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Sophia Al-Maria, Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-In (detail), 2014. First published on the occasion of the exhibition Sophia AlMaria: Virgin with a Memory, curated by Omar Kholeif, Cornerhouse, Manchester, September 6–November 2, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Cornerhouse, Manchester.

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Johanna Went performing at the Hong Kong CafĂŠ, Los Angeles, 1979. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Scott Lindgren.

CONTENTS

Carol Bove and Alice Wang The Space of Free Play

Rob Marks Saraceno’s Anthropocenic Art and the Rise of the Aerocene Review: Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion— Cloud Cities San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Kyle Proehl Woman at Point Zero Review: Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Doran George Can We Have Sex? Michael Turinsky’s Dancing Against Compulsory Ableism Introduction by Neha Choksi

Mariah Garnett, Suzy Halajian and William E. Jones One More Long Take

Christine Wertheim Johanna Went: Slave to the Grave

Jacob Stewart-Halevy Apologies as Access Rituals Review: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: I Must First Apologize… MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA

Travis Diehl BOOKS = YES! Review: Thomas Hirschhorn: Stand-alone The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

112

Carol Bove and Alice Wang The Space of Free Play

The following conversation took place

downstairs galleries at the Fondation

on May 6, 2016, at Carol Bove’s studio

Beyeler, there’s one room that has no

in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and was edited

windows and is about the same scale

for publication.

as the original Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Alice Wang: Artists tend to have very

of Gonzalez-Torres’s historical show,

We built an architectural facsimile sharp senses. For example, I believe

and stored all of the materials for

Cézanne had the capacity to perceive

the shows that weren’t on exhibition

certain hues and dimensions that other

in the room that you passed through

people could not. It enabled him to

on your way to the exhibition. All the

render in two dimensions the unstable

boxes of candies, posters, and strings

and shifting reality of lived experi-

of beads in the staging area were

ence. In your practice as a sculptor,

parts of pieces that we had to refab-

you can probably sense certain mate-

ricate using commercially available

rial and spatial subtleties because

and unmanipulated materials.

you’ve invested so much training in tuning into the dynamics of sculpture.

The show changed once a week, except

These subtle forces transcend ques-

one week it changed twice. We would

tions of form or beauty—something else

move the work that had been on exhibi-

is being activated.

tion into the staging area. When you walked through the staging area, you

Carol Bove: There’s some kind of non-

would see the work that was not on

verbal intelligence in the shapes and

exhibit—but it was being exhibited as

textures.

not exhibited. It had a very different energy. It was as if it was resting,

AW: This makes me think of the Felix

relaxing, because it was not perform-

Gonzalez-Torres retrospective you

ing. In the exhibition space it was

participated in at the Fondation

performing, but it hadn’t changed in

Beyeler. For me, Gonzalez-Torres’s

any way, it had just been moved. It

work is almost at a crossroads; it

was arranged, but not into a complex

can be framed in a conceptual way

shape; it was just put in the corner

or an institutional critique way—but

or made into the shape of a rectan-

something else is also happening that

gle. I thought it was really exciting

escapes language. I realized it when

to see how subtle physical changes

you showed—but did not show—his work.

completely changed the works ontologi-

You displayed some of the pieces in

cally. You still don’t understand how

their packaging.

the material becomes sculpture, even

CB: At the Beyeler, one half of the

transparent.

when the process is made completely show I did was to restage a 1991 Felix Gonzalez-Torres show called Every Week

AW: It’s similar to what you said ear-

There is Something Different. In the

lier in your studio about unintended

Installation view, Gallery 20 staging area for Every Week There is Something Different reconstruction, as part of Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, curated by Carol Bove. Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, July 31–August 29, 2010. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Photo: Serge Hasenboehler.

Installation view, Week 3 of Every Week There is Something Different (week of August 1, 2010), restaged as part of Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, curated by Carol Bove. Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, July 31–August 29, 2010. Foreground: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (GoGo Dancing Platform), 1991. Wood, lightbulbs, acrylic paint and Go-Go dancer in silver lamé bathing suit, sneakers and personal listening device, overall dimensions vary with installation, platform: 21½ × 72 × 72 in. Background: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Natural History), 1990. Framed black-and-white photographs; overall dimensions vary with installation, thirteen parts: 16 ¾ × 20 ¼ in. each, image; 8 7⁄ 16 × 12 in. each. Edition of 3. Background right: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Chemo), 1991. Strands of beads and hanging device, dimensions vary with installation. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Photo: Serge Hasenboehler.

illusionism—in the process of illusion

but then it’s candy, it’s sweet, it’s

making, something else happened.

seductive. There’s a lot of seduction in Gonzalez-Torres’s work—the idea of

CB: One of the things that most inter-

moving the viewer through the space,

ested me in doing this project was

suggesting different actions to take.

seeing how Gonzalez-Torres had made

Sometimes he would have a regular

arrangements. He famously didn’t have

photograph and, as the viewer, you

a studio, so I have to imagine that

would have to say to yourself, “now

as he was making work he was expect-

I’m just going to look at this as if

ing to see it in the gallery for the

this normal photograph is a normal

first time. So he was thinking about

photograph.” He heightens the artifi-

the gallery almost as the muse; it’s

ciality of the situation by making all

the invitation, it’s the situation. The

of these possibilities for the viewer.

physical gallery space was probably

Ultimately, you’re looking at display

a really compelling formative space/

itself.

occasion, and the types of relationships he made between objects were

I had seen his work exhibited many

very deliberate.

times over the years, but I hadn’t seen his sets of work, in other words,

Gonzalez-Torres didn’t invent the solo

all of the works he displayed together

show that looks like a group show,

in one exhibition considered as a

but he created a very clear template

coherent grouping. It was so excit-

for it. It’s not installation art, but

ing to see the groupings sequentially,

it’s very sensitive to the way it’s

because the pieces related to each

installed. There are different types

other within one hanging, but the

of artworks in the space, and he

hangings also interrelated across

anticipated that a viewer would have

the weeks. For example, in one week,

to interact with each of them really

everything was on the left of the

differently. It places demands on the

gallery and in the next week every-

viewer, because you can’t just go in

thing was on the right of the gallery.

and look at everything with the same

That’s not in the documentation, but

eyes or the same strategy—you have to

it’s so clear in his intention. I see

use a different interactive strategy

this as an important part of his prac-

with each piece. For example, going

tice that he was doing but wasn’t

into a room with a beaded curtain

talking about. I see these sets as

and interacting with that piece means

complete statements; they’re not art-

touching the piece and walking through

works per se but they are something

it. That’s your strategy as a viewer.

similar. I don’t have a way to talk

Then, going up to a candy piece, you

about what the groupings are. As non-

have to reset your strategy—whatever

objects, they resist language.

social awkwardness you feel about taking candy. Who do you ask if it’s

AW: The feeling of a heightened bodily

ok? The tension of breaking through

experience seems to be obvious with

that barrier is part of your viewing

Gonzalez-Torres’s work, because you

strategy. Personally, I’m very inhib-

have to physically walk through the

ited about physically interacting with

curtain or eat the candy. But there’s

works of art. Grappling with my uneasy

also a strange mind-body trigger when

feelings around being asked to perform

encountering your work, because I

on the work’s terms is part of view-

can’t touch any of it.

ing this type of art for me. That you would actually allow the sculpture to

CB: You have to touch it with your

go into your body is totally radical,

imagination.

AW: Yes, it’s a total mind-body expe-

One thing that I’ve been trying to

rience. I remember seeing the platform

do along those lines for my work is

you made for The Foamy Saliva of a

just to support my free associative

Horse, at the Arsenale in the 2011

thinking, which is a type of think-

Venice Biennale, and being very con-

ing that works with images, sensations,

scious of the viewing experience. As

and emotions, and is more nonlin-

I walked around the gigantic plinth,

ear. It’s inhibited by task-based

taking in the work from a low van-

thinking, which is goal-oriented and

tage point, I had to strain my body

linear. There are so many things in

in order to run my eyes over the

our culture that support task-oriented

objects. Some scientists believe that

thinking. It’s great—I have nothing

we don’t have the cognitive capacity

against it, but, it’s overemphasized.

to consciously process 100% of the information we take in. This means

I was so happy recently to read about

that involuntary cognitive processes

all the neurons scientists are finding

are happening, and the mind-body

in your stomach—you have this second

can be cultivated to become aware of

brain in your stomach. It makes me

these subtle cues. You use the phrase

think about your “gut reaction,” that

psychic energy. It’s not that it’s

expression is based on this physical

non-intellectual; rather, as the title

reality.

of the catalog for your Kunstverein Hamburg show in 2004 suggests, it’s

AW: Finally, science can prove this

Below Your Mind.

thing we all feel and know to be true; it’s not wishy-washy.

CB: I want to set up these conflicts between your intellect and other

CB: Right, it’s not wishy-washy; it’s

types of experience.

scientifically based. In Zen meditation, they talk about putting your

AW: I feel that the type of intelli-

consciousness in your abdomen. You

gence we are talking about applies not

have a brain there, and you are

only to art but also to sociopolitical

encouraged to use that visceral brain.

situations, such as diplomacy or even in sports—like boxing. There’s a dif-

AW: Consciousness is much more

ferent order of knowledge at play.

diffused. Seeing the different textures in your work, somehow my mind

CB: I’ve been trying to find tools

starts to travel to my toes. It’s not

to work with the intelligence that I

conceptual—or, if it is conceptual,

have that’s nonverbal and not to lead

it’s not centered in the brain. Is

with the verbal intelligence. Sensory,

that possible?

social, emotional, pre-objective—there are these other types of intelligences

CB: To have a non brain-based concep-

that you have, like pheromone recep-

tual experience…

tion, that are sources of information and of intelligence. Your spiritual

AW: Focusing one’s consciousness on

sense, your survival instinct, and

the gut in Zen meditation—that’s a

your sense of location, for example,

concept, but it transcends the cere-

and all these other senses that com-

bral. That’s why I tend towards

prise your total intelligence and

Buddhism, the I Ching, or the Tao Te

outweigh your verbal intelligence.

Ching. These ancient treatises con-

But, it’s also important to try to

tain concepts, but the way language is

create bridges so that you can commu-

used in these texts also seems to pro-

nicate verbally about them.

duce an altered experience.

Above: Carol Bove, Io, 2014. Stainless steel and urethane paint. Beverly Gardens Park, Beverly Hills, California. © Carol Bove. Courtesy of the artist. David Zwirner New York/London and Maccarone New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.

Previous spread: Carol Bove, The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, 2011. Found metal, bronze, driftwood, sea shells, peacock feathers, steel, gold chain, silver chain, foam, Styrofoam. 174 × 600 × 222 in. Installation view, 54th International Art Exhibition, Illuminazioni—Illuminations: la Biennale di Venezia/Venice Biennale, June 4–November 27, 2011. © Carol Bove. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner New York/London and Maccarone New York/Los Angeles.

Foreground: Carol Bove, Oriented Plane, 2003. Sterling silver, monofilament and Plexiglass. Left: Carol Bove, The Look of Thought, the Ways of Thought, 2003. Knoll tables, mirror, book. Right: Janine Lariviere, Garden Flowers, by Janine Lariviere, 2003. Flower bulbs, glass and Plexiglas vases and unlimited Xerox edition. Installation view, Experiment in Total Freedom, Team Gallery, May 3â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 21, 2003. ÂŠ Carol Bove. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner New York/London and Maccarone New York/Los Angeles.

CB: Right, there is no stable self,

CB: Something completely nonreferen-

and we are constantly being influ-

tial would be something that’s really

enced and affected by our environment,

unknown. But also, I think there’s a

biology, and language.

way that an artist could work with signs where the signs never resolve,

AW: It was through reading your book

where the meanings are always ambigu-

Below Your Mind that I was able to

ous and inconclusive yet they hold out

enter your work through a completely

the promise of a definite meaning. As

different mindset. You talk about the

a viewer, you are left chasing false

unconscious impulse we have for read-

clues. The chase holds the discursive

ing artworks; it’s almost the default

intellect captive; meanwhile, the rest

mode for experiencing contemporary

of your intelligence can interact with

art. I find that your work has a con-

the poetic dimensions of the work.

ceptual feel and can be read, but it’s

These are the tools I’ve been thinking

not entirely based on the intellect.

about.

Yet, it doesn’t end with the phenomenological either, because you’re also

AW: I feel that sometimes an artwork

working with symbols.

that’s perceived as beautiful can be

CB: The idea of reading and referen-

of seduction is something you are

tiality has been a concern for me in

actively working with. In the press

the last few years because I see how

release for your show Plants and

quickly dismissed; but that aspect

destructive it is, and how much it

Mammals at the Horticultural Society

cheats us from having actual art expe-

of New York (2008), you wrote:

riences. There has to be more. But you will read works of art—and you have

Flowers are shaped by many forces.

to accept that your viewer will read

They reflect commerce, taste,

works of art. So how can you frustrate

intellectual labor, fashion, cus-

reading so that you can have an expe-

toms, human emotional life. They

rience and be open to not immediately

are indexical with a culture in a

understanding it, like being open to

given moment. They are the living

a paranormal encounter? In a paranor-

expression of social forces and

mal experience, you are introduced to

social experience. But all of this

a concept that hadn’t existed for you

content remains part of a hidden

before. It is an intrusion from some-

dimension. Flowers are so lovely

where else. It’s totally disturbing.

and gratuitous, even dismissible.

A wound in reality. We want the wound

When they are read at all it tends

to close, and to make the wound close

to be for the content of an inter-

we have to understand it. To under-

personal gesture. Like romantic

stand it, we have to put a concept to

intentions. Or solidarity with the

it; once we have a concept, the wound

bereaved.

can close, and then we can be comfortable again. As a viewer, I think it’s

This statement seems to encapsulate

important to cultivate the idea that

your work in a really nice way: it’s

it’s ok to have the wound in reality,

not just the surface, but it could be.

and for that you need a tolerance for discomfort.

CB: It could flicker between being nothing and being full of things—being

AW: It’s like having those wiggly

empty or being full. That idea about

lines slip into the viewers’ con-

flowers is something I’m really con-

sciousness through their peripheral

scious of, as with any design object

vision.

or even with sculpture. A design

object manifests ideology. What we

be very tricky about it. That sounds

were looking at in my studio upstairs,

like a defense for something, and I

those works could only be made in that

feel more and more that it’s important

studio. The studio is the void that

not to defend things, or to make things

they come into, so they really are the

that are indefensible. Something

product of the process that they’re

beautiful could maybe, in a way, be

developed through, and the process

indefensible, but also undefended.

has meaning and intention. AW: There’s a disjuncture in the feelPeople have this long-standing con-

ing of your forms and how they become

flict with the idea of beauty. We

what they are. There’s something at

don’t trust it because we don’t trust

work between what’s happening in the

our motives. We are worried we like

studio and when the objects are mani-

something because it is agreeable.

fested on display.

We’re worried we like it because it appeals to us and not because of

CB: The studio is a mess! That’s

some real truth that it’s expressing.

the big difference. If you’re mak-

Truth is not always so comfortable,

ing things that are repeatable, it’s

and in fact, we know it’s mostly not

craft; if you’re making things that

comfortable. So, it’s natural to be

are not repeatable then it’s art. But,

suspicious. Because of this long-

you can’t really get skilled at mak-

standing prejudice against beauty, it

ing art because the process is always

seems sexy to me to work with that,

going to be different each time, and

since you’re not supposed to do it.

the actual training is more in developing the capacity to recognize when

AW: It’s a bit kinky.

art happens. It’s interesting, the difference between capacity and skill,

CB: Yes.

even though they may be related.

AW: Flowers, seashells, peacock

We keep talking about meditation. Say

feathers, driftwood, and junk assem-

you’re meditating with the idea that

blage—these materials are considered

if you keep meditating then you’ll get

cliché and almost taboo to use in

enlightened. If you start meditating

contemporary art. Yet, over the years

in this goal-oriented way, thinking

you’ve developed a sculptural lexicon

that there are steps along the path,

with these materials.

you may never get there. But if you’re

CB: I think the content of that per-

just going to be a flash and something

versity is part of the hook—that’s the

could happen—you don’t know where it’s

more open to the idea that there’s

difficulty. As a viewer, you sense the

going to happen and you’re just going

perversity of it, and that’s why it’s

to be patient about it—you get to the

ok: it’s ok because it’s perverse. It

goal, ironically, by being non-goal

has invisible barbs. That’s the dis-

oriented. You have to rely on things

agreeable part of the work. And people

that come from unexpected places,

actually need that in order to inter-

being flexible and open to insights.

act with art. So first there’s the idea

I think that’s the type of capacity

of perversity, which makes interact-

that you need in art making. Those

ing with this art object ok, and then

insights could come when you’re sick

there’s hiding the difficulty in a form

or when you’re being your most lazy,

that’s difficult to perceive. You have

where you least expected it—or, in the

to always be creating different ways

worst situation. It could be hiding

to assault the viewer, and you have to

anywhere.

Carol Bove, Setting for A. Pomodoro, 2006. Concrete, bronze, Arnaldo Pomodoro sculpture, driftwood, steel, and wood; 72 × 96 × 144 in. Installation view, Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occuring, Camden Arts Centre, December 7, 2007–February 7, 2008. Curated by Steve Claydon. © Carol Bove. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner New York/London and Maccarone New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Andy Keate.

AW: It goes back to the impulse of

from size, one is left with an

reading the object, not letting the

object or language that appears to

object be something unknown, and

be certain. For me scale operates by uncertainty.²

always trying to categorize it as something recognizable. Eventually it will be recognized—but it’s that

CB: Was Smithson interested in frac-

moment, that special time period.

tals?

CB: Yes, it’s the lifecycle of the

AW: Yes—at least, it seems that way.³

object. In the beginning, it’s larval, that’s when it’s interesting. That’s

CB: Right, he made fractal forms, but

when you don’t know what it is, maybe

I wasn’t sure that he knew about frac-

it’s nothing, maybe it’s terrible. And

tals. I think fractals are interesting.

then people accept it, then it goes to

I’m consistently drawn to situations

a museum, and then it’s kind of dead—

where you sense that objects are

and that’s just the lifecycle.

detached from scale, where you can

AW: The manipulation of scale seems

it was made from a smaller piece. Or,

see a monumental piece, but you know to be an important element in your

where something looks like a model,

work. The inspiration behind Setting

but there’s nothing about it that you

for A. Pomodoro (2006) was based on

can particularly identify that’s mak-

an encounter you had “being in the

ing it look like a model. Those things

Museum of Modern Art, looking down

can detach the object from its scale

at the sculpture garden from a higher

and give you a sense of floating

floor, these mini sculptures—[each

freely. When scale seems separable

one] a reduced linguistic unit—

from the object, you see the miniature

[describe] the relationship [between]

in the monumental, but you could also

the miniature and the monumental.”¹

see the monumental in the miniature.

I wonder if you’ve thought about the function of scale in terms of Robert

AW: Maybe the question of scale is, in

Smithson’s work, for example, in the

a way, going back to the idea of your

distinct experiences of encountering

work being conceptual, but not in the…

the Spiral Jetty (1970), seeing the photographs or drawings, watching the

CB: not in the tradition of conceptual

film, walking on the actual artwork,

art coming out of the 1960s.

reading the text, and thinking about the piece. In the essay “The Spiral

AW: Right.

Jetty,” Smithson wrote: CB: Yes, it’s more like conceptual art The scale of the Spiral Jetty

coming out of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

tends to fluctuate depending on where the viewer happens to be.

AW: Maybe the idea of scale is where

Size determines an object, but

your work becomes conceptual—it’s in

scale determines art. A crack in

the process of imagining the fluctua-

the wall if viewed in terms of

tions between the miniature and the

scale, not size, could be called

monumental in relation to the body.

the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of

CB: Yes, that makes sense. Just to

the solar system. Scale depends

bring it back to the idea of a con-

on one’s capacity to be conscious

flict with the visceral experience,

of the actualities of perception.

you have to introduce the intellectual

When one refuses to release scale

understanding to resolve the conflict,

Carol Bove, Flora's Garden I, 2012. Petrified wood, steel. 144 × 36 × 46 in. Installation view, Carol Bove: Flora's Garden, dOCUMENTA 13, June 9–September 16, 2012. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. © Carol Bove. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner New York/London and Maccarone New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Nils Klinger.

Carol Bove, Mouse Hole, 2016. Found steel, stainless steel, urethane paint, 47 × 46 × 46 in. © Carol Bove. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner New York/London and Maccarone New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Maris Hutchinson.

or to at least have interplay with the

giving false clues so that you can

conflict. Maybe what we were talking

travel with it up to a certain point.

about early on is the idea of how you

But it never really takes you to where

engage both, or how both are engaged.

it promises, so you then have to start

In Flora's Garden I (2012), the

from square one and follow a different

petrified wood as a material is inter-

clue, which is going to drop you some-

esting, because it looks like wood but

place else. Within that, there’s a lot

it’s broken like a stone. You sense it

of space for free play and free asso-

as a stone, but you sense it as wood—

ciation, but it doesn’t lead you to

you have to negotiate the two. It’s

the resolution of a riddle. It’s never

speaking in the language of direct

going to resolve, it’s always going to

experience, but you have to have more

be a space of free play.

of a cerebral knowledge that conditions it.

Carol Bove lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her sculptures, assem-

AW: Right. The impulse of reading

blages, paintings and prints are

guides the intellect, but the concep-

represented in permanent collections

tual understanding doesn’t sit well

around the world including The Museum

with the phenomenological encounter.

of Modern Art, NYC; Fonds Régional

Here, our total mind-body intelli-

d’Art Contemporain, Dunkerque, France;

gence is activated and sets in motion

The Aishti Foundation, Beirut and The

involuntary cognitive processes. The

Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.

mind-body divide is frustrated in

This spring, she will co-represent

this piece the same way that object

Switzerland in the 57th International

and scale or material and form can be

Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

separated in your other pieces. Your work seems to exist neither here nor

Alice Wang is an artist based in Los

there in some latent imaginary zone.

Angeles.

CB: Yes, it’s a huge motif for me: the

Endnotes

thing floating. The heavy thing looks light, the hard thing looks soft, and

1. Tyler Green, “Episode No. 89: Liza

everything is suspended.

Lou, Carol Bove,” The Modern Art Notes

AW: Thinking of suspension, you

com/portfolio/no-89-carol-bove-liza-lou/.

Podcast (July 18, 2013), https://manpodcast.

describe your sculptures as artworks

2. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,”

that can be disaggregated, and in

in The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays

that constitution, they have a shift-

with Illustrations, Nancy Holt, ed. (New

ing identity. What is the difference

York: New York University Press, 1979), 112.

between a hybrid and an aggregate?

3. Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Taste of Time: Salt and Spiral Jetty,” in Robert

CB: A hybrid would be an artwork in

Smithson, Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler,

which you can identify all the con-

eds. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary

stituent elements, kind of like the

Art, and Berkley | Los Angeles | London:

genome, and in that frame, the work

University of California Press, 2004), 103,

can be understood. “It’s part Brancusi,

note 20.

but it has a 1980s Gucci look, and Space Invaders. I have the three parts, now I get it.” I don’t know how you would make something that doesn’t do that, but that’s my interest, to almost refer you to some other place,

Rob Marks

Review: Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion— Cloud Cities

Saraceno’s Anthropocenic Art and the Rise of the Aerocene

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art December 17, 2016– May 21, 2017

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, geologists began to name geological periods—the history of the earth—based on the chronological layering of rocks and organic matter. Although the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic era is most familiar, the subsequent Cenozoic era, whose name means “recent life,” is marked by the procession of the “-cene” epochs, which culminate with what has been provisionally called the Anthropocene, the geochronologic period dominated by human activity. Pending ratification by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the “Anthropocene” is an epoch-in-waiting. Not even its starting point is agreed upon: the spread of agriculture and deforestation, the “Columbian Exchange” of “old” and “new” world species, the Industrial Revolution, or the mid-twentieth century? 1 Still, the term so effectively gives temporal form and meaning to the contemporary experience of living in a world where human acts have shifted even the climate that it has met the embrace of a range of nonscientist thinkers, artists, activists, and public policy planners. Now deep into the Anthropocene, can we imagine a way out of it, beyond humanity’s climate-changing activity? Our carbon-freeing momentum hurtles the world toward a tipping point, with rises in temperature and sea level that, although measured in single digits now, forecast larger effects and enormous events: polar ice melt, coastal inundation, drought. No way out, it seems, but Tomás Saraceno imagines a different way—up— floating into what he calls the Aerocene. Saraceno’s Aerocene dodges the

1. See, in particular, Colin N. Waters, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, et al., “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351, no. 6269: aad2622 (2016), doi: 10.1126/science.aad2622; and a summary of this article, George Dvorsky, “New Evidence Suggests Human Beings Are a Geological Force of Nature,” Gizmodo.com (January 7, 2016). The Science article

argues for the validity of the Anthropocene and its starting point in the mid-twentieth century. See also Stanley C. Finney and Lucy E. Edwards, “The ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch: Scientific Decision or Political Statement?” GSA Today 26, nos. 3–4 (March/April 2016), 4–10, doi: 10.1130/GSATG270A.1, http:// www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/ archive/26/3/abstract/i10525173-26-3-4.htm. Finney, Chair of the International Commission

on Stratigraphy, and Edwards, a Commissioner on the North American Commission on Stratigraphic Nomenclature, argue that “the drive to officially recognize the Anthropocene may, in fact, be political rather than scientific,” since it will take millennia for the fossil record to reflect the most substantive human activities. They do not mention the Science article, which was published just two months prior.

controversy surrounding the geochronologic nomenclature by hypothesizing a time beyond the Anthropocene when the record of human activity will be laid not upon the earth but in cities floating in the air. If most environmental planners envision earthbound adaptations to climate change—a world of towers, barges, sea gates, desalination plants, and mass population movements—the Argentine-born, architecture-trained artist relies on more delicate models—“the intricate structures of soap bubbles and spider webs” 2 —air dwellers that escape the earth. Stillness in Motion— Cloud Cities (2016), a site-specific installation that anchors Saraceno’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition of the same name, summarizes the artist’s response to the decline of life on earth and attempts to free our minds of the earth, at least for the moment. The exhibition is, in effect, a retrospective of Saraceno’s Aerocenic interventions all packed into a single gallery. In addition to Stillness in Motion, the artist exhibits a set of drawings and a sculpture produced in partnership with spiders, a video demonstrating the technological foundation for floating cities, and a sculptural approximation of a floating Aerocene structure. These evoke, more than reveal, Saraceno’s proposal. There are no floor plans, no descriptions of Aerocenic living. But if the stakes of the exhibition are as Saraceno lays out—an “invitation to shape a post fossil-fuel epoch” 3 —then this omission might inspire visitors to conceive other radical resolutions of fossil-fuel dependence.

Making Small to Fit a Big Idea Stillness in Motion, experienced as a sculpture and a model for the networks of human connectivity inherent in Saraceno’s Cloud Cities, reveals the elaborately conceptual underpinnings of the artist’s environmentalist vision without compromising an embodied aesthetic and affective experience. The installation—“a cloud of 10,000 nodes” 4 —links a half dozen polygonal structures. Each structure is studded with cords that radiate to other structures and nodes, forming a matrix that stretches to the 18-foot-high ceiling, the walls, and the floor of the 47-by-59-foot gallery. Suspended above the ground within the matrix, the structures are two to six feet in diameter, and several contain smaller polygons within them. Some of the structures are partially walled with transparent plastic or stainless steel, which at some moments reflect the ceiling lights and at other times mirror objects or people in the gallery. As curator Joseph Becker puts it, Saraceno “conjur[es] an era in which humanity has ceased to negatively impact our planet and instead inhabits sustainable airborne structures that exist in symbiosis with nature and the atmosphere.” 5 On his website, Saraceno elaborates, “When these structures become large enough…they will be able to carry massive payloads, and

2. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “SFMOMA Presents Site-Specific Installation by Tomás Saraceno,” press release, October 6, 2016, updated

December 16, 2016, https:// www.sfmoma.org/press/release/tomas-saraceno/. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Joseph Becker, Tomás

Saraceno: Stillness in Motion— Cloud Cites, wall label, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (December 17, 2016–May 21, 2017).

Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities, installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 17, 2016–May 21, 2017. Photo: © Saul Rosenfield 2017.

remain aloft, as long as the temperature within is one degree warmer than the outside air temperature. Cloud Cities will no longer rely on the power of the Sun and the Earth, but on the simple breathing of the creatures that inhabit it.” 6 Becker places Saraceno within the lineage of Buckminster Fuller—who proposed floating cities in the 1960s—and a range of other “visionary precedents,” including the “structural explorations of the Argentine artist Gyula Kosice,” the “fictional universes of the Italian writer Italo Calvino,” the “futuristic urban visions of the London-based architectural group Archigram,” and the “multidisciplinary, countercultural projects of the Bay Area artist collective Ant Farm.” 7 These thinkers have imagined beyond obvious solutions and even existing technologies, edging toward utopia and science fiction. So it makes sense that Saraceno’s immersive model of cloud-like cities that hover above the Earth, moving freely from one place to another, should materialize to museum visitors as fantastic, a cross between the constructions of a sci-fi movie set designer and the fabrications of a Tinker Toy fanatic. If this seems theatrical, it’s only because Saraceno’s installation uses humble materials in sophisticated ways to transform the gallery into a constructed setting: topographically complex “systematic landscapes,” to use the term of another artist/architect, Maya Lin. Stillness in Motion recalls, in particular, Lin’s installation Water Line (2006), a web of aluminum tubing that renders the undersea topography of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Like Saraceno, Lin endeavors to create works that, according to Systematic Landscapes curator Richard Andrews, “offer a point of entry into our experiential relationship with the natural world…predicated on the belief that a connection to nature is an essential component of our humanity.” 8 Both Saraceno and Lin depict, within the gallery’s bounds, spaces so enormous that they comprise worlds unto themselves. But neither approach reduces these spaces to simple replicas of topography—or to the didactic and activist goals of the artists. How do they accomplish this task? One measure of the success of installations such as Lin’s and Saraceno’s is the willingness of visitors to engage in an imaginative interaction that reframes the false dichotomy of mind and body. We enter Saraceno’s galaxy by foot, as it were, and accept its terms as both abstract sculpture and model for living. In this fusion of understanding and embodiment, visitors achieve the experience of virtual reality without the necessity of an electronic interface.

6. “Cloud Cities,” Aerocene: An Open Artistic Project, http:// aerocene.org/cloud-cities/. According to the Saraceno Studio, the temperature difference depends on the diameter of the structure. Smaller structures might require a twodegree difference; larger one may require only a one-degree difference. SFMOMA Press Office, Personal communication, January 3, 2017. 7. One of the installation’s

labels narrates the connection between Saraceno’s and Fuller’s visions: “In the early 1960s the inventor Buckminster Fuller and the architect Shoji Sadao envisioned Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud 9), a milewide floating city that could house thousands of inhabitants. The low mass-to-volume ratio of its spherical form would allow Cloud 9 to levitate if the air inside were slightly

warmer than outside conditions. Saraceno’s Cloud Cities advances their investigations by exploring more complex geometries.” 8. Richard Andrews, “Outside In: Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes,” in Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes (Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 61.

Maya Lin, Water Line, 2006. Installation view, Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 25, 2008â&#x20AC;&#x201C;January 18, 2009. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

As with all architectural scale models, both Lin’s and Saraceno’s installations require viewers to imagine themselves small in order to transport themselves into these constructed worlds. In fact, as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests, all figurative artworks are scale models, if not always literally miniature in size then minimized by the reduction of the real object to its metaphorical representation. The magic of such a scale model, LéviStrauss says, is in its “renunciation of [its] sensible dimensions” in exchange for “the acquisition of intelligible dimensions.” 9 It’s arguable, in fact, that the viewer’s imaginative insertion of self into the artwork would enhance all art viewing, intensifying the intelligible dimensions that the artwork represents. But if the effort to “enter” a painting in this way might daunt a museum visitor, Stillness in Motion and Water Line both have an advantage: to enter the gallery is to enter the work. These works are multiplicitous. They replace one set of sensible dimensions—city in the clouds, mountain under water—with another equally embodied set, as the visitor walks through, not merely observes, the scale model. Because of the enormity that they represent and the skill with which they represent it, Stillness in Motion and Water Line deliver a whole range of sensible and intelligible dimensions that relate to the immersive artistic installation. In discussing Lin’s work, curator Andrews quotes Rebecca Solnit, whose characterization of installation art also describes this strange and wonderful combination of the intelligible and the sensible: “Installation could be described as an attempt to speak the mind in the languages of the body: space, substance, systems, sensation.” 10 This language of the visitor’s body finds itself responsive to language of the artist, which, according to Lévi-Strauss, locates itself “mid-way between design and anecdote.” Saraceno’s and Lin’s sculptural languages are a species of this mid-way: supported by science, they are more persuasive than anecdote; buoyed by imagination, they are less inhibited than design. They materialize what Lévi-Strauss says “unit[es] internal and external knowledge, a ‘being’ and a ‘becoming,’ [to] produc[e] an object which does not exist as such,” but which the artist “nevertheless [is] able to create.” 11 Propelled through the expanse of space over the course of time, visitors experience a fusion understanding and embodiment, Solnit’s “space, substance, systems, sensation.” Standing at one edge of Stillness in Motion, my eye almost touching a node and sighting along an elastic polyester ropes, I see in the distance a cluster of cords of different thicknesses. They form a polygonal structure that resembles a spherical manifestation of Fuller’s geodesic dome. As my eye follows the rope, my virtual body cannot resist joining in, the length of rope becoming a thoroughfare. Imagining myself small, the polygon becomes a city, the distance, maybe six feet, becomes hundreds of yards, maybe miles. The reflective surfaces contribute to my willing suspension of disbelief by abstracting and expanding the space. The sheer number of nodes stand in not only, as the label states, for “the networks of human connectivity that

9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1966), 24, my emphasis.

10. Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 47. Quoted in Andrews, “Outside In,” 63. 11. Lévi-Strauss, 25.

Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities, installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 17, 2016–May 21, 2017. Photo: © Saul Rosenfield 2017.

Tomás Saraceno, Hybrid Dark solitary semi-social Cluster Kepler-20b built by: a solo Linyphiidae sp.— two weeks—and a solo Cyrtophora citricola—two weeks, rotated 360°, 2016. Spider silk and carbon fiber, 15 ¾ × 7 ⅞ × 7 ⅞ in. Photo: © Saul Rosenfield 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Saraceno envisions in the airborne cities,” but also for the complexity of such arrangements, the ways in which the most lasting tenacious traces of civilization—its architecture—are dependent upon the less tangible entanglements of human conjunction. Saraceno’s installation invites us into this world first by making it intelligible—the city still fits within the gallery—thus revealing if not the actual sensation of what it would be like to live in the clouds, then the virtual sensation of both how cloud living might comprise an urban network and the feeling of wonder such a network might induce. Here, Saraceno approximates, rather than replicates, the experience of the cloud: we accept as floating the experience of suspension, elastic cords standing in for the science of aerostatics.12 The Stillness in Motion installation won’t convince the scientist of the plausibility of what it represents, but it does model a potential arrangement of urban areas and community connectivity. Through his miniaturizing magic, Saraceno is able to emphasize the aspects of the representation that matter most to him, and by extension to us. By “accentuat[ing] some parts and conceal[ing] others,” 13 the unavoidable task Lévi-Strauss assigns to all figurative artists, Saraceno nonetheless reveals to intrepid visitors some portion of the “actual”—in this case, nonetheless, fictional— object of the Cloud City. The interplay of the technological—the idea of the Cloud Cities and their necessity—and the phenomenological is what holds the installation together. Stillness in Motion is not like a plastic model of the solar system, in which metal rods position the sun in relation to the planets. Instead, it is like a game in which visitors have been asked to participate, not by moving things around, but by imagining. Saraceno never tells us the interval from the now to a time when conditions will require retreat, up, into a new age. Neither the physical experience of the installation nor the commentary that accompanies it offers insight into the facts of cloud life or how it would compare and contrast to my life on terra firma. In fact, unlike traditional architectural models, Stillness in Motion offers no indicators of scale, including human figures. (Will we have exceeded even our bodies by then?) The beauty of Saraceno’s installation, however, is that just as it sets the body free from the constraints of typical museum behavior, it sets the mind free to imagine Aerocenic living.14 What would it be like to live in a city like this? What will Aerocenic dwellings, and communities, resemble? Will “up” and “down” shift in meaning when everything is both above and below? None of the activities Saraceno provokes—making myself small, playing the game, imagining a future—reflects normal art museum behavior. Stillness in Motion escapes the vitrine of the architectural model, the 12. Buckminster Fuller describes this phenomenon as a “sky floating tensegrity structure” in his 1981 book, Critical Path: “When the Sun shines on an open-frame aluminum geodesic sphere of one-half-mile diameter, the Sun penetrating through the frame and reflected from the aluminum members of the

concave far side bounces back into the sphere… When the interior temperature of the sphere rises only one degree Fahrenheit, the weight of the air pushed out of the sphere is greater than the weight of the spherical-frame geodesic structure. This means that the total weight of the interior air plus the weight of

the structure is much less than the surrounding atmosphere… [T]he geodesic sphere and its contained air will have to float outwardly, into the sky.” R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 336. 13. Lévi-Straus, 25. 14. This activity seems to be consistent with Saraceno’s

method, which is to inspire a world-wide network of collaborators not only to imagine the Aerocene but also to develop the technologies necessary to achieve it. See Aerocene: An Open Artistic Project, http:// aerocene.org/.

pedestal of the sculpture, and even the gallery, slipping out the back into the playground. The security guard is watchful, but hands out no reprimands for bumping into a wire, leaning against the wall, sitting on the floor, or traversing the sculpture—under cords, over cords, and sometimes both at once.15 Saraceno elevates the visitor’s whole body to the central instrument of perception. And once the artist enlists that body, and the museum grants it this rare freedom, the mind is free also to follow. In fact, it is this reversed order—mind following body, learning following play—that creates the condition by which disbelief might be willingly suspended. At the same time, however, Stillness in Motion provides its own counterpoint. If, at one moment, the reflective surfaces expand the space, at the next, the mirror image of myself or another person disrupts the illusion. The very act of play that the museum encourages, allowing me to use my body to imagine the Cloud City, forces me to consider the immediacy of the space and consider other questions: How do I navigate not only this non-place of the future, but also this place in the moment? Where are my feet, my shoulders? Where are the other visitors? How do I fit in here, with them? I must look up, down, and sideways, close up and distant, dodging and dancing with the dozen anchor points and wires and the dozen other visitors and their equally unpredictable movements. Thus the interplay is not only between technology and phenomenology or the future and the moment, but also between body as constructive and body as potentially destructive. Both Saraceno’s Stillness in Motion and Lin’s Water Line impel visitors to imagine themselves in two locations at once: the space of the gallery, with its insistently physical and visual experience, and the space of immense landscapes—or airscapes in Saraceno’s case—that are beyond common human experience. In Water Line, Lin positions the viewer at the bottom of the South Atlantic Ocean, or, more precisely, beneath the bottom of the sea floor, peering up to the mountain’s apex, tiny Bouvet Island, one of the most remote landmasses in the world. In Stillness in Motion, Saraceno propels us along the connective tissues of communities that would float 20 miles above the Earth. The embodiment that Lin demands is, in a sense, comprised of isolation, breathlessness, and immobility: distant from any habitable land, immersed thousands of feet below the sea level, trapped in the earth’s crust below the ocean floor. Both Lin and Saraceno present the Earth as inaccessible—in Lin’s case, ultimately alien; in Saraceno’s, relinquished—in order to save it. This is not your great-great-great-grandparent’s connection to nature, a place of romance or beauty or even of the sublime. If Lin seeks to strengthen my sense of my humanity by connecting me to nature, Saraceno seeks to reconnect me to nature through my humanity, through his vision of interactive networks and human ingenuity. In this, Stillness in Motion seems an apt physical manifestation for the aspirations, if not always the achievements, of this technological moment: modular, interconnected, and green.

15. On my visits to the exhibition, I never observed this freedom being misused. Visitors honored the space as

gallery, the work as “art,” and applied all the conventional rules associated with these concepts.

Tomás Saraceno, 005, 2015 and 001 K1016c, 2016, of the Cloud Cities Thermodynamics of Self-Assembly series. Carbon fiber, plastic inflatable, glue, and polyester rope. Installation view, Tomás Saraceno: Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 17, 2016–May 21, 2017. Photo: © Saul Rosenfield 2016.

Above: Tomás Saraceno, Solitary mapping of CL 1358+G2G1 by: a solo Tegenaria domestica—two weeks, 2016. Spider silk, ink, and fixative on paper, 16 15⁄16 × 16 15⁄16 × 115⁄16 in. Photo: © Saul Rosenfield 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Following spread: Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene, launches in White Sands (NM, United States), 2015. Photo: © Studio Tomás Saraceno.

The exhibition’s two spider-generated projects visually and functionally model this concept of interconnection as well as the structure of the Cloud City. According to the wall label, the spider projects comprise “explorations of cooperation and cohabitation.” In the first project, Saraceno mounts eight drawings made of flattened spider’s webs enhanced with ink, for example, Solitary mapping of CL 1358+G2G1 by: a solo Tegenaria domestica—two weeks; the drawings evoke the galaxies for which Saraceno names them.16 In the second project, a three-dimensional work, Saraceno “collaborates” with arachnids—solo Linyphiidae and solo Cyrtophora citricola. While inhabiting a carbon fiber armature within an acrylic box for a period of residence, the spiders create a three-dimensional representation of connected space. If Saraceno’s “collaboration” with spiders does not comport with the ethics and politics of consenting human collaborators, they do frame, for the artist, the inevitable entanglements among beings as a condition of being. On his “Hybrid Webs” webpage, Saraceno quotes Dorion Sagan: “[Thus] life is not just about matter and how it immediately interacts with itself but also how that matter interacts in interconnected systems that include organisms in their separately perceiving worlds—worlds that are necessarily incomplete, even for scientists and philosophers who, like their objects of study, form only a tiny part of the giant, perhaps infinite universe they observe.” 17 If Stillness in Motion offers a sense of the whole urban enterprise, a schematic of a world interconnected, two works from Saraceno’s Cloud Cities Thermodynamics of Self-Assembly (2015–16) series, which occupy another corner of the same gallery, display the technology that would support the airborne city. Hovering a few feet above the gallery floor, one plasticballoon-levitated geometric structure stretches five feet across, another is about two feet wide. Tethered to the floor by barely visible filaments of polyester rope, Saraceno’s “self-assemblies” appear as magical, their buoyancy sustained, it seems, by air only a degree warmer than the atmosphere outside its bubble, in accordance with Saraceno’s (and Fuller’s) theory. But it turns out that it is filled with helium, topped off about once a week by SFMOMA staff. When, at the media preview, I expressed confusion— “helium” is absent on the work’s label—the artist smiled and characterized the artwork as a “demonstration.” The non-architect faces limitations to an intuitive understanding of architectural practice, so architects routinely create models like these not so much as working prototypes but rather as explanations of possibility, as demonstrative rather than literal, requiring a suspension of disbelief. Saraceno’s demonstration is consistent with this practice, but his label omission distinguishes his work from typical commentary at both art museums and science museums. Art museum practice would demand that the label include a complete listing of materials, in this case requiring the addition of “helium.” Although science museums

16. Saraceno claims to possess “the only three-dimensional spider web collection” in existence. “Tomás Saraceno: About,” Tomás Saraceno, http://tomassaraceno.com 17. “Projects: Hybrid Webs,” Tomás Saraceno, http:// tomassaraceno.com/projects.

The quotation is from Dorion Sagan’s foreword to Jakob von Uexküll’s 1934 book, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 1.

do sometimes create similar sorts of demonstrations, curators would have sought a way to exhibit the actual technology, not a visual facsimile of it, for example by documenting a balloon flight based on Saraceno’s methods as does the artist’s video, Aerocene, launches White Sands (NM, United States) (2015). The omission of “helium” is part of Saraceno’s hybrid art–sciencedesign-architecture-engineering project, the fictional hot air as the moment of untruth necessary to make his vision real enough for the moment. Art is always a theatrical process, an illusion dependent on the deflection of the viewer’s attention away from the source of the trick. The labels in the exhibition become a crucial part of that illusion; concealing the helium, omitting a description of Cloud City living, and obscuring details of scale all function to avoid foreclosing for the visitor the possibilities of Saraceno’s—and the visitor’s own—vision. The labels achieve just the sort of misdirection that is crucial to magic: they are filled with the evocative detail that studies of museum behavior suggest visitors crave, just not enough to pin down the Cloud Cities, to suture them to the skepticism engendered by radical ideas for a new epoch.

Cenozoic Living At this moment of environmental reckoning, what can art contribute? It can seek to document the tremendous changes wrought by Anthropocenic activity, as do photographer and filmmaker Edward Burtynsky and his collaborator Jennifer Baichwal.18 It can tally and map Anthropocenic extinctions, as Maya Lin does in her ongoing multi-platform memorial project, What Is Missing?, whose “global Map of Memory showcases historical, factual, and personal accounts of what we have lost from the natural world.” 19 Art can also render Anthropocenic dystopias as these futures verge toward anthropo-absence. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which is evocative enough to comprise a work of visual art, tracks the wanderings of an unnamed father and son, victims of an unspecified apocalyptic event that has left the landscape uninhabitable and its other inhabitants dangerous.20 The novel tenderly portrays the survival of compassion and love without descending into a saccharine or untruthful evasion of the catastrophe it depicts. All three interventions force us, today, to imagine a future beyond our comprehension, when geochronological strata will reveal the devastation that humans will have wrought on ourselves. Or art can invoke the Anthropocene by envisioning a new epoch, the simple act of imagining beyond our time forcing the art participant into a radical recasting of perspective, looking forward to see backward to this contemporary moment. Saraceno frames his symbiotic Cloud Cities as places we

18. See Raffi Khatchadourian, “The Long View: Edward Burtynsky’s Quest to Photograph a Changing Planet,” The New Yorker (December 19 & 26, 2016), 80–95. 19. Maya Lin, “What Is

Missing?” Maya Lin Studio, http://www.mayalin.com/. See http://www.whatismissing.net/. 20. Cormac McCarthy, The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

could inhabit in an attempt to save the planet from ourselves before it is too late. In his vision of the clean, buoyant Aerocene, humanity embraces a fossil-fuel-free future now, and the Earth survives intact. But, the history of sci-fi is littered with Cloud-City-like habitations that have risen in the wake of an irrevocably spoiled Earth, last-ditch alternatives to the toxic, sunken Anthropocene. In this sense, Stillness in Motion double-punches us with two contradictory futures, both of which might enlist the Cloud City: one, a hopeful and beautiful image of a sustainable Aerocenic future that reclaims the Anthropocene; and the other, the dystopian vision of irrevocably toxified Anthropocenic one, in which the Cloud Cities become last resorts, spaceships to raise us above the uninhabitable earth. But, and here’s the kicker, no matter which epoch you imagine—Saraceno’s Cloud Cities protect the fragile Earth from the people, or Saraceno’s Cloud Cities protect the people from the toxified Earth—you find yourself ungrounded, unEarthed. Or, more precisely, you find yourself grounded in loss, a lost terrestriality. Saraceno believes in his vision. And it is a vision worth pursuing. It might be, in the end, that the job of art is to use any means—utopian or dystopian— to bring us to this precipice of truth in order to impel us to step backward. Rob Marks writes about art and aesthetic philosophy. He publishes in Daily Serving, Art Practical, Frieze, and X-TRA. He has written extensively on the nature of the museum and on the work of Richard Serra. His chapter “In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time: Feeling Your Way Through Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time,” is forthcoming in Sarah Lippert’s Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics (I.B. Tauris).

Kyle Proehl

Review: Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday

Woman at Point Zero

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York July 26–October 31, 2016

Against the back wall of the darkened gallery in Sophia Al-Maria’s Black Friday exhibition at the Whitney Museum, a large, vertical screen loomed over a bed of sand, awaiting approach like a shrine. The sand, piled six inches deep, was strewn with phones and a few tablets, each plugged into a snaking wire and chattering its own repeated, programmed scene, some cut from, all in reflection of the main feature on the big screen. (Black Friday was actually two pieces: Black Friday above and The Litany below, which is worth noting only to keep track of commodification; imagining them split is discouraging.) The chopped, shivering memes seem cast off and forgotten by the video above, where a man’s resounding voice preaches the evil of contemporary temples of purchase. A woman and her child, dressed in white, make their way through marble halls in synthetic dusk toward a fluorescent noon that breaks with a climactic bellowing and the arrival of a femme fatale. The camera follows past shuttered shops in the empty mall at a sluggish tilt like swimming, until a woman in black abaya appears; it holds on her strutting ankles, then cuts to overhead shots of her body splayed on the floor, then on the stairs, as though what she had threatened was her own doom. Rather than the simple melodrama of a consumerist allegory, the video is suffused with the normalized fear embodied by a pair of moving walkways that, seen from above, evoke the image of a familiar pair of towers that have yet to fall. While Black Friday’s three-month run anticipated the November shopping holiday, the middle of that run fell almost precisely on September 11. The video loops and leans toward dream, so things are more associative than causal; but like a dream, the fragments of narrative accumulate meaning. It begins and ends with the moving walkways scrolling against each other, appearing to bend the fixed space, towering above the phones lying in the sand like debris. Yet while the atomized cries glow with a sense of decay, the looming scroll feels ascendant, the magical fixation of flux. Shopping malls have come to resemble airports and vice versa, lubricant hubs where you can watch circulation drive consumption, rather than the reverse; where the commute bleeds into migration; where phones are like undropped anchors, offering the illusion of safe return. If checking in at a place of business has given way to safety checks during a disaster, this is because the two have been entwined since at least the fall of 2001. That is, the way we use our phones is inseparable from commerce and catastrophe. Whether we huddle separately over small screens or side by side before a big one, digital communication bears the weight of desperation, in our anxious, repetitive attempts to prepare for a tragedy that has already happened. Are we getting any closer? 38

Sophia Al-Maria, Black Friday, 2016, and The Litany, 2016. Sand, glass, smartphones, computer screens, tablet computers, and USB cables, with multichannel looped digital video, color and black-and-white, sound; durations variable. Installation view, Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 26â&#x20AC;&#x201C;October 31, 2016.Â Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris and The Third Line, Dubai. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Sophia Al-Maria, Black Friday, 2016. Video still. Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai.

These are the fractures that define Al-Maria’s world. She was at the American University in Cairo in September 2001, and she watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center while standing in a crowd around a television outside a shisha cafe. She records the moment in a late chapter of her memoir The Girl Who Fell to Earth. The book begins with the story of her Bedouin father, who leaves the provinces of Saudi Arabia for Tacoma, Washington, where he meets Sophia’s mother. Much of the rest moves between rural Washington and modernizing Qatar. Al-Maria’s story follows a conventional arc of awakening, with insistent metaphors and mentions of space; but she also refuses to indulge exoticism in either direction, so that the moon and the stars become a ballast, a reference to the sharing of difference. When writing about the World Trade Center attacks, Al-Maria sticks initially to the unspoken consensus that there is nothing to be said beyond accounting for where you were at the time: “No words I write could even begin to touch the horror of the event, but whether in New York or Cairo, everyone was afraid.” 1 But in the aftermath’s compulsory viewing, her vision collects itself: “The frantic loops of conversation and the patter of car commercial/ horrific images/insurance ads were the symbolic externalization of all our internal monologues.” 2 The moment at the cafe recedes into a chapter that begins with her arrival in Egypt and ends with her moving out of the dorms into a houseboat on the Nile. She skims through the neon welcome of a city both ancient and futuristic, through a plague of “pure-process magenta” 3 locusts that descends on the city at the start of September, the attack she suffers that night by a man with his “flappy thing”4 reaching out of his fly, the cops’ dismissal of her complaint, the personal fury that builds across similar experiences toward political rage, the increasing distance from her high school boyfriend, and the navigation of margins and misunderstanding toward something that might feel like home. The American demand to consecrate the suffering of 9/11 is displaced by the uncanny, by longing, by movement and flight and struggle, by a sense of breaking away. At the end of the chapter, she writes, “I could reinvent myself in a room of my own, begin from a blank page, like enjoying the moments before writing in a fresh notebook full of virgin paper.” 5 Al-Maria’s first solo show, Virgin with a Memory, took place at Cornerhouse, in Manchester, England, in 2014. In a video on the Cornerhouse website, she refers to the show as a collection of DVD extras for her unmade revenge film Beretta, an homage to Abel Ferrara’s 1981 film Ms. 45. In the Ferrara film, set in New York, a mute young woman working at a fashion agency is raped twice in a matter of minutes by two different men. The first is a mugger who assaults her on her way home from work. The second has broken into her apartment, and she manages to kill him. In shock, she cuts his body into pieces, which she puts in her refrigerator and discards one by one throughout the city. The film ends at a Halloween party, where she has dressed up as a 1. Sophia Al-Maria, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), 225. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid, 217. 4. Ibid, 219. 5. Ibid, 228–29.

nun and brought along a gun, a .45. She more or less indiscriminately shoots the men at the party, until a coworker picks up a cake knife and stabs her in the back. As she turns and falls, she looks the other woman in the eyes and says, “Sister.” Al-Maria’s Beretta remains unmade in part because it came too near the intellectual property line of Ms. 45, though not for Ferrara. His words, “Just let the chick make the film, man,” appear on the cover of Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-In (2014). Black Friday’s big moment, when an “apocalyptic sky trumpet” 6 announces the woman in black, is a glimpse of what could have been, or what still might be. The Exhibition Tie-In offers another. Fragments of the novelized Beretta script alternate with diary entries about Al-Maria trying to make the film; both are interspersed with chat transcripts, scans of script, pixelated photos of interiors and obstructed faces, and an image file name that stretches across three pages. Her foreword calls the book “a small act of de-mystification.” 7 It is also a kind of portrait of creative animus as Medea: as Al-Maria’s frustrations mount, her heroine sinks deeper in violence. The fantasy of retribution stands in for justice when justice seems unobtainable. Beretta is set in Cairo, and Al-Maria is told more than once that the film’s ideas, and by extension the filmmaker’s, are not Egyptian enough. An American-born Egyptian man at a gallery opening tells her she doesn’t know about violence, referring presumptuously to her lack of participation in Egypt’s recent uprising. On an earlier page is a scan of the cover of Bidoun magazine’s twenty-fifth issue, which shed its gloss and glue and color for a black-and-white, stapled, and disordered attempt to meet the gaze of revolution. The cover features Al-Maria’s words recounting a dream of flying over Cairo. Black Friday was shot by drone in an empty, opulent shopping mall in Doha. It bobs, floats, dives, and ascends through the liquid air of dreaming. It dodges men on buffing machines, stalks the woman and her son in white, fixes on the heels of the woman in black, and hovers over her contorted body. While the gaze may not be the eyes of war, neither is it neutral. The minimal narrative suggests a mannequin, shaped and painted as a woman, springing to life then returning to its inanimate state. The woman in white walks with her son, then the son is gone and another woman, or perhaps the same one, appears in the color of mourning. The preacher’s voice haunting us through the video belongs to the actor Sam Neill, the hero of Jurassic Park (1993). We are in the object world of man’s willing seduction, but the desired calamity turns to fluid. The femme fatale, that modern siren, appears dramatically but briefly, to walk in circles.

6. https://sophiaalmaria. wordpress.com/2016/08/11/ blackfridayalldayeveryday/. 7. Sophia Al-Maria, Virgin With a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-In (Manchester, England: Cornerhouse, 2014), 9.

Above: Sophia Al-Maria, Black Friday, 2016, and The Litany, 2016. Sand, glass, smartphones, computer screens, tablet computers, and USB cables, with multichannel looped digital video, color and black-and-white, sound; durations variable. Installation view, Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 26–October 31, 2016. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris and The Third Line, Dubai. Photo: Ron Amstutz.

Following spread: Sophia Al-Maria, Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-In, 2014. First published on the occasion of the exhibition Sophia Al-Maria: Virgin with a Memory, curated by Omar Kholeif, Cornerhouse, Manchester, September 6–November 2, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Sophia Al-Maria, Sisters 5, 2016. Photographic print, 78 Ă&#x2014; 44 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai.

The boy and the men on buffers are not the focus, and the male suffering that would be depicted in Beretta is absent—unless you can imagine suffering without direct representation. Sisters, Al-Maria’s contribution to the 2015 New Museum Triennial, also featured a lack of male figures. Looping, chopped, pixelated videos pulled from the web, all or almost all of women dancing in Muslim dress, were projected on three fiberglass screens hung like staggered, raised curtains around a wall-mounted cellphone. On the phone played a video of a girl singing. She leaned back in a bed against a wall in a room lit dimly by sunlight, her face cloaked in a digital veil. Her song— all longing and echo—is cut short, a matter of seconds; the horizon or seduction of sound pulled you in to push you away. With each repetition, the music receded, a teasing denial of possession. Set against the Triennial’s discord, where the artworks appeared to interrupt each other, Sisters reflected the allure of impossible refuge. Black Friday worked in reverse, insisting on refuge as enveloping doom. In Black Friday too, the sound worked against the space, or seemed to supplant the spatial horizon of installation with a temporal fluidity that escaped the confines of the gallery, which felt less like a room than a pause in a cold wind’s passing, so that the sand appeared not piled on the floor but in the midst of being removed. At the end, or what may not be the end at all, of Black Friday, when we’re looking again at the walkways, we hear Al-Maria’s voice. She recounts riding one in Doha past a group of American soldiers in civilian clothes. They are obviously soldiers, despite the attempt to blend in, and she is wearing a veil. She recognizes one of them as a guy she knew in school in the United States. He doesn’t recognize her, and she imagines she fits the description of a target in his training. The distance between their passing cannot be bridged. She calls it a bad dream. We don’t need pictures of Abu Ghraib to think this dream might be American, but hearing Al-Maria shifts the video’s tone, pulls it away from sleep. The walkways are walkways, the phones in the sand are not fallen stars, the murmur of shopping returns. Al-Maria speaks in flat, exhausted bitterness. There is no rise to seduction, only recognition of its muting. Her veil may be both disguise and display, just as his casual dress can be as conspicuous as any uniform. Seeing is obstructed no less by your own habit as by another’s apparent costume. In The Girl Who Fell to Earth, the chapter that follows Al-Maria’s reflections on September 11 is about losing her virginity. Her Saudi boyfriend has gone to school in Boston, and she meets an American student in Cairo. She comes to that realization which, once arrived at, always seems late: “The concept of falling in love more than once was liberating.” 8 What happens happens, but there is no melodrama over choosing this or that boy. With a light touch, she attends tenderly to each moment, while pulling loose the threads that would bind the occasion to a predestined meaning.

8. Al-Maria, The Girl Who Fell to Earth, 237.

The positive side of that flux, of what appears an unceasing expenditure, is its power of renewal, where out of the exhausted depths unwinds a tenacious desire. She holds us in that moment in Black Friday, above the walkway as she looks to the warrior for the boy she might have known. No penetrating glances occur, no exchange of understanding. What makes this holding apart greater than the power of alienation is how the refused collision renounces the image of fate. A lingering approach suffuses the collected moments with a semblance of chance. The dream may have yet to begin. Kyle Proehl is an editor at Art Handler. Baad, a work of collaborative fiction, was published last year by Les Presses Editables.

Doran George Can We Have Sex? Michael Turinskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dancing Against Compulsory Ableism Introduction by Neha Choksi

Doran George kinks the love letter, presenting not a romantic subject but a body in heat thinking about being in heat, desiring sex. This heat is in reaction to a performance, My body, your pleasure (2014), a heat which plunges through the dancing bodies to desire a specific body, that of the choreographer Michael Turinsky, whose work addresses his own cerebral palsy.* Turinsky’s figure is integral to the substance of his work in the same way that the margin holds the center. His anomalous embodiment is physically peripheral, his figure lingering in the very corner upstage left. He leaves that spot twice, briefly: once stutteringly pushing a wheelchair center stage for the pink-bikini-clad Asian female dancer to sit on and deliver a monologue, and a second time wheeling himself seated to stage center to voice joyously some barely comprehensible words related to fucking. But his body remains in the dance because the dancers at different points reproduce his body’s capacities, his body’s movements, his body’s challenges to the temporarily able-bodied. Turinsky has choreographed this precisely to evoke his own body and his—and your—pleasures. My body, your pleasure wants to dislodge sex and disability into a public provocation, available and visible. Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes that to have a body is to locate it, to engage in a spatial act. George’s letter extends Turinsky’s use of bodies as “staged(d) environments” (to use a phrase of Petra Kuppers, the disability culture activist and scholar) to stage George’s own pleasures. George mentions staring at Turinsky. Staring is usually what the able-bodied do when faced with the physically disabled, theatricalizing disability as a public performance. Is the work of the letter to translate that staring into an erotics, a multivalent economy of seductive gazing and sexual desiring? George’s letter and Turinsky’s body, both full of desire, teach us how to resist by embracing each other. —Neha Choksi

Doran George PhD is a cultural historian writing on sexual culture, avant-garde dance, and performance. They are also a performance artist and choreographer who deconstructs socio-political identity categories, stages work that builds micro-communities, and cultivates radical practices of intimacy. George’s artwork and scholarship is represented in art books, Oxford University Press anthologies, and journals. George currently lectures in Disability Studies and LGBTQ Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, and teaches erotic work in both art and sex-positive contexts. Neha Choksi is an artist and a member of the editorial board of X-TRA.

* A video recording of My body, your pleasure is available at https://vimeo.com/109161478. For further information, see http://michaelturinsky.org/9-english/20-my-body,-your-pleasure-english.

You are hot and I want to have sex with you. I’m revealing my desire because your dance, My body, your pleasure, which I saw at Germany’s oldest integrated disabled and non-disabled arts festival, challenges how bodies marked as disabled get de-sexualized. Declaring my attraction isn’t rhetorical; as a sex-positive artist working in the academy, I consciously resist the exclusion of the erotic from intellectual discourse. My embodied response to your dance challenges the belief in absolute objectivity that would require a disavowal of the body. Observing you in your dance from a safe distance turns your body into an object, and well, voyeurism isn’t my thing. By letting you and my readers know that I want to get in your pants, I’m foregrounding my lust to reject intellectual detachment, which I see as part of the will to absolute knowledge that we inherit from European colonialism. This letter thus consciously opens up pleasure, sensation, and desire as strategies for thinking— or should I say feeling—about dance, disability, sexual culture, and social power.

Dear Michael,

February 3, 2017

The problem of professionalized diversity is also evident in the way contemporary dance covets the kinetic difference that disability offers. Choreography that includes disability validates the art form’s rejection of compulsory ableism, affirming that contemporary

Yes, I am making a pass at you. By doing so I’m questioning the middle-class protocols by which art and educational institutions have embraced the political aim of cultural diversification, wanting or needing to affirm their inclusion of marginalized voices. Your dance reminded me of how, in the absence of a working-class “call a spade a spade” sensibility, language and behavior get regulated through professionalization, which, since the late twentieth century, has been increasingly infused with identity politics. I’m happy that we see greater diversity in the arts and education, your and my position in those fields are probably in part a result of this process. But middle-class propriety invariably leaves marginalized folk carrying multiple dimensions of the body that are unsettling for professional culture, including the erotic and its discontents. As you put it when we sat talking in Mainz Staatheater’s canteen after your show, in contemporary dance, bodies marked as disabled get fetishized for their intellectual capacity and creativity while being robbed of the pleasures of being sexually objectified. You want to be sexually objectified.

The British company that I danced for, CandoCo, and Oakland’s Axis, broke new ground in the 1990s by staging a unique movement language built through kinetic cooperation between disabled and non-disabled dancers. Yet, in line with your frustration at not being sexually objectified, the choreography made disability available for dance viewership while tending to assure its audience they wouldn’t have to confront their erotic attraction or repulsion toward disabled bodies. In order to gain access to concert stages, disabled performers had to comply with the prevailing conceit of chasteness in contemporary dance. This sustains a pattern of desexualizing disability, rooted in the infantilization of disabled people, which is partly based upon an assumption that they can’t or shouldn’t reproduce, let alone experience sexual pleasure. Choreographers and dancers that are marked as disabled are fetishized for their

dance is progressive. But some key elements of that ableism get left in place. Historically, classical and modern dance, the precursors to contemporary dance, idealized versions of elegance and capacity in ways that purported to evacuate eroticism from the body and excluded disability from the concert stage. In the late twentieth century, disabled bodies began achieving visibility in contemporary dance by presenting themselves as uniquely elegant and capacious, while complying with the exclusion of sexuality.

Our discussion of the moment, in My body, your pleasure, when an East Asian dancer appears holding two plates of wobbling jello overhead, exemplifies our intellectual intercourse. The bright pink jello exceeds the color of any fleshy breast, the body part to which I assume the quivering desserts refer, while conveying the

But by focusing on these terribly earnest reasons for talking about sex, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m diverting my intention to proposition you, and I am sanitizing my desire. I found you arousing as we sat drinking and talking post-show, and had hoped we might go back to the budget hotel together. Maybe Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d see the inside of your room, leave fingerprints on the accessible bathroom grab bar. But I have to admit that, along with your looks and your body, your intellect was beguiling. You engaged eagerly as I probed beneath the surface of your choreography. While conceding that my undressing of the dance might reveal one dimension of an image or action, you insisted that others were at play, and thus disrobed your dance for me further, drawing me into its undergarments.

intellectual and creative prowess, while the price of their inclusion in contemporary dance is a constant pussyfooting around sex. The dirty secret that is never acknowledged is that their bodies are constructed as not only undesirable, but also devoid of desire.

In hyperbolic seductive tones, using continental philosophy’s vocabulary, she delivers a diatribe on art and intimacy, but then dismisses anyone’s interest in her intellect, charging: “Are you open-minded enough to seriously consider me as a potential sexual partner? Do you have the balls to do it with me?” Now I see Shimokowa as a surrogate for you, her sexualized image thwarts our association of her scholarly discourse with her, which is analogous to the difficulty we might have taking in what you say because our idea of your disability masks your subjecthood. So convinced was I of this reading that my project of propositioning you was fueled by Shimokowa’s sexual invitation. Yet while you confirmed some of my suspicions, you also insisted she symbolizes your desire to be

commercial sex-industry’s idealization of white female availability. But the dancer’s race draws attention to the exotic alternative that Asian femaleness signifies in the same context. Manaho Shimokawa, the jello holder, sits in a wheelchair I’d imagined was meant for you. The intensity of her sexual objectification lubricates your first entrance onto the stage. Enjoying the comfort of anonymity in the darkened auditorium, I want to gawk at your disabled perambulation, something middle-class prohibitions on staring would never allow. But the pink bikini, hackneyed smile, and accompanying physical language of Shimokawa, instructs me to focus on her.

I took this discursive back and forth with you as our foreplay that, while intellectually driven, was also physically charged. The multidirectional, contrapuntal motion of your head, shoulders, elbows and hands, lips and jaw, beckoned me into your motile maze. Your words stretched time, and stretched across time, with verbal melody. You punctuated your ideas with surprising lurches of your voice that were in delicate accord with your polycentric bodily motion, seducing me in the process. As ideas, body parts, and tones gathered in impeccable staccato rhythm, I noticed tension in myself, an unbidden desire to dampen the motile and verbal fireworks you set off in our conversation. Was I maybe experiencing the way you were speaking as a physical struggle; one I wanted to ease? You aren’t the first person with cerebral palsy I’ve talked to, but previously my insistence on a liberal conviction that I must model equality has masked my underlying assumption that the motion and speech associated with

sexually objectified. A pink bikini-ed Asian woman struggles to claim intellectual prowess, but it is sexual objectification that eludes your disabled body. Yet I suspect this symbolic surrogacy works because of the complex web of race and gender that European colonialism has left us with: intellectual prowess might get projected onto you as a disabled white guy in a way that it wouldn’t onto Shimokowa, whether or not she used a wheelchair.

The dancers’ skilled execution of your movement alleviates some of my concerns about your choreographic strategy. When people not diagnosed with cerebral palsy imitate the angular holding patterns and juddering shifts from intense muscular flexion to extension, it’s usually to demean those who are diagnosed. Yet rather than mocking you, your dancers demonstrate dedication to your vocabulary; the two men, who would pass as white, are joined in this later by Shimokowa

The performance begins with two well-lit male dancers seated side by side in chairs downstage left, facing out. You’re upstage right, in half-light, with a laptop at your knees. The audience quiets after sustained stillness and silence, then a tremble begins in the ribcage of one of the men; movement radiates through his arm, and fingers struggle to separate as if glued together, then coming back together with suddenness.

cerebral palsy needs correcting. With greater awareness of the personal dynamics propelled by compulsory ableism, I counseled myself that any urge to make you more comfortable was probably me avoiding my discomfort. I breathed into the moment, taking in the aesthetics of your embodiment. You’d taught me how to do this in My body, your pleasure. At your behest, your dancers performed your movement, unmistakably that of someone with cerebral palsy.

Despite the cultural gains made by having dancers without cerebral palsy embody movement language that we associate with the diagnosis, I still see a problem. By embodying your movement signature alongside perambulation and other quotidian movement that generally connotes physical normality, your dancers not only establish the aesthetic value of how you move, but also claim skill and dexterity that eludes you. The way that you’ve made your vocabulary attractive to me has moved me beyond fetishizing your intellectual prowess. But I fear my desire is for the artistic innovation that the inclusion

and a white female dancer. However, there’s another problem. Activists criticize casting the non-disabled in disability roles as robbing disabled performers of employment opportunities over which they command experiential authority. Disagreement about Oscar winning performances are a case in point, such as Daniel Day Lewis’s rendition of Christy Brown, the Irish painter and writer with cerebral palsy, in the bio-pic My Left Foot (1989). Are you denying dancers with cerebral palsy some of the few available roles in contemporary dance? But it’s precisely because your cast doesn’t share your diagnosis that I’m looking at the movement as dance. You’ve asserted the aesthetic value of your everyday kinetic patterns and broken with a prevailing assumption in contemporary dance that seamless able-bodied motion is a necessary foundation for choreography.

I think this is why your sexual provocation is so important. As either a metaphor for, or a practice of, social engagement, erotic entanglement has a greater potential for mutual vulnerability than middle-class protocols that are bound up in politesse. That’s why I’ve decided to proposition you in order to talk about your work. My vulnerability is also on the table, because the question is are you attracted to me? Having sat and talked with me, you know I’m not obviously marked as disabled, so fetishization of my intellectual

of disability promises, the kinetic difference that I earlier suggested contemporary dance covets. The problem is that with this creative development, non-disabled bodies reassert themselves as normal, being bodies that can “do” disability when they choose, or not do disability, while the existential challenges of disability disappear into excitement about the next wave of artistic innovation. Without the explicit political critique of compulsory ableism, doesn’t disability become a kind of sublime difference, elegance powerfully reinvented, even to the point of it being inelegant and therefore all the more interesting? Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited by this artistic maneuver. But if we consume cerebral palsy for its groundbreaking artistic potential, we risk overlooking the day-today challenges built into a physical environment and culture that presumes a normative sensory, motile, cognitive, and emotional body.

This explication of how my body, like yours, is marked as other than normal in a sexual economy of attraction and repulsion has a purpose. I’m launching a textual strategy to build upon your intervention in contemporary dance’s chasteness when you invite your

prowess isn’t the problem. But you’ve also tasted how I circulate in an erotic economy of attraction and repulsion. I transgress gender in ways that makes me conspicuously queer. Queeny as I am, it’s easy to value me for my humor rather than my intellect, even when I’ve said nothing funny. Bodies like mine tend to be hyper-sexualized, but struggle to be taken seriously in their sexual desire. Some straight non-transsexual women enjoy how my flaming nature signifies a lack of sexual threat for them, while gay guys are often repulsed by what they see as a lack of power in my sissyness (the prime target for schoolyard homophobic violence), even while they delight in what they see as my heroic visibility. Straight men, at least the non-transsexual variety, or let’s say cissexual, especially those raised as the kind of masculine that we inherit from European colonialism, see my gender as a threat by association. Don’t stand too close, or you might seem gay, and thus they prefer highly sanitary encounters, making me want to ooze my nelliness all over them, perhaps like you do your cripness, claiming sexualized space where it is simultaneously enforced and denied.

Will you enter into this erotic exchange with me? Don’t get me wrong— I’m not fishing for compliments. While I know that your soundtrack for My body, your pleasure moves from Jamaican dance hall to queer rap—from homophobia to homo-hop—I also noticed that you chose to have

In postmodern dance historical terms, both of us are anything but pedestrian. I’m thus fantasizing about the discordant sexual music we might make together: my pronounced assibilation of f’s and s’s (snakey s’s as they’ve been called) tinkling through your atonal enunciation. My frivolous hands and arms, coy tilts of my head, brazen puffed out chest, and scattergun laughter dancing in maniacal bliss with the rapid jerking joints, obtuse angles, and gamboling emphasis of your quotidian movement.

audience to look at you as sexual fair game. Much like the anonymity of darkened theater seating, the pretension to academic detachment would normally hold the well-behaved relationship between audience and artist, non-disabled and disabled, viewer and viewed, in place. So I’m sullying this intellectual contemplation by marking myself, while perhaps also aiming to ameliorate my anxiety about how people will react to hearing me describe your movement and speech patterns. I’m breaking the middle-class code of promising not to stare and exposing my own socio-sexual vulnerability as rhetorical protection.

‒Doran

With kisses like mead wine,

the female dancing bodies show more flesh on your stage than the boys, so there’s no guarantee that you would find my male embodiment enticing. I might not be your type. But I’m looking for the same kind of honesty that you demand of your audience, be that repulsion or attraction. Like you assert in your work, I’m curious about practices of intimacy as means of resistance, and in this sense, I’m calling your bluff. How about doing some resisting with me?

Mariah Garnett, Suzy Halajian and William E. Jones One More Long Take

Mariah Garnett and William E. Jones’s

William E. Jones: I remember see-

experimental, research-based, and

ing your Peter Berlin piece with the

multifaceted practices are rooted in

film projected on the disco ball

documentary filmmaking and critical

(Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had

engagements with archival sources.

With Peter Berlin, 2012). I think

Their works explore unexpected nar-

that was the first time I had seen

ratives and complex histories that

your work.

interrogate the role of the subject, the spectator, and the documentarian.

MG: I remember when you walked in,

Both artists also unapologetically

and you said, “Where did she get these

and distinctly tackle sex and gender.

old images of Peter Berlin?” If I ever

In anticipation of their two-person

I would put that quote on the back.

had a DVD jacket for that installation, exhibition, The Long Take, which I curated at Los Angeles Contemporary

WJ: You fooled me.

Archive in the summer of 2016, Garnett and Jones joined me one hot

SH: You’ve both engaged with porn star

Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles.

Peter Berlin. Mariah, in the single-

We recorded our conversation while

channel version of Encounters I May Or

thinking through which of their video,

May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, you

photo, and archival works to include

attempt to embody Berlin as you reen-

in the show. The conversation has

act his poses in his signature style,

been edited for publication. For more

and later on you actually interview

information and images from the show,

Berlin in his apartment. And William,

visit: http://lacarchive.com/long-

you include footage of Berlin in your

take-0.

59-minute work v.o. (2006), which is composed of various segments of gay

—Suzy Halajian

porn films produced prior to 1985. Was the initial impetus to delve into Peter

Suzy Halajian: How familiar were you

Berlin’s world a nostalgic one?

with one another’s practices before this exhibition?

WJ: The video v.o. came out of my experience working for Larry Flynt.

Mariah Garnett: I was pretty familiar

I was producing a line of budget

with William’s work. In fact, he came

compilation DVDs—four hours for ten

to screen Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays

dollars—composed of scenes from old

Itself (1972) in Thom Andersen’s class

gay porn titles owned by Hustler

at CalArts, and I was the teaching

Video. I was most attracted to scenes

assistant.

from movies that were shot on film, and consequently were of the most

Mariah Garnett, Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin, 2012. Video still. 16mm film, color, sound, 20 min. Courtesy of the artist.

aesthetic interest. Two of the best

ago, I gave a talk with Barbara

were the Peter Berlin films. I have to

Hammer, who came to prominence as

confess that I don’t find Peter Berlin

a lesbian feminist filmmaker in the

sexy as a performer. He interacts very

early 1970s. We were both a little

little with others, because he’s most

apprehensive at first, but it ended

concerned with his own attractive-

up being a delightful event. She was

ness. His work is an enormous project

really afraid that my work would

of self-portraiture, an expression of

have all these penises in it, and she

hardcore narcissism. For me, there’s

wanted nothing to do with that. Women

no access there, but it allowed some-

of later generations are embracing

thing to happen for Mariah.

gay porn in its sexual explicitness.

MG: The work was actually partially

MG: I guess there’s a fair amount of

influenced by your work, because I

that now. It’s been re-appropriated

was looking at pre-AIDS-era gay porn

by a younger generation. Maybe it’s

that has one foot in experimental film

because images of women, especially

and one foot in this new genre that

pornographic images of women, are

was gay porn, which had no real mar-

so charged. It’s impossible to look

ket yet. It was gay men making images

at any images of women without them

for their own pleasure; there was no

bearing some relation to sexism and

structure codifying how it was sup-

exploitation. Gay porn effectively

posed to look. And then I came across

removes that problem—for women—and

Peter Berlin, whose films are so

in that early gay porn, there is this

aesthetic, and something about the

sense they are doing it because they

narcissism was compelling to me. Not

are turned on by it, which is hot.

in a sexually titillating way, but there was something about how earnest

WJ: I think it’s also that early gay

and un-self-critical it was. There was

porn stages something like pure sex

also the style that he’s completely

in a way that people want to use for

fabricated, which is hypermasculine

their own purposes today. This relates

but also weirdly androgynous.

to my writing on Boyd McDonald (1925–

WJ: The pageboy haircut.

zine, Straight to Hell (1970s). Boyd

MG: Yeah, it was like discovering this

ences” like an anthropologist of smut.

person who is off by himself doing

He wasn’t making erotica by transform-

this little thing totally obsessively

ing sex stories into literature, but

and generating thousands and thou-

rather presented the sex writing of a

1993), publisher of the first queer collected “true homosexual experi-

sands of images purely for his own

multitude of anonymous men in all its

pleasure. He didn’t parlay it into a

unadorned glory. His ideal, he used

financial career, really; he avoided

to say, was the graffiti in public

the spotlight. He was doing it for

toilets, which gets straight to the

his own self-gratification, and that

point. Some older gay men have read

played into this cliché narrative of

my work with a certain incomprehen-

what an artist is supposed to be: “I

sion. They’re not really sure why the

do it because I have to.” That’s not

subjects of my research are some-

the way I make art.

thing special, because they were so

WJ: Another aspect of your Peter

daily experience in previous decades.

much a part of the fabric of their Berlin work is that it reflects a

On the other hand, almost all of the

radical change in women’s attitudes

most positive reviews I’ve gotten for

toward early gay porn. A few years

my book True Homosexual Experiences:

Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell

built in to second-wave feminism and

(2016) have come from women who are a

was the context for images of les-

generation or two younger than I am,

bians from that era. I know a lot of

and that’s been very gratifying.

people don’t identify as women who

I wonder why that is the case.

love other women; they think about it in more abstract terms, and one way

One way into Boyd’s project is through

to do that is to look at gay porn.

his film writing. He wrote wonderful

It’s gay, but you can, like you said,

essays on actresses. He saw them as

inhabit the body of another gender,

often humiliated by an industry that

and then perform these mental sex

transformed them into sex objects and

acts with the other person. It becomes

oppressed them. For Boyd, the best

really complicated conceptually,

actresses got through this with a

which is exciting, I think. It takes

sense of dignity by making wisecracks

you out of being stuck in this gender

or perhaps by raising an eyebrow and

binary. And it’s in line with what’s

subtly adding an extra dimension to

going on now politically, in terms of

frankly sexist material. They sug-

thinking about queerness and third-

gested subtexts of their own. This is

wave feminism being a reaction against

very similar to what gay men of past

defining what a woman is and identify-

generations were doing: they were

ing strongly as a woman.

taking old Hollywood films and using them as a mode of communication, a

SH: Mariah, how does your own physi-

way of speaking in code to address

cal appearance in films factor into

someone who was clued in. In any given

this personal desire, for instance,

film, Boyd’s favorite performer wasn’t

with your performance in this work

necessarily a glamour queen, and she

with Berlin? I’m also thinking about

wasn’t necessarily a “great actress”

your recent work, Other & Father

either, but she had a sense of humor

(2016), with your father. For that

about the situation in which she found

piece, you investigated the political

herself. This kind of performer com-

landscape of Belfast in the 1970s, and

municated in a profound way to gay

also reenacted the original 1971 BBC

men, who literally had no way of see-

news documentary that featured your

ing images of themselves on screen.

father in an extremely controversial

They couldn’t be explicit in their

Catholic/Protestant relationship in

sexual interests unless they were

Belfast. This was at the beginning of

with trusted friends or in a gay bar.

the conflict known as The Troubles,

They identified with these women who

and it led to his leaving Ireland for

went after men but who couldn’t say

good. We witness you reenacting your

they were just after cock—that would

father in the documentary, next to

be pornographic—and they couldn’t

Robyn Reihill, a transgender actress

be totally passive either, because

who plays your father’s girlfriend.

that wouldn’t make for an exciting

Did your father end up seeing the

film. Both actresses in classic mov-

project?

ies and gay men before liberation had to negotiate complicated restrictions

MG: Yes, he’s seen whatever I’ve

on their behavior. It’s great that

shown of it thus far. His response

younger women have understood and

is, naturally, wrapped up in his own

appreciated this connection.

experience of the past, and the way he was misrepresented by the BBC, so he

MG: Something that just came up for

was a bit miffed that, in my reenact-

me when you were talking was about

ment, the BBC narrative stayed intact.

refusing this gender binary, which is

In making this work, my driving desire

William E. Jones, v. o., 2006. Video still. Video, color, sound, 59 min. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.

Mariah Garnett, Other & Father, 2016. Still from two-channel video installation. HD video transferred from 16 mm, color, sound, 11 min. Courtesy of the artist.

William E. Jones, Killed, 2009. Video still. Sequence of digital files, black-and-white, silent, 1:44 min./looped. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.

was to get to know my father better.

the anxiety around it and a desire to

In the video, I was re-enacting his

forget. I would’ve expected an Irish

desire, which was portrayed by the

cemetery to be quaint and mournful,

BBC, for his girlfriend. I cast Robyn

but this was like deep trauma. And

Reihill partly because she’s a great

there were drunk guys in tracksuits

actress but also because I wanted to

hopping the fence and pissing on the

map my own queerness onto this foot-

gravestones. I was there alone, and I

age. If I truly was going to try to

was kind of scared, actually.

understand my father better through a reenactment of his adolescent love

SH: That’s quite a crude introduction.

affair, my reenactment would inevitably be queer, and I wanted my casting

MG: I did eventually find her, but

choice to reflect that.

her grave was unmarked, and I had to

SH: Mariah, did you have a clear plan

there are two other people buried with

go to the cemetery office. Turns out when you went to Ireland to make

her. Everything there is more compli-

Other & Father, or was it more of an

cated than you would expect. All of

attempt to spend some time wandering

the old streets in my dad’s neighbor-

around in Belfast and see what hap-

hood are gone. It’s hard to pinpoint

pened?

where the old street even was, where his school was. The city has changed

MG: Initially, I was going to go stay

and been reorganized so many times

with my dad (who no longer lives in

since the 1960s. Simple tasks like

Ireland) for six weeks, and I didn’t

that become really, really difficult.

really have a clear plan. I knew I wanted to make this project about him

SH: It seems that, with both of your

and about his history in Belfast. I

practices, you enter into a pro-

had found this archival footage of

cess, often through archival research,

him and brought it with me. I knew

thinking that the work will land one

I wanted to document us interact-

way. But the material you encounter

ing, which was really difficult to do

opens up multiple narratives that then

because I didn’t have a cameraperson.

shift the work. William, for example,

It was also really hard to navigate

with your 2009 film Killed, which

when to turn the camera on and when

first introduced me to your work, you

to turn it off. I think I made it a

were looking for examples of gay

much bigger burden than it actually

life in the Library of Congress’s FSA

was. I had always planned on going to

archives. The punctured images you

Belfast to look up his old street and

encountered in the archives led to a

check the city out, and maybe look up

different kind of project.

one of his brothers or sisters in a phonebook. I imagined I’d be there a

WJ: I was looking for something very

week; it turns out that just my ini-

subtle. Using the phrase “gay life” is

tial idea took two months, because

already going farther than the sub-

it’s so confusing there. On the first

jects of these photographs would go.

trip, it took several attempts and

Nobody having a “fairy party” would

multiple government agencies before

have allowed a government photog-

I found my grandmother’s grave. The

rapher to come in and take pictures.

first time I tried, half the grave-

At that point in the United States,

stones were knocked over, and all the

it was illegal to have a single-sex

graves were overgrown. It was not a

gathering of more than two or three

well cared for cemetery, it seemed

people. Even private parties got

like evidence of massive death, with

busted.

SH: This is when?

in participating in mainstream intellectual life. He preferred to be an

WJ: The 1930s through the early 1960s,

irritant, the one who says, “Oh, but

perhaps even later in some places.

wait, all you people are lying.” There are lies we mutually agree upon so

MG: Could straight men not have par-

that we can get ahead in this world,

ties with all guys then?

and he wanted no part of them. Boyd lived on welfare in a single-room

WJ: There’s clearly a double stan-

occupancy hotel, so he had nothing

dard. Nobody was busting baseball

to lose. He could call anyone out on

games. This is the situation that

their hypocrisy.

Boyd McDonald described: being gay and totally surrounded by these all-

I’m most interested in people who

male groups that were homoerotic, yet

occupy a position in the world that is

no one was saying a word. The main

despised and not respected, yet who

object of his wrath was hypocrisy.

do something that is artistically or

Boyd constantly ridiculed profes-

intellectually compelling and speaks

sional sports, the military, and the

to the situation of the world. The

mass media. In every newspaper he

people making the most decisive and

read, he was looking for instances of

thorough critiques of society do it

hypocrisy, especially those denigrat-

from a position of no status whatso-

ing queer people. He wrote satire, and

ever. They’re not trying to get tenure;

it’s hilarious. For instance, in his

they’re not trying to be published

book Cruising the Movies (1985), Boyd

in a national magazine; they’re not

writes about Ronald Reagan appear-

trying to be on television or to be

ing without pants in a movie and says

recognized as a public intellectual.

he looks like a butch lesbian. For

They come from nowhere and they say

a femme lesbian, he uses the word

something shocking, and it is simply

“fluff.” He doesn’t explain, he just

on the strength of what they say that

remarks, “Patricia Neil’s fluff in

they convince; they’re not relying

this film is Lizabeth Scott.” This

upon the authority conferred by status

casualness reflects his simply not

or association to make their argument.

giving a damn about the standards of conventional society. It’s such a

SH: Has the desire to get closer to

refreshing attitude, so salutary for

specific subjects driven your proj-

thought.

ects? For example, in William’s films

SH: How were you first drawn to

ist/filmmaker Fred Halsted, the cult

and texts, subjects have included arthis work? Did you find a copy of

band Morrissey, Finished (1997) porn

the magazine?

star Alan Lambert, and, recently, Boyd McDonald. And Mariah’s work

WJ: The first thing I gravitated to

has engaged with distinct subjects,

was Cruising the Movies. I had studied

such as US war veterans who work as

film, and I was interested in some-

Hollywood stunt men, in Full Burn

one who wrote about films in a way

(2014), and Catalina de Erauso, a nun

that was not pious. Boyd had nothing

turned conquistador from the sixteenth

to do with academic film theory, but

century, in Picaresques (2011).

he was smart, and he engaged with issues that were well beyond what one

MG: I use filmmaking as a way to con-

would expect from a book with a guy’s

nect with people who I wouldn’t really

naked ass on the cover. Boyd wrote

be able to connect with in regular

very well, but he was not interested

life. For example, with the veterans,

Cruising the Movies by Boyd McDonald. (Gay Presses of New York, 1985). Courtesy of William E. Jones.

that drive was pretty strong. They’re

a different way than a graduate of an

not in my social circle, but I have

MFA writing program is, but why do we

a lot of military men in my family,

respect one more than the other?

none of whom I ever broached the sub-

Unfortunately, the risk you run when

ject of war with. The film was a way

you choose as a subject somebody who

of understanding something about them

is an outsider, who is really idio-

that I was interested in—that they

syncratic, is that people won’t take

would come back from being under con-

you seriously. It’s a form of non-

stant threat of bodily harm and then

discursive, naïve criticism, implying,

volunteer to essentially reenact that

“This person isn’t worth writing a book

scenario in their work life. I wanted

about.” It’s a complete disregard of

to know if this was a way of dealing

argument and of the aesthetic force

with trauma, or if it was a personal-

of the subject’s work. It’s merely an

ity type that gravitated toward the

assertion of status, but it carries

military, or if it is just an extreme

weight in this common world.

by-product of capitalism. I’m really interested in people who obsessively

Mariah, something you said really

do something that could be viewed as

interested me. In making films, you

outrageous or outside of the norm. A

are getting access to people you

lot of the time it doesn’t have to do

would not necessarily see in normal

with prestige or money. For example,

life. It reminds me of what queer life

one of the reasons I was drawn to

used to be, a way for people of dif-

Peter Berlin is because his inter-

ferent social classes and different

est in this thing was so pure and his

ethnic groups to mix, to have inter-

output so prolific. He continues to do

course—not just sexual, but social.

it in a vacuum and doesn’t show any-

Someone of a very elevated social

one—he has a dresser full of Hi8, VHS,

class could be dating working-class

and MiniDV tapes no one has ever seen,

partners, and people of differ-

and I imagine he’ll do it forever,

ent ethnic groups could be together,

whether anyone sees it or not. This is

because they were equally despised

the type of person I’m interested in.

by mainstream society. They were all

What is the driving impulse? Why do

outlaws. With gay liberation, and now

you keep doing that?

gay marriage, that’s something that is getting lost in our society. We are

WJ: There’s always a problem of

being encouraged to cultivate a men-

legitimacy. Most of what passes for

tality that was once associated with

literary criticism in the United

suburbia, even if we live in a city,

States is really just a veiled state-

by adopting conventional attitudes for

ment of class prejudices, a variation

“safety.” Nowadays, there’s a lot of

on “This person is not a real author

talk about multiculturalism, but in a

because he didn’t go to an Ivy League

certain way, our society is actually

school, or he didn’t go to an MFA

becoming more static, and the social

program.” I have absolutely no inter-

mixing of people, especially across

est in that kind of status mongering.

class lines, is becoming very dif-

The first chapter of my Boyd McDonald

ficult. For instance, as educational

book is called “An Improbably

institutions become more expensive

Literate Hustler,” a phrase I found in

and more exclusive, we’re seeing less

a successful (and conventional) gay

of what education used to be about—

biography. To me, that phrase is redo-

people from different backgrounds

lent of prejudice. Why can’t a hustler

fucking and having fun and learning

be literate? Now, we must admit that a

from each other. Those are impor-

hustler is allowed to be literate in

tant lessons. This reminds me of the

William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Video still. 16 mm film transferred to video, color, silent, 56 min. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

utopian possibility in Tearoom (2007),

first-generation Smiths fan, and I

which consists of surveillance foot-

bought those records when they origi-

age shot by the police in the course

nally came out. I wanted to see what

of a crackdown on public sex in the

kind of conversations I could have

American Midwest. You see black men

with fans who were much younger than

and white men together, men who were

I am and mostly Latino. It was really

clearly working-class with guys who

wonderful to speak to them and to

were wearing business suits. They were

interact around questions that we all

fucking each other, but they could

cared about. My original plan was

only do it underground, literally

for a narrated film. I recorded about

underground—the sex the police docu-

an hour’s worth of voiceover. Then I

mented took place in a public toilet

started interviewing people, and the

under the central park of Mansfield,

whole project changed. Basically, my

Ohio, in 1962.

rule of thumb was that every time an interview subject said something that

SH: Yeah, but you weren’t meant to

overlapped with my narration, I would

ever see those interactions.

remove it from my narration, so I cut

MG: That’s one of the weird things

20 minutes. I gave the floor to the

my share of the film to about 15 or about the internet. The paradox is

people I was interviewing. That was

that it has supposedly destroyed

a liberating gesture. It was wonder-

all the barriers that necessitated

ful to get other points of view from

these underground spaces to exist in

people recounting their experiences

the first place, and consequently,

in a very intimate space, often their

those spaces don’t really exist any-

bedrooms. How can I put their contri-

more. So there is less social mixing

butions into a proper context? It’s an

in real life, less interest in other

important ethical question for a docu-

people, and the internet is start-

mentarian, and a responsibility that

ing to reflect that. What’s emerging

you shouldn’t turn away from.

is this impulse to barricade yourself into a group of people who agree with

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer

you or fight viciously with those who

based in Los Angeles.

disagree. I know I do it (the barricading; I avoid the fights). But in

Mariah Garnett is an artist and film-

reality, I don’t always want to be

maker known for her filmic portraits

around people who think just like I do.

that combine multiple cinematic strategies to locate and codify identity.

WJ: A chance meeting with someone you

She is currently working on her first

didn’t expect have anything in common

feature, Trouble.

with, but with whom you share something important, is a thrill. That’s

Fall into Ruin, William E. Jones’s new

something very precious, and I wonder

film about art dealer and collector

if it’s getting lost in the present

Alexander Iolas, premieres this year

era.

in solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, U.K., and David

MG: That thrill is definitely one of

Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

the biggest impulses behind making work for me. WJ: It was certainly one of the motivations behind my documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004). I’m a

Christine Wertheim Johanna Went: Slave to the Grave

Introduction: The Punk Platform Halfway through 1984’s Knife Boxing, Johanna Went interrupts her incessant frenzied bopping to thrust her hands into a crudely made body part—halfbuttocks, half-vagina—suspended from the roof of Club Lingerie.1 A vicious viscous excremental substance seeps down her arm. She brings her face close and sucks the stuff into her mouth before hauling out a giant goocovered tampon that she aggressively flings at the audience. Some cringe, others laugh. Quickly she pulls on a costume, a huge mask-headed apron covered in sex doll heads, all the while screaming her unique tongue, a babble from Hell channeled through Lolita-cum-Medea. Screeching tape loops accompany her, along with a blaring saxophone and a loud percussive racket emanating from a woman drumming on found objects.2 A monstrous vagina appears stage right. Went extracts more tampons, heaving each into the mesmerized mosh pit. Completely at one with her, the audience starts hurling these back in a game of volleyball gone mad. After all, this show was held to coincide with the Los Angeles Olympics. Much art programming accompanied that event, but Went was not part of the roster. Instead, she held her own celebration of sports, on the stage of a punk club, flanked by headless stockinette figures replete with genitalia parodying the elegant cast metal kouroi made by Robert Graham to decorate the official Olympic stadiums. Suddenly Went disrupts the flow of tampons, drags down the effigies, and flings them at the audience, but not before sucking on one’s dick. An evil secretion oozes, again, and Went laps it up. Tampons and effigies rocket between audience and performer at a rapid clip. Went is almost knocked down. Abandoning the dolls-head costume she picks up a skull-ringed cardboard wheel. Pulling the bones off, she hits these into the audience, using a plastic femur as a bat. Next comes the “watersports,” when Went dons a crude coat made of foam and map pieces before hacking into a dummy made from a stuffed wetsuit.3 Guts spill everywhere, real meat guts, and she starts spinning in circles, “just like in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” 4 She dons a new outfit—an elaborately made Statue of Liberty, 1. Many of Went’s club shows were untitled; this was one of the first with a formal name. Footage of this show can be found on the DVD Johanna Went: Club Years 1977–1987, (Soleilmoon Recordings, 2007).

2. Robyn Ryan was the drummer in this performance. 3. This is how Went described the scene in conversation with the author, August 2016. I would like to thank Johanna for help in researching this piece.

4. Ibid.

Johanna Went, Knife Boxing, July 27, 1984. Performance at Club Lingerie, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lynda Burdick.

its torch gushing a river of red fire. Seizing a skinned goat’s head trailing an extraterrestrial tail, Went’s hand starts pumping. The head writhes. Blood spews from its maw, spraying both the performer and the front row, though her intention is not to deliberately smear them.5 In any case, those up front are her most ardent fans, and they know the drill. The music shifts sharply into a patriotic anthem, as Went whirls with her blood-gushing alien baby. Covered in muck and now deeply sunk in a trance, she drops the still pumping head and wraps herself in a plastic sheet. Letting this too fall into the piles of debris filling the stage, she moves exhaustedly. Suddenly, a spectator grabs at her ankle. She kicks back and falls awkwardly, literally collapsing into the mess she has made with her excremental, carnivalesque frenzy. Tampons and effigies fly, but, for the performer at least, the show is done. Between 1977 and 1987, Went performed nearly 200 shows, mostly in punk clubs. She says, “Clubs are the perfect place for spontaneous work because all the audience is drunk. Working in clubs removes the preciousness. And you can leave a mess on stage, drunk people don’t care about getting blood on their jackets.” 6 For Went, the punk scene was a revelation, encouraging performers of all stripes to experiment in ways not possible within selfdesignated art spaces, where habits of spectatorship are fixed and aesthetic provocations rarely inspire real antagonism. By contrast, punk audiences were willing and eager, even longing, to engage in fights with performers. The performing duo known as the Kipper Kids was once dragged off stage by bouncers before the audience killed them.7 Even more than its lack of preciousness, first wave L.A. punk was marked by a unique inclusivity embracing suburban kids, camp performers, Hollywood players, and fashion designers, all rubbing shoulders with artists and art students like future luminaries Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. As Mark Wheaton, Went’s long-term musical collaborator says, “There wasn’t really a punk scene. It was more like a broad underground composed of many different interlocking groups and interests, though at its core there were really only a few hundred people.” 8 And these people moved freely from one medium to another. Nothing congealed for long. Tomata du Plenty, a member of the gay glam theatre group known as The Cockettes, later became front man for The Screamers, one of L.A.’s seminal punk bands. A Seattle-based offshoot of The Cockettes, known as Ze Whiz Kids, often opened for proto-punk musical headliners like Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls when these bands played in Washington State. Of course, punk was not an exclusively West-Coast phenomenon, nor was the crossover between punk and performance art unique to the area. But, with its distance from centers of cultural authority, Los Angeles provided a particularly auspicious environment in which the two could mix. 5. “I never aim to dirty the audience, but you don’t come to my shows if you expect the venue to dry-clean your outfit.” Went in conversation with author, August 2016. 6. Ibid.

7. Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations,” in Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970– 1983, ed. Peggy Phelan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 98.

8. Mark Wheaton in conversation with author, November 2016. I would like to thank Mark for his generous time in helping to clarify many details and in compiling the images for this piece.

Self-identified performance artists who crossed between art and punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s include the Kipper Kids, Bob & Bob, Fat & Fucked up, Ron Athey (who performed with Christian Death), and Phranc, who played with Catholic Discipline and Nervous Gender. Vaginal Davis, a queercore progenitor, founded a concept band called The Afro Sisters fronted by Alice Bag of The Bags, while “Asco co-founder Willie Herrón led the Chicano punk rock group Los Illegals and helped found...the first venue for punk concerts in East LA.” 9 Went entered this scene as an outsider who had to beg the owner of the Hong Kong Café to grant her first club gig. Despite her rawness, Went was already a highly experienced performer, having traveled the United States and Europe performing guerilla theater in streets, coffee shops, and playhouses with Tom Murrin, aka Alien Comic. However, it was not until she collaborated with musicians in punk clubs that she found her audience, and they found her. The Hong Kong Café show made Went a star. Even in that heterogeneous world, no one had seen anything like it; but the audience was open-minded, loved her energy, and appreciated her willingness to improvise and experiment on the spot. By 1980, she had been interviewed by Slash magazine, the mouthpiece of the punk scene, and was playing gigs in the great clubs, such as Club Lingerie, Mabuhay Gardens, and The Whiskey.

The Johanna Went Experience Went’s shows are composed of four main strands: collaboration with musicians, her own contribution as vocalist-performer, an intensely focused interaction with the audience, and the vast array of costumes, sets, props and other objects with which she adorned the stage and herself. First, the sound. Though Went worked with numerous noisemakers from the punk scene, such as Robyn Ryan, Greg Burk, and the legendary percussionist Z’EV, her longest-term collaborator is Mark Wheaton, who played experimental tape loops and synthesizer and engineered all her recordings. Until his death in the mid-eighties, the drummer Brock Wheaton, Mark’s brother, often accompanied them. This collaboration, which began in early 1980, at Went’s request, lasted until 2007 and included over 100 shows, plus a series of recordings, including the LP Hyena and the single Slave from Beyond the Grave. These and other audio recordings engineered by Wheaton have been collected on the bonus CD accompanying the DVD Johanna Went: Club Years, 1977–1987, the only commercially available source of recordings of Went’s work.10 In both recordings and live performances, the music is loud and cacophonous. “It was something like music but it was also something like a roar. I don't necessarily remember it having a beat but it may have because I remember it as being very sexy. Sex is something that usually moves to a beat. Sometimes so slow you don't even know it has a beat, sometimes a steady muffled pulse, other times a flailing, grinding, 9. Lacy and Sternad, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations,” 97. 10. This DVD features only a small portion of the footage of Went’s shows; the rest is not available on public release.

Johanna Went and Brock Wheaton (left) performing at the Hong Kong CafĂŠ, Los Angeles, 1980. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Alan Peak.

Johanna Went, Hyena, 1982. LP, Poshboy Records, produced by Mark Wheaton and Johanna Went, included in Johanna Went: Club Years 1977â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1987, DVD (Soleilmoon Recordings, 2007). Cover design: Diane Zincavage. Photo: Ed Colver. Courtesy of the artist.

pounding machine-like syncopation, but always a beat.” 11 Accompanying this cacophonous roar, Went’s vocals are an uncategorizable mix of sound and word fragments muttered and babbled, indecipherable screams, and hypnotic chants, all emitted at a high-octane pitch that completely meshes with the musicians’ noise. The overarching effect is a punk-version of virtuoso jazz, though, as punks, they naturally eschew the concept of artistic expertise. Indeed, Went declares, “A performance artist must never rely on skills that could be construed as actual talent.” 12 Even more, Went shuns any notion of rehearsal or formal preparation before a show. “You should not rehearse, ever. Or script the formal portions. The aim of a performance is to surprise people, yourself as well as the audience. Whatever inspirations lock onto me like a brain spider, those are as profound as anything scripted. I trust.” 13 This is why it takes a special kind of musician to work with her, for she insists that they be as improvisational and interactive as she, ceding mastery and intentional control for the gift of creating interactions with herself, with the other musicians, and with the audience. Went’s attitude here recalls Allan Kaprow’s focus on un-art. In In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art, Meiling Cheng argues that, in addition to the profound influence of feminist art, Los Angeles performance art of the 1970s and 1980s was deeply influenced by Kaprow’s distinction between Art-art—which assumes a condition of spiritual, technical and conceptual rarity—and un-art—which has not yet been accepted as art.14 Kaprow’s overall project involved a pedagogical mission aimed at the “education of the un-artist.” 15 Here, already formed artists were trained to disavow Art and re-orient themselves toward un-art, by forgoing any reference to being an artist in the first place. With her refusal of skill, planning, and mastery, Went is a natural un-artist. Went calls her performances “wet work”—not because of their moist components but for their “unfinished” qualities. Cheng suggests we see them as examples of the grotesque, after the literary critic and theorist of the carnivalesque, Mikhail Bakhtin.16 According to Bakhtin, the grotesque entails a downward movement toward degradation, reveling in the functions of the lower body—the belly, reproductive organs, and orifices of elimination. Entrails, copulation, defecation, and digestion each play a role. “Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.” 17 Cheng’s point is apposite, for despite the proliferation of crude, grotesque, and even scatological elements, Went’s performances exhilarate and regenerate, leaving audiences with a heightened, even ecstatic sense of being; a kind of Burkean sublime, produced not

11. Mark Bloch, “Johanna Went: Where to Go After Perfection,” Panmodern blog (1991), http://www.panmodern. com/JohannaWent.htm. 12. Went in conversation with the author, August 2016. 13. Ibid. 14. Meiling Cheng, In Other

Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 35. 15. Kaprow, cited in Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses, 35. 16. Ibid., 301. 17. Bakhtin, quoted in Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses, 301.

by the re-presentation of a simulated life-threatening event—like a horror movie—but rather through her highly incongruous mix of materials, images, actions, and sounds often focused on the lower organs. Artist and writer Mark Bloch describes the experience: I was bordering on a frenzied anti-aesthetic love psychosis at the time, that’s how I remember Johanna Went in L.A… The experience I had that night bordered on religious. It was beyond subversion; it was madness... Remember—the opposite of absolute oppression is absolute pleasure. There has always been an extremely dark side to Johanna’s work but there was always something very pleasurable about it too–something beautiful bordering on dark—reminiscent of those scenes in Dante, Hieronomys [sic] Bosch or William Blake.18 Just as Went collaborates with noise-makers, she is guided by a deep sense of co-participation with her objects and costumes, which comprise a vast array of items cobbled together literally hours before each show. Most are made from detritus found on the streets: sex dolls trawled from the dumpster behind the shop where Mark Wheaton once worked; rolls of plastic, fabric, cardboard, and other discarded materials; pantyhose stuffed to resemble deformed bodies; scraps of lurid red vinyl crafted into huge vagina-like headwear; baby dolls and plush toys sewn onto crude aprons or ponchos that turn bodies into Barbarella nightmares; and last, but not least, the ubiquitous blood and guts gleaned from the morning’s meat market. Sometimes dolls were set in pots of gelatin that Went would suck, as if on a bone, or she would repeatedly stab a prop, such as a vague figure crafted from a cardboard box, with a knife, releasing jets of (fake) blood she would then bathe in. Her costume might be a crude bridalesque formed by yards of net thrown over the head and secured by a giant gag-style plastic fried egg. The overall effect is Bosch channeled through a garment district dumpster. Through interacting with these apparently inanimate things, Went channels something not found in ordinary experience and perhaps not amenable to coherent critical thought. She says, “It’s as if they speak to me, or through me.” 19 By all of the above means, Went pushes a grotesque aesthetic to the extreme, eschews narrative and logical progression, values visual cacophony, and achieves a high degree of interactivity with the audience. And if the form is chaotic, the content too is unstable—a dreamscape of fluctuating monsters and phantoms that aspire to revelation. Above all, Went has no need to thrust significance upon her audience under the guise of Culture; she simply trusts in our capacity to make something for ourselves from what she has to offer, however theatrical, entertaining, absurd, gross, or downright dumb.

18. Bloch, “Johanna Went: Where to Go After Perfection.” 19. Went, in conversation with the author, August 2016.

Went has since performed a number of more elaborate shows—Interview with Monkey Woman (1986), Twin, Travel, Terror (1987), Last Spring at Grey Gardens (2002), and Ablutions of a Nefarious Nature (2007). These works include other performers, such as Annie Iobst and Lucy Sexton, formerly of Dancenoise; Tom Murrin; Stephen Holman; and Lily Greenfield-Sanders. However, her masterworks are the club shows. Unrehearsed, unruly, and often untitled, everyone who saw them speaks of the ecstatic mind-melting experience they induced. But given Went’s goal of direct experience, how are we to evaluate her work and legacy? Amelia Jones raises this question in her contribution to Live Art in LA, beginning with a citation from Derrida: We yearn for experience of the live “without mediation, and without delay. Without even the memory of a translation.” This yearning in fact is translated into some of the more idealistic... practices, which…often fail to obtain “the memory of translation” in their seeking for the utopian potency of the moment... This structure in and of itself becomes one of the ways in which such practices easily get forgotten. Not only are they provocative, messy, and often resolutely un-codifiable...they may also have been initially performed with little attention to the “mediations” necessary for historicizing… What [then] can we say their legacy has been? 20 Oddly, not the least appropriate way to address this question is through the concept of “genius.”

Conclusion: The Genius of Went Work According to the philosopher Nick Land, “genius” enters serious philosophy with the work of Immanuel Kant. After having established a “transcendental” structure for the mind in his first two Critiques, Kant was forced to write a third volume because he confronted the inconvenient fact that “utter chaos had still not been outlawed.” 21 This is because Nature offers no guarantee of conforming to the transcendental system. We must keep firmly in mind that in Kantian discourse the term “transcendental” does not mean something above and beyond ordinary experience but simply means the conditions necessary for there to be any experience at all; that is, any comprehensible experience. In other words, while Kant believed that the sense of experiential coherency could only be explained by the mind’s having an innate internal coherence-giving structure, and that this “transcendental” edifice could be analyzed and described, he also finally recognized that nothing assures

20. Amelia Jones, “Lost Bodies: Early 1970s Los Angeles Performance Art in Art History,” in Live Art in LA, 146. The quote is from Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 93.

21. Nick Land, “Art as Insurrection: The Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (New York: Routledge, 1991), 147.

Above: Johanna Went, Knifeboxing, July 27, 1984. Performance at Club Lingerie, Los Angeles. Courtesy ofthe artist. Previous spread: Photo shoot of Johanna Went for Chic magazine, early 1980s. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: David Arnoff.

that the empirical laws of external Nature are similarly consistent. That is, he recognized that nothing guarantees that the objective world conforms to the structure of our mental apparatus—that which enables us to make sense of this world. Nature, instead, might be governed by such a multiplicity of laws that it may never cohere. Logically then, our sense of experiential consistency might be produced not by the facts of Nature but rather by an ungrounded subordination of Nature to the structure of our own minds. Or, to use Kantian terminology, by the subsuming of Nature to our own faculties of representation. The appalling conclusion of this eminently rational inference is that the objective world may simply be beyond comprehension. From thence springs both Kant’s ideas on art and genius, and the “brutal war” into which Western philosophy has been locked ever since.22 Land outlines two attitudes to the incomprehensible that are pitted against each other in this war unleashed by Kant’s third Critique. For rationalists, the experience of an incomprehensible phenomenon causes the mind to become aware of its own complex mental faculties—specifically, the split between Understanding (the transcendentally necessary and “given” mental apparatus outlined by Kant in his first Critique) and Reason (the free, collective, and creative aspect of mind that forms new concepts and thus extends both knowledge and the range of coherent experience). Historically, at least for Kant, the first example of a free concept of Reason is the scientific notion of “mass,” that quantum of stuff that acquires weight when subjected to a gravitational field. Without such innovative concepts, science cannot progress.23 For true rationalists, no experience is, in principle, beyond mastery and coherence by the development and application of new concepts. On the other hand, even the most rationalist of philosophers, including Kant, struggle with the fact that human experience often seems marked by the stain of some “otherness” that, whilst it undeniably subsists, remains beyond comprehension, forever defeating our attempts to contain it with concepts. Land calls this non-rationalizable surplus “nature with fangs.” 24 And its mark is upon us all. For some time, philosophers thought of this “otherness” as a pure force of Nature, something that irrupted into human consciousness from without. Later however—at least for some—this idea faded, and the incomprehensible disrupter began to be seen as part of the psyche itself. This is where psychoanalysis parts ways with philosophy, and the psychoanalytic concept of subjectivity as inherently split (between consciousness and the unconscious) distinguishes itself from the purely philosophical concept of a subject that, no matter how complexly composed, is in some sense unified. The split subject of psychoanalysis—which haunts 22. Land, “Art as Insurrection,” 150. 23. We can also argue that many “abstract” concepts, like the polis, or even “society,” are concepts of Reason. It is also important to keep in mind that concepts of Reason are always collective, not individual. 24. Land, “Art as Insurrection,” 151.

even the most dogged rationalists—is an I infested with an It, an It that is more present in the I than the other way around. For Freud, the formula for this subject is: where It was, there I shall come to be—a temporality of dizzying complexity. This It, which irrupts into the subject with the force of a trauma, defies comprehension, for It annihilates the sense of (coherent) selfhood. From the rationalist perspective, there must be some concept adequate to grasping the It, even if we haven’t yet found it. It is just a matter of time and progress. To the non-rationalist (who may be highly rational), there is simply a limit to the human mind, some experiences that even Reason (as well as Understanding) cannot grasp. Hence the “war.” One either believes there are incomprehensible experiences, or one believes that these are simply the effects of an as-yet-undiscovered concept/knowledge. But one thing is certain, we cannot claim simultaneously that an experience is incomprehensible and also give it a concept or name. At least we cannot do so with consistency; we cannot do it philosophically. To put it another way, we can never build a properly philosophical metaphysics on the concept of the inconceivable, for this is a contradiction. However, many religious and spiritual systems are founded on just such a phenomenon. Although rationalist philosophy must avoid, even deny, the real existence of incomprehensibility—precisely because we cannot coherently speak about it—for Kant and many of his successors, this accursed phenomenon is the essence of both genius and art. As Land points out, for Kant, “Genius is nothing like a character trait, it does not belong to a psychological lexicon; far more appropriate is the language of seismic upheaval, inundation, disease, onslaught of raw energy from without. One ‘is’ a genius only in the sense that one ‘is’ syphilitic, in the sense that one is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority.” 25 Land also notes, “Kant’s word ‘genius’ is the immensely difficult and confused but emphatic...thought of an utterly impersonal creativity that is historically registered as [a] radical discontinuity...as ‘order’ without anyone giving the orders.” 26 One way of understanding this strange idea is that the genius is one who is not traumatized by an inundation of otherness; geniuses welcome, invite, or even give themselves up to it. To use more Kantian terminology, geniuses can turn the “negative pleasure” of self-annihilation into the positive force of creativity that produces art. Thus, art too “irrupts into European philosophy with the force of trauma.” 27 And, as Land states, “Kant is quite explicit that a generative theory of art requires a philosophy of genius, a readmission of accursed pathology into its very heart... Kant only manages to control this disruption by maintaining art as...implicitly marginal.” 28 But if Kant contained the trauma of art through its marginalization, his successors could not. The demands of the geniuses and their art were simply too disturbing. From Schelling to Schopenhauer, art, the aesthetic, and the geniuses who produce them were sirens, luring otherwise rigorous philosophers into ever more dangerous waters.

25. Ibid., 153. 26. Ibid., 151. 27. Ibid., 145. 28. Ibid., 151.

Johanna Went, Dancenoise (Lucy Sexton and Annie Iobst) and Tom Murrin, Primate Prisoners, Jan 10, 1987. Performance at Abstraction Gallery, Los Angeles. Curated by Jack Marquette.

Johanna Went performing at the Hong Kong CafĂŠ, Los Angeles, 1979. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Scott Lindgren.

Finally, in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche split art from philosophy entirely by distinguishing between two radically different kinds of aesthetic experience and two radically different orientations of the subject to its object-other, the artwork. These are the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Distinguished by a contemplative or distanced relation to the artwork, the Apollonian subject preserves some of philosophy’s aims, including its desire to use the object-other as a means for its own self-aggrandizement. This distance, within which the subject claims to become more self-aware precisely by alienating itself from some other, is the essence of what, since Kant, has been called “critique,” and it lies at the heart of the modern/contemporary art project. In other words, Apollonian art aims, like Socrates, at increasing the contemplating subject’s self-awareness, rather than increasing its knowledge of (its) others. On the other hand, the Dionysian subject intentionally loses its self by allowing an incomprehensible otherness to flow into its space. The aim here is not to “know” the other in the sense of being able to explain or put a label on it, but in order to actually experience It. Thus, as Nietzsche rightly points out, Dionysian art must break down the “distance” between audience and spectacle by being more than, or other than, “contemplative.” Indeed, a truly Dionysian artwork can never be a mere “spectacle.” It must by definition be immersive and participatory, inciting not critical contemplation but a self-forgetting in which Freud’s dictum is reversed, as the It comes to be where the I was. For Nietzsche, only this kind of heroic self-annihilation can save us from the fastidious, brittle, and puny self-consciousness that so characterizes modern subjectivity.29 Johanna Went is a Dionysian genius, a Siren whose irresistible song cannot help but lure us into the temptations of ecstatic, participatory, and brave self-annihilation. Christine Wertheim’s books include three poetic suites, the book of ME, mUtter-bAbel, and +|'me'S-pace; three edited literary anthologies, Feminaissance, The n/Oulipean Analects, and Séance, the last two with Matias Viegener; and Crochet Coral Reef, with Margaret Wertheim, about their decade-long art-science-feminist-community project. She has received grants from the Annenberg and Orphiflamme Foundations, and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

29. The best (re)presentation I know of this subject is the unnamed protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a man who is literally afraid of his own nervous system.

Jacob Stewart-Halevy

Review: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: I Must First Apologize…

Apologies as Access Rituals

MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA February 19–April 17, 2016

There are only so many ways to open up a channel of communication with a stranger. What does it mean when someone begins with the words “I must first apologize…”? This demure utterance serves as the title of an elaborate exhibition by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) List Visual Arts Center, where the artistduo reveals how apologies often disarm strangers in order to defraud them. Picturing the practice of online spamming, the artists employ a heuristic the anthropologist George Marcus once famously called “follow the thing,” whereby everyday physical phenomena—an utterance, a material, an object under our noses—mediates a set of intertwined and inevitably geo-politicized social relations.1 This technique has achieved cachet along the global biennial and contemporary museum circuit as a result of its dominance within the humanities and social sciences. In fact, if “follow the thing” were not so persuasive, we might call the heuristic itself a kind of proliferating spam. In the MIT exhibition, the familiar object is the deceptive message that shows up in your email inbox, the one claiming to make you rich and perpetrating advance-fee fraud. As the media scholar Finn Brunton describes in his erudite history of spam, “Nigerian Prince” frauds and others like it are generically patterned on centuries-old Spanish Prisoner confidence schemes. Swindlers lure their marks by claiming they are aristocrats with large fortunes holed up in Spanish jails under false pretenses. Since the turn of the millennium, spammers have had to adapt the romantic motifs of exotic locales, damsels in distress, and covert rescue plans that inhere in the genre to online platforms and less gullible victims.2 The content of spam messages is far-fetched to be sure, but the processes of social and technical adaptation that undergird them belie truths about the relations

1. George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), 95–117. 2. Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013).

between spammer and spammed. These relations can be read metonymically as microcosms of exchange between core and peripheral processes in the modern world system.3 The online plea by a “diplomat” hoping you will funnel large sums out of the country speaks to the expropriation of capital and natural resources in petro-states worldwide. The scam-baiting subculture (an anonymous online community that outwits and embarrasses spammers) is based primarily in Reddit forums in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Germany. When these scam-baiters dupe spammers in Nigeria and the former Soviet Bloc, they hypostasize the kinds of transactions that allow surplus value to flow from weak countries to stronger ones. And when scam-baiters coerce spammers into posing in drag, donning “ethnic” garb, or performing invented “primitive” rituals, they perpetuate the kinds of “ethnic marketing” and late-orientalist fantasies that continue to naturalize the inequality built into global markets. Articulating these types of metonymic connections has preoccupied scholars for decades.4 When online spammers began shaking down their marks in the late 1990s, a host of cultural anthropologists started to describe the spammers’ lived experiences as they toiled away at internet cafes across Africa and Eastern Europe. They explained the kinds of exploitative hierarchies, dire prospects, technical assemblages, and historical tragedies that produced spamming as an enterprise.5 Their research flourished as a strategy we might call “Material Infrastructure Studies” (MIS), achieving success through the way academics and others who used it leveraged concrete examples—water, drugs, remittances, electronics, or decommissioned cruise ships—for the purpose of justifying their research and acquiring financial and institutional support. The example cathected granting organizations, university administrations, and lay audiences alike, luring in anyone who wanted to hypostasize macro-social processes in physical artifacts. MIS found its strongest adherents in fields that privileged materiality: architecture, art history, archaeology, cultural anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, and, to a certain degree, art, where examples could be fabricated out of whole cloth. The examples performed exceptionally well; they were infinitely fascinating to describe in nearly myopic detail, legitimating close-reading techniques, but they also globetrotted, mirroring the expansionist missions of neoliberal academic institutions and their entrepreneurial scholars. I Must First Apologize… seems to conform to the MIS paradigm: spam is its concrete example, its discourse readymade.6 The question for the critic then becomes two-fold: Where is the art? And how is it operating

3. See Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 4. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

5. Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 6. In the catalog Hadjithomas and Joreige released prior to the opening, writers interpret the artists’ project from cultural,

philosophical, historical, and geographic perspectives that draw heavily on the MIS paradigm. See Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Rumors of the World: Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Berlin: Sternberg, 2015). Contributors include Nicholas Auray, Finn Brunton,

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Henriette Huldisch, Omar Kholeif, Norman M. Klein, Eric Mangion, Laura U. Marks, Franck Leibovici, Sarah Perks, Jacques Rancière, Uzma Rizvi, and Rasha Salti.

Above: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Trophy Room (detail), 2014. Installation view, I Must First Apologize..., MIT List Visual Arts Center, February 19–April 17, 2016. Courtesy the artists and In Situ/ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), CRG Gallery (New York), The Third Line (Dubai). Photo: Peter Harris.

Following spread: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Trophy Room, 2014. Installation view, I Must First Apologize..., MIT List Visual Arts Center, February 19–April 17, 2016. Courtesy the artists and In Situ/ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), CRG Gallery (New York), The Third Line (Dubai). Photo: Peter Harris.

within a pre-packaged nexus of design, research, information, and commentary? Proponents of research-driven art projects argue that artists’ archival impulses unearth suppressed histories and point to the productively unresolved way art accesses historical knowledge; detractors frown at its inevitably pedantic quality, where amateurs seem to tell less nuanced versions of stories that derive from, illustrate, or even obscure academic inquiry. Even when these positions are valid, they hardly begin to address the way artists actively transpose existing dominant attitudes and formulas for dealing with an issue—in our case MIS approaches to spam—onto the chosen exhibition format. Critics avoid considering the act of adaptation and inflection as the artwork, preferring to do away with this intermediary problem in order to think about how artists use formal means to address the stated issue directly. But Hadjithomas and Joreige are not just showing alternative histories of spam or illustrating work by scholars such as Brunton. Even when they do so, they are also preoccupied with calibrating established discourses around spamming practices with existing vanguard exhibition strategies. And this art of mutual calibration deserves critical attention. I Must First Apologize has an informational style typical of factographic or conceptual art: lists, maps, printouts. The artists rekey these gestures by highlighting their indexical qualities. The form of the list is not enough; we actually have to read what it says. By opting for the legibility of their references over sheer enumeration, the artists shed the historically utopian or urgent dimension associated with earlier avant-gardes. Scrolls of paper— diminutive in comparison with El Lissitzky’s dizzying rotating newspapers from the Soviet Pavilion at Pressa, Cologne (1928), and Hans Haacke’s from the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York (1970)—present the epistolary correspondence between scammers and scam-baiters. In The Trophy Room (2014), printouts of scam-baiting “trophies”—online documents evidencing the humiliation of scammers—are affixed to concrete plinths bisected by glass sheets. The format is meant to refer to Lina Bo Bardi’s staging of Andre Malraux’s Museum Without Walls in Sao Paolo in the 1960s, which has become synonymous with the democratization of culture and Paolo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.” 7 The sculptures comprising Hadjithomas and Joreige’s A Matrix (2014) are made of reticulated hemispheres laser-cut into minimal plywood cubes. The Geometry of Space (2014) is a series of mobiles that diagrams networks of spam communication through crisscrossed lines of stretched-oxidized steel. They look like three-dimensional flight plans. Each of these works borrow from the practical pedagogy of the proposal and the brief; they have the look, scale, and finish of architecture-school maquettes and informational posters that are employed by students and professors in the rest of the MIT List building on a daily basis. While the models ostensibly invoke the travel of spam across a global network, in effect, they signal an allegiance to established trends in contemporary art, whether through restaging Bo Bardi’s installation, which has gained currency in curatorial circles over the past decade,

7. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).

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or by materializing as steel sculptures the maps cultural geographers have produced in recent years to picture global flows of labor, capital, and information.8 Across the hall, amateur actors read spam messages aloud on thirteen screens in The Rumor of the World (2014). If the lit rooms in other parts of the exhibition amount to a space of pedagogy, wherein the audience is asked to read, this darkened space is more theatrical. The installation hews closely to the rubric of docudrama installations connoting geopolitical gravitas, which have been commonplace since Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI. Toward the ceiling, wires cross above the installation as small blue lights overhead approximate distant cities seen from a plane at night or, more precisely, a kind of “heart-of-darkness” cyberspace—a pitch black zone for the post-colonial encounter with the spam message. But because the lights and wires are part of the equipment of the audio speakers and the monitors, they reduce the metaphoric associations of the installation to an effect of practical decision making and cost cutting. The conceit that the equipment had to be plugged in and the wires had to end up somewhere cleverly undercuts the felt-immediacy that the installation otherwise promotes. Hadjithomas and Joreige borrow from the global biennial black box/white cube video installations of the 1990s, but only in order to present the labor and research that went into compiling and assembling their show. If the artists are apologizing here, it is because they refuse to offer us the spectacle of full immersion. The artists use the avant-garde art of the past—factography, constructivism, docudrama, and so forth—to bathetic, pedantic, and banal ends, draining it of its affective intensity. How then do they calibrate their work to the already existing discourses on spam? In The Rumor of the World, the artists seem to vivify the typical written qualities of the spam message—an amalgam of grammatical errors and adventure plots—by recording nonprofessional actors who read the messages aloud. Employing direct address, they videotape the actors frontally, opposite the viewer, against a studio backdrop. The actors read the messages in a measured way that precludes us from suspending our disbelief in their performance. We are unable to imagine that they are truly spammers themselves. By highlighting the artifice of the spam prose and dis-aligning the actor and the spam writer, the artists nominate spam delivery as a kind of artful practice, something that can be done with different degrees of competence, creativity, and effectiveness. Hadjithomas and Joreige therefore restage the work of scholars, such as Brunton, who have made salient the ethno-poetic quality of spam, transposing the setting of the address from online computer interfaces to the theater of the video installation. Tucked away in a small gallery toward the back of the show, four video testimonials play slightly out of synch with one another in the installation It’s All Real (2014). These testimonials of immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe residing in Lebanon provide ways of talking not about spam

8. See Diana Franssen and Steven ten Thije’s exhibition Museum Modules, Play Van Abbe, Part 2: Time Machines,

which restaged Bo Bardi’s Malraux installation at the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands, in 2010, and Roger

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Buergel, “‘This Exhibition Is an Accusation’: The Grammar of Display According to Lina Bo Bardi,” Afterall 26 (2011), 51–57.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Geometry of Space (detail), 2014. Sculptures, stretched oxidized steel; Scam Atlas. 3 publications; murals, chronologic drawings of 2005, 2008, & 2010. Sculpturesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; diameter 31Â˝ in. Courtesy the artists and In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), CRG Gallery (New York), The Third Line (Dubai).

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Rumor of the World, 2014. Installation view, I Must First Apologize..., MIT List Visual Arts Center, February 19â&#x20AC;&#x201C;April 17, 2016. Courtesy the artists and In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), CRG Gallery (New York), The Third Line (Dubai). Photo: Peter Harris.

itself, but about the legibility, perspectives, norms, and affective attachments that go into research on the precarious circumstances of refugees, domestic workers, and laborers. Only “Fidel” turns out to be a reformedspammer. The rest have nothing to do with the enterprise. On one level, the videos straightforwardly contribute to this research, providing vignettes of everyday routines in Beirut: adolescents at leisure, a “christotherapist” who bridges the secular/religious divide through a syncretic form of healing, and the ex-spammer at the gym. But because the testimonials are expertly edited and shot in high definition, the moments we witness appear staged, and we are conscious of the compositional decisions that went into the framing—the long takes, synched frames, and the removal of the prompt of the questioner. Thus the production quality interferes with what might otherwise be considered participant observation. The video testimonials are not exactly tokens of the interview or documentary research type found in, say, visual anthropology. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s alteration of documentation and use of non-actors for dramatic purposes corroborates a strategy that they pioneered—alongside Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, and others in and out of Beirut—in the late 1990s in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War. Doctoring photographs and textual evidence, this generation invented fictional archives that seemed to dissemble official accounts while filling in historical gaps around everyday life during wartime. At the same time, their use of pseudonyms and avatars gestured towards the establishment of political agency under conditions of censorship. Yet in this exhibition, Hadjithomas and Joreige seem to play with documentary conventions for different reasons, not to dissimulate the historical record with rumor and partial information, but rather to point to the way registers of self-constraint and self-actualization are used for sentimental effect among strangers. The subjects of these vignettes appear as actor-protagonists in public relations stories about their own lives. When we watch them play basketball, do sit-ups at the gym, or sit in softly lit interiors, we get the sense that they are expertly performing the role of the “humanized” refugee, spammer, laborer, or child-victim recognizable from the ethnographic vignettes of anthropologists researching subaltern peoples. This effect is compounded by the fact that they are named in a credits section at the beginning of the video and sometimes appear as amateur actors in the highly-staged The Rumor of the World and the loosely choreographed (De)Synchronicity (2014), which was shot outside an internet café in Beirut. The vignette at the ex-spammer’s gym, for instance, looks like an ad for fitness gear. While Fidel works out, he gives us a lesson about how spammers deceive their marks. His testimonial is an odd combination of online tutorial and a new genre of video that currently proliferates through the American criminal courts: videos that present the everyday lives of defendants in order to show them as “real” people and their “crimes” as the accomplishment of an entire community.9

9. Howard Saul Becker, “Moral Entrepreneurs,” Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1973).

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Top: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, The Rumor of the World, 2014. Video still. Video installation, 38 HD Films, on LCD screens, 100 loudspeakers, variable lengths. Coproduced by HOME, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Villa Arson. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie in situ fabienne Leclerc (Paris) The Third Line (Dubai), CRG Gallery (New York).

Bottom: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s All Real: Fidel (Video 1), 2014. Video HD; 11.48 min. Co-produced with Fonds National des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques. Courtesy the artists and In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), CRG Gallery (New York), The Third Line (Dubai).

Since the late 1990s, anthropologists and cultural critics have tried to move beyond simply demonizing spammers by showing the historical and political economic forces that drive their activities. Hadjithomas and Joreige, however, slightly modify this enterprise. They present these pseudo-ethnographic accounts as they become commoditized through the format of contemporary online video, that is, through projects ranging from the aforementioned defendant court testimonials and online videos about ethical consumption practices to long-form political campaign advertising. These are forms that mediate ethical stance-taking to various stranger publics. If Hadjithomas and Joreige’s work is progressive in any sense, it is because they make these forms of mediation available to the subjects of their videos. Rather than the ethnographers, cultural critics, or filmmakers who might picture refugee activities from an external perspective, they suggest how their subjects might begin to control the way their story is told. Moreover, as the artists suggest, these accounts need not be either true or false, but full of unreliable narrators and historical lacunae. Because the same character appears in multiple artworks, a non-actor acting naturally in one video installation turns out to be an amateur actor acting artificially in another. The video testimonial format of It’s All Real, in particular, allows the refugees to implicate themselves within a matrix of circumstances: within geo-political events, within kinship ties to their families and communities, and within the civil society of Beirut. The gym setting of Fidel’s full-body workouts and the domestic interior shots where a subject named Tamara looks through old family and school photographs are crucial here because they show mediated forms of domesticity and self-love, that is, contemporary models of everyday celebrity that now circulate globally online and find their way into their subjects’ repertoire for accounting for their own situated activities. Because they have chosen to use non-actors, the artists seem to suggest that their subjects too have access to the lifestyle registers of “curating” and “fitness.” So what does the apology do for the spammer who begins her message with the phrase “I must first apologize…”? Since the work of Erving Goffman on access rituals, ethno-pragmatists have argued that strangers use apologies to mark the threshold of increased or decreased contact with one another.10 Apologies allow participants with an inferior status in a community to take on the role of initiating the greeting, to manipulate it and become responsible for its entailments. Of course, the deferential apology is the result of interactional asymmetry—as in “sorry to bother you, sir”—but it is also a path to remediating the power imbalance among participants. The artists transpose the spoken apology onto the video testimonial. And by mapping the confidence scheme onto the online video, with its routinized bio-political tropes of self-divulgence, self-management, and self-actualization, Hadjithomas and Joreige suggest that the subjects in their works have access to the everyday protocols by which strangers communicate with one another on equal footing online. It is a way of moving from the written

10. Erving Goffman’s writing on access rituals appears in Behavior in Public Places (New York: Free Press, 1963);

Relations in Public (New York: Basic Books, 1971); and Frame Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

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Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, (DE)SYNCHRONICITY (detail), 2014. Video still. Video installation, 4 continuous synchronized screens, 2:30 min. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie in situ fabienne Leclerc (Paris) The Third Line (Dubai), CRG Gallery (New York).

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s All Real: Omar and YounĂ¨s, 2014. 2 synchronized HD videos, 14:50 min. Co-produced with Fonds National des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques. Courtesy of the artists and Galerie in situ fabienne Leclerc (Paris) The Third Line (Dubai), CRG Gallery (New York).

or spoken apology of deference to the apologetic moving image. When Fidel lifts weights or Tamara leafs through her photo-album, they are drawing on the sentimental tropes of contemporary self-monitoring and presentation: Watch me work out! Watch me eat! Watch me look at pictures of my friends and family! These tropes permit the refugee-actors to enter into embodied, affective relations of confidence and trust with their audiences. In turn, they might manipulate these relations for the purposes of committing real economic fraud; they may also use them to assert their rights to the norms of politeness and civility continually denied them. Nevertheless—despite the progressive politics of the exhibition—it turns out that the now-global online spamming practices that Hadjithomas and Joreige picture technically originate from a kind of ur-spam first entered into the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET)—a proto-internet collaboration between MIT and the Pentagon, which Brunton describes in detail in his book. This gives the exhibition an interesting subtext, which is partially acknowledged by the curators when they write in the catalog, “Incidentally, the World Wide Web was invented at MIT in 1990.” 11 The conceit that spam travels abroad and returns physically to the omphalos of the MIT campus has a kind of hagiographic function, working as a proxy-monument to the enduring legacy of the “cyber-revolution” that once transpired there. On an institutional level, therefore, the show traces the global phenomenon of spam to its source in the university and legitimates MIT’s foundational position within the history of mediatized conduct. If the notion that a reputable institution would promote a nefarious activity like spamming seems farfetched, observe how, just as the exhibition closed, the director of the school’s prestigious Media Lab announced a quarter million dollar “disobedience award” at a wildly popular “forbidden research” symposium. Funded by the founder of LinkedIn, a company built on the monetization of social networks, the award was meant for “the fields of scientific research, civil rights, freedom of speech, human rights, and the freedom to innovate.” 12 Here we witness the way the school socializes its members into the “disruptive” techno-libertarian values that sustain it. The call for the “forbidden”—announced in the public relations materials— marks a kind of return of the repressed, where anxieties stemming from the enormous gap between the development of technological equipment and the social interactions of the people who come to use it may resurface as art. In exploring this interstitial zone between technology and conduct, Hadjithomas and Joreige may be interpreted as uttering their own trick apology, raising difficult questions about the ideological roots and geopolitical outcomes of a technicist ideology unabashedly promoted by the institution that hosted their exhibition. Jacob Stewart-Halevy is an assistant professor in the Art History Department at Tufts University. 11. Henriette Huldisch and Sarah Perks, “Introduction,” in Rumors of the World, 14. In Spam, Brunton outlines the seminal role the Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) at

MIT played during the 1960s in the remote sharing of information, which serves in his book as a prehistory of internet communication in the present. 12. Joi Ito, “Rewarding

Disobedience,” statement on the MIT Media Lab Website, https://medium.com/mit-medialab/rewarding-disobedienc eae194d9f0785#.2mgbydk sz. For further reflections on

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Ito’s concept of technological disobedience, see his treatise “On Disobedience,” https://joi.ito. com/weblog/2016/03/21/ondisobedience.html.

Travis Diehl BOOKS = YES!

Review: Thomas Hirschhorn, Stand-alone The Mistake Room, Los Angeles October 7–December 17, 2016

It’s an excessive atmosphere, but if one holds up, and the important thing above all is not to understand, the important thing is to take on the rhythm of a given man, a given writer, a given philosopher, if one holds up, all this northern fog which lands on top of us starts to dissipate, and underneath there is an amazing architecture. —Gilles Deleuze An exhibition unfolds like a story, or unpacks like a library. Then there is Thomas Hirschhorn. His Stand-alone (2007), reprised for the first time in the United States at The Mistake Room, hits you like a stack of books. The gallery is broken into four shotgun rooms, four iterations of the same basic layout, separated by cheap, kicked-in doors. You stagger through, concussed. What you’ll notice first is a life-size tree trunk made of cardboard and packing tape that has seemingly crashed through the gallery roof and into this war zone of a living room. The delivery is as subtle as the trunk angling before you: taped to its painted-on bark are photos of blown-apart corpses, detached torsos, blood drenched clothes, caved in faces, and severed heads in the street. Looking away, walking under or around the trunk, you’ll notice the colorful graffiti covering every wall; the shelves holding a scattering of redacted leaflets of stats, lists, articles; the pile of oversized robin’s-egg blue pills stamped YOU; the slices of log spray-painted FAITH; the love seats and armchairs “upholstered” in brown packing tape, up on racks; and the CRT television sets, both taped and screwed to the wall. You’ll also notice the fireplace in each room, somewhat blocked by the tree and by the Ikea-type cardboard and particle board rubble spilling onto the hearth. Each mantel is piled ten high with books on one of four subjects ( LOVE , PHILOSOPHY, AESTHETICS , POLITICS). Taped to the left corner of each mantel on several joined sheets of copier paper is a printed list of the books’ authors and titles, headlined in marker: LIST OF BOOKS . Across Hirschhorn’s work and in countless pieces by other artists, the stack of books can be a quick way to recruit ideas as paratext.1 The books provide a hermeneutic shortcut: the work’s valence, or at least its author’s intention,

1. To name just one concurrent exhibition in Los Angeles: Mickalene Thomas, Do I Look Like a Lady? at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,

contained, if not a lending library, at least a reading room, where the plush seating for Thomas’s video doubled as living room furniture, surrounded

by stacks of related feminist and black theory and literature on the floor and side tables.

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Above and following spread: Thomas Hirschhorn: Stand-alone, installation view, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, October 7â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 17, 2016. Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, and Coleccion Isabel y Agustin Coppel (CIAC).

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seemingly follows from the arguments the books contain. This is true of Stand-alone, yet the project depends less on its particular citations than on a recognizable humanist and post-structuralist worldview, of which the books cue the parameters. The specific titles speak to the artist’s own interests, while their hermeneutics is broad enough to be iconic in itself—of the four categories, but also of the larger project of human thought. Rather than a way out, this materiality of thought is the kernel of Hirschhorn’s practice. In their sheer numbers and cacophony, the “stack of books” in Hirschhorn becomes another of his regular materials, along with tape, cardboard, copy paper, permanent markers, televisions, and cheap lumber. You can’t read these books, though—or, to the point, you won’t do so here— and not just because we are conditioned to not “touch the art,” in even a ransacked white cube. This much is underscored by an installation that surrounds, closes in, and gives no space for action. The mantels sit near 60 inches high, putting the book stacks at the standard eye level of artworks. The stacks are not ordered as in a library but rather skewed with an aesthetic, intentional casualness; to disturb the piles would undo the composition. The books are crisp, not “well-thumbed volumes” but bubble-mailer fresh. They retain a sealed quality, as if not so much texts as illustrations of texts. They sit on the mantelpiece like the leather-bound trophies of darker ages, where just the fact of a book in the home besides the Bible spoke to uncommon learning. The stack of books is potential—measured in number of titles, pages, words, but also in terms of the time investment required to read them: a kinetic time. The library contains hours of reading. Yet the only chairs line the walls on metal racks, off balance, more or less in storage. Chances are you will not spend hours standing in a gallery to read a dense philosophical tract. Standalone is a gauntlet and a confrontation. Hirschhorn frames up your busy life with the contrarieties of touching and not-touching, reading and not-reading, knowing and not-knowing—the guilt of unacquired ideas.2 Nor should “stack” or “list” here imply a sequence. Like the apprehension of a history painting, Hirschhorn’s titles are dumped on you by the hundreds in an instant. The stacks of books constitute a tumbledown syllabus, a sculptural version of the LIST OF BOOKS taped below (and not the other way around). Works by Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, and Marquis De Sade follow Seneca, Virgil, and Euripedes, all under the heading LOVE; you are in chaos, and the books are too. Maybe you’ve read a few. There is no way you’ve read them all. Hirschhorn hasn’t. “I’ve heard people making critical comments about your work,” says Alison Gingeras, interviewing Hirschhorn, “along the lines of, ‘Thomas has not read all the works of Deleuze or Bataille.’” To which Hirschhorn replies, “Of course I haven’t!” Instead of an expert, Hirschhorn calls himself a fan.

2. See the “trailer” for Standalone at The Mistake Room: https://vimeo.com/185016308.

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Thomas Hirschhorn: Stand-alone, installation view, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, October 7â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 17, 2016. Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, and Coleccion Isabel y Agustin Coppel (CIAC).

Thomas Hirschhorn: Stand-alone (detail), The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, Octoberâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 17, 2016. Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, and Coleccion Isabel y Agustin Coppel (CIAC). Photo: Travis Diehl.

The fan, says Hirschhorn, is “committed to something without arguments; it’s a personal commitment. It’s a commitment that doesn’t require justification.” 3 It’s a looser kind of love. The four book-covered mantels in Stand-alone recall Hirschhorn’s quartet of monuments to his favorite philosophers. All include libraries of their texts, ranging from a small inset shelf in Spinoza Monument (1999) to a freestanding, furnished plywood room in Gramsci Monument (2013). The four thinkers occupy the spokes of a diagram Hirschhorn draws between the quadrants of his “force field”: LOVE , PHILOSOPHY, AESTHETICS , and POLITICS .4 For Stand-alone, each category structures a selection of books, and each pile is topped by an oversize cardboard sculpture of a single book. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings crowns POLITICS . A Continuum Impacts edition of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, with a cover designed with brightly colored pills, rests atop PHILOSOPHY. These categorized piles shore up certain canonical texts but also make a mess of them. They are statues, not meant to be resolved or consumed but stated with an emphatic and contagious belief.5 If Stand-alone doesn’t itself constitute a library, it points to one. Hirschhorn’s “act” was to deploy the piece—presenting and arranging four groups of texts. It is your prerogative to follow through. The action you must take isn’t inside the gallery, but beyond it.6 Meanwhile, the installation is on pause. Hirschhorn sets himself against quality—that is, expertise, virtuosity, or having read and understood his books—and for energy—the kinetic knowledge that you could gain, as he has, from even a piecemeal study of these authors. In these wasted, unlivable living rooms, through the chaos of slogans and gore, the stacks of books slam into view like so much wood. Whereas the installation collapses and explodes, they are silent and self-assured. In the scene of death and destruction, they flee inward, into sealed contemplation. Stand-alone is not a war zone, of course, but an image of one—complete, like a training center or a TV set, with graffiti. These “slogans”—immediate, fragmentary, and aggressive—form a parallel, second text to the stacks of books. Where the stacks of books double as lists of names and titles, the Sharpie slogans read like a hash of news and ads: “fun has gone out of it,” “suicide squad,” “dead man walking,” “above and beyond,” “sticking together,” 3. Alison Gingeras, “Alison Gingeras in Conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn,” Thomas Hirschhorn (London: Phaidon, 2004), 35. Hirshhorn: “It’s not about being a historian. It’s not up to me to be a scientist. This isn't scientific work, it’s an artwork in relation to the world, which confronts reality, which confronts the times I live in. I’ve never claimed to be a specialist, or even a ‘connoisseur.’ I’m a fan of Georges Bataille in the same way that I could be a fan of the football club Paris SaintGermain. I’m not obliged to go and see all the matches. I’m not obliged to know the whole

history of Paris Saint-Germain football club. You can even be a very fickle fan: when a fan goes to live in Marseille he can become a fan of Marseille’s football club; he’s still a fan.” 4. “Sitting at a plywood table in the installation one recent steamy day, Hirschhorn drew a circle on a piece of paper and quartered it. He labelled the segments ‘love,’ ‘philosophy,’ ‘aesthetics,’ and ‘politics’ and located his heroes at the radius points: Spinoza, love/philosophy; Deleuze, philosophy/ aesthetics; Bataille, aesthetics/ politics; and Gramsci, politics/ love.” Peter Schjeldahl, “House

Philosopher,” The New Yorker (July 29, 2013), 76. See also Hirschhorn’s own response to a questionnaire he designed for the 2016 Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee: http://www. sommerakademie.zpk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/2016/PDFs/ Reader_Thomas_Hirschhorn/ Why_2015-OK.docx.pdf. 5. See Hirschhorn’s Road-Side Giant Book Project (2004), a proposal to put a fifty-foot tall sculpture of a book in a Minneapolis neighborhood. The book would have been a building and housed a library, hosted lectures, and produced a newspaper—all elements

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later realized for the Gramsci Monument. The project “outgrew its budget.” Hirschhorn’s proposal survives on the Walker Art Center blog. See Paul Schmelzer, “The Road-Side Giant Book Project,” Untitled (Blog), http://blogs.walkerart. org/visualarts/2006/11/21/ road-side-giant-book-project. 6. See Claire Fontaine’s line of brickbat sculptures (c. 2006)— bricks wrapped in the covers of tomes such as Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle and the collected works of Marx and Engels.

Thomas Hirschhorn: Stand-alone (detail), The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, October 7â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 17, 2016. Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, and Coleccion Isabel y Agustin Coppel (CIAC). Photo: Travis Diehl.

“time to accept the obvious.” There are the closed-up texts that you won’t read, the chattering text you can’t avoid, and, like trophies, the televisions, taped over and unplugged, their screens deathly gray, that nonetheless form the books’ cartoonish opposites.7 Here is the leather-bound, elitist angle: a characterization of low materials and high notions. On the mantel are the slow, reified texts; while the war porn on the tree trunk and the sanitized mayhem of television force themselves uninvited into your consideration— flashy, spectacular, and instant—to the point of oversaturation and apathy. Yet what might happen if you do seek out and apply yourself to one of these books, or many others? In Hirschhorn’s mass-media dichotomy, you might either lend your spectatorship to the cause of power or apply your efforts to a grander project (those projects of LOVE , PHILOSOPHY, AESTHETICS , and POLITICS)—and thus refuse your attention to the ongoing image-war. Hirschhorn’s installation, its cardboard and tape, is ephemeral—or, in the artist’s more precise term, “precarious”; the materials will be thrown away.8 Yet the books will persist. Even if these copies wind up in the dump, it would take much more to delete the books they represent. Unlike the news, unlike tweets or shares, unlike even online images of Hirschhorn’s work, these books are off the network. The stack of books offers a ballast—a kind of collective memory that the news cycle can’t quite wipe. Indeed, the collective project of thought does have, if not a sequence, at least a stacking effect; books accumulate, not supersede. Art is Hirschhorn’s sphere of action, where he deploys the forces of love, philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. To the question of how to take an action that will outlive the actor—that will escape our local crises, outward into time—the stacks of books are Hirschhorn’s answer. In his image of a broken world, the falling trees and soldiers spare the books.9 Travis Diehl lives in Los Angeles. He serves on the editorial board of X-TRA.

7. Mickalene Thomas also sets up this dichotomy; her viewing room presents a flashy montage of television—sitcoms, comedy specials, and televised concert spectaculars—underpinned, quietly, by the many ready books. 8. “I like this term ‘precariousness’—my work isn’t ephemeral, it’s precarious. It’s humans who

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decide and determine how long the work lasts. The term ‘ephemeral’ comes from nature, but nature doesn’t make decisions.” Hirschhorn in Gingeras, “Conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn,” 24. 9. It was in the Thomas show, however, that I saw people actually reading them.

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Cruz-Malavé Cruz-Malavé ARTIST ARTIST PROJECT PROJECT The The Regime Regime of of thethe Visible Visible ARTIST ARTIST PROJECT PROJECT The The Regime Regime of of thethe Visible Visible Kristina Kristina Benjocki Benjocki The The Regime Regime of of thethe Visible Visible Kristina Kristina Benjocki Benjocki DOCUMENT DOCUMENT Kristina Kristina Benjocki Benjocki DOCUMENT DOCUMENT Mute Mute Screams: Screams: AnAn Introduction Introduction to to Althusser’s Althusser’s “A “A Young Young Cuban Cuban Painter Painter Before Before Surrealism: Surrealism: Àlvarez Àlvarez Ríos” Ríos” DOCUMENT DOCUMENT Mute Mute Screams: Screams: An An Introduction Introduction Althusser’s Althusser’s “A “A Young Young Cuban Cuban Painter Painter Before Before Surrealism: Surrealism: Àlvarez Àlvarez Ríos” Ríos” and and Letters Letters to to Wifredo Wifredo Lam Lam to to Mute Mute Screams: Screams: An An Introduction Introduction to to Althusser’s Althusser’s “A “A Young Young Cuban Cuban Painter Painter Before Before Surrealism: Surrealism: Àlvarez Àlvarez Ríos” Ríos” and and Letters Letters to to Wifredo Wifredo Lam Lam Bécquer Bécquer Seguin Seguin and and Letters Letters to to Wifredo Wifredo Lam Lam Bécquer Bécquer Seguin Seguin A Young Bécquer Bécquer A Young Cuban Seguin Cuban Seguin Painter Painter Before Before Surrealism: Surrealism: Àlvarez Àlvarez Ríos Ríos (1962) (1962) A Young A Young Cuban Painter Painter Before Before Surrealism: Surrealism: Àlvarez Àlvarez Ríos Ríos (1962) (1962) Letters Letters toCuban to Wifredo Wifredo Lam Lam (1977) (1977) A Young A Young Cuban Cuban Painter Painter Before Before Surrealism: Surrealism: Àlvarez Àlvarez Ríos Ríos (1962) (1962) Letters Letters toAlthusser to Wifredo Wifredo Lam Lam (1977) (1977) Louis Louis Althusser Letters Letters to to Wifredo Wifredo Lam Lam (1977) (1977) Louis Louis Althusser Althusser Louis Louis Althusser Althusser EDITORS: EDITORS: Sven Sven Spieker, Spieker, Karen Karen Benezra, Benezra, Francesca Francesca DalDal Lago, Lago, Octavian Octavian Eşanu, Eşanu, Anthony Anthony Gardner, Gardner, EDITORS: EDITORS: Sven Sven Spieker, Spieker, Karen Karen Benezra, Benezra, Francesca Francesca DalDal Lago, Lago, Octavian Octavian Eşanu, Eşanu, Anthony Anthony Gardner, Gardner, Angela Angela Harutyunyan, Harutyunyan, Andrew Andrew Weiner Weiner EDITORS: EDITORS: Sven Sven Spieker, Spieker, Karen Karen Benezra, Benezra, Francesca Francesca DalDal Lago, Lago, Octavian Octavian Eşanu, Eşanu, Anthony Anthony Gardner, Gardner, Angela Angela Harutyunyan, Harutyunyan, Andrew Andrew Weiner Weiner ISSN: ISSN: 2162-2574 2162-2574| e-ISSN: | e-ISSN: 2162-2582 2162-2582| Triannual | Triannual Angela Angela Harutyunyan, Harutyunyan, Andrew Andrew Weiner Weiner ISSN: ISSN: 2162-2574 2162-2574| e-ISSN: | e-ISSN: 2162-2582 2162-2582| Triannual | Triannual ISSN: ISSN: 2162-2574 2162-2574| e-ISSN: | e-ISSN: 2162-2582 2162-2582| Triannual | Triannual

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Prometheus

2017

ISA CARRILLO ADELA GOLDBARD

RITA PONCE DE LEÓN

NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO JOSÉ CLEMENTE OROZCO FOUR AR T IS T S FROM ME X IC O

RE V ISI T ORO Z C O

POMONA COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART Claremont, CA pomona.edu/museum

AUGUST 29—DECEMBER 16, 2017 Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 5-7 PM

Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California.

1 MUSEUM 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles | hammer.ucla.edu

MARISA MERZ, UNTITLED, 1977. NYLON GAUZE, IRON, STONE; 6 × 114 ¼ × 114 ¼ IN. (15 × 290 × 290 CM). COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS.

“Personal, untrammelled originality.” – The New Yorker

Nicole Eisenman, Another Green World, 2016, oil on canvas, 128 Ă&#x2014; 106 in. (325.12 Ă&#x2014; 269.24 cm), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee, photo by Brian Forrest

Selections from the Permanent Collection On View Now | moca.org

moca.org