, Outlaws of the Sea, starring the baby-faced French actress, Marguerite Courtot. That same year, he invited the famed Irish director, Rex Ingram—known for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—to film a movie at the studios.

Ingram would utilize Miami Studios to shoot Where the Pavement Ends, a 1923 film produced by Metro Pictures and one of his bestknown works. The majority of the film was shot in and around Miami, and interiors were shot “under difficult conditions” at Miami Studios.

Ingram was already known as a world-class director when he was persuaded to shoot in Miami—he wanted to get away from “the direct studio supervision of Hollywood,” and Miami seemed fitting. Where the Pavement Ends became a kind of literal and metaphorical catalyst for the demise of Miami’s film industry.

Set in the South Seas, a location trope of the time that Miami was always able to moonlight as, minorities were hired to play the “natives,” a job that, compared to other options available at the time, was better paying and less physically taxing.

After a miserable shooting schedule—plagued with rain delays and inexperienced stagehands—ended in Miami, Ingram spent ten days in Cuba filming the waterfall scenes needed for the end of the film. Immediately after shooting concluded he gave an interview with The Miami Herald, slamming the Miami Studios, detailing the waste of time, money, and materials due to inexperienced crews and technicians. Still backed by American studios, he moved his entire filmmaking enterprise to the French Riviera, where he would continue making movies until the advent of “talkies.”

Ingram would never make another film in America. ***

*** Miami Studios officially opened in March 1922 to much acclaim, and moviemakers were quick to take advantage of the new facility. Allegedly, Hamilton Smith’s South Seas romance, The Isle of Doubt, was slated to be shot at the studios. It is unclear whether the movie was shot there in its entirety and like so many others from the same decade, the movie seems to have been lost.

It’s reported that the film’s stage manager, Harold Haliday Costain, was ultimately disappointed with Miami Studios’ technicians, declaring them decent, good listeners, but unsophisticated in regards to moviemaking.

The studios needed a manager. John Brunton, who was the well-known manager of Brunton Studios in Hollywood, swooped

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Like Ife in Nigeria, Greece’s Mount Olympus is replete with myth and magic. In the mid-1920s, the city of Olympia in Hobe Sound, Florida, an unincorporated area in Martin County, was briefly named Picture City by developer Charles L. Apfel of the Olympia Improvement Corporation. Apfel hoped to establish a city designed for filmmaking; movie stars and the crew would live there during production. Producer Lewis J. Selznick (whose son, David O. Selznick, later produced Gone with the Wind) predicted massive success and entered into a contract for Picture City’s development with Apfel; they received backing from Henry Daugherty, a Sinclair Oil tycoon, who financed the city with a loan of about $1.5 million.

Years prior, the city’s streets, parks, and islands had been

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named for Greek gods and goddesses (Adonis St., Mercury St., Athena St., Jupiter Island, Zeus Park, Olympia Beach), which Picture City founders felt was perfect for their new endeavor.

In keeping with the theme of all of Florida’s fledgling silent film industry, it seemed like a good idea at the time. In 1925, The Miami Herald published a story stating that an Arctic current off the coast of California would freeze the state’s landscape, driving moviemakers east toward Florida. Apfel supposedly heard this from scientists himself, so the jury’s out regarding who, precisely, planted that story.

Florida’s land boom at the time drew real estate salesmen and filmmakers alike to the state, all seeking what appeared to be a sound fortune. It’s difficult to determine how much money was invested and lost in both these sorts of ventures by the time the land boom imploded. A lack of loan payments and the 1926 hurricane rendered Picture City an abandoned project, left to become a ghost town visited by film buffs and “weird Florida” adventure nerds. All that remains are its concrete light poles (some surrounded by grassy overgrowth), its sidewalks, its school and above it all, those signs bearing godly names. The curved arches of the school’s structure recall Miami Studios’ architecture, welcoming and vaguely majestic.

Any place that retains traces of a forgotten history has a preternatural creepiness, inklings of ghosts and lost narratives. How appropriate that in Hobe Sound it becomes clear that the form of Florida’s silent film industry matches its content: ephemeral, quick to burn, all but disappeared (there are few traces left of Jacksonville’s industry, too). This is where the pavement ends.

There’s a story that’s still being told, one about a city’s imagery and how to sell it, about what is real and what is not and how dreams—either through movies or half-witted promises—are made into realities.

Much of the information in this story comes from Leonhard Gmür and his book, Rex Ingram: Hollywood's Rebel of the Silver Screen, Richard Alan Nelson’s article, “Palm Trees, Public Relations, and Promoters: Boosting Southeast Florida as a Motion Picture Empire, 1910-1930,” Stuart B. McIver’s book, Dreamers, Schemers and Scalawags: The Florida Chronicles and materials sourced from the HistoryMiami Museum archives.

Monica Uszerowicz writes and takes photos in Miami. She is the film and performing arts editor for the Miami Rail.

Domingo Castillo is a human being. In 2010 he founded the end / SPRING BREAK, a nomadic artist-run project space in Miami, FL with Patricia Margarita Hernandez with frequent contributions

by Cristina Farah and Kathryn Marks. In 2013 he founded the gallery Noguchi Breton (F.K.A. Versace Versace Versace F.K.A. Guccivuitton) with Loriel Beltran and Aramis Gutierrez. In 2015 they were joined by Jonathan Gonzalez.

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ultidisciplinary artist Chase Joynt’s stunning genre-blending book, You Only Live Twice, co-written with Mike Hoolboom, was released in May by Coach House Books. A confessionaltheoretical exchange of vignette and conversation between Joynt and Hoolboom, You Only Live Twice explores the temporalities, potentialities and narrative challenges of “second lives”: that is, for Joynt, transitioning from female to male, and for Hoolboom, surviving a near death from AIDS. Joynt’s most recent documentary, Between You and Me, produced in association with CBC Docs, takes up the knotty intersection of complicated intimacies, mass incarceration and questions of social morality. Joynt corresponded with RL Goldberg to discuss You Only Live Twice, narratives of becoming, collaborative artistic practice and the future of trans cultural production.

CHASE J RL GOLDBERG (MIAMI RAIL): In the foreword to You Only Live Twice, you call the conversation contained in the book, “a technology of profound intimacy, one that when rendered public will find new privacy again.” I was wondering if you could speak to what this “new privacy” means in the context of self-narrative.

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CHASE JOYNT: I am borrowing from Foucault when I assert that all representation requires stylization. In the context of YOLT, Mike and I attempt to both sabotage and continually mark the failure of story and self-narrative—by undermining divisions between fact and fiction—as a way to create new aesthetic and affective channels for hopeful, collaborative resistance. What happens if we give up on the pursuit of capital ‘T’ Truth?

Foucault’s work continually reminds us that the story of the self cannot be separated from the story of the world—a necessary reminder when considering the historical trajectories of trans narratives in North America. The roots of trans self-summary are found in medicine, often within testimonies from patients published by service providers summarizing anomalies and/or case studies for their colleagues; a key example here is the canonical case study of “Agnes” as published by Harold Garfinkel and Robert Stoller at UCLA. It is easy to track how those medical summaries then become re-packaged as autobiographies, and that formula—moving from dysphoric association to one of binary resolve—is now firmly in place, and is assumed to be the truth of trans experience.

My first access to a public personal narrative that strategically defied easy categorization was through Kate Bornstein.

Bornstein’s work mobilizes a version of the personal for strategic, performative, political gain. Similarly, Dean Spade’s essay “Mutilating Gender” is a provocative contribution to the interplay between the medical industrial complex, and the ways in which trans people might/can/could/ don’t self-narrate.

RAIL: Definitely! And as you bring up Bornstein and Spade: I admire how your work is foundationally dialogic, grounded in juxtaposition (Resisterectomy, Between You and Me, Imagine Us, Akin, You Only Live Twice). There is a natural fluidity, a back-and-forth, and an openness to ambiguity, dialogue, and revision. This feels profoundly and broadly trans to me (transgressive, transecting, transfiguring, transitional, transdisciplinary). At the same time, trans art often feels singular and individualistic (memoirs especially, for the historical reasons you mention).

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How do you see your work in the context of a trans narrative or artistic canon? Of a trans aesthetic?

JOYNT: I understand my work to be an articulation of collaborative, interdisciplinary, methodological inquiry, inspired by the cross-disciplinary, conversational theory-making of people like Lisa Duggan and José Muñoz (2009), James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (1984), and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (2013). I take up Berlant and Edelman’s assertion that all relationality “puts into play reaction, accommodation, transference, exchange, and the articulation of narratives” on account of our proximity to, and engagement with, various forms of intimacy. As such, I employ—deploy?—conversation in strategic capacities to build upon legacies of thinkers who are collaboratively discussing social issues.

Those of us living in marked bodies— gender non-conforming people, people of colour, people living with disabilities— don’t have the luxury of opting out of the personal as a political project. I hope that my work contributes to a growing canon of work—trans and otherwise—that draws strategic attention to the simultaneous need and failure of the personal, through the manipulation of various aesthetic sign systems.

RAIL: Can I ask a follow-up question about your reference to those of us living in marked bodies? In the November 2015 Transgender Studies Quarterly article you co-authored with Kristen Schilt, you write about how, while working in the Stoller archives, you often wanted to disorganize the boxes to protect the identities of the photographed naked patients. You write, “Who am I? And what does it mean that I want to protect things/people by rendering them unfindable again?” As a multi-disciplinary artist, do you find that some media are better than others in making marked bodies private, politically autonomous, and personal?

JOYNT: The marking of bodies is so often embedded in the making of work.

Legibility can sometimes be a choice. Mike and I approached YOLT with the shared understanding that narratives of both living with AIDS/HIV and transitioning had

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already permeated the literary landscape.

As a result, we made choices to strategically experiment with form and genre hybridity.

The traps of memoir are akin to the traps of documentary, in that narratives of becoming are often structured through conflict and resolution. By and large, contemporary North American media representation of gender non-conforming people demands that continued attention be paid to the process of transitioning. Artistic cultural production emerges as a method through which we can approach different questions.

How might trans narratives be recapitulated as something other than that which presumes a known or necessary relationship to a gender binary?

RAIL: The question of our relationship to binaries (gender or otherwise) makes me think of something Lauren Berlant writes, in Desire/Love, about how “fantasy denotes a sense of affective coherence to what is incoherent and contradictory in the subject.” Can you speak to how fantasy or desire operates in your work?

(I’m struck by how much of trans artistic production refuses or elides description of trans sexuality or trans desire; I love how your work doesn’t!)

JOYNT: Your nod to coherence here reminds me again of the devastating impacts of living incoherently, or of claiming incoherence, in public space. We don’t have to look much further than the trans panic defense, the bathroom bills, or the continually climbing murder rates of gender non-conforming people to understand that living a life that challenges the gender binary can have brutal consequences. In YOLT, we use the somewhat fantastical structure of the dialogue to open up an otherworldly exchange. Talking to Mike openly within the world of the work meant that my soon-to-be-public disclosures had a container, a receiver, and an aim.

RAIL: Speaking of disclosures and aims: how do you know when you’ve reached the end of a narrative—or, if not the end, an em dash, or a semi-colon? What is your process of revision like?

JOYNT: Mike and I imagined a world for each other within YOLT wherein the partial story, and/or the fractional

anecdote, could behave as the most trusted connective threads between us. Never imagining we could tell whole stories—and frankly de-investing in the idea and/or pursuit of wholeness as narrative strategy—meant that we met ends constantly.

Signing the publishing contract with Coach House offered incredible release from our obsessive tinkering and provided new opportunities for collaborative learning. ‘Tis a strange thing to have an editor say: “Yeah, that part of your life? Not so relevant to the project trajectories.” What a dream!

RAIL: I like the idea of de-investing in wholeness as narrative strategy. I’m reminded of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, and particularly that line when Ismael says, “Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries. Maybe we all flow into each other, boundlessly and magnificently.” This quote seemed to me to embody a lot of the content of You Only Live Twice. Perhaps I’m thinking of the Bergman simply for the scene’s sense of mutability, of both gender and historical inversion (conversion?). In any case, I wanted to ask about how your work has, over time, changed in teasing out the relationship between historical pasts, psychic hauntedness, and boundaries—either as it relates to a trans aesthetic or not.

JOYNT: I love this connection, and this quote. I hope that it lives in public alongside YOLT in some capacity. Thank you.

My early interest in trans narratives began in earnest amidst a crushing period of apprehension in the initial stages of my transition. Trans cultural production became an avenue through which I could imagine a possible future. That said, my early forays into trans art and related criticism also illuminated many missing pieces, and inspired ongoing engagement with the limitations of published trans histories. I continue to learn from work made by queer and trans artists of color, disabled artists, and indigenous artists who are asking similar questions of missing histories within our communities. In thinking about your question further, I realize that the hauntedness, stickiness, and connective traction throughout my work actually have very little to do with transness and everything to do with sexual violence.

RAIL: Can you say more about this? About your film Between You and Me? JOYNT: As I was radicalizing around my own history with sexual violence while studying at UCLA, my friend Rebekah’s father, Michael, was convicted of 20+ counts of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 29 years in a California state prison. Between You and Me is a short documentary that follows Bekah and me en route to visit Michael in prison, and offers public access to many unspoken intimacies that surround these issues and offenses. The project is deeply rooted in and through questions asked by prison abolition activists, and positions our conversation at the intersection of debates between love, moral panics, and mass incarceration. Between You and Me is currently available online here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=z1tnBjgQgFY RAIL: What inspires you? What have you been surprised to be inspired by?

JOYNT: There are numerous queer and trans artists working on and with histories of gender non-confirming people whose work I follow closely. In the digital landscape, Morgan M. Page’s new podcast One From The Vaults “brings you all the dirt, gossip and glamour from trans history” through audio vignette-style portraits of trans subjects predominantly in North America and Europe. Working in parody, performance, and digital détournement, multidisciplinary artist Chris Vargas—also, notably, the creator of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA), quite literally the smartest trans art project I have ever seen—provocatively intervenes upon mainstream representations of transgender subjects to offer alternative and often satirical histories.

RAIL: What’s the last thing you’ve read that thrilled you?

JOYNT: I keep returning to Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN: An American Lyric (2014) with vigor, both for content and form. There, she positions text alongside images that have no immediate caption, a strategy that invites pictures to interact with the written work in a free-flowing, rather than demandingly directional, capacity. From a

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

methodological perspective, I am interested in the differences between what we are told about something or someone and what we actually see; how our own interpretive experiences/silences/occlusions/lapses are informed in part by our own privileges and marginalization, a challenge that I believe Rankine approaches directly in the work.

RAIL: Is there a trans narrative you’d like to see told—by yourself or by another trans artist?

JOYNT: I’m invested in de-exceptionalizing what it means to be “trans.” If we fracture our understanding of trans from a contemporary identity politic, narrative, or related movement, and instead embrace it as a theoretical and/or aesthetic possibility, distinctions between trans and non-trans become productively muddied. In this way, I’m thinking alongside a push made in trans studies by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah and Lisa Jean Moore to consider “trans” a method of inquiry that exists beyond, but not in spite of, its common suturing to “gender.” To this end, the potential of what might be considered “trans” expands exponentially, and we might be able to think about art and processes of representation as occupying transitional spaces, spaces that can rightfully be considered “not quite” or “almost,” sparking anticipatory thoughts about future possibilities.

RAIL: In terms of future possibilities: what’s up next for you? Your article with Kristen Schilt in the November 2015 TSQ mentions an experimental book project visibilizing “anxiety at the archive”—is this something we can look forward to?

JOYNT: Yes! Kristen and I have a cross-disciplinary book forthcoming from Duke University Press for Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman's TheoryQ series called The Case of Agnes. This fall, I will be on tour with multi-media artist Vivek Shraya, presenting You Only Live Twice, alongside Vivek’s debut collection of poetry, even this page is white (Arsenal Pulp).

RL Goldberg is a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University.

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P O E T RY

THE SITWELLS ORGANIZE A ROYAL POETRY BENEFIT FOR THE FREE FRENCH WITH: EDMUND BLUNDEN, GORDON BOTTOMLEY, H.D., WALTER DE LA MARE, T.S. ELIOT, JOHN MASEFIELD, EDITH AND OSBERT SITWELL, WALTER TURNER, ARTHUR WALEY, LADY WELLESLEY, AND VITA SACK-VILLE WEST (Aeolian Hall, April 14, 1943) G E OR GE G R E E N

Six minutes was the limit they agreed to, but Walter Turner just went on and on.

The audience applauded more than once to cut him off, but he misunderstood, and, though the poets heckled him and booed, he haughtily continued to perform.

Was Lady Wellesley drunk or just insane?

And didn’t Mr. Eliot seem perturbed after he caught us giggling at his hodgepodge?

But, anyhow, the royals loved the show, and Harold Nicolson felt gratified, certain that Vita Sack-Ville West, his wife,

The princesses, who sat up front with Osbert, would chuckle, delicately, with the queen, as other poets who went overtime were grumbled at, though Walter took the cake; the chairman had to pull the plug on him.

And Lady Wellesley, lit-up like a church,

had far outshone the rest, especially Edith, who overdid her hierophantic bit.

Harold was worried sick about the war and couldn’t sleep, though things were looking up.

The Jerries in Bizerte were shellacked, and, past the Irrawaddy, Wingate read

was way too drunk to read. Edith had locked her in the lady’s room, but she escaped, approached the stage, and had to be restrained.

Surely the princesses would have some questions: Why were the poets scornful of each other?

And why did most of them go on too long?

Gray’s Elegy to resolute commandos by firelight. Above the Solomon’s, Lieutenant Barber, army ace, had tailed and shot a Nippon betty bomber down, an ambush partly laid in retribution.

Say, Admiral Yamamoto, Sayonara!

FROM THE AUTHOR

Keeping it regular allows the speech rhythm to "ruffle the meter" (Frost).

The six line stanzas are entirely arbitrary.

To restore the pentameter, that is the first heave.

The blank verse here is tight; there are no anapests (EL yet and e SPESH lee are glides). The substitutions are all conservative: nine feminine endings (one fourth of thirty-six lines) plus five first-foot trochees and one fourth-foot trochee following a caesura.

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Blank verse will accommodate decoration and elevated diction. You can wrench the syntax if you are careful to omit anything "that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say" (Pound).

Vainly, I dream of accessing some of the splendor that seems almost inherent in the form itself, from Tamburlaine (1587) to Idylls of The King (1874).

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M O U T H WAT E R A M U LT I - G E N E R AT I O N A L E X H I B I T I O N OF WOR KS BY YOU N GARTS ALUM N I C U R AT E D BY

ROBERT CHAMBERS OPENING ON SEPTEMBER 27 YO U N G A R T S AWA R E N E S S DAY ON VIEW THROUGH NOVEMBER 21, 2016

YOU NGARTS GALLE RY 2 1 0 0 B I S C AY N E B O U L E VA R D MIAMI, FLORIDA

# MY ART S TO RY

J O I N U S I N C E L E B R AT I N G YO U N G A R T S AWA R E N E S S D AY

BY S H A R I N G YO U R A R T S T O R Y. YO U N G A R T S .O RG

Returning to Myself (it is not poetic) (detail of video still) Mikayla Brown 2016 YoungArts Winner in Visual Arts

REVIEWS

Installation view: Intersectionality, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. Photo: Richard Haden

Intersectionality MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART NORTH MIAMI JUNE 16–AUGUST 14, 2016

ERICA AN D O Intersectionality—a theory of discrimination—takes into account life as it’s lived, a complex overlapping of multiple social identities. While identity politics of the ‘80s and ‘90s demarcated along strict lines—say, by gender, class, race, or ability—intersectionality, championed by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, layers divisions to account for experiences marginalized by traditional discourses of oppression. Current activist groups like Black Lives Matter embrace intersectional theory to include women, poor people, undocumented immigrants, queer and transgender people, and so

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on—groups traditionally unacknowledged in the name of the greater good. In an era of white male rage, agonizingly exemplified by “Trumpism” and police shootings of black people, intersectional theory is not only relevant, but also urgently necessary.

Organized by guest curator Richard Haden, Intersectionality draws on these ideas and features more than sixty artists, the majority of whom are from South Florida. In the spirit of intersectionality, the sprawling exhibition displays a multiplicity of voices and strategies. It provides a space for discussing how identity can be messy, for allowing art to protest, affirm and humanize, and for contending that artists can be agents of change.

Confronting identity in our age of self- curation, the exhibition presents it as mutable, unglamorous, and expressed through the body. Societal expectations, as Kerry Phillips shows, precariously hold up notions of

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femaleness. Disease can undermine women’s bodies, but not eradicate them, Sarah MK Moody asserts. Cooper Lee Bombardier shares the pain and loss experienced from gender confirmation surgery. Mariette Pathy Allen documents transgender people in Cuba, contesting socially acceptable images of the rich, white, conservative, American counterpart, Caitlyn Jenner. Carol Jazzar traces the process of her identity’s dissolution and consequent re-creation. Through the absence of bodies, Anja Marais expresses the dehumanizing shifts in identity experienced by refugees. In addition, overt nods to feminist art of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—through the use of handcrafts or fabric as a medium—show that new ways to speak about new subjects rely on the past for guidance.

The exhibition suffers, unfortunately, several hours a week. During the hours MOCA hosts a children’s summer camp,

video projections are turned off for fear that images of nude bodies will offend. Several of the videos—by Jillian Mayer, Cat Del Buono, and Cristine Brache—parse social and mass media’s role in the malleability of identity today. Also invisible for most of the week are photo projections by Zanele Muholi, who makes black queerness visible through her self-portraits and portrayals of black lesbians in her native South Africa.

The final piece of the exhibition, by Heather Cassils, shows the pain of oppressive gender binaries experienced by trans people—both internally and through violence inflicted on them. A gender nonconforming trans masculine bodybuilder, the artist rejects surgery and synthetic hormones, using diet and training to sculpt a muscular physique. Cassils’s sound work, presented in a darkened room by itself, comes from a 2013 performance in which the artist pummeled and kicked a 2,000-pound block of clay in the dark. Cassils’s grunts and punches resound throughout the exhibition, implicating us in the violence, while affirming, as we anticipate the next blow, the hard-won self.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Ben Russell

loss—or compromise—of identity. In Suarez Frimkess’s ceramics, the aesthetic pleasure is evident. Rather than making an overt statement regarding the influences of American culture on her Venezuelan upbringing, she presents the cartoon personalities of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and Porky Pig as images of comfort.

Although they appear to be recreated through the artist’s own perception, the idea of commodity still comes into play; the objects are utilitarian—small plates, a cup, and a napkin holder. The handmade, painted, and glazed ceramics dig into the psychology of possession and show how our belongings can define our identities—we are what we obtain. But in this case, Suarez Frimkess reproduces her self-portrait through objects she is initially creating; these simple and fine items become the physical manifestation of America’s globally emphatic influence onto other cultures.

Russell’s single-shot film depicts a dance in a Suriname village. A young man in a red jumpsuit leads a gathering of men out of a house, each man leaning on another for support as the group drags its feet in a procession; the young men are playing the part of old men. The perspective allows the viewer to follow this group to the source of the drumming sounds. Once there, an act of celebration

erupts. What makes these men distinct is their costume: plastic masks of Caucasian characters. Although the circular formation of the dance alludes to ritual, the interaction of Western culture is evident through the personalities portrayed. The Halloween-like masks alter the men’s identities so that they become not only something they are not, but also something they have consumed.

While the dancers supplement their Western costumes and dance with comedic gestures that are not their own, spectators of the town stare on, dressed in traditional clothing. The onlookers avoid the camera, distracted by the strange acts of the alien, Western characters— another interaction with the unfamiliar.

Jamilah Sabur: My Queen before you go tell my horse MAGGIE KNOX JUNE 25, 2016

VERO N ICA M IL L S A robed figure emerges from the shadows atop a wooden staircase littered with flickering candles. Heavy notes of otherworldly music accompany the figure’s

MICHAEL JON & ALAN JUNE 4–JULY 2, 2016

SEBASTI AN PE R E Z In a corner space of the Michael Jon & Alan gallery stands an installation of minimal composition. A short, white pedestal with six ceramic pieces placed on top introduces the exhibition against a bold red wall positioned directly behind the delicate sculptures. From behind this emanate the obscure sounds of drumming, chanting, and feet dragging on a gravel floor. The small, recognizable figures of iconic cartoon characters emerge, painted on the surfaces of Venezuelan artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s ceramic works.

The unfamiliar sounds and vibrations come from the 2009 ethnographic film TRYPPS #6 (Malobi) by Ben Russell.

Both artists’ works approach similar subject matter: the consumption of Western culture by non-Western countries and those cultures’ subsequent

Ben Russell, TRYPPS #6 (Malobi), 2009. 16 mm film, 10 min., 30 sec.

REVIEWS

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Jamilah Sabur, My Queen before you go tell my horse, Maggie Knox, June 25, 2016. Photo: Courtesy Roy Wallace

descent down the stairs. Coming to rest before a rapt audience, the candlelight reveals the white clay–painted face of artist Jamilah Sabur. Sabur’s My Queen before you go tell my horse, an installment of a larger series, responds to the dysfunctional global mechanisms that helped create the noxious breeding ground for Jamaica’s looming economic and environmental crises.

Performing as a traditional Obeah priestess, Sabur summons the spirit of Michael Manley, the late former prime minister of Jamaica. Manley was a globally recognized revolutionary figure, a leader in the fight against economic inequality across the developing country. In Sabur’s work, Manley addresses the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Looped images

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of Manley play on a large monitor above Sabur’s head. Her electronically manipulated voice echoes inside the intimate performance space, further intensifying the surreal and mystical nature of the “conjuring.” What follows is a powerful call to action to write off Jamaica’s billions of dollars owed to international lenders and allow the island to invest locally and restore economic stability and independence to the nation.

Though the island was granted independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, Queen Elizabeth remains Jamaica’s head of state. After using colonies’ resources to further the development and establish economies of colonial nations, independence comes at a high price—debt in exchange for freedoms. For the majority of

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its status as an independent nation, Jamaica has spent twice as much on debt repayment as it has on education and healthcare combined. These trends are reflected in the country’s decline in literacy and increase in maternal mortality rates.

During the performance, the video monitors surrounding Sabur reflect elements of Manley’s address to the lenders.

Swimming horses, Jamaican landscapes, numbers, and a climate change map underscore the commanding oration, which reverberates, climbs, and falls throughout the performance. An amalgam of political and scientific text from expert sources— including Manley and other key political figures—the rousing speech taps deeply into the recesses of the relationship between emerging economies and the countries that once colonized them.

Jamaica is unable to cover the debt with capital generated by its own resources, perpetuating a cycle of poverty. Recently the IMF acknowledged fault in its policy surrounding debt repayment. The powerful binds of its debt render the island nation helpless in the face of global warming.

According to climate change scientists, as of 2023, Jamaica will be home to extreme temperatures and climate behavior. The threat of flooding, loss of land, warped ecosystems, and the dip in tourism promise to further cripple the economy. Sabur’s piece responds to this, as well as to the lack of effective interventions and support from the international community, most notably the Queen.

Resonance/Dissonance THE PATRICIA & PHILLIP FROST ART MUSEUM FIU JUNE 18–SEPTEMBER 18, 2016

EVIAN KUZ N IK Resonance/Dissonance, an installation at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU, showcases the work of six distinctive, leading female artists who create provocative video art approaching such diverse themes as the body, gender, sexuality, violence, and popular culture. The videos, on loan from the de la Cruz Collection, are

by Tracey Emin, Quisqueya Henriquez, Beatriz Monteavaro, Sarah Morris, Aïda Ruilova, and Susanne M. Winterling. FIU curator Klaudio Rodriguez and de la Cruz Collection director Ibett Yanez collaborated on the powerful installation, which groups the videos to highlight their relationships to one another. Video art inherently demands the senses to be active during observation, making the viewer’s role as a partial participant a significant part of the work.

In the exhibition’s main gallery space, the audio from each work plays from opposing corners, creating an inexorable clashing of sounds and an overwhelming sense of unease and chaos when standing at the center of the room. This jarring soundscape, emanating from the works of Emin, Henriquez, and Morris, embodies the “dissonance” of the

exhibition’s title. Emin’s Sometimes the Dress is Worth More Than the Money (2000–01) investigates the misogynistic undertones related to the tradition of marriage. The Western music that makes up Emin’s soundtrack effectively clashes with the honking sounds from Henriquez’s Intertextualidad, which features a rooster walking through city streets, juxtaposing modernity and a vestige of the past, interrogating the notion of progress.

Nearby, Morris’s Midtown depicts the utter isolation that can be found in the cityscape of Manhattan.

In its own devoted space, Winterling’s work is projected on a high screen.

Underneath the video—which portrays a woman inharmoniously and incessantly playing a violin—is a grouping of beanbag chairs inviting the viewer to stop and fully

engage with the cacophonous work.

A sense of relief, or of resonance, can finally be found in the initial silence heard upon entering the exhibition’s third, smaller space where the works of Ruilova (six videos on small screens featuring unintelligible sounds) and Monteavaro (a mute narrative acted out by plastic human figures) are on view.

Throughout the installation, the viewer gets the sensation that time is, in a way, formed and reformed over and over again.

The medium of video is irrefutably effective in relaying the themes explored by these artists in a palpable and captivating manner.

The artworks incite an interrogation of present societal norms, asking the viewer to rethink his or her surroundings and position in the world.

Tracey Emin, Sometimes the Dress is Worth More Than the Money, 2000-01. Projection, with sound, shot on mini-DVD, 4 min. Courtesy the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU

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Mark Fox, Giverny: Journal of an Unseen Garden, 2010–15. Five-channel video installation, edition 1 of 6. Purchase, acquired through the generosity of Beth Rudin DeWoody and of Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo through the Dorothea Leonhardt Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas, 2016.41

Giverny: Journal of an Unseen Garden NORTON MUSEUM OF ART JULY 5–OCTOBER 30, 2016

SANTIN O S I N I The ponds of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, studies of the Giverny gardens in the Normandy region of France, are unmistakable. As the paintings number around 250, the series may be the most thorough study of any resting waters. During a residency at Giverny, the artist Mark Fox filmed beneath the surface of the ponds, a sort of fish-eye view of the famous landscape. What he produced changes up common perceptions of Monet’s iconic subject.

Monet’s glimpses into the garden are highly personal and emotive. In his work, the aesthetic and metaphysical aspects of the water’s surface—the reflections of sky and the implied depth—range across

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seasons, show the effects of time, and vary in degrees of closeness and abstraction. The paintings demonstrate the innumerable perceptions that can occur between an image and a viewer.

In contrast, Fox’s protracted gaze is detached and impersonal. It references the large scale of Nymphéas by surpassing it—his scale is even larger, with video projections occupying five screens on three adjacent walls, reaching well overhead and some stretching thirty feet long. The screens alternate views, and fade in and out of black with the passage of days. Two cushioned loveseats are located in the center of the gallery. With free entry on a Wednesday in West Palm Beach, the crowd is largely seniors. The couches are soft and cozy.

Considering Giverny, it is hard to picture a below that mirrors the above. Ponds are thought to be murky, cut through with sucking catfish, dancing mosquito larvae, perhaps some sunken detritus. But these ponds are not murky—they’re clear and beautiful. The

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open water is a soft green that becomes blue at its peak of clarity. On overcast days, the greens grade into gray haze. On the clearest days, the brightness intensifies. The sharpest greens can be found in the lily stalks and pond grasses. Many lilies have red faces.

Feathered, blooming plants approach the water’s surface. Certain flora resemble the legs of mantis shrimp. Sunlight catches millions of suspended particles. The surface ripples and, when stilled, appears like ice.

The murkiness does come, but the bottom never falls completely into shadow; the ponds are too shallow for that. The bottom is not a decaying, silty brown, but is similar instead to a dark, variously pigmented oil paint. A miniscule orange leaf rests on the bottom and does not move for weeks in a row. Time moves on in an unbroken chain.

Fox’s long and unencumbered gaze, while somewhat detached, makes Monet’s very personal study somehow more intimate, and its effect is equally calming.

BOOK REVIEWS Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic GINA WOUTERS AND ANDREA GOLLIN, EDS. THE MONACELLI PRESS AND VIZCAYA MUSEUM AND GARDENS, 256 PP.

ANNIK AD E Y - BABI N S K Y Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872–1930) was buried in his white, paint-spattered work overalls. By all accounts, he was a bon vivant who would put the best of today’s vivants to shame.

Allow me a brief, indulgent review of Chanler’s life. He was one of the ten Astor orphans, members of an elite New York dynasty raised by various caretakers at Rokeby, the family estate in the Hudson Valley. Chanler made headlines in his youth for marrying Lina Cavalieri, a Parisian opera singer, and divorcing her less than two weeks later. When James Deering—who built the Vizcaya estate in Miami and was a patron of Chanler’s—asked him about the marriage, he reportedly said, “It cost me a million but it was worth it.”

A prolific and fevered painter, sculptor, set-designer, and decorative artist, Chanler played a pivotal role in starting not one, but two modernist art collectives. Later in life, he had not one, but two live-in lovers who received stipends from his family accountant. They took turns hosting parties in his New York City home, “The House of Fantasy.” A policeman once called to quell one of the fêtes reportedly ended up behind the bar, mixing drinks beside Chanler, who wore his hat.

As a result of a post-war preference for realism over decorative art, Chanler was mostly forgotten after his death in 1930. In his heyday, he was known for his work with screens and murals in private homes in New York. However, he also dabbled in stained glass, portraiture, and sculpture, usually working on large interior spaces. Chanler’s work is often referred to as fantastic.

Imagined ecosystems in which Florida alligators swim in the Hudson River and new constellations appear in the skies were a hallmark of his work.

Increasingly, Chanler is recognized as a contributor to the Gilded Age of modernism, in part because the divisions between so-called decorative and fine art have collapsed. As Frank Mateo writes in “Preserving the Fantastical,” Would one label Klimt, Klee, or Vuillard

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as “decorative artists,” given their deployment of ornament, color, and pattern, or Whistler as a decorator given his obsession with carefully orchestrated interiors? [ . . . ] It is within this renewed attitude that Chanler’s work should be revisited.

This revisitation developed when a few dedicated scholars came together in 2014 for a national conference on his work.

The event was hosted by Vizcaya Museum

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and Gardens, which houses two Chanler commissions: Vizcayan Bay—a free-standing screen—and the mansion’s undersea ceiling mural over the swimming pool grotto.

Discovering the Fantastic emerged from this conference. A collection of criticism edited

by Vizcaya curator Gina Wouters and freelance writer Andrea Gollin, it is the first in-depth survey of his life and work in more than 80 years. The book includes 6 major essays about Chanler, his life, his work, and his home; 200 illustrations; and preservation notes from Lauren Hall, Vizcaya’s conservator.

While the book covers in delightful tabloid detail the personal side of Chanler’s life, the authors also do the categorical work necessary to recover his impact on modernism. Laurette E. McCarthy, author of “Setting the Stage: Chanler and the Armory Show,” does painstaking research into the twenty-six pieces Chanler included in the Armory Show, proving that his contribution was more than any American.

Aside from his talent, the author links this achievement to Chanler’s connection to the elite women of New York who formed the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS) that put on the exhibition in 1913. After all, as Wouters writes in “Chanler and the Gilded Age,” “A year before the commission for Vizcaya’s swimming pool grotto ceiling, the Richmond Times Dispatch declared ‘Mr. Chanler’s weird screens the newest fashionable fad’ and asserted that the ownership of his work was a ‘virtually accepted proof of wealth.’”

Chanler’s works are notoriously difficult to conserve. Hall explains that misguided overpaints, a lack of color photography, and structural and environmental factors at Vizcaya pose significant challenges for restorers. If you take a walk through the museum gift shop and study the mosaic ceiling, you can imagine how storm surge waters during a hurricane would threaten the gessoed plaster casts of shells, Hudson River sturgeon, and fantastical creatures Chanler pieced together for Deering.

Since Chanler’s work was mostly for private homes, his own home functioned as a portfolio. In Lauren Drapala’s “Building the House of Fantasy,” readers learn Chanler’s home, with its meticulously designed rooms, became an icon of modern life. In the 1920s, Chanler had the Edison Company create a

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heating mechanism for his aquariums, and he kept pools for the flamingos and peacocks he represented in his work. This Animal Annex occupied the back of the home and the basement, and it was Chanler’s source for his loose representations of nature that, according to the authors, had “less to do with natural habitat” and more to do with “color and line.”

As this collection set out to prove, Chanler influenced modernism with his fluidity between high and low, representation and imagination, and screens and sculptures. Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic is a welcome contribution to conversations we have about making art today—and what it means to call yourself avant-garde in 2016 given the modernism that came before us.

Annik Adey-Babinski is a writer living in Miami. She was one of Jai Alai Books’ Eight Miami Poets.

John ANNIE BAKER THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP, 160 PP.

RYA N R UF F SM ITH The first thing most people notice about Annie Baker is her dialogue. When I saw her play The Flick in 2013, I left the theater with an odd awareness of the fragments, false starts, vague inferences, repetitions, evasions, and caesuras that characterize my own speech. Nothing could sound stranger than the way we actually talk. Baker has an unmistakable style of her own, but like Chekhov’s, its genius is that it looks like the absence of style. In fact, her dialogue vérité is so striking that at first it’s easy to worry that her plays might be mere slices of life, their hyper-realism an end unto itself, but she also has a patient, subtle gift for plotting that defies the quotidian settings that she favors—a windowless dance studio in a small-town community center, the alley behind a small-town coffee shop, an independent movie theater in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Add to that list a benignly haunted bed

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and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Baker’s latest play, John, is at once her subtlest and strangest, her most mysterious and most masterful, her riskiest and most self-assured—and I haven’t even gotten to see it. It ran for just six weeks last summer at the Signature Theatre in New York, but it’s out now in a handsome trade paperback from TCG, and the work easily justifies its new incarnation in book form. To be sure, Baker writes for the stage, and on some level, reading a play is always an incomplete experience. But not many people get to the theater, and John is deserving of a much wider audience.

The play concerns a young couple, Elias Schreiber-Hoffman (“twenty-nine, glasses”) and Jenny Chung (“thirty-one, no glasses”), who stop off in Gettysburg on their way home to Brooklyn from Jenny’s parents’ house in Ohio. Elias was a Civil War buff as a kid, and he’s eager to see the battlefields.

Jenny is in the throes of particularly savage menstrual cramps and is hardly able to leave the couch. Things for them, we sense and then know, are not going well. A few weeks ago, Elias discovered that Jenny had been unfaithful, and they almost broke up. (“I guess we’re um . . . we’re trying to um . . . heal?”)

The proprietor of the B&B is Mertis Katherine Graven (“seventy-two, no glasses”), whose eccentricities range from the expected (a small army of tchotchkes, hyper-regional cooking) to the bizarre (self-identification as a Neoplatonist, a diet involving daily injections of pregnancy hormones) to the Brechtian (the stage directions indicate that she manually resets the grandfather clock and changes the music to signal each scene change, and that she opens and closes “an old-school red velvet curtain” between the acts). Mertis is often visited by her friend Genevieve Marduk (“eighty-five, blind”), who seems to share some of Mertis’s new-age leanings, and who was once convinced that she was possessed by the spirit of her ex-husband, John. “Oh. That’s funny,” Jenny says. “I . . . know someone named John.” “Everyone knows someone named John,” Genevieve tells her.

In The Flick, an invisible movie screen constituted the fourth wall between the audience and the stage. The set consisted of rows of empty movie theater seats, mirroring the space in which we, the audience, were sitting. John also mirrors the audience back

to itself, in a way that is even more subtle and even more uncanny—through the presence of thousands of watchful miniature objects, which adorn the parlor of the bed and breakfast: gnomes, trolls, porcelain angels, and, most eerily for Jenny, the American Girl doll Samantha, the same doll that tormented her as a child with projected reproaches. In fact,

Jenny’s childish animism is still very much alive, and when Elias looks under Samantha’s skirt, she begs him to stop, saying, “She’ll never forgive you!” As the play unfolds, we slowly come to realize that every character has carried from childhood the sense of being watched, of having a Watcher. Hence the epigraph from Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the

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Marionette Theatre,” which reads, in part, “Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.” The play puts equal weight on both possibilities. It’s as god-haunted as it is doll-haunted.

That passage from von Kleist is also cited in Barbara Johnson’s book Persons and Things, a disquisition that also touches upon toys, dolls, and statues. I have a hunch that Baker read Johnson’s book before composing John; if not, their correspondence is a cosmic coincidence that would impress Mertis and Genevieve. In the play’s final scene, Jenny, recalcitrant, stands frozen still as Elias comes up and hugs her. “You’re like a statue,” he says. Then he carries her over to the couch and begins to tell her a story. (Jenny is always asking him to do this—another childish quirk.) The story is of a genre familiar to Johnson: a female statue brought to life by an ardent human admirer. And this is where Baker’s project dovetails with Johnson’s, who writes in the prologue to Persons and Things that she has “realized that the problem is not, as it seems, a desire to treat things as persons, but a difficulty in being sure that we treat persons as persons.”

Elias never finishes his story. Jenny’s cell phone starts dinging with text messages, something that has been happening more and more frequently throughout their stay.

She claims it’s her sister. He asks to see the phone. Haltingly, she refuses, and an ugly fight ensues, which ends with Jenny upstairs packing and Elias alone in the living room with her phone, now locked. Mertis, startled by the noise, comes out into the living room and discovers that Genevieve has been sitting there in the dark the whole time.

(The fact that she is blind only makes all the more uncanny her role here as a Watcher.)

Suddenly, Mertis realizes that she has forgotten to light her Swedish angel chimes, which she always does at the end of November. She lights some candles beneath the chimes, and “The angels begin to fly around in circles and chime. It’s pretty magical.”

The play’s flat, understated last line, delivered by Mertis, answers matter-offactly its central dramatic question (has Jenny still been texting John?), but by the time we get there, it no longer feels like the question—because of the chimes, because of the lengthy pause in the action, and because

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of an unexpectedly romantic monologue delivered by Mertis. We, like the characters, have found ourselves transported.

This is excellent theater, even on the page. And in many ways, Baker excels in this format. She’s a delightful and exacting writer, and not a word here is wasted—even the stage directions and the character and scene descriptions are brimming with personality and wit. To my mind, Baker is not only our best young playwright but the best American writer under forty. I hope a production of John is soon mounted again, but even if it isn’t, this is work that deserves to be celebrated. It’s a wonderful book.

Ryan Ruff Smith’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared recently in Ploughshares, Subtropics, and New Ohio Review.

Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow FABIENNE JOSAPHAT THE UNNAMED PRESS, 256 PP.

SEBASTI AN BOE N S C H The thrilling and nuanced opening of Dancing in the Baron's Shadow, Fabienne Josaphat's debut novel, introduces us to Raymond L'Eveillé, a cabbie in 1965 Port-auPrince. He is parked outside a brothel, Chez Madame Fils, waiting for his fare, a john, to finish up. Raymond needs to make it home before the citywide curfew goes into effect at eight. He's every age's little man: he's beleaguered with money problems, the water's running through his fingers, there are no good choices for him. But it turns out that he actually harbors an exceptional ability—a superpower—that will shortly prove needed.

Raymond's is a city and a nation living under the cloud of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier's increasingly paranoid regime.

Only two years before the novel's action opens, Duvalier (Haiti's self-appointed "President for Life"), in response to a coup attempt, ordered all black dogs in the country shot; he had come to believe that the coup's chief conspirator, to evade capture, had transformed himself into one. Papa Doc is, per Josaphat, the "sinister figurehead for

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a sinister country." His agents of terror and control are the rural militia known as the Tonton Macoutes, distinguished sartorially by their straw hats, blue denim shirts, red ascots, and—most importantly—the dark sunglasses that hide their eyes, sunglasses in which their victims can make out only their own terrified reflections. The glasses help "[fuel] the rumors" that the Tonton Macoutes are "not men but devils, evil spirits, loup-garou."

So on one side, the Vodou militia, the 30,000 to 60,000 murdered over the course of Duvalier's rule; on the other, the cost of rice, the impact of curfew on the sex trade and by extension the cab industry, and Raymond, the fellow trying to get through his shift, whose children are starving. This is the immediate situation of the story, the machine that sets it in motion—history's big events, the big evil of them, and the little person who is slowly being crushed in the wheel. Raymond sits outside the brothel in the beat-up old Datsun of which he is immensely proud, listening to the relentlessly upbeat méringue—konpa music—on Haitian official radio, songs with lyrics that go, "Our new song spreads joy all over the streets." Raymond reflects on konpa like a Port-au-Prince Philip Marlowe: "Its rhythms were intended to carry away problems. Too bad they always come back."

Then a jeep full of Tonton Macoutes

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pulls up down the block. Machetes and tommy guns flash in the night. Raymond, desperate for his fare, slides down in his seat and waits. He watches in the rearview as they close on him. He is on the point of cutting his losses when a fist pounds on the window. A man and his wife and baby daughter are outside, begging Raymond to let them in. "They're going to kill us," the man cries. Raymond reluctantly unlocks the door. What follows is a chase in which Raymond's superior knowledge of the city and almost conjugal relationship with cars—"he'd spent most of his waking time inside vehicles, bent over engines, fixing and oiling auto parts"—allow him to save the family and perform the heroic act he had never imagined or wanted for himself.

But this is a novel in which the hero, after his heroic act, has to return home sheepishly, without his fare, to his wife, Yvonne, a hotel washerwoman. Her ruined hands are a point of repeated emphasis: "The very first time she'd held his face, he'd felt the damage of her life against his cheeks."

Quite sensibly, Yvonne tells him that he shouldn't have done it, that it wasn't right for him to take the risk considering his family’s dire poverty. He would make more money if he gave up driving cabs and worked in the tannery, but driving is all he knows (shades of a Michael Mann protagonist or Ryan O'Neal in The Driver). Yvonne has an uncle in Miami and wants to get the children there, but just last week twelve families died at sea trying to make the voyage. It's as if Raymond’s heroic act were in the most important sense beside the point: it solved nothing for him. Life, unfortunately, goes on. There is a wonderful moment when Raymond comes home and hugs his children: [He] let [them] hold him for a while and pressed his hands against their small backs. It often struck him how small Enos and Adeline were. He knew they weren't getting enough to eat, and he couldn't get past the guilt he felt when he ran his hands along their backs and felt their bones. But he loved that their smallness was still a kind of innocence in a place where so much experience was painful.

These lines, maybe the finest in the book, capture so much of the novel's virtues, so much of what Josaphat understands about Raymond and his predicament. Yvonne is

more practical than Raymond, but perhaps something more than that. She is willing to admit that death—even the death of these children whose smallness is a kind of innocence—is preferable to life in this place.

In the second chapter we are introduced to Raymond's brother, Nicolas, a character who never comes into focus. The brothers' acrimonious relationship becomes the novel's subject, but Nicolas’s perspective remains obscure. A wealthy lawyer and university lecturer, he treats Raymond like dirt. The trouble is that we never come to understand why Nicolas does so or how he justifies his behavior to himself. He seems both sketchy and over-described. As a result the conflict remains unresolved for the reader even as it is, ultimately, resolved between the two men. Until the end, we remain aggrieved and bewildered on Raymond's behalf.

Nicolas gets arrested and sent to the hellish prison Fort Dimanche for writing a manuscript exposing the crimes of the regime—a manuscript he inexplicably does not bother to conceal—and Raymond decides to save him. There are passages to savor: the description of how the men in Fort Dimanche's cells treat infections (spoiler alert: it's urine) and the sleeping-sitting-standing rotation the overcrowding requires of them are highlights (think House of the Dead or Fallada's The Drinker).

However, Raymond's plan to break Nicolas out is ludicrous and involves Raymond’s intentional incarceration at Fort Dimanche.

For all his deft touch with the Datsun's clutch, Raymond is not Jason Bourne.

He’s shoehorned into the role of hero in situations where his one superpower—cab driving—is useless. In the end, it’s hard to believe that Nicolas would have gotten out of prison, or that Raymond would have tried to save him. It is as if the novel, having already shown them to us, can no longer face its own hard truths.

Sebastian Boensch is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Florida. He lives in the Hudson Valley. His short story "Death Sentence(s)" appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Subtropics magazine.

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Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

Free Admission! icamiami.org Installation view: Renaud Jerez at ICA Miami.

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

I C A ≤≥ MIAMI