X-TRA Fall 2017 20.1

X-TRA CONTEMPORARY ART QUARTERLY

VOLUME 20 NUMBER 1 www.x-traonline.org DISPLAY UNTIL DECEMBER 2017 $10.00 U.S . / CAN

X-TRA Volume 20, Number 1 Fall 2017

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X-TRA PO Box 41-437 Los Angeles, CA 90041 http://x-traonline.org T: 323.982.0279 editors@x-traonline.org ISSN 1937-5069 X-TRA is a contemporary art quarterly that has been published in Los Angeles since 1997.

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Cover: Rakish Light Press, Make-Readies (detail), 2017.

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Kerry James Marshall, Portrait of a Curator (In Memory of Beryl Wright), 2009. Acrylic on PVC, 30 ⅞ × 24 ⅞ × 1⅞ in. Penny Pritzker and Bryan Traubert Collection, © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

CONTENTS

Letter from the Editors and Publishers

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Miljohn Ruperto: Geomancies REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles Review by Candice Lin

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Kerry James Marshall: Mastry Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Review by Travis Diehl

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Shambhavi Kaul’s Haunted Nursery Ryan Holmberg

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Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Review by Anuradha Vikram

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ARTIST WRITES, No. 1 It’s Nobody’s Fault: Extinction of Consciousness and Everything Else A.L. Steiner + Otherwild

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Trajal Harrell: Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Madeto-Measure) / Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Review by Alison D’Amato

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art Queens Museum, New York Review by Michelle Grabner

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Fiona Connor and Others: An Unfolding Text Kavior Moon

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Make-Readies Rakish Light

160 and insert

Letter from the Editors and Publishers

Dear Reader, This fall marks the twentieth volume of the collectively produced quarterly X-TRA. The journal was initiated by a few artists in Los Angeles who had identified, as Ellen Birrell put it, “a need for artists to take control of the processes by which their work is seen and understood.”* For the first six years, X-TRA was printed on newsprint and given away for free at galleries, museums, and art schools. Regardless of cover-price, the X-TRA editorial board has always focused on high quality writing. We continue to strive to present diverse, surprising, and thoughtful approaches to contemporary art that uphold our core mission to promote and provoke critical engagement with contemporary art.

We are proud to present this first issue of the twentieth volume. The transition from the newsprint freebie to the substantial full-color journal in your hands today is part of our history. For giving X-TRA its unique physical form over the years, we thank current designers Brian Roettinger and Taylor Giali, and those of the past: Aaron King and Holiday, Michael Worthington, Conny Purtill of Purtill Family Business, Brian Bartlett and Danielle Foushée, Mitchell Kane, and Jérome Saint-Loubert Bié. Thumbnail images of our front covers from the past twenty years will be scattered throughout the pages of volume 20.

X-TRA’s entire archive, which represents our work with more than 450 artists and writers, is available for reading online. In addition to the quarterly, X-TRA also presents public events, editions, and books, and we are growing our online presence. These facets of X-TRA are integral to fulfilling our mission.

In honor of this twentieth anniversary milestone, we are poised to launch several new programs that further define X-TRA as an artist-driven organization with deep roots in the community. Our aim is to provide a platform for artists to define their own terms of engagement and to expand the fields of criticism and theory.

With the Artist Writes series, we have commissioned essays for volume 20 by four significant contemporary artists: A.L. Steiner, Andrea Fraser, Martine Syms, and Pope.L. Each artist-author will present a corresponding public lecture in Los Angeles. Their essays will be anthologized upon the series’ completion.

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In this issue, you will find the first of the series—A.L. Steiner’s “It’s Nobody’s Fault: Extinction of Consciousness and Everything Else.”

The project, which Steiner produced in collaboration with Otherwild, is both a direct address and a meditation reflecting on the frustrations and tribulations of being an artist-writer-activist in this charged political moment.

Later in the year, we’ll announce details of another new initiative—the X-TRA Forums—for which we’ve invited four artists to delve into X-TRA’s archives. The artists—Malik Gaines, Michelle Grabner, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, and Patrick Staff—will select an article from the past to use as a departure point for a public forum. Engaging contemporary art criticism via different platforms and media, the X-TRA Forums will mine the recent history of contemporary art in order to consider the present and to foster cross-generational conversations between artists.

It has been an honor to deliver X-TRA to you for two decades. Whether this is your first issue or your seventy-eighth, we are happy to have you with us and look forward to celebrating with you this year and in the future.

With warm regards, The Editors and Publishers of X-TRA: Jeff Beall, Stephen Berens, Ellen Birrell, Neha Choksi, Poppy Coles, Leslie Dick, Travis Diehl, Karen Dunbar, Jon Leaver, Shana Lutker, Mario Ontiveros, Elizabeth Pulsinelli, Nizan Shaked, Brica Wilcox * Ellen Birrell, “Project X Paper,” The First Show (Orange, CA: Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 1992), 2.

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Candice Lin

Miljohn Ruperto: Geomancies

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REDCAT, Los Angeles January 14–March 12, 2017

Dust carries within it multiple places and times. It is “a disguised unity of minute contagions and pollutants” from “milieus so distant from one another that they can operate for each other only as outsiders.” 1 Even as dust is the return to oneness with God (from dust to dust), dust is always legion; it is a host of other bodies that were once under this possessive, coherent illusion of your body, your self.

In Miljohn Ruperto and Rini Yun Keagy’s 45-minute video Ordinal (SW/ NE) (2017), which I first encountered in Ruperto’s Geomancies exhibition at REDCAT, we see aerial views of Central California’s parched and devastated environment and our alienation from it, as shots cut between drought-stricken landscapes and suburban homes with swimming pools and manicured lawns. In the opening intertitles, Ruperto and Keagy connect this contemporary landscape to the history of the American Dust Bowl, a site that witnessed a series of dust storms due to the destruction of the Midwestern agrarian landscape in the 1930s from overfarming, overgrazing, and subsequent droughts. During the “dirty thirties,” the depleted soil from the Midwest formed vast, billowing clouds of dust that were seen as far as the East Coast and were known as “black blizzards” or “black rollers.”

The invocation of blackness or darkness for that which is foreboding, evil, ominous, and contaminating is an association that is racialized, whether or not it is acknowledged as such. In their film, Ruperto and Keagy employ many such racialized assemblages of the demonic, including dark stormy clouds, Pazuzu (an Assyrian demon), a black spinning square, and a possessed, dancing black body. But they do so in order to destabilize the logic that links blackness to evil and non-being.

The film begins with a black sprinkler head emerging from a well-watered, suburban lawn, lit by the artificial sun of a garage security light. The banality of the black sprinkler head becomes eerie and at the same time absurd, in its reference to the mysterious black monoliths in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Like Kubrick’s monoliths, which arguably represent extraterrestrial consciousness in a non-anthromorphic form—beings so evolved they are “immortal machine entities” of “pure energy and spirit” with “limitless capabilities and ungraspable intelligence,” 2 the demonic in Ordinal (SW/NE) is also often represented by abstract black shapes. Like global warming or any other hyperobject ,3 the demonic in Ordinal (SW/

1. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 222.

2. “Stanley Kubrick: Playboy Interview,” Playboy (September 1968), 94.

3. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects:

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Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto, Ordinal (SW/NE), 2017. Video still. Digital video, 43:44 min. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto, Ordinal (SW/NE), 2017. Video still. Digital video, 43:44 min. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

NE) is that which cannot be encompassed and fully understood. The demon appears only rarely in human-like form, as Pazuzu or the possessed dancer, but is present throughout the film as a collection of effects—the devastated environment, a chronic and persistent cough, the sick baby—that withdraw from any totalizing understanding.

Philosopher Eugene Thacker uses the phrase “horror of philosophy” to address the existential dread and void that yawns when “the answer to the philosophical question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ could quite possibly result in the response ‘there is nothing,’” rendering philosophy’s endeavor futile and absurd.4 For Thacker, this horror of nothing has a tradition of being described by its blackness, its darkness, its negation of whiteness and light. Thacker uses descriptions of black sentient oil, black metal music, and black abstract artworks to show how darkness points to a limit that brings us “to a philosophical dyad…the distinction between presence and absence, being and non-being. Darkness is at once something negative and yet, presenting itself as such, is also something positive.”5 In these philosophical dyads of good/evil, human/inhuman, light/dark, and white/black, we see the seeds of racialized horror. Blackness becomes the visible mark of the impossible-to-imagine ontological opposite, but it seems separate from issues of race or black bodies because it is represented through abstraction, often appearing as an amorphous cloud or a “self-negating form of representation,” such as a primary shape. Thacker writes about the black square as an early representation of cosmic nothingness, first with Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi, of 1617, and later with Kazimir Malevich, in 1915: “Black is less a color and more the withdrawal of every relation between self and world.” 6 Arthur Jafa, writing about European Surrealists and Cubists encountering traditional African artifacts, explains how such artifacts were seen as stylized and abstract because of “the inconceivability of the black body to the white imagination.” Cubism arose as a European response to the way African art and the radical ontology these objects embodied broke open Western conceptions of space and time. But this rupture to the white imagination could not be followed out politically or socially; it could not actually tear the fabric of European hegemony beyond a nod to cultural relativism or, worse, as exemplar of a primitive, symbolic state. African artworks that challenged a European conception of reality were seen as artistic interpretations, as “creative distortions,” as fetishes. In their difficulty in grappling with the equal reality of beings radically different from them, both physically and culturally, in their conception and representation of bodies, time, and space, Europeans turned to abstraction, claiming that these African objects did not refer to a real “radically different (alien) ontology” but rather to an earlier symbolic state. This aestheticization allowed for the preservation of “Eurocentric belief in itself as the defining model of humanity. This, in turn, has provoked the ongoing struggle against the acceptance of the ‘other,’ and its full humanity.” 7

4. Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2 (Winchester, UK, and Washington DC: Zero Books, 2015), 63–64.

5. Ibid., 17.

6. Ibid., 51.

7. Arthur Jafa, “My Black Death,” Everything But the Burden: What White People

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Are Taking from Black Culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 247.

In “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe argues that some subjects are alienated from full humanity. He distinguishes between those who possess zoe, mere biological life, which aligns them in proximity with death and instrumentalization, and bios , those who possess full human existence. Mbembe and other scholars—including Paul Gilroy and Alexander Weheliye—have linked this necropolitical view of “bare life” (the wounded, expendable destroyed remainder of political bios that lies in a “zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast,” between zoe and bios)8 to race. Mbembe traces the genesis of “bare life” not to the Nazi death camp, as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben does, but to the plantation and the colony. It is in the plantation and the colony where a philosophical understanding of the void/ demonic/inhuman as blackness becomes attached to flesh. The phenotypical darkness of certain bodies marks and justifies their lesser humanity, their closeness to supernatural evil, the demonic, and the subhuman beast. The darkness, philosophically and as attached to human bodies, exists merely to foreground, through contrast, the light—the fully human white subject.

In all his writings on darkness and the inhuman, Thacker is in collusion with Agamben in the avoidance (or transcendence—“the biopolitics of racism so to speak transcends race” 9) of the language of race through examples that abstract the use of blackness from the human body. One example Thacker uses is the sci-fi writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s writing is important to the film Ordinal (SW/NE) as well, which makes reference to the Necronomicon, the imaginary book that appears in Lovecraft’s writing. Graham Harman, another philosopher influential on Ruperto’s thought, speculates that Lovecraft’s success in portraying the inhuman comes not from a detailed precise description but rather its opposite, a “vertical” or “allusive aspect” in his writing that creates a gap “between an ungraspable thing and the vaguely relevant descriptions that the narrator is able to attempt.” 10 Lovecraft, like Thacker, also uses metaphors of darkness to describe the inhuman, the void, but in the context of the overtly racist language in Lovecraft’s writings, blackness cannot maintain the illusion of neutral abstraction.11 The demonic can only be seen through blackness, through obfuscation, through oblique, peripheral attention. Ordinal (SW/NE) layers various histories and stories hypnotically, and seemingly disparate references to The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Assyrian demons, and valley fever all circle around a fleeting and ungraspable horror. The references point across each other, creating oblique lines of attention, allowing for flickering glimpses of

8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 1998), 109.

9. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 85.

10. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, UK, and Washington DC: Zero

Books, 2012), 24.

11. Lovecraft’s writings use metaphors describing Africans as “gorilla-like,” “apes,” “beasts,” “semi-human,” “vicefilled,” “nigger[s],” and he has characterized the “inscrutable, repulsive” Chinese as “mongrels without intellect.” See Phenderson Djeli Clark, “The ‘N’ Word through the Ages: The Madness of HP Lovecraft,” Media Diversified (May 24,

2014), http://mediadiversified. org/2014/05/24/the-n-wordthrough-the-ages-the-madnessof-hp-lovecraft/, and Laura Miller, “It’s OK to admit that H.P. Lovecraft was racist,” Salon (September 11, 2014), www.salon.com/2014/09/11/ its_ok_to_admit_that_h_p_lovecraft_was_racist/).

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Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto, Ordinal (SW/NE), 2017. Video still. Digital video, 43:44 min. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

Miljohn Ruperto, Demonology: Pazuzu, 2017. Installation view, Geomancies, REDCAT, Los Angeles, January 14–March 12, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

what usually remains beyond understanding. This methodology to locate the demonic is evident in the layout of the works in Ruperto’s exhibition Geomancies, where Ordinal (SW/NE) is one of five works on display and the only work made in collaboration. In the gallery, the entrance to the room where Ordinal (SW/NE) is projected points southwest and is directly across from Demonology: Pazuzu (2017). Ruperto’s lenticular print of the blackclothed demon Pazuzu is a visual “trick of the eye” that uses low-brow reproduction techniques to echo a stereoscopic illusion of three-dimensionality. From different angles, the lenticular print shifts slightly, echoing the parallax shift in your left and right eye, moving the demon into an illusionistic space shared with our bodies. With this momentary entering into our space, it operates as a memento mori, like the hidden, anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous painting The Ambassadors (1533).

Originally hung in a stairwell, Holbein’s painting could only be seen in passing, out of the peripheral vision of the person descending or ascending the stairs—a sobering, daily reminder of death. Because Demonology: Pazuzu is placed in the narrow space between the wall of the gallery and the room containing the video Ordinal (SW/NE), one cannot ever see the lenticular print at appropriate art-viewing distance. Instead, like the Holbein skull, viewers only see it out of the sides of their eyes, while entering or exiting the video room, brushed with death.

In the eastern corner of Geomancies is a short video that also spatializes the oblique. Driving South at Sunset. The Camera Faces East (2007) depicts a South Asian woman driving south on Interstate 5 near San Diego.

In Geomancies, Ruperto recontextualizes this older work within the contemporary political landscape, at a time when the United States / Mexico border is particularly fraught with demonizing rhetoric. As the woman drives, the camera captures her image from an oblique angle, and she sings a phrase from a country song intermittently under her breath, “You were always on my mind.” The viewer echoes the cameraperson’s axis of attention, which points east, while the driver focuses her attention south, creating an X between lines of sight, a target that is constantly shifting because it was filmed as the car moved steadily closer to the politically charged, southern national border. The oblique angles and lines of sight explored in this short work point to the exhibition’s formal uses of the X in other works, such as its appearance in the video Ordinal (SW/NE), where the X is referenced in the shape of the demon Pazuzu’s wings and is the name of the invisible, female character whom we do not see but who is marked with sickness and contamination. We also see the main character sitting below a poster with the symbol X as he struggles through fits of coughing. Both videos use X as a formal symbol and as recurrent intersection of the gaze to ask larger questions of the shiftiness and uncertainty in marking what or whom is considered demonic, monstrous, contaminating, and possessing.

But if the X marks the impossibility of pinning evil to one fixed site or body, the dust that swirls around in Ordinal (SW/NE) reiterates this failure. Dust complicates philosophical dyads of good/evil, self/other, and light/dark, which are predicated on clear boundaries between who is stranger and who is kin, who has a legal right to be within a nation and who does not, and who is designated for death and who for life. Reza Negarestani writes, “The release of these multiplicities disguised as one within each dust particle 13

is equal to the arrival of the alien not from without but from within.” 12 In its fragmentation and dispersal, dust holds a multiplicity of geographies and histories; it blows across the boundaries of nations and property lines, including the propertied sense of one’s self as an individual discreet from one’s environment. The dust in Ordinal (SW/NE) complicates this blurring of the boundaries as dust is breathed in and takes on a life of its own.

The dust of the Central California Valley carries within it living fungal spores, Coccidioides immitis and Coccidioides posadasii, which cause valley fever, coccidioidomycosis, or “cocci” for short. Valley fever causes respiratory infections, tiredness, fever, cough, skin lesions, and muscle and joint pain. “In the nineteen-fifties, both the U.S. and the Russians had bio-warfare programs using cocci,” said scientist John Galgiani in a 2014 interview with The New Yorker.13 The history of biological warfare extends from the US government’s purposeful dissemination of small-pox ridden blankets as “gifts” to Native Americans to the weaponization of inhalational Anthrax, a powdered form of living bacterial spores. But biological warfare can be slippery to trace—accountability can be denied, weaponized biological agents escape standardization, and purposeful contagion cannot always be contained to the intended victims.

Galgiani explains that cocci spores were not easy to control because they relied “on air currents to disperse them, and it was difficult to use the vector precisely, so it fell out of favor. But terrorists don’t care about that stuff—all they care about is perception. A single cell can cause disease, and you can genetically modify it to make it more powerful.” 14 The weaponization of living beings finds expression in terrorism, whether in the use of one’s own body (suicide bomber) or through other living bodies (anthrax). Like the fungal or bacterial spores that can parasitically lodge and grow within our bodies, taking over our will and health from the inside out, the terrorist, too, is spoken of as being already within our national borders. A threat from within must be surveilled within the national body, marked and rooted out.

Valley fever operates as a spectral character in Keagy and Ruperto’s film.

Invisible but present through menace, it reminds us of its power through the persistent asthmatic cough of one character and repeated scenes of possibly contaminated engulfing dust storms. From the lungs, valley fever can spread through the blood to the spine and brain, sometimes resulting in osteomyelitis, meningitis, and death. This is the fever’s most damaging form—disseminated coccidioidomycosis—where the fungus spreads all over the person’s body, and this specific fatal form disproportionately affects Filipinos and African-Americans.15 Those who work with disturbed soil or spend a lot of time outside in dusty environments are particularly susceptible—migrant farm workers, construction workers, oil field workers, and prisoners.16 During the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps 12. Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 90.

13. John Galgiani, quoted in Dana Goodyear, “Death Dust: The Valley-Fever Menace,” The New Yorker (January 20, 2014), http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2014/01/20/ death-dust.

14. Ibid.

15. Valley fever affects Filipinos 175 times more than non-Hispanic whites and African-Americans 14 times more than non-Hispanic whites, according to a study by Barbara E. Ruddy, MD, Anita P. Mayer, MD, Marcia G. Ko, MD, Helene R. Labonte, DO, Jill A. Borovansky, MD, Erika S. Boroff,

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MD, and Janis E. Blair, MD, “Coccidioidomycosis in African Americans,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 86, no. 1 (January 2011), 63–69.

16. In some cases, “inmates were 400 times more likely to contract cocci than the people living nearby,” because of the racial makeup of prisoners

and not having local resistance. David Ferry, “How the Government Put Tens of Thousands of People at Risk of a Deadly Disease,” Mother Jones (January/February 2015), http://www.motherjones. com/environment/2015/01/ valley-fever-california-centralvalley-prison.

Miljohn Ruperto, Driving South at Sunset. The Camera Faces East, 2007. Video still. Digital video, 15:20 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Miljohn Ruperto, Re-animating “Valley Turbulence” by Sam Chase, 2016. Installation view, Geomancies, REDCAT, Los Angeles, January 14–March 12, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

in Central California and Arizona, many of those interred left with lifelong health issues related to this fungi. “For African-American and Filipino prisoners, and those with suppressed immune systems due to HIV or diabetes, incarceration in the endemic area can be a death sentence. Between 2006 and 2011, thirty-six prisoners died from cocci, twenty-five of them black.” 17 In Ordinal (SW/NE), two gloved hands carefully examine Sam Chase’s historical photograph of a 1977 dust storm taken from above Weedpatch, a Central Californian camp in which the FSA housed the influx of migrant workers from the Midwest. The image is subtly animated to depict the dust storm slowly advancing in an incessant loop, which destabilizes the photograph’s function as material from a historical archive. The film’s primary narrator, a female character named X in the script, tells us the photo is taken from a height of 5000 feet. (According to Omer Fast’s video 5000 feet is the Best (2011), that height is ideal for military drones.)18 The photo also appears as an individual work in Geomancies. Re-animating “Valley Turbulence” by Sam Chase (2016) is a sculptural “lightbox” with the same seemingly still illuminated image that is actually a gif-like animation.

But in this sculpture, the looping image takes on the weighty proportions of the large wooden cube it is housed within, a cube that references the Minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd and Tony Smith and, by extension, the human body. But here the square, the cube that stands in for the body, is obscured by the perpetual moving dust of its image, which is constantly, ineffectively surveilled from above.

Military technologies of surveillance also figure heavily in the filmic style of Ordinal (SW/NE). Between aerial views of landscapes, we see a herd of pigs in low-resolution black and white. This aesthetic looks the same as the infrared-sensitive, thermal imaging technology used in drone surveillance, where whiteness marks what is alive and warm in a dark landscape. In this cinematic recreation of a biblical scene of demonic possession, the demon announces, “My name is Legion for we are many,” and leaps into the bodies of the pigs. A close-up of a squealing pig reveals the animals to be CGI. As the pigs stampede off the cliff, their death is a simulation. In the Bible and in Ordinal (SW/NE), demons occupy a human body before Jesus moves them into the bodies of pigs. The possessed man is human and worthy of saving by virtue of his unsuitability to enslavement: “For he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but chains he wrenched apart and the shackles he broke in pieces and no one had the strength to subdue him.” 19 Full humanity (bios) then is granted to those people who can reject enslavement, and who can distance themselves from the animality of mere life (zoe), refusing to be mere livestock or tools possessed by others. The death of the swine, that which is demonically marked by coordinates (SW/NE), makes possible the life of the human. The demon spirit flits between these two physical forms—swine and human, zoe and bios—and creates between these poles the realm of “bare life”—an animalized, barely human existence that Mbembe argues finds its form in the figure of the racialized slave.

17. Goodyear, “Death Dust.”

18. The drone pilot in Fast’s video says, “5000 feet is the

best, you learn more sitting at 5000 feet, you have more description, plus at 5000 feet

I could tell you what kind of shoes you’re wearing from a mile away.”

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19. Mark 5:4.

The history of possession can be traced to the plantation and the colony as sites in which bodies are instrumentalized to carry out the will of others.

Historically, on the plantation, the enslaved refused to be subdued through uprisings and the literal breaking of shackles, but also through subtler means. In the New World, slaves commonly took on the habit of eating dust, and this “Cachexia Africana” was one of the leading causes of slave death in the American South, second only to yellow fever. Some speculated that perhaps slaves ate the dirt to supplement their constant malnutrition and meager diet, a deficiency of B vitamins, or an infestation of parasites. But, in 1835, the physician F. W. Cragin surmised that slaves “willfully” and “craftily” chose slow suicide through a “desired repast…of charcoal, chalk, dried mortar, mud, clay, [and]…other unnatural substance[s].” 20 Indigenous and African slaves also used their knowledge of plant poisons and abortifacients to threaten abortion or suicide as a form of bargaining in the “crevices of power,” where the only power to be had in a powerless situation was the elimination of one’s own life and ability to give life.21 This acted coercively on the master not through a valuation of the slave in terms of his or her equality or humanity, but solely through the economic value of the slave’s body as property.22 Many notable slave uprisings, such as the Haitian Revolution, relied heavily on an interspecies confusion of bodily boundaries. Slaves infiltrated the water and food supply with biological poisons, introducing the sap of plants, the spores of fungi, and the venom of other animals into the bodies of their white masters, who sickened and died. Biological warfare causes a confusion of hierarchies. The term host undergoes a revision of meaning, revealing the breadth of its original Latin eponym hospes which contains the seemingly contradictory meanings of guest, host, and stranger within one word.23 The body of the white master, who previously thought of himself as a host—as in a subject providing largess and hospitality for his guests—becomes himself estranged by the new parasitical relationship to host and is no longer a subject but an object for the parasite: a house, tool, or food.

Consider the parasitic wasps of the genus Glyptapanteles, who inject their eggs into the soft flesh of living caterpillars. Inside the caterpillar’s body, the wasp eggs hatch into larvae and slowly feed on the caterpillar’s innards before eating through its skin to be born. Strangely, after the wasp larvae emerge, they turn around and patch the wounds they just made in the caterpillar’s body. The caterpillar survives and uses the energy and resources

20. F. W. Cragin, “Observations on Cachexia Africana, or Dirt-Eating,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 17 (1835), 356–62.

21. “Crevices of power” comes from Jenny Sharpe’s book Ghosts of Slavery, where the author recontextualizes Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everday Life to understand strategies to navigate institutional power

22. The slave who chooses death as a form of resistance is a historical parallel to Mbembe’s somewhat Romantic description of the suicide bomber who takes necropolitical power away from the State and into his or her own body. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1, trans. Libby Meintjes (2003), 11–40.

23. This is a concept I learned from my conversation

within the context of slavery and its afterlives. Sharpe defines this as a tactic or strategy by which “people who are relatively disempowered to find a place for themselves within a system they are not free to oppose…inhabit the crevices of power.” Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxi.

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with Jih-Fei Cheng and Mel Y. Chen, where Jih-Fei Cheng is referencing ideas in Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). See Candice Lin, Jih-Fei Cheng, and Mel Y. Chen, “What Is Contagion: A Roundtable,” Sublevel, http:// sublevelmag.com/what-iscontagion-a-roundtable/.

Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto, Ordinal (SW/NE), 2017. Video still. Digital video, 43:44 min. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

it would have used to spin the cocoon for its own transformation to weave instead a protective cocoon around the wasp larvae. It guards them against predators for the rest of its short life. Thus it replaces its commitment to propagate its own kind and takes on the wasp’s desire.24 Many popular science articles use the figure of the zombie to talk about these parasitic relationships between insects. The sensational figure of the zombie in American cinema emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, during the United States’ occupation of Haiti.25 Hollywood inverted the folklore of the zombie—originally an expression of the horrors of slavery—to be a mindless body controlled by others and used the figure to speak of white fears of miscegenation.26 When Ruperto and Keagy raise the specter of the fungal spores that cause valley fever, they are activating the parasite as a demonic relation. The parasite possesses the body of the host and changes its subjectivity, its place in the hierarchy. It works from the inside out, hollowing the body and making it a slave to a foreign will, a non-being, a zombie, a void.

For Geomancies, the southern corner of the REDCAT gallery is painted black. When Kazimir Malevich showed Black Square at The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 in Petrograd, in December 1915, he positioned the painting high on the wall in the corner of the room, taking the same spot that the icon of a saint would normally occupy in a traditional Russian home. The first Black Square (there were four versions between 1915 and 1930) was painted in 1915, though Malevich dated it 1913, the year he used it as a design for a stage curtain in the futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The black-painted corner of the REDCAT gallery can be read as a multivalent sign. On the one hand, it is an extension of Malevich’s Black Square— a supposedly non-referential thing in itself that replaces the icon and does not point to any future event or object in the world. On the other hand, it could be read as the opposite—an empty stage or backdrop waiting for the bi-monthly performance Possession (2017), in which Ruperto has choreographed a work for two dancers, who re-enact a mirrored version of the formal movements of possession, based on the infamous scene from Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film Possession, which features the actress Isabel Adjani.

The performers of Possession have a curiously evacuated affect. They take Adjani’s bodily movements and facial gestures from a cinematic scene that is charged with emotion and replicate them with the feeling drained out.

What we are left with is a twice-removed representation of flesh animated by a demonic force—a robotic, opaque husk of movements and twitches.

The deadpan style of the actors in Ordinal (SW/NE) also embodies this evacuation of emotion, and this hollowed-out body is articulated in the 24. In reconsidering the parasite/host relationship and the body as potential home, I am thinking of Timothy Morton’s analysis of the children’s poem, A House Is a House for Me: “Home, oikos, is unstable…

“Home” is purely “sensual”: it has to do with how an object finds itself inevitably on the

inside of some other object.

The instability of oikos, and thus of ecology itself, has to do with this feature of objects. A “house” is the way an object experiences the entity in whose interior it finds itself.” Morton, Hyperobjects, 118.

25. The United States’ occupation of Haiti lasted from July

28, 1915, to August 1, 1934.

26. The zombie is also possibly traceable to the historical person Jean Zombi, who partook in the violent struggles of the Haitian Revolution. See Colin (Joan) Dayan, Haiti, History, Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

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glaringly white scene at the doctor’s office, where the film’s main character Josiah, a young African-American man with an asthmatic cough, is told by the female Asian doctor, “You have nothing inside of you.”

In summarizing different Aristotelian views of “the void,” Eugene Thacker writes, “Ambiguity ensues, as philosophers attempt to render the nothing as something; the void is not the container itself, but the nothing that ‘is’ in the container, at best negatively demonstrated by displaced space (e.g. water poured into an empty vessel). In this plenist view, the void is simply that which is not-yet-full, or that which is not-X, where X denotes an existent, actual body and the void simply marks the interval or relation between one body and another, the space in-between.” 27 In considering the Aristotelian void as the space of relation between X and not-X, I think about Frantz Fanon’s psychological construction of race. Fanon writes, “Not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” 28 Conceptualizing the void and its horrific otherness, like the construction of race, is a fluid space constantly in the making, a poetics of relation. The moral values or affective qualities of the other, not-X, become inextricably bound to one’s own meaning and being, even as that meaning is made through alienation. But the objective is no longer to determine the nature of X and not-X but to question the very ether they supposedly float around in. “No longer are my intimate impressions ‘personal’ in the sense that they are ‘merely mine’ or ‘subjective only’: they are footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark—that is, me. I become (and so do you) a litmus test of the time of hyperobjects. I am scooped out from the inside.” 29 Ordinal (SW/NE) is primarily narrated by a young Filipino woman whom we hear but do not see in the film.30 She plays the character of X, who has recently given birth and, as we learn at the end of the film, has contracted valley fever. We understand her illness as the result of a dark bargain with Pazuzu because the narration announces “evil for evil” and goes on to describe how protective mothers invoke the evil of Pazuzu to ward off the evil of Lamashtu, a Mesopotamian goddess whose furies are oriented towards the destruction of human children, while nurturing non-human animals. The sacrificial mother is a well-known trope, as is the use of the cis-female body and its reproductive potential to metaphorically reference the fertile, agrarian, and productive potential of land.31 Anthropologist Anna Tsing writes of how the state’s promotion of cereal agriculture supported a patriarchal realignment of power: “The pater familias was the state’s representative at the level of the working household…who ensured that taxes and tithes would be drawn off the harvest for the subsistence of 27. Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse, 63.

28. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 90.

29. Morton, Hyperobjects, 5.

30. We know the character to be Filipino by the background voices speaking Tagalog in her phone conversations with Josiah.

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31. For example, Eva Feder Kittay writes in her classic text, “Woman as Metaphor,” Hypatia 3, no. 2 (June 1988), 67: “Man speaks of conquering the mountain as he would woman, of raping the land, of his plow penetrating a female earth

22

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the elites. It is within this political configuration that both women and grain were confined and managed to maximize fertility…

This obsession with reproduction in turn limited women’s mobility and opportunities outside of childcare… [I]t seems fair to call this [rise of cereal agriculture], …echoing Frederick Engels, ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex.’” 32 At the end of Ordinal (SW/NE), after giving birth to a human child, the character of X becomes pregnant with spores. Like the fetus, the spores of coccidioidomycosis, incubated in the warm bronchioles of her lungs, feed parasitically off of the mother’s nutrients. The birth of one is celebrated and protected—a future productive citizen—whereas the other, as it grows into a multitude, temporarily or permanently takes away the productive potential of the mother or the prisoner working in the field. The parasite, like Lamashtu and her breast-fed puppies, troubles the idea of proper maternal relations, as it also disrupts the hierarchies and clear boundaries of host and guest, master and slave, X and not-X. The disembodied character X is complemented by the main character that we do see: Josiah. We first see him sitting on his bed with his inhaler, reading off the vital signs of his body and of the environment. As Josiah is overcome with a fit of coughing, a poster of Malevich’s Black Cross (1915) that hangs above his bed swings loose from one corner, forming an X and deepening the connection between him and the disembodied character named X. In many religious traditions, the cross signifies life and death: the crossroads.

Transformed by a possessed wind that blows through the bedroom—a wind potentially laden with dusty spores—the cross becomes an X. After the end of slavery in the New World, X took on specific meanings.

X became the naming device for that which cannot be named, the symbol that stands in for the signature of an illiterate slave, the signifier of a lost name, homeland, lineage, and family. Without being a name in itself, X is a device, a sign that points to irrecoverable and unknowable loss.

Because of literary discourse and actual history that associates blackness with dispossession (of homeland and self-possession of one’s own body), “black geographies are often unimaginable because we assume they do not really have any valuable material referents, that they are words rather than places, or that their materiality is always already fraught with discourses of dispossession.” 33 X stands for irrevocable loss but also X marks the spot: the hypervisible, marked, racialized body. This is also the body on display, the body that performs and for whom the performance never ends.

In Ordinal (SW/NE), Josiah’s encounters with the demonic are punctuated by other moments in which he is dressed as a mascot, dancing in an empty gym. Because the mascot has no cartoon head, just Josiah’s head emerging from the overly padded and enlarged costume, we understand that the mascot is Josiah himself, endlessly performing, with or without a visible audience; we are always watching him. X can never exit the stage.

32. Anna Tsing, “Unruly Edges, Mushrooms as Companion Species (for Donna

Haraway),” Environmental Humanities 1 (2012), 141–54.

33. Katherine McKittrick,

Demonic Grounds (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 8.

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Above: Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto, Ordinal (SW/NE), 2017. Video still. Digital video, 43:44 min.

Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

Previous spread: Miljohn Ruperto, Possession, 2017. Performance at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Geomancies, installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, January 14–March 12, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Toward the end of Ordinal (SW/NE), Josiah and a circle of friends take turns freestyling dance moves for each other. The dancing body becomes robotic and zombie or puppet-like, angular in its movements. During Josiah’s dance, his hand takes his shirt and moves him around as if it is the hand of another person. Each spasm ripples like a fit of coughing through the body, like the rupture of an inner demonic state working its way to the surface.

Superimposed on this dance scene, Josiah’s voice speculates, I once heard that the word influenza had two possible etymologies. The first is the more accepted one where in an alchemical cosmology the stars influence our bodies through an invisible cosmic fluid… The second theory is about uncontrollable mimetic contagion… The disease influences my body to copy the cough and mime the symptoms of the sickness that I see… I sometimes wonder about the difference between choreography and freestyle.

If choreography is influence imposed upon you by outside bodies (like stars, or other humans), what is freestyle? It radiates from the inside out. Is my evil star inside?

Timothy Morton writes that the word disaster comes from dis-astron, a dangerous or evil star that takes place against a relatively stable outside horizon, in order for its deviance to be seen. In the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian world view, the earth was stationary and central, surrounded by a machinery of the spheres, a series of concentric circles made of a glass-like, transparent material—“quintessence”—which literally held the stars and other planets in place so that they appeared to move while the earth remained still. This was the common system of belief in the Middle Ages among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions alike.

So what, then, does it mean if disaster is repositioned as internal, imploding? If choreography is the organization of a body imposed from outside that body, like the master’s orders to the slave or the surveillance drone that controls one’s actions and mobility from above, freestyle is assumed to be a space of internal freedom. Arthur Jafa’s description of jazz could apply here. Jafa writes, “Jazz improvisation is first and foremost signified self-determination. This actually precedes its function as musical gesture.

For the black artist to stand before an audience, often white, and to publicly demonstrate her decision-making capacity, her agency, rather than the replication of another’s agency, i.e. the composers, was a profoundly radical and dissonant gesture.” 34 Freestyle and jazz improvisation in this context speak of self-possession, imagining black geography within a language of dispossession from one’s agency, one’s homeland, one’s own body. This imagined geography is not based in colonial narratives of conquest and possession but rather is a “landscape of relation,” of ever-moving, ever-shifting “demonic grounds.” 35 Drawing from mathematics, physics, and computer science, “the demonic

34. Arthur Jafa, “My Black Death,” 249.

35. I am referencing McKittrick’s interpretation of

27

Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997) in McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 8–9, 14–18.

Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto, Ordinal (SW/NE), 2017. Video still. Digital video, 43:44 min. Courtesy of the artist and REDCAT.

connotes a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable outcome. The demonic, then, is a non-deterministic schema.” 36 We find it so difficult to think of X and not-X, evil and good, parasite and host, outside of a relation of enmity, colonization, or assimilation to the other’s desires. But in Ordinal (SW/NE), X is a shifting thing: it is a woman’s voice cracking with illness, it is a black square spinning into a circle, it is the tetra winged shape of Pazuzu the demon in flight.

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains.

Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at Gasworks, London; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; and CAAA, Guimarães, Portugal.

36. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxiv. This is McKittrick’s quotation of Sylvia Wynter’s idea of “demonic grounds” which, for Wynter, are grounded in an un-visible parallel geography in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

There, Wynter locates the demonic in the ontological impossibility of imagining Caliban’s female counterpart or mate.

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Travis Diehl

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles March 12–July 3, 2017

Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh…

Kerry James Marshall added his name to this list of masters in 1980 with A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, a black-black egg tempera portrait of a grinning man in a black hat against a black background. Mastry, the first career retrospective of this painters’ painter, includes many selfportraits and portraits of black artists and models in artists’ studios. Yet the only image that depicts Marshall in his own studio is a photograph: Black Artist (Studio View) (2002). At least it seems to be Marshall; that’s his painting on the wall. But the only figure is seated with his back to the camera. The studio is cast in dark blue, as if underexposed. And it is—but only in terms of the so-called visible spectrum. The scene is lit with ultraviolet or black light. The shoulders of the black figure’s white short-sleeved shirt glow. To the right of the frame is a studio table cluttered with tools and brushes, but all that pops in the black light are the neon orange handle of a screwdriver and a neon yellow jar of acrylic paint. Black light, by which to see the black artist; black light that’s really right of blue. Since his 1980 portrait of the artist, Marshall has painted black figures almost exclusively, meaning black-black, lamp black, mars black, and bone black. Such is the inadequacy or withheld precision of the English language, within which, in most of Western art history, the walls are the same white as the people. The minstrel-show bluntness of Marshall’s early paintings of black-black skin and shock-white teeth and eyes is punny but pugnacious. A later work, the totalizing Black Painting (2003–6), almost dares you to mistake it for a monochrome. It takes a close look to make out a detailed interior scene coaxed skillfully from a tight range of blacks: a bedroom, a couple in bed, an Angela Davis book on the nightstand, and a Black Panther flag draped beside the lamp. The carpet that takes up a canted fifth of the picture is the abstraction you thought you were getting, and it serves as the floor for Marshall’s greater figurative project.

The photo Black Artist (Studio View), as reproduced in the exhibition catalog for Marshall’s Mastry, is more or less legible, but as displayed in the museum, its dark hues and protective plexiglass make it not only underexposed, but positively reflective. The artist is in his studio; the table is strewn with paints and tools; the wall above is collaged with reference images; and in the center breadth of the photograph is a work in progress, on unstretched canvas tacked to the wall. The seated figure, his hands behind his head, seems to contemplate the picture in the picture like a view through a window. The painting on the wall in Black Artist is 7 am Sunday Morning (2003). 7 am Sunday Morning is an unusually crisp picture for Marshall, rendered with chilly clarity down 30

Kerry James Marshall, Black Artist (Studio View), 2002. Ink-jet print on paper; framed dimensions: 50 ⅛ × 61⅞ x 2 ½ in. ©Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

to the brickwork of the Rothschild Liquors store and the beauty school next door. It is a billboard-scale canvas with such a wide sweep that the few finely painted buildings at the intersection have a model aspect, and the figures standing outside the closed liquor store feel like figurines. A cloud-marbled sky takes up most of the image, and the mirage of a giant lens flare buries the rightmost third. 7 am Sunday Morning also differs from Marshall’s oozier, gestural, collage-style paintings of the 1990s in that it is, for the most part, a believable and simultaneous scene. The work crystalizes the painter’s wry relationship to photorealism, a style that he undertakes, as he does all the others, to détourne by mastery. It’s Chicago and it’s early. Notes on a musical staff rhyme with the powerlines; they curl out of an apartment window in the background, and a flock of birds looks stamped on the sky. One man is paused in a crosswalk; to his left is a motion-smeared gray car—a mini Gerhardt Richter, which is to say a nod to another painter’s version of photographic effects. The picture is smooth and flat with all the different speeds of its same frozen time.

These pictorial tricks, registers of cartoon and photograph, bring to the painting the nested concurrence that is Marshall’s particular revisionism. In other words, it is as accurate a picture as one can paint of how one history persists as a fragment within some other version—a temporal pastiche, accomplished not by collage but by composing a decisive moment.

Marshall’s revision of art and art history remains a painterly one, steeped in Northern Renaissance and Abstract Expressionism. To get into history, he needs to get into the museum, and the best way into the museum is to put on its prevailing conservative mode. But this doesn’t stop him from adding a photographic dimension to his paintings’ reflection. In Small Pin-Up (Finger Wag) (2013), the model’s finger gives off motion trails; in Untitled (Club Couple) (2014), the pair smiles as if for a camera. The lens flare blasting across 7 am Sunday Morning resembles or imitates a photographic artifact, but it isn’t one; the paint is paint, and the virtuosity here is on painting’s terms—transparency, layering, and the uncanny potential for a compositional element to be both pictorially resolved and conceptually dazzling—to push out of the frame while flattening the painted object to the wall. The lens flare, or Marshall’s imagination of one, refracts like a sunbeam through a garden hose into a pattern of diamonds edged in rainbows, layered like filmy scales or a ghosted harlequin. Three big hexagons separate into red, yellow, and blue—the foundational elements of painting’s color theory but nothing to do with the elements of a camera lens that actually shape the effect. Between them is a scattering of five smaller, dense black hexagons: improbably black light in broad daylight.

The Art of Hanging Pictures (2003), stands out in Mastry because it is, in fact, an installation of some two dozen photographic prints. Two frames contain grids of photos of churches, many in storefronts or garages—congregations making do. The same photo of a tchotchke swan (a photograph of a TV screen, maybe) is reproduced with two different croppings. On a pair of blocky ledges are vintage-looking double portraits of black couples resting on a couch or posing. In another frame, high and center in the arrangement, is a false-color printout of a famous newspaper photo of four grinning Chicago police officers leading Fred Hampton’s corpse on a stretcher. The emphasis is on pictures, as in, there are so many ways to mount them and then to arrange them in the home: on plexi, behind a matte, or with linen borders; on ledges; 32

Kerry James Marshall, 7 am Sunday Morning, 2003. Acrylic on canvas banner, 120 × 216 in. © MCA Chicago.

Photo: Michal Raz-Russo.

Kerry James Marshall, The Art of Hanging Pictures, 2003. Installation view, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, March 12–July 3, 2017. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Brian Forrest.

on the wall; from a picture rail (the way a “fine art” picture might be hung). Then there are the lay ways: on a low-hanging ledge is a blackand-white photo of a woman standing in front of a brick apartment block, gazing off frame. The photo is printed poster-size, framed in a cheesy faux-antique stock and fitted with a foot like a scaledup drugstore picture frame. A wooden wheelchair ramp behind the figure is echoed by the chunk of two-by-four lumber propping up the white buildout her portrait sits on. The scale is out of whack; the frame stock looks “normal” but the rest doesn’t match. The setup is artificial, too artistic—or it feels too close to home. Marshall uses photography as a vernacular with which to push into intimate, domestic space. The world feels framed. The art of hanging pictures, then: one photo dangles off kilter from the molding on a too-long wire. The shot shows a Cadillac parked on the street, near a tree and a line of treeless yards and houses; the sky is blown out—it is not a “good photo.” The wire is ominous, even evocative of a hanging; the piece recalls the lockets on chains printed in the triptych Heirlooms and Accessories (2002), the background of which depicts a souvenir postcard of a twentieth-century public lynching, which Fred Hampton’s murder practically was. Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police while asleep in his apartment. An FBI informant slipped Hampton barbiturates the night of the raid so he would never wake up again. Later, the Black Panthers took images of the blood-soaked mattress. The Art of Hanging includes a photograph of a framed triple memorial portrait of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Within Marshall’s photo, the portraits’ stamped metal frame is hemmed with wallet photos and clippings, including of the four child victims of the Sixteenth St. Baptist Church bombing of 1963.

In Marshall’s Souvenir series, black figures with glittery wings hold lonely vigils in their living rooms while the image of that trinity—JFK, RFK, MLK— hovers on their walls in a cloud. In other paintings, life goes on: It’s not just the museum walls at stake. In one gallery are two touching scenes of couples— Slow Dance (1992–93) and Could This Be Love (1992)—set in bedrooms and laced with the melodies of popular songs. These are made around the same time as Marshall’s Garden Project, a major series of exterior scenes of housing projects in Los Angeles and Chicago. The flowers of the wallpaper and the flowers of the gardens that give the housing projects their aspirational names are stenciled like blood on the walls or like an Andy Warhol silkscreen. It’s in this period that Marshall’s work synthesizes his modernisms—the polyvalent flatness of modernist painting and the built idealism of modernist architecture. Marshall sticks realism and historicity between panes of figure and ground. Indeed, the Garden Project codifies the tragedies of Marshall’s subjects within the disappointments of its form. His referential, postmodern medleys uphold a figuration that has been mistaken for cheerfulness, and for which Marshall is sometimes miscategorized as a painter of modern life.

(True, his pictures are rendered with a warmth that continues to defy the prevailing cynicism or cannibalism of contemporary painting. The figures are enjoying and tending the gardens of dripping rose stencils.) Other works depict figures inside of homes and businesses. His masterworks De Style (1993) and School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), populate the interiors of a barbershop and beauty school, respectively, with modern versions of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), vanitas and all. Posters decorate the walls and photos are tucked into the frames of heart-shaped mirrors.

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Left: Kerry James Marshall, Self Portrait of the Artist as a Super Model, 1994. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, mounted on board, 25 × 25 in. Center: Kerry James Marshall, Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum, 1981.

Acrylic on paper, 62 ½ × 52 ⅜ in. Right: Kerry James Marshall, Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self, 1980. Egg tempera on paper, 8 x 6.5 in. Installation view, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, March 12–July 3, 2017. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, installation view, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, March 12–July 3, 2017.

Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Yet Marshall’s work vies for a tradition consigned to the museum interior— an “insider” space. At MOCA, the Garden Project is at the heart of the show’s layout. Seven works from the series are hung in one long room, unstretched, unframed, and stuck up with grommets like a painter’s dropcloths and like tapestries lining a medieval hall.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Super Model (1994) bears a background of stenciled roses, like wallpaper that pops to the surface. The artist renders himself with black paint. His lips are rose red, and a blonde, translucent “wig” drapes across his head like bundled brushstrokes. Behind him is the nimbus of a religious icon. At MOCA, this is the leftmost picture on the first wall of the show; the rightmost is Marshall’s originary Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self. The show opens with several of Marshall’s “invisible men,” which is the chronological start of his mature work but also throws into ironic relief a visibility which, especially here on the retrospective’s third stop (after Chicago and New York), is now close to total. Between these two works is the much larger Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum (1981). Of the permutations of the invisible man motif, only Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum shares with Black Artist (Studio View) the sense of a diegetic collage—a picture-in-picture and art-historical pastiche composed not at the level of the painting’s surface but within its mise-en-scene. In the picture, a smaller version of Marshall’s 1980 portrait ornaments a room: portrait of the artist as décor. The painting has the sense of destiny fulfilled. It is a flat, knowing piece of art, preordained to the wall, that speaks to the baggy drudgery of domestic life and the vulnerability of breathing things to history’s arrows. Yet Marshall wedges a space between the work and the wall—a space that can’t be seen. Like Black Artist (Studio View), the small picture in Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum contrasts with its immediate context; the black light in the photograph is blown out by the white light of the museum, and the white border of the deep black Portrait of the Artist is set against red wallpaper, hung above the chore, the only other object in the room: a big unplugged green-gray machine. And this whole picture, again, hangs on the museum wall, where it was always meant to go.

Mastry is not only a measure of acceptance from the white Western art system, not only its highest honor—the title of Master (one day, to be Old…). At MOCA, the title wall has the word Mastry in the typeface Marshall developed for his Rhythm Mastr comic strip (1999–ongoing). The word hangs in black space studded with brushy, floral white stars. The title wall is visible from the museum lobby. To the left of the front desk is the MOCA iteration of Kerry James Marshall’s “Mastry”; to the right is the permanent collection. Both exhibitions share a curator in Helen Molesworth. Framed by the rightmost doorway is Jackson Pollock’s Number 1 (1949), an all-over floor-format masterpiece to remind you what Marshall has built on. To master the museum is to gain entry on the museum’s terms, but also to command the museum—the building, the staff, the board, the curator, the collection, and even—to illuminate Marshall’s invisible man—the museum’s publicity arm. Ads are hung on streetlights and pasted to construction sites like pictures in the picture.

Travis Diehl is an editor at X-TRA.

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Ryan Holmberg Shambhavi Kaul’s Haunted Nursery

Once expanded cinema split, flipped, and warped the screen in the 1960s, filmmaking’s old guard found themselves like clowns on an ice rink.

Nothing had been more reliable than the stationary, flat, and singular projection surface. It had been a fixed window onto a contained world governed by shots and cuts. Now the screen was whirling around and folding over itself, cavorting with ceilings, bodies, and other untraditional surfaces, and producing hybrids with fruit-fly speed. There was no chance of pinning it down, flattening it out, and sewing it back together again. But what if the pesky devil could be figuratively captured instead? What if the expanded screen’s mitosis and mutation could be halted and then trapped in an imaginary plane—like when General Zod and his minions were banished to the Phantom Zone in Superman II (1980)? Or like in the funky martial arts film that Shambhavi Kaul sources in her Fallen Objects (2015), which stars a flying pair of shears that valiantly attempts to subdue an endlessly replicating black, screen-like void.

When I first saw Kaul’s work, at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai in November 2014, I arrived with my head filled with space—specifically Indian space. A few days prior I had watched Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) at Sterling Cinema, around the corner from Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus. If you’ve seen this movie, you probably remember its nods to When Worlds Collide (1951) (Earth is doomed and humans need a new home) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (outer space is inner consciousness). But, just a few minutes into the film, well before the sublime themes and the big budget spectacles began to materialize, the Mumbaikars sitting around me were already aroused. Hero Matthew McConaughey was driving his pickup, with son and daughter beside him, kicking up clouds of dust and mowing down cornfields in pursuit of an errant aircraft. “It’s an Indian Air Force drone,” Dad says with a twang, “Its solar panels can power an entire farm.”

No fewer than a dozen Sterling patrons cooed, “Ohhh,” the second h rising in amazement and third firming up with national pride.

Science fantasy was in the air. In September 2014, with the Mars Orbiter Mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation had succeeded in putting a space probe into orbit around the Red Planet, inspiring higher-ups to promise manned missions to follow. Meanwhile, rightwing crackpots were claiming (once again) that ancient Hindus had mastered flight millennia ago in the form of the mythological soaring palaces known as Vimana. That summer, Farouk Virani had released Vimana, a short Hindi film about two Indian astronauts on a one-way deep space voyage. The entire October 2015 issue of Studies in South Asian Film and Media was dedicated to the 40

topic of Indian science fiction. Researchers at Jadavpur University were unearthing Martians and land-before-time beasts in old Bengali newspaper comic strips through the archival The Comic Book Project. Artist Sahej Rahal would soon begin roaming the state of Maharashtra in the guise of a Jedi knight, resulting in the exhibition Adversary at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai in early 2016.1 Half of the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014–15) was focused on the cosmos. And, for no rationally explainable reason, I began staring at Baburao Sadwelkar’s paintings online, mesmerized by his floating palaces and extraterrestrial landscapes. A few months later, I was at the security gate of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in the Navy Nagar area of Mumbai, asking to see the art collection built by nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha for India’s leading science research center. Standing in the institute’s halls, abstract paintings by V. S. Gaitonde and Krishna Reddy no longer looked to me like statements about facture and color, or mythology and inner consciousness. They were optical trips to worlds not within but way out, amongst the stars. Something was up.2 Kaul claims that she did not enter India in the latter half of 2014. She was in North Carolina, where she lives, and did not make it to her own show.

Presence, however, is a relative thing. It is well understood (and I am not talking about modern telecommunications) that psychic connectivity is not dependent on physical proximity. Granted, Kaul had been making work inspired by supernatural atavisms, extraterrestrial landscapes, and filmset magic for many years. But that alone cannot explain the unsettling fact that her show at Jhaveri opened on November 12, just a few days after Interstellar ’s Indian release on November 7. And get this: Her show was titled Lunar State. From what I recall, there were no eerie, 2001: A Space Odyssey-style monoliths in the show. There didn’t need to be because, effectively, the whole show was a monolith. Lunar State was a veritable beacon planted on the moon (Jhaveri Contemporary is a remote satellite of the Mumbai art world’s center, which is located in Colaba, some miles away), sending out secret signals for millions of seconds prior to the show’s opening to ensure that the right human transponder would arrive. Wily Kaul, exploiting the ignorance of her gallerist and the press, surrounded the show with turgid academese about post-colonialism, non-places, and mediatized identity. But my brain, having been pre-tuned by Christopher Nolan, was synced to the artist’s vibe. I perceived the constellation of signs through the artspeak noise.

UFO conspiracy pervaded the show. The five-minute Scene 32 (2009) turns the desiccated salt marsh of the Rann of Kutch into an Indian version of Area 51, with mysterious tire tracks implying dangerous “aliens” over the border and secretive tests in nearby deserts. There was also the newer Night Noon (2014), a film shot in California’s Sonoran Desert. The film pays subtle homage to the simulacra overlaying this otherwise blank landscape, where 1. See Ryan Holmberg, “Adversary: A Misleading Introduction” (January 2016), http://chatterjeeandlal.com/ shows/adversary/.

2. On the Tata collection, see

Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal, The TIFR Art Collection (Mumbai: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 2010); Homi Bhabha and Modern Indian Art: The Collection of

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Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Mumbai: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2011); and Ryan Holmberg, “Atomic Modernism,” Art in America (March 2016), 120–27.

Shambhavi Kaul, Scene 32, 2009. Video still. 16mm converted to HD video, 5 min. Courtesy of the artist.

many a Hollywood spectacle—from space adventures to Egyptian epics and modern wars—has been filmed. We see hardpan hills, dunes, and an inland sea. The wind whistles ever more sharply. We see a dog and a parrot up close and tight in the camera’s frame, though never their master, who one assumes must be a Robinson Crusoe type, stranded with only animal companions. Eventually the sun sets on this day-in-a-life on a foreign planet. As the sounds become electronic and strange, a bright light appears in the air, like in a 1950s-style Martian invasion.3 Kaul understands that there is no such thing as a truly alien world for people raised on movies and television. She has spoken about how screen landscapes provide a sense of home that is at once uncanny and familiar, even when those landscapes are ersatz, exotic, and geographically unidentifiable.4 This paradoxical nostalgia certainly speaks to me. Though I grew up thousands of miles from any desert and have never been to Lake Powell, in Utah, or Tunisia, I regard the Planet of the Apes and Star War ’s Tatooine home. Kaul’s movies also take me back to evenings spent stoned in the glow of the Essential Cinema program at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan—not to hardcore structuralist filmmaking or the “personal film” genre, but rather to the quaint magic that prances out from Georges Méliès, across Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and into Joseph Cornell’s films. Which is to say, while Kaul is a first-class cine-dork, she is also an upstanding modernist (“I absolutely ADORE Vertov,” she gushed to me in response to a fact-checking email, letting her professorial guard down) and is careful to stay this side of artistic respectability by avoiding what fandom usually opts for, which is spoof.

On that note, Kaul’s work reminds of a stupid movie that I used to love: Hardware Wars (1978), Ernie Fosselius’s famous send-up of the original Star Wars. That Fosselius has cast a clothes iron as the Millennium Falcon and a vacuum cleaner as R2D2 (an echo of the flying objects in a number of Kaul’s films) is not the only reason I say this. And it is purely coincidence that the Han Solo character (Ham Salad) looks like an ugly version of Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan. The key to much of Kaul’s work, aside from her ability to tap into mediatized nostalgia, is her sense of humor.

More and more, her work has come to be defined by what we might call modernist screwballism: Hardware Wars without the humans. While pursuing an orthodox modernist antipathy toward narrative and, particularly, the human figure, she simultaneously indulges in a personal penchant for zany source material, with magic often serving as a conjunction between the two and a way to tastefully structure her comedy.

One of her first works in this comic magic mode, Mount Song (2014), draws on Hong Kong martial arts films from the 1970s and 1980s. The source material isn’t science fiction by any definition. Instead, Kaul has chosen (as in the later work Fallen Objects) movies that feature sorcery and the

3. For more on this exhibition, see Ryan Holmberg, “Shambhavi Kaul,” Artforum International (February 2015), 255–56.

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4. “In Focus: Shambhavi Kaul,” interview with Shanay Jhaveri, Frieze (November 2013), https://frieze.com/article/focusshambhavi-kaul.

Shambhavi Kaul, Mount Song, 2013. Video still. HD video, 8 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Shambhavi Kaul, Night Noon, 2014. 16mm converted to HD video, 12 min. Courtesy of the artist.

supernatural. Magic and fantasy—rather than utopia, technological futurism, or speculative fiction—were likewise what she accentuated in sci-fi works like Scene 32 and Night Noon. Her way of editing further emphasizes those tropes. She removes all scenes with humans, leaving but remnants of the story. As a result, the special effects, sets, and props appear as autonomous and self-animating phenomena. Doors open, clouds expand, trees shudder, buildings explode, glowing birds fall—as if they are themselves statements rather than contexts or conjunctions. She makes the hocus-pocus of chintzy special effects seem philosophical by chiseling around them with tight cuts and aggrandizing them through loops.

“One could say that my work is not attempting a critique, or a subversion, as much as it hopefully creates a field for criticality,” said Kaul, “a chance to look at these images again, to think about what they conjure up and what complex ideas they retain.” 5 Very well. But these entities she calls images are also things in themselves. They are not passive. They do not wait to be interpreted. Their animation strikes before the viewer has time to think about their cultural discourse or their relationship to memory. Kaul has spoken of landscapes as actors. Works like 21 Chitrakoot (2012) and Mount Song are for me like Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979), where the human actors are intimidated not by ghosts or goblins but by architecture. In Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), the television, the closets, the backyard pool, the backyard tree, and ultimately the entire home attempt literally to devour the happy family. “It doesn’t want people,” says the old lady about the old house in Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980). Kaul has compacted that aesthetic further, to the point where the moving image assumes the shape of a visual and conceptual architecture that not only moves on its own accord but also, through that animation, physically drives out humans and their stories. There are many haunted house movies. Kaul instead creates movie haunted houses.

And they’re funny. In the way they are funny, they remind me of Japanese artist Tanaka Kōki’s early work, circa 2005. On video, Tanaka performed simple tricks—like tossing a fat rubber ball into a metal bucket and having that trigger a simplified Rube Goldberg chain reaction, or throwing a boot through a second story window and having it land directly onto a drum. These feats presumably took many tries to execute successfully, but as neither the outtakes nor the human agents are shown, the execution looks wonderfully and absurdly smooth. It is as if objects are capable of a higher level of dexterity when left to their own devices, without the muddling intervention of clumsy humans. It’s like the silly home video showing the ten-year-old kicking the ball a hundred meters miraculously against his grandmother’s head, or that serendipitous bounce that momentarily makes the drunk golfer a world-class talent. By hiding the outtakes and tightly controlling his scenarios, Tanaka is able to reproduce this humor of stupendously dumb luck.

5. “Shambhavi Kaul with Jordan Cronk,” Brooklyn Rail (May 2016), http://brooklynrail. org/2016/05/film/shambhavikaul-with-jordan-cronk.

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Jackie Chan was, before he moved to Hollywood, a master of this technique on a far more elaborate scale: repeat an impossible stunt on film endless times until it comes off perfectly, making the human look like an acrobatic genius—or, more exactly, like too much of an acrobatic genius. As all bad liars learn, excess signifies artifice, something that Chan always acknowledged at the end of his films by running the outtakes beneath the closing credits. Slapstick provides some of the comedy in his films. But a deeper laughter stems from the constructed nature of his miracles. How we respond to a trick partly depends on how the tricksters do their hiding, whether they keep from us the truth of the matter or whether they take us into their confidence. Professional magicians reveal their trade only to inner disciples. Comic magicians, on the other hand, compress the hiding and the revealing, juxtaposing one against the other in a limited time frame.

Laughter is a privilege. It is the expression of pleasure gained from being allowed to see the inner workings of a trick while still enjoying the experience of its outer effects.

Kaul works in reverse from Tanaka and Chan: She takes completed films and judges the entirety of the story and all human action as outtakes. Yet the resulting humor is similar. The self-animated sets not only act ridiculously, they look put-on. And while they thus may not be convincing, they are nonetheless impressive. Her editing is simple and straightforward, but that is precisely why it is effective. What makes Kaul’s movies comical at a deeper level is this balance between deft technique and open artifice. If she engaged only in the latter, she would be making spoofs. But she is careful to maintain that look of magic, in which the genre codes are still functioning even while they are being laid bare. She avoids camp. As she says, these are settings we believe in even though we know they are fake. We inhabit them mentally and emotionally even though we know they exist nowhere physically and are rife with stereotypes. A viewer can approach this matter coolly, and reflect on our personal identification with “mediatized non-places,” as Kaul and many critics have done. But that tone misses the humor. It misses how that process of identification is structured by Kaul as a comic magic show in which performance and artifice are played off each other.

Kaul’s landscapes are indeed familiar. But it is important to note that most of them are familiar to us specifically from childhood. While watching her movies, we are looking upon not so much the kitsch of popular entertainment as upon the sweet and exciting naiveté of our own pasts. Because Kaul constructs her works like movies—that is, by employing montage and a modicum of narrative development—watching them inevitably rubs against conventional experiences of cinematic viewing. One sits down in a darkened room and looks at a screen (nothing special here), but her focus on studio sets and short shots transforms the viewer’s relationship to cinematic space and fantasy in curious ways. With the actors gone, relations of scale between the viewer’s own space and the diegetic space of the source material evaporate. With the sets accentuated, the internal world of the film becomes shallow and sometimes flat. The overall effect is like that in tilt-shift photography, in which the focal details turn toy-like and the architecture and the landscape around them condense into a miniature diorama.

What were elaborate fantasies in the source material become vulnerably small in appropriation.

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Shambhavi Kaul, 21 Chitrakoot, 2012. Video still. Found footage, color, sound, 9 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Shambhavi Kaul, Fallen Objects, 2015. Video still. HD video looped and velour cutouts, 40 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Shambhavi Kaul, Modes of Faltering, 2016. Video still. 6-channel HD video, looped. Installation view, UT Downtown Gallery, April 1–2, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mike C. Berry.

Cinema becomes a magical nursery room. Watching Mount Song is like seeing the toys coming alive at night, after the children go to bed. Again, the effect depends on being simultaneously enchanted and privy. We have one eye open, faking sleep but actually alert. The toys know they are being watched. In fact, it is for us that they are dancing. But they do not let on that they know. If they did, the magic would be destroyed. We will be voyeurs and they will be exhibitionists, but heaven forbid our eyes meet, for then the tension would be lost, and the performance would lapse into either storybook whimsy or adult camp. As the kid who loves Disney and Hollywood also thinks that the backyard or neighborhood garden is forest and jungle enough for an afternoon adventure, so a family road trip to the Californian desert is all Kaul needs to get to outer space. It is all mediatized viewers of her work really need, even in a setting as decidedly non-futuristic as twenty-first-century Mumbai.

This brings me to Kaul’s newest works. Relative to her oeuvre, the editing in Fallen Objects, first shown in 2015, is simple. Totally silent, it is composed of seven shots from an unnamed Hong Kong martial art film, showing magical flying scissors (limned in electric red) battling a black void that flits around like a flying carpet (limned in electric green). The scissors and the void collide, sending off an electric crackle. The scissors split through the void, dividing it in half. The two pieces fall to the ground, and then the action picks up again, with a slightly modified rearrangement of the same shots as before. We never see more than one carpet void in the air, but the looping repetition makes one think that, somewhere, in an imaginary dimension, the carpet is being split many times over. Sure enough, placed before the screen on the floor of the gallery are six black fabric cutouts, each representing the void in different crooked states of flying and bending.

Interpreting both the sculptural objects and the flying void within the video as surrogates of the projection screen doesn’t seem far-fetched. After conceiving Fallen Objects, Kaul created her first multi-channel installation, Modes of Faltering (2016). Exhibited at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee (April 2016), it was comprised of six contiguous screens, each featuring a short, looped clip showing actions of rocking, turning, stroking, and panicking (various “modes of faltering”), all appropriated from mainstream Indian movies. The movements alone are creepy enough. Add to them a cacophony of creaks, thunder crashes, eerie string instruments, and birds flapping madly like bats out of a belfry and you have Kaul’s most complete movie haunted house to date.

Fallen Objects is a multi-screen installation, too, but only figuratively speaking, with the additional screens either objectified as sculptural surrogates or framed within the diegesis of a single-screen projection. Kaul employs two modes of self-referentiality here: fictional capture (a screen within a screen) and comic abjection (screens cast out into the gallery). While multi-screen projections often aim for immersive spectacle, Kaul’s version invites a distanced and conceptual view. Since the cutouts are arranged in rows directly before the screen, where a theater’s seats would be, you would be forgiven for thinking they are magic carpets to sit on and ride away into cinematic reverie. But one does not sit on a screen. Looking at these fallen surfaces, one sees only a cinematic dead zone. Though superficially “animated” by 53

Shambhavi Kaul, Fallen Objects, 2015. Video still. HD video looped and velour cutouts, 40 min. Installation view, Sunaparanta Art Centre, October 4–22, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

quirky contours, as substrates for projection they are dead. They are not even ambient. Made of black synthetic velour designed to absorb light, they are black holes from which the projected image can never escape. If the traditional white screen is a window, the black screen is a prison.

Near the beginning of Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), the cocky punk from Neverland appears on the Darling family’s roof in silhouette. He is there because he wants his shadow back. According to J. M. Barrie’s original text, the previous night Peter was caught snooping around inside the Darling’s rooms after listening to Mrs. Darling’s bedtime stories. Mum screamed. The family dog sprang. Nimble Peter managed to leap free through the window. His shadow, however, lingering one step behind, was cut from its owner by the closing panes. The next night, once the lights go out, Peter steals back into the nursery. With the help of Tinker Bell—like Kaul’s scissors, a luminous gold fairy who glows red when angry— Peter locates his shadow locked inside a dresser drawer. Once he opens the drawer, his shadow slips out. Around and around Wendy’s room he chases it, overturning furniture before wrestling it under control. Haplessly, he tries to reattach it by rubbing his soles with soap. Wendy, the Darling’s eldest daughter, awakens to witness Peter’s stupidity, and offers to sew his shadow to his feet. This works. Peter is whole again. With promises of more storytelling from Wendy, he takes her and her siblings to Neverland, where life is a fairy tale and children never grow up.

Kaul too believes in Pan. But while Wendy keeps the window open at night with the hope that Pan might visit, Kaul keeps it tightly shut, torturing Pan, forcing him to flit around anxiously outside in the black box of night, while his shadow lies inert inside the nursery of the white cube.

But expanded cinema finds a way. As long as the white cube exists, the split screen will continue to subdivide and multiply. The artist tells me that, for the most recent showing of Fallen Objects at Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts, in October 2016, the work was held up in customs precipitously close to the opening. In haste, Kaul created a second set of textile cutouts and shipped them to Goa. Meanwhile, the first set arrived, just in the nick of time. The second set followed. Thus, Fallen Objects succeeded in duping its creator into producing a clone. Who would have guessed? The true identity of the magical scissors was the Department of Excise and Customs!

Ryan Holmberg is an Academic Associate of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture. As a freelance art historian and critic, he is a frequent contributor to The Comics Journal, Artforum International, and Art in America. As an editor and translator of manga, he has worked with Breakdown Press, Drawn & Quarterly, Retrofit Comics, PictureBox Inc, and New York Review Comics. He is also the author of Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964–1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010) and No Nukes for Dinner: How One Japanese Cartoonist and His Country Learned to Distrust the Atom (forthcoming). This essay was written with the support of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Department at Duke University.

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Anuradha Vikram

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World

Technologies of Futility: Cosmopolitanism and Tradition in the Art of Jimmie Durham

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles January 29–May 7, 2017

Speculative fiction writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke first cited his “Third Law” in the essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination.”

The concept describes the interpretation of specialist knowledge by the uninitiated public, positing that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” 1 While an easy interpretation of this principle might set the spiritual in opposition to the technological, the work of Jimmie Durham prompts consideration of how we might understand both technology and magic a little differently and still apply the same principle.

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in the United States since 1994. While much has changed in the US art world since then, Durham’s exhibition suggests there is still more work to be done in challenging the simplistic narratives and easy assumptions that are too often hung on artists of color.

As an artist and an activist, Durham experienced an awakening while studying abroad at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1973, when American Indian Movement (AIM) activists in the United States initiated a three-year occupation of the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee. He consequently left school and returned to the United States to take up a role in the movement, organizing Native Americans and indigenous peoples globally. AIM was founded as an outlaw movement, meant to operate in opposition to a legal system that seemed rigged against its constituents. Durham is artistically rebellious, long known for his unwillingness to be defined, whether ethnically, geographically, or stylistically. Durham developed and led the organization’s International Treaty Council, a body that continues to coordinate indigenous communities worldwide in advocacy for their rights to land, cultural expression, and a dignified quality of life. Durham’s organizing work with AIM and Treaty Council has had long-lasting impact, as evidenced in the confluence of international groups currently fighting in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Foregoing a nationalistic and oppositional approach in favor of an international strategy of engagement with various political and legal systems to make change, Durham came to

1. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Pan Books, 1973).

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Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 29– May 7, 2017. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Jimmie Durham, Upon reflection, I was no longer sure of my position, 2009. Obsidian, German silver (copper, zinc, and nickel), steel table, obsidian mirror with colored tin frame. Mirror: 13 ½ × 10 × ¾ in. table: 39 ½ × 197 × 23 ½ in.; obsidian: 18 ½ in. diameter; German silver: 17 ¾ in. diameter. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. Courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

diverge politically from other AIM leaders. Though he ended his involvement in both AIM and Treaty Council around 1980, this tension between engagement and opposition, as well as the outlaw spirit of these formative years, continues in many aspects of his work as an artist.

In a conversation at the Hammer Museum between University of California Los Angeles art historian Miwon Kwon and Whitney Museum curator Elisabeth Sussman, At the Center of the World curator Anne Ellegood raised some of the prevailing narratives that persist about Durham’s work.2 One is that Durham’s activism ended at the time when his art career resumed, thereby separating the artist’s politics from his studio practice in a way that makes him more palatable to arbiters of official history. Another has it that Durham was heavily invested in questions of identity prior to the watershed 1993 Whitney Biennial, which Sussman co-organized and in which Durham participated. Many assume that he subsequently abandoned this interest in favor of formal, material, and architectural concerns on his return to living in Europe in 1994. These assumptions are predicated on certain preconceived notions: one is either an artist or an activist; identity is something one either obsesses over or ignores; and artists of color who assume a subject position in their own work are working from autobiography rather than allegory.

Cherokee, American, internationalist, artist, activist, poet, trickster, contemporary, ancestor—Durham performs these conflicting expectations in order to deflate them. For example, a work in the exhibition from 2009 is titled Upon reflection, I was no longer sure of my position. Not articulating a sure position allows for the possibility that the artist of color could be working from a complex sense of self at all times. In the sculpture, a large hunk of shiny black obsidian sits opposite a similar mass of “German silver,” an alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel with a blond, golden sheen, atop a steel frame table. A small obsidian mirror faces the table lengthwise. As installed at the Hammer, it is impossible for the viewer to see oneself reflected in the mirror. Each point within the whole represents a possible position. Other recent works use handmade obsidian knives to cut away at drawing and sculpture materials. Durham’s use of razor-sharp, primordial obsidian references ancient technologies, but it also represents the artist’s incisive language, piercing intellect, and cutting humor.

Sharp, black comedy pervades the exhibition. Like the best comedians, Durham employs both verbal and physical humor to address real political and historical issues, such as violence and its consequences. Language can be a punchline, but so can color and material. In Self-Portrait (1986)— 2. Miwon Kwon and Elisabeth Sussman in conversation, moderated by Anne Ellegood, “The Politics and Problematics of Representation,” Hammer Museum, March 9, 2017, archived video, https:// hammer.ucla.edu/programsevents/2017/03/the-politicsand-problematics-of-representation/.

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a life-sized silhouette of the artist—the conceptual artist’s disdain for autobiography is gleefully skewered. Having reduced his self-representation to a set of stereotypes about Indians, Durham now systematically embraces or rejects them. Materials commonly associated with Native Americans, such as tanned hides, seashells, and braids, reinforce the stereotypic framing and thereby deepen the subversion. Durham writes in laconic block printing over a deep reddish brown background cut to his shape: “Mr. Durham has stated that he believes he has an addiction to alcohol, nicotine, caffine [sic]; and does not sleep well.” This reflects common prejudices about Indians, but also could describe any New Yorker, as Durham was at the time. Color is the kicker. “My skin is not really this dark,” he inscribes on one shin bone. “But I am sure that many Indians have coppery skin.” Material is a pun. “I am basically light-hearted,” reads one note, with an arrow pointing to a space in which the artist’s “skin” has been cut away to reveal a cloud of yellow feathers where his heart should be. It’s a disarmingly sweet moment in a show that feels forged in the fires of the artist’s disillusionment with both cultural and political institutions.

Other works from the early 1980s to the early 1990s use found bones, including animal and human skulls. Durham has said that in these works he was trying to “understand what each particular animal (I mean the individual not the generic) feels about being dead.” 3 The individualism of each sculpture is a gesture against the flattening of a community of “Native Americans” into a symbolic entity. The dead among the living is a theme to which Durham consistently returns, as if teasing out a hauntology of Native philosophy and tradition from within our glib consumption culture. For Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, haunting transpires whenever an echo of the past manifests in the present, as a re-experiencing rather than a remembering. Capitalism is haunted by the potential commoditization of every object of use, which infuses each form with a foreboding of its eventual reduction to exchange value alone, even before the act of disassociation that turns a religious totem into an art object, for example, is realized.4 For postcolonialists following in Derrida’s wake, haunting becomes the last vestige of resistance that remains to represent a decimated people in the culture of their conquerors. As described by British cultural critic Mark Fisher, hauntology is enacted by postcolonial artists through pastiche, unexpected juxtapositions, and reiterations. “Haunting,” according to Fisher, “can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time.” 5 Durham’s sculptures force such an encounter. They are accursed—dead while still alive, contemporary yet mired in the traumas of the past—and the encounter

3. Lucy R. Lippard, “Jimmie Durham—Postmodernist ‘Savage,’” Art in America (February 1993), republished as “From the Archives: Jimmie Durham—Postmodernist ‘Savage’” (2017), http://www. artinamericamagazine.com/ news-features/magazine/fromthe-archives-jimmie-durham-

postmodernist-savage/.

4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

5. Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Fall 2012), 19.

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Jimmie Durham, Self-portrait, 1986. Canvas, cedar, acrylic paint, metal, synthetic hair, scrap fur, dyed chicken feathers, human rib bones, sheep bones, seashell, thread. 78 × 30 × 9 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee. Digital image © Whitney Museum, N.Y.

is not an easy one. These extremely beautiful objects, painted in rich colors and decorated with feathers and semi-precious stones, are both desirable and hostile.

Resisting traditional or commercial expectations for Native American art, Durham uses the contemporary post-conceptual visual art tropes of the social, the phenomenological, the monumental, and the mystical to deflate institutional authority and to communicate revolutionary ideas to a contemporary, media-savvy audience numb to the traditions and the political theater of previous generations.

AIM founder Russell Means famously said that, while he refrained from writing out of adherence to the oral traditions of the Lakota, he was “concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions.” Thus he consented to having his words written down and published to combat “the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples today.” 6 While Means, whose nationalist politics prompted Durham’s departure from AIM around 1980, had a very different worldview from the cosmopolitan artist, his words here indicate why one might not be so quick to write Durham off as an activist just yet. Durham uses the language and institutions of contemporary art to put ideas about indigeneity and contemporaneity in front of audiences, including young indigenous people, who care more about the present than they do about the past.

Activism in art is often connected with collectivism and acts of sharing of knowledge and/or resources, as in the radical theater of Durham’s touchstone, Augusto Boal. Generosity has been a recurrent theme in Durham’s practice since the early 1970s. Before Felix Gonzalez-Torres was making takeaways and Rirkrit Tiravanija was serving meals in the gallery, Durham was engaging in projects like Little Black Things (1971), at Circa Gallery, in Geneva. In this work, each art object was priced at “minus one centime” such that a sale would leave the buyer richer by an artwork and an extra penny.7 In Manhattan Festival of the Dead (1982), Durham adorned a Day-of-the-Dead-style altar with brightly painted skulls in “an honoring ceremony of those people...in New York who have been killed by subways, .38 slugs, needles or desperate acts, without any proper ceremonies to help their passage and our passage.” Rather than sell the work, which the artist

6. Russell Means, “For America to Live Europe Must Die,” Marxism and Native Americans, ed. Ward Churchill (Boston: South End Press, 1982), republished at blackhawkproductions.com, http:// www.blackhawkproductions. com/russelmeans.html.

7. Mackenzie Stevens, “Selected Chronology,” in Anne Ellegood, Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum/ Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), 289.

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Jimmie Durham, Karankawa, 1982. Human skull, cedar, seashells, abalone shell, alabaster, beads, button, turquoise, cow leather, fish bone, parrot feathers, woodpecker feather, two deer teeth, white and black ink, 19 × 9 × 9 in. Collection of Robert Cantor and Margo Levine, New York. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Photo: Adam Reich.

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 29– May 7, 2017. Photo: Brian Forrest.

has expressed feeling conflicted about, he frames the ceremony as “a traditional Cherokee give-away, but since this is a Manhattan ceremony the give-away will cost you $5.” At once Durham references the origins of New York as Lenape tribal land, “purchased” for the equivalent of $24 from a people who understood only gift and barter economies; and the ruthlessness of the city’s capitalist hustle, which extends to the city’s artists of color, who must endlessly re-perform their stolen heritage in order to make ends meet.

Included in Manhattan Festival of the Dead and on view in the Hammer exhibition is Karankawa (1982), a human skull inlaid with turquoise, shells, feathers, and carvings. To see a real human skull in an exhibition of contemporary sculptures seems shocking, yet human remains, including skulls, are commonplace in museum collections and displays of Native American art. Karankawa is made from a skull that Durham found on a beach in Texas where a historic Indian massacre took place. Durham’s work with skulls expresses the fury and the majesty denied to those ancestors whose bodies have become the cultural property of the colonial power.

In this work, Durham exploits expected material tropes of native art, such as semi-precious stones, beads, and bleached skulls (a fixture of Southwestern decorative painting), but he infuses his assemblages with an uncanny aliveness that produces palpable discomfort. He soon became frustrated with the experience of working in the United States, where his insistence on identifying as a contemporary artist rather than an indigenous one while still focusing on his Indian culture continues to pose an overt challenge to curators and critics working within prevailing political and cultural systems. United States history is built on a myth that the land of this continent was for the taking.

This narrative requires Indians to be long-dead in order to be legitimate.

Living Indians who are urbane and culturally contemporary disprove the premise that Indians do not, and cannot, belong to the modern world.

Within communities that have been forcibly separated from their histories, efforts to restore cultural connection can be hampered by the effects of this erasure. Which elements of the culture have been preserved and studied, and whose version of events has been incorporated into history, will be determined by their relative usefulness to the colonial power. Since the national story requires Indian cultures to exist in the past, much of what is known even by Indians is anchored in a version of indigeneity that is rooted in pre-industrial lifestyles. In the United States, Durham frequently came up against the expectation of fellow Native Americans and Americans of other backgrounds that authentic cultural expression for a Cherokee artist would require use of traditional techniques and motifs. Durham's resistance to this type of practice is informed by historical precedents such as Ishi, the Yahi tribesman who was “discovered” by University of California Berkeley anthropologists in 1911 and brought to live in a museum as a living monument to his decimated tribe. Rituals and technologies that evolved out of practical and social contexts became mimetic actions, a performance of living that was instead a kind of death.

Durham is no doubt aware of this history when exhibiting his work within the context of a museum that is part of the same University of California system, which continues to maintain study collections of indigenous human 65

remains, despite repatriation challenges from recognized Indian tribes.

This knowledge may provoke the viewer to respond differently to works made from animal and human remains in the exhibition. Durham identifies as Cherokee, but he is unwilling to allow the United States government to “recognize” him as a member of a tribe, thus foregoing access to the limited support allotted on this basis.8 Even the terminology is suspect.

“Indian” is derived from the Spanish (“in dio”) and anecdotally associated with Columbus confusing the New World for the Far East. “Native American” legitimates an “America” that excludes the Americas—another non-starter. Durham uses both terms when referring to himself, though he uses "Indian," the moniker politicized by AIM, more frequently. This may reflect his generational position or his identification with the activist over the academic.

Questions of exclusion and legitimacy are ongoing in Durham’s work.

Consider the pair of sculptures titled Cortez (1991–92) and Malinche (1988–92), which are among the first of his large-scale works. The sixteenthcentury Spanish conquistador and his indigenous Mexican translator and concubine are a study in contrasts. Cortez’s pale face tops a standpipe body and a plow carriage base, suggesting a machine that tills soil into profit. He is made of industrial materials, including found steel, and PVC. One gloved hand droops aimlessly while the other is a tangle of rebar. He is hard, sharp, and confident. While Cortez stares nobly into the distance, Malinche’s affect is more ambivalent. Her form is mostly organic, made from wood, cloth, and paint. She sits demurely with her hands in her lap, one carved foot resting primly next to the other, which is shaped from a lump of dirt and straw. This earthen foot suggests her connection to the soil of her birth, as well as her fall from grace. Her torso is made of found and carved wood, sticks, and chair parts. A gold lamé bra droops from her shoulders. Her body seems assembled from a combination of indigenous and European elements, with a Gothic feel to her mismatched hands and feet, reminiscent of a medieval German crucifixion, often made from a similar soft wood.

Durham uses guava wood, which is indigenous to Mexico and grew close to Durham's home in Cuernavaca.9 Feathers and beads adorn the celebrated beauty. Her lips bear a hint of pink, and the expression on her carved face reads between mournfulness and shame. One eye fixes on the viewer; the other is darkened behind a sheath of serpent skin. Is she longing for her absent people? Or ruminating on their rejection of her unmanageable qualities? Is she a symbol of complicity in the colonial project or an emblem of transcendence? Conflicting impulses play out on her body and in her adornments. Durham shows his capacity for naturalism in her features but also employs other means of using his materials to get his point across.

8. Recognized Cherokee tribes are on record stating that they do not consider Durham as a member of their communities.

See, Cara Cowan Watts, Ph.D., Luzene Hill, M.F.A., America Meredith, M.F.A., Kade Twist, Lynne Harlan, Pauline Prater, M.B.A., Brian K. Hudson, Ph.D., Candice Byrd, M.F.A., Yvonne

N. Tiger, M.A., Ashley Holland, "Dear Unsuspecting Public, Jimmie Durham Is a Trickster,” Indian Country Today (June 26, 2017), https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/ dear-unsuspecting-publicjimmie-durham-trickster/.

9. Stevens, “Selected Chronology,” 215.

66

Malinche is a complicated figure in indigenous Mexican lore. Born between Aztec and Mayan-controlled territories, she is caught between identities and loyalties. Malinche entered Cortez’s circle as a slave, but her exceptional beauty and her skill with languages promoted her to insider and confidant. Abandoned by her own people—the mother and stepfather who gave her away and the Tobascan clan that sold her to the Spanish—she becomes his native informant. Malinche is also the mother of Cortez’s son Martín, and thereby the symbolic mother of the mestizo or mixed European-indigenous Latinx people. Despised by the revolutionary nationalists of the early twentieth century for what they took as her lack of agency or loyalty—her abjection—Malinche has in recent decades been reclaimed by some Third World feminists, who hear echoes in her story of their own subjugation by men on both sides of the struggle. Writing in 1980, Chicana literature scholar Cordelia Candelaria’s essay “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype” helped to position her as a cultural symbol of la mestizaje, representing the mixed-blood indigenous-European heritage of a majority of Latinx peoples.

Rather than a traitor, Malinche becomes a hybrid, occupying a space of political visibility otherwise reserved for men through her association with the conquistador. As a political operator, Malinche’s opposition to the rule of the Aztecs who had enslaved her had been total, and her cooperation with the Spanish colonizers is thereby justifiable, despite their racial dissimilarity. As an enslaved person, her agency is not guaranteed. On the question of shame, Candelaria notes, “She would have brought shame to the cacique of Tabasco and to her adopted people, had she not obeyed and served as best she could.” 10 Durham’s Malinche is the poster image for this exhibition, reproduced three stories high on the Hammer façade, and it is tempting to think she represents Durham’s own rejection of Indian nationalist political thinking after 1980.

Under colonialism, technology has been the wedge used to differentiate the savage from the enlightened man and to manipulate allegiances among preexisting communities in a region to enable conquest. Technologies that have been used in this way include language and writing, currency, craft, photography, and agriculture, as well as the digital technologies of the present. Access to those technologies connotes advantage, and their lack connotes disadvantage, with a moral judgment attached. Durham’s distinctive approach to sculpture is informed by both official and unofficial technological knowledge. He attended the art school in the 1970s, worked construction jobs in the 1980s, and also learned carving and handworking from his father as a child. “Everybody in my family carved and made things,” explains Durham.11 His ideas about pedagogy and access to technologies and ideas are also informed by the influence of the Brazilian thinkers Paolo Freire and Augusto Boal, with whom he studied and talked.

10. Cordelia Candelaria, “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 1980), 5.

11. Ellegood, Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, 218.

67

Jimmie Durham, Malinche, 1988–1992. Guava, pine branches, oak, snakeskin, polyester bra soaked in acrylic resin and painted gold, watercolor, cactus leaf, canvas, cotton cloth, metal, rope, feathers, plastic jewelry, glass eye, 70 × 23 ⅝ × 35 in. ©S.M.A.K. / Dirk Pauwels. Courtesy of Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium.

Jimmie Durham, Cortez, 1991–92. Fiberglass and resin, PVC, metal car parts, leather, glass, acrylic paint, rebar, sheet metal, pulleys, handles, 88 ½ × 57 × 20 ½ in. ©S.M.A.K. / Dirk Pauwels. Courtesy of Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium.

Durham draws from both craft and anti-art discourses, combining careful and thoughtful making with subverted expectations of the value and integrity of objects. In Still Life with Stone and Car (2004), a performance in Sydney, Australia, that is reproduced as a large poster on the museum's exterior, Durham uses the most elevated sculptural material in the classical hierarchy—stone—as a tool of negation used against symbols of human achievement. Using a large construction crane, he lifts a massive boulder high above a red Ford Festiva, and brings it crashing down. When the destruction is wrought, he paints a simple cartoon face onto the boulder.

This is a technological achievement: a primal gesture that ironically requires heavy equipment to enact. As explained by philosopher Alva Noë, “Art is not a technological practice any more than choreography is a way of dancing. But art presupposes technology and can be understood only against that background. Just as choreography is preoccupied with the fact that we are organized by dancing, so painting (say) responds to the fact that we are organized by pictures (or by techniques of picture making and picture using). Pictures, crucially, are a technology, and picture making and picture using are organized activities. And so these are raw materials for art.” 12 Noë stipulates that what differentiates the artist from the technologist is the artist’s capacity to use these technologies to produce constructive failures rather than march toward heroic ideals. Dropping a stone, like drawing a pathetic “face” on the boulder that he drops, is a way for Durham to reassert the power of the human in alignment with nature, against capitalism and industrial resource exploitation. The gesture simultaneously deflates the artist's own ego, foregrounding his technical limitations as a sculptor. This seemingly infantile gesture in fact employs artistic, linguistic, and cultural technologies to articulate a complex subject position within the work.

Durham’s technical facility with materials and aesthetics is matched by his ability to charge a space with emotional energy carried in the objects that he creates. Sometimes the most simple or mundane gestures carry the most charge. Hommage à Filliou (A Piece of Wood Sculpted by a Dog, Painted by a Human. A Piece of Wood Sculpted by a Machine, Painted by a Human) (2003) presents the titular two pieces of wood, side by side. One is a near-perfect, elongated cube, the other a mangled irregularity. Both are painted gold to reflect their elevated status as artistic and metaphysical objects and their commensurately elevated value. This simple act of comparing and equalizing mankind's warring impulses toward the animal and the machine is rich in visual poetry, befitting its dedication to Robert Filliou, the Zen trickster of the Fluxus generation. I Forgot What I Was Going to Say (1992) dissects and inverts a handgun into a gesture of formal impotence. Creating meaning from such provisional materials and methods seems a kind of alchemy.

A Pole to Mark the Center of the World in Berlin (2004) is a whittled branch, mostly straight and standing 71½ inches, comparable to the height of an adult male. Attached on a braided wire is a handheld mirror, with which one might re-center one’s individuality and be reminded of one’s merits

12. Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 19 (ebook edition).

70

Jimmie Durham, I Forgot What I Was Going to Say, 1992. Metal gun parts, yew tree from Ireland, wood dowel, bone, acrylic on canvas, 24½ × 26 ½ × 2 ½ in. Collection of Dieter & Birgit Broska.

Jimmie Durham, Self-Portrait Pretending to be Rosa Levy, 1994. Color photograph, 32 Ă— 24 in. Collection of fluid archives, Karlsruhe. Courtesy of ZKM I Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

when buffeted by the self-assuredness of northern Europe. The pole can, of course, be placed anywhere, questioning who holds the power to determine center and periphery, and whether that power can be seized. Durham has made several such poles, each one tied to a specific geography which the works propose to reorient, with the bearer always at the center.

The globe is in fact being reoriented, with power shifting away from the United States and Western Europe into emerging markets and developing industrial zones in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Durham’s outsider position in Europe provides a vantage on American provincialism while enabling him to engage in a version of reconquista, a term that has recently been used ironically to describe Latin Americans taking advantage of the weakened European economy to buy property there and in some cases to relocate. The once-stark distinctions between First and Third World are more permeable now, with economic collapse threatening nations associated with empires of the classical and colonial eras, such as England, Spain, Italy, and Greece. European Romanticism idealizes Native American archetypes, yet enables more visibility for an Indian artist than the willful erasure of Native peoples in the United States will permit. The result is that Durham gets more exposure and support for his work on the continent, if not any less pigeonholing of his practice. The disintegration of Europe’s cultural and economic dominance is rich subject matter for Durham, whose signature re-mixing of salvaged materials is ideally suited to questioning the hierarchies of European material and formal aesthetics.

His time in Europe has prompted the artist to investigate the properties of monumental architecture from his customary trickster’s perch.

Durham deconstructs urbanism by deflating its self-regard. “Maybe this piece is not finished well,” he writes in Suggested Proposal for a New Architecture No 3 (2003), an assemblage of found wood carved with laurels and a pitted sedimentary rock. “Should there be another stone?” Durham understands architecture from both the aesthetic and the labor positions.

Whether dropping a rock onto a car in Still Life with Stone and Car (2004) or smashing a urinal with a large stone in Homage to David Hammons (1997), he recognizes the fuzzy distinction between the street as a space of constructed national identity and leisure, and as a site of potential armed resistance. Inside and outside, public and private, institution and town square are flexible categories, and a brick can be a tool or a weapon. Here Durham, ever the iconoclast, nonetheless wears European influences, such as the French Situationist Guy Debord, on his sleeve.

The Western art historical canon comes into play in tongue-in-cheek homages to Brancusi and Magritte, interspersed with Beuysian acts of artistic self-invention. These strains have always been in the work, as indicated

by Self-portrait Pretending to be Rosa Levy (1994), an early photographic riff on Man Ray’s photograph, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (1920–21). The urinal of Homage to David Hammons is another obvious reference. In Europe, though, Durham is wrestling with his own passage into history. In 1948 (2012), the artist looks at newspaper fragments and ephemera to consider the confluence of global historic events that shaped his world view at the age of eight. These materials are assembled into works on paper that chronicle 73

social and political upheavals, including the exodus of Palestinians out of lands now designated for the Jewish state of Israel, the forming of the Hell’s Angels in the United States, and the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in India, from the artist's individual viewpoint as one who has lived long enough to see current events pass into the canon of history.

Though Joseph Beuys famously likened socially engaged artistic practice to shamanism, Durham is not an artist who can be lauded or followed in the manner of a religious leader. He is unwilling to seduce the viewer with false promises of redemption. All of Durham’s work, however mundane or even abject, is anchored in material and historical research. A reality of what is, not only an idea of what could be, forms the backbone of his practice.

If Durham is a shaman, it is not because he operates on a spiritual plane, but instead because our collective disengagement with the technologies that enable culture, philosophy, and art has rendered us so ignorant of them that we mistake his extraordinary skill for magic.

Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is Artistic Director at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California, and Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. Her research combines media studies, theory of globalization, and critical race discourse with international art history from the early modern to the present.

74

ARTIST WRITES, No. 1 It’s Nobody’s Fault: Extinction of Consciousness and Everything Else A.L. Steiner + Otherwild

This is the first installment of Artist Writes, part of X-TRA’s 20th Anniversary Programming. Artist Writes is a series of commissioned essays and public programs by contemporary artists who write: A.L. Steiner, Andrea Fraser, Martine Syms, and William Pope.L. The essays will be published serially in X-TRA Volume 20. Each author will present a corresponding public event in Los Angeles.

Artist Writes is firmly grounded in X-TRA’s mission to provide a platform for artists to define their own terms of engagement and to make meaningful contributions to the fields of criticism and theory in Los Angeles. Support for this series generously provided by the Michael Asher Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Isambard Kingdom Brunel Society of North America and Pasadena Art Alliance.

A.L. Steiner’s works and activities span photography, video, installation, collage, performance, lectures, writing, and curating, often made in collaboration.

A self-described “skeptical queer eco-feminist androgyne,” Steiner is a collective member of the musical group Chicks on Speed and cofounder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE), which advocates for the payment of fees for artists exhibiting in nonprofit art institutions. Steiner’s artworks are irreverent, humorous, personal, perverse, and—above all—political. Most evident in her large-scale installations of collaged digital photographs, Steiner’s image repertoire provides a look into the network of queer friends and lovers that form the basis of both her community and her artistic practice.

Otherwild is a studio, a store and a gathering, workshop and event space. Otherwild was founded in 2012 within a vast, multi-disciplinary community of inspiring artists, craftspeople and designers.

IT ’S NOBODY ’S FAULT:

E X T INC T ION OF C ONS C IOUSNE S S A ND E V ERY T HING EL SE TEXT

A . L .

ST EINER

“IT’S DISAPPOINTING TO FIND OUT THAT THE PAST IS THE PRESENT IS THE FUTURE. NOBODY WANTS THAT.” -Claudia Rankine

DE SIGN

OTHERWILD

“IMAGES ASSOCIATED WITH THE OPTICAL UNCONSCIOUS HAVE PLAYED A FUNDAMENTAL ROLE IN DEMYSTIFYING OUR WORLD; WITHOUT THEM, ENCHANTMENT WOULD HAVE A GREATER GRIP ON OUR UNDERSTANDING.”

“Claudia Rankine on Blackness as The Second Person”, interview with Meara Sharma, Guernica, November 17, 2014 https://www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-secondperson/; Edwards, Steven, “Forgetting Photography”, Photography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006)

-Steve Edwards

A B S T R AC T 1

DOW N w ith human supr emacy.

2

OH! BL A ST A MERIK K K A

Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine Imagine

if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if if

we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we

could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could could

confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront confront

the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the

truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth truth

head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on. head-on.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

Together.

A B S T R AC T

OMNICIDE, ARE

SUPREMACISM AND HETERONORMATIVITY

NOT IN SPELLCHECK.

A B S T R AC T

ABSTRACT

5

4

Crapitalism (the artist’s well-worn neologism) has spurred a global omnicidal crisis through extractivism and its ideological underpinnings, such as Henry Kissinger’s notion of Constructive Ambiguity®. In order to understand homo economicus’ tendencies, it’s imperative to confront the unquestioned and ponder the web-of-life destructors: consensus delusions of money, supremacy, progress, supply, demand, accumulation and profit. Is there a foil to the current coercive global corporatocratic crapitalocene? The artist will present works that speak to these concerns, as well as read from a selection of responsive texts.

E V E RY T HING FE E D S PATRIARCHAL POWER AND PAT R I A RC H Y H A S NO GE NDE R OR IDE N T I T Y .

A B S T R AC T

6

3

Belief is this stuff we value, the lies of history and

progress, of dominant insurrection, the will to kill anything or everything.

Questionnaire 1. Is your project spite-specific?

2. How is ‘fun’ political for you?

3. Would you kill – YES / NO (circle one), DIRECTLY or INDIRECTLY (circle one), SMALL-SCALE or LARGE-SCALE (circle one) -- to protect your access to capital, either YOURS or OTHERS (circle one or both)?

4. Do you feel you’ve been primed by a social scene’s urge to be historicized?

5. On a scale of 1-10, please rate the potential for your inevitable abuse of power.

6. What’s wrong with collecting contemporary art?

7. In the space provided below, discuss this term as if it were a CAPTCHA: THE RAPIST __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

[OVERTURE / proEPILOGUE/ REFRAIN/ ODE/

DIRGE]

Genocide, slavery, imperialism.

Racism, imprisonment, militarization.

Expression, equality, education.

Extraction, extinction, omnicide.

Survey, classify, map.

Develop, manage, rule.

Analyze, historicize, finance.

Route, philosophize, prosthyltize Begin again.

WE, THE PEOPLE , together, with wealth, kill everything.

We, the people, together, with order, kill everything.

This land was never your land or my land from California to the New York island.

From the Gulfstream waters etc.

Die anal yzer, die Die fin an cier, die Die his story, die Die deve loper, die Die man ager, die Die ruler, die Die mapper, die Die surveyor, die Die class i fier, die Die order, die Bad ideas must die.

All ideas are bad ideas, (at this time)

[REPEAT]

CAN U O Y

fuck a man, state, territory, system that ultimately wants to rape you for gain, pleasure and profit; that kills indiscriminately, denies its participation in such a schematic?

holes

All bodies are porous, full of . Minds are absorptive, cavernous organs, as are holes.

A fantastical negation of this knowledge exists in the world, one that denies this truth outrightly: the truth of holes. It is a fiction that drowns and drains, cuts off, separates, suffocates, kills the possibilities and pleasures of holes. The human fights, maims, kills, destroys indiscriminately the porosity of penetration, the inevitable penetrative force of death — our holes.

[TOAST:

“KILL THE RECT ANGLE!”] TO OUR TO OUR OUR TO OUR TO OUR

HOLES! HOLES! HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES!

YOUR OUR OUR OUR

HOLES! YOUR HOLES! HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! HOLES! OUR HOLES! HOLES HOLES HOLES!

TO YOUR HOLES!

HOLES!

OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! TO OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES, OUR HOLES! YOUR HOLES! YOUR GODDAMN HOLES! YOUR HOLES! A L L YO UR G O D DA M N H O L E S !

EVERY HOLE! OUR UNIVERSE OF HOLES! EVERY HOLE, A UNIVERSE OF HOLE! TO OUR HOLES! TO OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! TO OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! YOUR HOLES! YOUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OUR HOLES! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUR HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLES!

Lolz CRY

OGENICS

LOLZ THE GREAT CHAIN

OF BEING HAHAHAHAHA PLASTI CITY Intelligence

≠with consciousness. Consciousness is bodily, you can feel it in your tears.

BREAKING NEWS: HUMANS PLACE HUMANS AT THE TOP! BREAKING NEWS: THE HUMAN (INTRIN[SIC]ALLY) HAS NO RIGHTS! A great undoing.

Supremacism and omnicide: (1) incessant; (2) ubiquitous, (3) affective

power

patriarKKKy

privilege

FIN ANCE KKKRAPITAL CON SERV A TIVE GOV ERN MAN T AMMOSEXUALS IN GLO BALL ISM H8ER SUITS Human consciousness would depend highly on attributes such as:

- insight - foresight - empathic communication or something

Mapper, surveyor, developer/taxonomist, analyst, governmentalist/ technologist, historian, financier.

wealth :: omnicide reckoning :: poisoning

WE, THE PEOPLE, TOGETHER, WITH WEALTH, KILL

EVERYTHING.

I N P P S T T

ts

N o t C l i mate C

h a n ge!

(It’s Human-Induced Global Annihilation!)

at i o n , e n e m y o f Wo r l d ! o l i t i c s , e n e m y o f C o m m u n i t y ! o l i c e , e n e m y o f H u m a n i t y ! c i e n c e , e n e m y o f N at u r e ! e c h n o l o g y , e n e m y o f T h e P e o p l e ! h e P e o p l e , e n e m y o f E a r t h !

T h e p e o p l e , s c i e n t i s t s , p o l i c e , t e c h n o l o g i s t s , a r m i e s . g at e k e e p e r s . p l e a s e s t a n d d own .

T h e We , We , We , c h i l O u r O u r

N at i o n , a l i e. t h e p e o p l e , m u s t l i e. t h e p e o p l e , m u s t l i e a n d s t e a l. t h e p e o p l e , m u s t l i e a n d s t e a l f o r o u r d r e n . c h i l d r e n m u s t l i e a n d s t e a l. c h i l d r e n a r e l i a r s a n d t h i e ve s, l i k e u s .

The

united states,

A LIE

>>>>

OR

The united states: LEAST FREE nation on Earth.

The united states: the MOST PRISONERS on Earth.

The united states: the MOST PRISONERS OF COLOR on Earth.

T h e u n i t e d s t a t e s : 5% o f E a r t h’s p o p u l a t i o n .

T h e u n i t e d s t a t e s : r a c i a l i s t s p e r p e t u a t i n g r a c i a l i z a t i o n i n a r a c i s t c o u n t r y, s u b s i s t i n g o f f t h e r i c h e s o f R A C I S M , G E N O C I D E , S L AV E R Y, I M P E R I A L I S M , I M P R I S O N M E N T, M I L I TA R I Z AT I O N a n d EXTRACTION. G e n o c i d e , s l a v e r y, i m p e r i a l i s m Imprisonment, militarization, extraction Extraction, militarization, imprisonment I m p e r i a l i s m , s l a v e r y, g e n o c i d e .

u n i t e d s t at e s i s a c r i m e white supremacism is a crime Man is a crime HuMan is a crime P R O SE C U T E t h e h u m a n f o r i t ’s c r i m e s Humanit y: the crime of all crimes The

The lies of Lies meted and doled.

Lying patriarchs.

Shitliers of lies.

Poisoners of Earth.

Creme de la creme, the worst of the worst.

F R E E D U M B , E K K K U A L I T Y, e Q U I T Y, n e o L I B E R T Y, F R AT E R N I T Y

Back to the lie.

E v e r y t h i n g a l i e t o b u y.

The lies of patriarchs.

Va l u e l e s s v a l u e s y s t e m s , a l l t h a t i s v a l u e d , v a l u e l e s s .

All that is invaluable, invalid.

The invalid value of that which has no value is priceless, that which has no price.

Deep time.

Silica.

Silly con.

Memory of a nation, a buried

deep end.

If it could be finite the end.

A just end.

Just an end.

J u st e n d .

A smart and fInal end.

[INSERT SMART & FINAL COOLLAGE]

We don’t stop making it, all this STUFF, this magazine, in the store, in the mail, mall, online, in our house or someplace else that had to be destroyed to make this stuff, to disseminate this text, which we value more than anything else, this stuff, which requires a CHAIN OF PRODUCTION. We don’t stop making it, all this stuff, this magazine, in the store, in the mail, mall, online, in our house or someplace else that had to be destroyed to make this stuff, to disseminate this text, which we value more than anything else, this stuff which requires a chain of production and destruction much larger than I’ve noted here, in this magazine on this page, a page for which many beings have perished.

We don’t stop making it, all this stuff, this magazine, in the store, in the mail, mall, online, in our house or someplace else that had to be destroyed to make this stuff, to disseminate this text, which we value more than anything else, this stuff which requires a chain of production and destruction much larger than I’ve noted here, in this magazine on this page, A PAGE FOR WHICH MANY BEINGS HAVE PERISHED, who have no value in our diabolical system of value, in which I’ve just participated by publishing this text, thus, causing grave destruction.

GRAVE DESTRUCTION RIGHT HERE, BEFORE YOUR EYES. Our craven diabolical system of grave value must be ABANDONED BY TOMORROW. And stopped for good; this text, for instance.

Production of this text.

Consumption of this text, for instance.

This magazine.

The water for this magazine, FOR ALL OUR THINGS, to produce all our things.

To get us all the things, to produce other things in order to distribute these things, in order to buy these things and other things.

These things dependent on other things, to stimulate growth of more things, as many things as inf initely possible or impossible, which depends on the devaluation of some things. Most things.

MOST BEAUTIFUL THINGS. WHICH WE NEVER SEE OR KNOW. We have lost knowledge, to the state.

To state support, cooption.

State cooptation of the support of the corpooration.

State cooptation of the support of the human corpooration.

COLLECTION OF HUMANS, THE HUMAN CORPOORATION. Who are better to not know those things we kill for our things.

Collectives of humans form maps to UNKNOW.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could confront the truth, in retrospect. Together.

Imagine if we could.

Imagine if we could.

confront the truth, in retrospect.

>these words< to be my LAST.

N o t hin g of v al

that’s nothing of value, that’s been EXTRACTED, PLLLAGED from the witness: ground Ground soil air water and the beings within her,

PAPER

Earth.

u e.

All images and screenshots courtesy of the artist, except as noted: p. 77: Ridykeulous (Nicole Eisenman + A.L. Steiner), Love/Hate relationship, 2017; p. 79: A.L. Steiner, Oh! Blast Amerikkka, collage, 2017; p. 80: detail from Lee Lozano: Drawings (Hauser & Wirth, 2006), photo courtesy MPA (l); Bjarne Melgaard, Untitled (OWS Banner), 2011, from “Divided States of America” (r); p. 81: an earlier version of “Interview for K” was composed in 2009 by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer + A.L. Steiner; p. 87: Stop/Horrible (Human/Supremacy), A.L. Steiner, 2017

I choose The END on paper, that’s nothing.

Alison D’Amato

Trajal Harrell: Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Madeto-Measure) / Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church

Historical Realness and the Choreographic Fragment

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles January 14 and 15, 2017

Trajal Harrell’s eight-part series, Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, revolves around a central question: “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing dance tradition would have come downtown to Judson Church to perform alongside the early postmoderns?” 1 Harrell began working with this question in 2009, and has since initiated several unrelated projects, most recently involving the pioneering Butoh choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata. Yet Twenty Looks has strongly shaped Harrell’s identity as a contemporary choreographer concerned with the re-interpretation of historical sources. The penultimate episode in Harrell’s series—Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/ Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M)—premiered in 2012 and continues to tour widely; it has been presented recently in Canada, Portugal, Switzerland, and Greece, in addition to Los Angeles. It is the only dance in the series that reverses Harrell’s guiding question, rephrasing it to send the imagined postmodern dancer uptown.

Harrell’s guiding question alludes, on the one hand, to New York’s ongoing ball scene, where virtuosic performance and fierce competition belie resilient social bonds. While ball culture can be traced to 1960s Harlem (with evident precursors even earlier), balls are now found in “almost every major city in the United States and Canada,” drawing mostly, if not exclusively, Black and Latino participants.2 On the other hand, Harrell references the Judson Church, an institution standing at the south end of Manhattan’s Washington Square Park that still serves as a place of worship and a performance venue. In 1963, the church was at the height of its association with mid-century vanguardism, hosting a concert series that has been deemed the “seedbed for post-modern dance.” 3 The 1962–64 concert series set several monumental dance careers into motion, including those of Yvonne

1. Harrell’s question is phrased slightly differently across varying critical and scholarly platforms; the version cited here can be found in “Trajal Harrell in Conversation

2. Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 5.

with Thomas DeFrantz.”

Movement Research, Critical Correspondence (September 2010), http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=3123.

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3. Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), xi.

Chantal Regnault, Tina Montana, Avis Pendavis Ball, Red Zone, NYC, 1990. Published in Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City, 1989–1992 (London: Soul Jazz Books, 2011). © Chantal Regnault.

Yvonne Rainer, We Shall Run, 1963. Performance as part of A Concert of Dance #3 at Judson Memorial Church, and featuring Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, June Ekmna, Malcolm Goldstein, Sally Gross, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Tony Holder, John Mordan, Yvonne Rainer and Carol Scothorn. Courtesy of Fales Library. New York University. Photo: Al Giese.

Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, and Deborah Hay. It also drew contributions from visual artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Morris, which explains the interest that Judson has long garnered from art historians in addition to dance historians.

Investing in the “historical impossibility” of his proposed crosscultural exchange, Harrell leverages a presumed polarity between Greenwich Village and Harlem; between the activities of a white cultural elite and those of a marginalized Black and Latino subculture; between an aesthetic of minimalism and neutrality versus one of flamboyant theatricality.4 Harrell has been drawing out the productive potential of this impossibility for years, but the longer Twenty Looks circulates in theater, festival, and museum contexts, and the more his “what if” question surfaces in promotional language, reviews, and academic scholarship, the more these signifiers—“voguing” and “Judson”—threaten to collapse under their own weight. When did Judson-era aesthetics become synonymous with a rejection of theatricality, with a “neutral” performance aesthetic winning out over the play of identity signifiers along axes of race, gender, class, and sexuality? And with respect to the ball scene, recent research has made clear that serious appraisals must contend with the discursive and cultural labor that undergirds participation, especially the familial bonds between “house mothers” and their “children.” 5 To imagine a collision between these two cultures, then, must mean going beyond the aesthetic features of performance styles (even if a diversity among individual artists is aptly acknowledged). It must mean taking into account the way in which physical practices give rise to complex ecosystems of social practice. The Judson concerts benefitted from a famously “democratic” collective energy, with participants moving in and out of the loosely organized group at will, contributing when and as much as they liked.6 Within the social structure of the balls, however, membership revolves around an entirely different, and much more urgent, sense of belonging, one that actively redresses, through sustained community support systems, the acute vulnerability of queer subjects of color.

In Twenty Looks, Harrell does go beyond aesthetics; across the work’s eight iterations, he contends with multiple points of intersection between Judsonite and voguing cultures. The full range of this research is not necessarily visible from all vantage points, however. At 50 minutes, M2M is one of the shorter dances in the series, a spare trio for three male-bodied performers: Harrell, Ondrej Vidlar, and Thibault Lac. While they wear long, sheer tunic dresses for much of the piece, there is little variation or play in gender performance; nothing, certainly, that comes near direct citation of the ball scene’s famously well-developed “six-part” gender system.7 4. Clare Croft, “American Realness” (performance review), Theatre Journal 65, no. 4 (December 2013), 563.

5. For more on cultural labor in the ballroom scene, see Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps.

6. Banes, Democracy's Body.

7. The six-part system includes: butch queens (identifying as gay or bisexual men), femme queens (transgender women), butch queens up in drags (gay men who perform

drag but do not identify as women), butches (trandgender men or masculine-presenting lesbians), women (lesbian, straight or queer), and men (straight-identified). For further elaboration, see Marlon M.

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Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture.” Feminist Studies 37, no. 2 (Summer 2011), 370.

Harrell approaches additional reference points with a light touch as well, eschewing some of the subject matter that crops up elsewhere in his series, for instance, the Greek tragedy, Antigone. The resonance between ball houses and the fraught lines of filiation in the Greek narrative are most fully developed in Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L)—a dance for five performers running nearly three hours.

I saw Antigone Sr. (L) at Los Angeles’s REDCAT Theater in 2014, and I remember it as an explosion of sound and light, with the cast wrapping themselves in amazingly bizarre approximations of high couture, strutting amid Harrell’s scathing (but charming) house-mother-style exhortations.

There were quieter notes as well, hinting at the melancholy of historical recuperation. As Clare Croft notes, in a dual review of Antigone Sr. (L) and M2M for the 2013 American Realness Festival: “If Antigone, Sr. (L) felt touched by loss, then M2M was overwhelmed by grief. It embodied a person fighting to avoid coming undone.” 8 I agree with Croft regarding Antigone, Sr. (L); the dance-party pinnacle there felt communally, inclusively cathartic. Regarding M2M, though, I didn’t see the fight. The extended high-energy dance sequence near the end seemed literally to exhaust its performers, with the trio coming up against the impossibility of historical re-embodiment with resignation.

While Antigone, Sr. (L) makes full use of the theatrical proscenium, M2M is Harrell’s “custom-made” iteration. The relative bareness of its mise en scène makes the dance amenable to a range of contexts. At the Hammer, audience members were directed to the museum courtyard, site of much of the series, In Real Life: 100 Days of Film and Performance, where M2M was positioned as the most high-profile live performance.9 A square of white flooring identified the performance space and plenty of white folding chairs were lined up along one of its longer sides. I arrived early and watched these fill up, with spectators crowding into standing room at the back and sides. The sun was curiously muted that day, and without being cold it was breezy. The air stirred a portable rack of those sheer black costumes, placed in one corner of the performance space; they were further animated by a low fan, which was whirring even before the performers came into view.

At one point Vidlar appeared, walked over to the rack, and fussed a bit with the dresses. But it was Lac who emerged to perform an official introduction, or what André Lepecki calls a signature Harrell “pre-beginning.” 10 Lac spoke into a handheld microphone, welcoming us and elaborating the voguing/Judson provocation and making special mention of M2M ’s unique reversal. As Lepecki suggests, the pre-beginning “announces the supposedly actual beginning…which does not start but already continues.” 11 Indeed, Harrell held off revealing himself, using surrogates to set things going and stepping into a dance already in motion. Even so, motion was deemphasized for the bulk of the first half, with a spectator’s focus drawn to

8. Croft, “American Realness,” 563. In her essay, Croft refers to Antigone Sr. (L) as Antigone, Sr. (L).

9. The series ran from

September, 2016 until January, 2017.

10. André Lepecki, “On the Way Ongoing Going (Senselessly with an Aim): A

Fever,” Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (XL)/The Publication (January 2017), 97.

11. Ibid.

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Trajal Harrell, Antigone Sr./ Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L), 2012. Performance at New York Live Arts, New York, NY, April 25â&#x20AC;&#x201C;28, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Miana Jun.

Above and following spread: Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) / Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, 2017, documentation image, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 14, 2017. Photo: Justin Sullivan.

the mere presence of the three performers. They sat in loose triangulation on chairs or benches, lost in the plenitude of near-stillness. Harrell was soon singing, face contorting to produce a deeply resonant sound. Vidlar sat closer to the audience, gazing placidly outward and gently, maddeningly repeating: “Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” In addition to vocalization, Harrell also introduced recorded sound as if making a mix tape, letting a Gillian Welch song (wholly ahistorical and obscurely personal) play all the way through, letting us watch him and the other performers listen.

The opening section went on and on, slowly accruing tension, inextricably linking the trio though they never exchanged glances or touched. I found it brave for Harrell to reveal the un-spectacular and gradual coalescing of his ensemble. Dance audiences, and certainly dance audiences in the museum context, should be familiar with encountering minimalist movement. I’m thinking of Maria Hassabi’s recent exhibition at the Hammer (Plastic, 2015), where dancers slid so slowly down the central staircase as to make their movement nearly imperceptible.12 Yet I could feel the tension building amongst spectators throughout this section: When would they do something? Harrell eventually rewards his M2M audience with an unhinged battery of tippy-toed catwalking, riotous house-dancing, faceserving, and even a hint of those recognizable voguer arms (delivered by Lac). Yet he enshrouds that action with meaning by holding the commotion at bay, working his way slowly into a mixed-up corporeal history that never was, until now.

If you stumbled into the Hammer by chance that day, and didn’t read the provided program, you would likely not even register the dance’s references to Judson and voguing. Harrell has been utterly explicit regarding his disinterest in historical re-enactment, or anything that might betray a sense of nostalgia. In an interview with dance historian Thomas DeFrantz, Harrell explains that the project is aimed at historical “omissions” and at addressing such omissions by uncovering “future possibilities.” 13 By conflating voguing and postmodern dance, Harrell does not correct the historical record by according the same importance to early-1960s voguers as has been accorded to the Judson artists. Nor does he establish historical coherency by dwelling on the discovery of mutual aesthetic concerns, although he does acknowledge overlapping concerns, most notably a shared obsession with walking.14 Rather, he seeks productivity from within the gaps, failures, and exclusions of the historical record: “I think that there are 12. I performed in Hassabi’s Plastic at the Hammer Museum throughout February 2015.

13. “Trajal Harrell in Conversation with Thomas DeFrantz.”

14. The catwalk traversals of the ball performers lend themselves to an almost too easy juxtaposition with Judsonian pedestrian explorations of walking, which arguably reached their apex in Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover (1967).

99

100

always omissions,” he reflects. “We know that about history. We know that history is a kind of fiction.” 15 The essential narrativity of history is not a new assertion. Yet the question remains how one addresses or constructs narrative in and through the body, how one manifests future possibilities through the specific mechanisms of choreographic research.

Harrell’s antagonistic relationship with re-enactment (and, implicitly, appropriation) is informed by his refusal to participate in “or draw creatively from any personal relationship to the community.” 16 Though he began attending balls as a spectator in 1999, he came to them as an experimental choreographer with training in theater and visual art as well as an undergraduate degree in American Studies from Yale University.17 Harrell refuses to be the downtown experimentalist learning to vogue and then abstracting that physical language from its cultural context. In M2M, the ball culture references may be explicit, but he does not let them cohere into a recognizable facsimile, especially framed as they are by the unnervingly still introductory invocation. Yet Harrell’s avoidance of literal approximations of voguing also troubles entrenched assumptions about dance’s perpetuation. While it is important to remember the prominence of body-to-body transmission for those who uphold and build upon stores of embodied knowledge, it is also important to take into account the many strains of contemporary choreographic research that do not revolve around direct transmission.

In an essay addressing the historical re-imaginings of a French choreographic collective, the Albrecht Knust Quartet, Isabelle Launay puzzles over the “many instances where a contemporary dance has insistently undertaken—as a condition of its own renewal—a critique of past works that have been transmitted through the oral tradition.” 18 She cites Hannah Arendt citing Walter Benjamin, who champions a “modern” way of relating to the past that replaces person-to-person (or in Launay’s formulation, oral) transmission with “citationality.” 19 The Knust Quartet, which includes collaborators Dominique Brun, Anne Collod, Simon Hecquet, and Christophe Wavelet, restaged iconic dance works throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Nijinsky’s L'Après-midi d'un Faune, as well as postmodern exemplars, such as Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover and Rainer’s Continuous Project/ Altered Daily. For Launay, the text-centric concept of citationality reveals how artists discover points of departure by working with historical fragments rather than seeking a stable totality. In addition to drawing upon established sources, such as movement scores, the collaborators allowed themselves an open-ended relationship to history, affirming “themselves as the contemporary subjects of that narrative.” 20 They drew upon official archives while also welcoming information derived from their own histories

15. “Trajal Harrell in Conversation with Thomas DeFrantz.”

16. Madison Moore, “Walk for Me: Postmodern Dance at the House of Harrell,” Theater 44, no. 1 (2014), 13.

17. Ibid., 6–7.

18. Isabelle Launay, “Citational Poetics in Dance: …of a faun (fragments) by the Albrecht Knust Quartet, before and after 2000,” Dance Research Journal, 44, no. 2 (Winter 2012), 49.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 54.

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Above and previous spread: Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) / Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, 2017, documentation image, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 14, 2017. Photo: Justin Sullivan.

Trajal Harrell, Antigone Sr. / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L), 2012. Performance at Dansens Hus, Stockholm, April 4, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Bengt Gustafsson.Â

of rehearsal, production, and performance. Like the Knust Quartet, Harrell works with a keen awareness of his position relative to historical sources, allowing the research process to spin fragments into new centers of gravity— the incorporation of contemporary recorded music, the evident intimacy between performers, and the addition of Antigone references, for example.

While choreographic citation allows historical fragments to take on a life of their own inside of the creative process, it does become important to question how such fragments might then produce new totalities, not only within the work but also across the discursive landscape surrounding it. This includes promotional language, where presenters (including the Hammer) crystallize an opposition between the “formalism and minimalism” of the “Judson Church-period” and the “flamboyant and performative” voguer who “appropriates fashion vocabulary.” 21 Or in the realm of criticism, as exemplified by a 2012 New York Times review, in which Claudia La Rocco writes, “You can almost imagine a trio of Judsonite performers as artsy wallflowers, holding the line for their avant-garde principles…as ravishingly costumed voguers swirl around them.” 22 Even when the Judson/voguing juxtaposition is not thought in purely oppositional terms—La Rocco reminds us that “the Judson folks liked to party, too” and mentions some of the aesthetic overlap between Judson and voguing explored by Harrell—an opposition nonetheless tends to calcify.23 Likewise, in scholarly discourse: Madison Moore elaborates on the “Judson aesthetic” by citing Rainer’s “antispectacle propositions” as articulated in the NO Manifesto, and then quotes Harrell, who states that voguing allowed him to “turn all those ‘nos’ in the manifesto into ‘maybes.’” 24 From this vantage point, citational fragments actually reduce complexity, narrowing the range of meaning derived from social and historical formations. When circumscribed so neatly, signifiers like “Judson” and “voguing” give spectators a leg to stand on as they parse the strands of meaning in Harrell’s deeply nuanced dances, but they also give rise to new exclusions and omissions.

For example, consider a reading of Twenty Looks that takes the figure of Fred Herko as representative of Judson-era aesthetics, rather than Yvonne Rainer (especially the narrow glimpse of Rainer that we get when considering her NO Manifesto in isolation). Herko was 27 years old in 1963, immersing himself in the world of downtown dance after a four-year scholarship program at American Ballet Theater. In Democracy’s Body, Judson Dance Theatre 1962–1964, Sally Banes references multiple firsthand accounts of Herko’s contribution to A Concert of Dance #1, a solo called Once or Twice a Week I Put on Sneakers to Go Uptown. Reviewers Jill Johnston and Allan Hughes describe Herko dancing barefoot in an elaborate headdress designed by Remy Charlip and modeled after an “African design.”

21. https://hammer.ucla. edu/programs-events/2016/ in-real-life/trajal-harrell-judsonchurch-is-ringing-in-harlemmade-to-measure-twentylooks-or-paris-is-burning-atthe-judson-church/.

22. Claudia La Rocco, “Tension Is Uncorked Before a Parting: ‘Judson Church Is Ringing in

Harlem’ at St. Mark’s,” New York Times, October 14, 2012.

23. Ibid.

24. Rainer’s manifesto reads: “NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no

to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.” See Yvonne Rainer, “Some Retrospective Notes on a Dance for 10 People and 12 Mattresses Called ‘Parts of

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Some Sextets,’ Performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and Judson Memorial Church, New York, in March, 1965,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965), 178. As referenced in Moore, “Walk for Me,” 16.

Hughes praised Herko’s “sense of theatrical structure” and “charisma,” while Steve Paxton dismissed him as “campy and self-conscious…a collagist with an arch performance manner.” 25 Only a year later, Herko leapt to his death from a fifth floor window on Cordelia Street in an amphetamineinduced haze. Particularly in light of the tragic brevity of his career, it is easy to see why he, like many of the Judson-affiliated artists, didn’t rise to Rainer’s level of visibility.

Herko’s association with Judson may likewise be tempered by his participation in Andy Warhol’s Factory, evident in films such as Rollerskate/Dance Movie (1963). Paisid Aramphongphan teases out many of the underreported threads connecting Warhol’s circle and the Judson artists, including another 1963 film called Haircut #1 that features Herko, Billy Linich (who was the eponymous haircut-giver in the film, as well as a frequent lighting designer at Judson), and James Waring (choreographic mentor to many of the Judson artists).26 Aramphongphan also discusses Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963), a four-minute film capturing Herko and Jill Johnston, who was an exhaustive chronicler of the Judson concerts romantically linked to the prominent choreographer Lucinda Childs. Aramphongphan identifies in these films a performance aesthetic emerging “partly out of camp sensibility and the queer subculture of which Herko (and Warhol) were part,” an aesthetic that was “rejected, if not openly denounced in homophobic terms, by the more art-world-connected side of Judson that has since dominated its history.” 27 Aramphongphan is right to highlight the fact that it may only be parts of the Judson legacy that the “art-world” has found palatable, a concern worth echoing when Judson is invoked, via Twenty Looks, in museum contexts such as the Hammer and MoMA PS1, where the dance was commissioned.

Along these lines, many have pointed out the relative absence of people of color involved in the Judson concerts; this is important to acknowledge. Yet rather than merely remarking on it, why not leverage such assessments to confer visibility on a Judson-affiliated artist like Rudy Perez? In 1963, Perez was a young Puerto Rican from the Bronx who had studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham before initiating his choreographic career in the concert series. His breakout work was a 1963 dance called Take Your Alligator with You, a duet for himself an Elaine Summers in which the two performers struck poses “halfway between a bourgeois couple and a vaudeville team, their bodies stiff and mannered.” 28 While Perez eventually moved to Los Angeles and enjoyed success as a choreographer and teacher, his contributions are routinely eclipsed in historical narratives that emphasize the “more art-world-connected side of Judson.” I mention Perez not to argue for a re-examination of Judson’s inclusivity, but rather to emphasize the connection between historical narrative and the intelligibility of subjects of color.

25. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 44.

26. David Vaughan, “James Waring: A Remembrance,” Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 2 (1981), 108.

27. Paisid Aramphongphan,

“Real Professionals?: Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and Dance,” Performing Arts Journal 110 (2015), 2.

28. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 45.

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Andy Warhol, Haircut (No.1), 1963. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 27 min. at 16 fps. Š2017 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Rudy Perez and Elaine Summers rehearsing Take Your Alligator With You, 1962. Black-and-white contact sheet, dimensions unknown. Courtesy of Rudy Perez.

Indeed, many celebrate ball culture as a platform affirming the presence, and the artistry, of queer subjects of color. Here though, too, the fragment threatens to spawn totality, with Jennie Livingston’s 1991 film Paris Is Burning giving rise to an “academic cottage industry” unto itself. Theorists such as bell hooks, for example, argue that Livingston served up ball performers to be mocked by white audiences, and that performers themselves uncritically privilege white femininity.29 The prominence of and controversy surrounding Livingston’s film thrust a particular generation of ball performers into the spotlight, including luminaries of the late 1980s scene, such as Paris Dupree, Pepper LaBeija, and Willi Ninja. Lucas Hildebrand traces a preParis history of the balls, from the nineteenth-century exploration of drag as “privileged straights’ transgression” to the popular Harlem events of the 1920s, where “white tourists ventured” to partake of the spectacle.30 By the 1960s, we arrive at the “modern ball circuit,” fully dedicated to the exclusive self-representation of queer communities of color. But even in the context of Paris Is Burning, as Hildebrand points out, LaBeija and another performer, Dorian Corey, remark on the dynamic evolution of drag aesthetics, where performers were apt to emulate Las Vegas showgirls, in the 1960s, and film actresses, in the 1970s; supermodels (and therefore publications like Vogue) did not become a prime focus until the 1980s.

Analyzing participant-observation from the late 1990s until the early 2000s, Jonathan David Jackson produces a useful choreographic analysis of ball culture’s multiple “ritual traditions.” 31 Of the six categories he formulates, he notes that voguing was the only competitive style of the time that emphasized whole-bodied improvisation, while the other categories (including “runway,” “labels,” “body,” “face,” and “realness”) necessitate extraordinarily minimal movement patterns. Of the “face” category, for example, he reports that “competitors walk very simply toward judges and present their faces for inspection.” 32 Such analysis challenges designations of ball culture’s essential flamboyance. Harrell’s work complicates it too, as he clearly mines a tension between theatricality and minimalism.

He has uncovered intensely interesting links, for example between Judsonera investigations into the body’s actuality and ball performers’ expert play on illusion-as-realness. Such links reveal choreographic postmodernism and ball performance aesthetics to be in dialogue rather than in opposition.

And again, fixating on voguing’s artifice leads one to overlook the highly developed, vitally important social bonds that underpin its aesthetics.

Jackson highlights this “ethic for kinship,” as does recent scholarship by Marlon M. Bailey, which focuses on the cultural and discursive labor at the heart of ball-scene social praxis.33 As Bailey argues, much of the popular and scholarly attention the ballroom community has received “underemphasizes both the conditions under which its members live and their use of performance as a way of surviving violence.” 34 Bailey’s work demonstrates how ball children use the resources of the houses in concrete ways, with

29. For an in-depth review of various scholarly perspectives on the film, see Lucas Hildebrand, Paris Is Burning: A

Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), 119.

30. Ibid., 45.

31. Jonathan David Jackson,

"Social World of Voguing,” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2 (2002), 27.

109

32. Ibid., 32.

33. Ibid., 26.

34. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness,” 367.

Trajal Harrell, Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (XL)/The Publication, 2017.

Digital publication, downloadable at: https://hammer.ucla.edu/fileadmin/media/programs/2017/Winter_ Spring_2017/Trajal_Harrell-Twenty_Looks__XL__FINALE.pdf.

elders offering important advice on financial security, housing, and health care, especially related to gender transitioning.35 They also quite literally protect each other from attacks outside of the balls, where, as Bailey argues, “queer gender and sexualities signal to a would-be assailant that queers can be robbed and beaten, even murdered, with impunity.” 36 So in addition to balls constituting a platform wherein marginalized subjects attain visibility, the social structure of the houses offers support and protection for participants as they navigate a hostile world outside. Harrell sees the formation of “intense communities” as another link between postmodern dance culture and that of the ball scene.37 Yet this link may offer clues about another important disconnect at the heart of Harrell’s “historical impossibility”: the incommensurability of two worlds with such different stakes around the enactment of community.

In January 2017, at the American Realness festival in New York, Harrell celebrated the release of Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (XL)/The Publication. This digital document is widely available; I downloaded it for free via a link on the Hammer event page. It’s a tonguein-cheek play on Vogue magazine, Harrell’s effort to “vogue the magazine Vogue.” 38 There are photos, letters from audience members, commentary in multiple languages, and in-depth critical writings by well-known performance scholars. It should be required reading for all of Harrell’s spectators but, at 322 pages, that seems unlikely. Like the series as a whole, it is messy, sprawling, complex, and often brilliant. It allows historical and conceptual fragments to proliferate, boldly frustrating attempts to fashion a totality. It signals the end of Harrell’s research process, but for those seeking to take stock of what, over the last several years, Twenty Looks has produced, it’s a nice point of departure, an occasion for imagining what was, or what never could have been.

Alison D’Amato is a researcher, choreographer, and performer based in Los Angeles. She has lectured in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA and the School of Dance at CalArts; she currently teaches dance history, theory and practice at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. She holds a PhD from UCLA, an MA in Dance Theater Practice from Trinity Laban (London), and a BA in Philosophy from Haverford College. Her dances and scores have been presented widely in Los Angeles, most recently at PAM Residencies, Pieter Performance Space, and HomeLA. For more, visit http://alisondamatodance.com.

35. Jackson, "Social World of Voguing,” 30.

36. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness,” 366.

37. Mette Ingvartsen, Everybodys Self Interviews (Lulu.com, 2008), 48.

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38. Trajal Harrell, “Voguing Vogue,” Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (XL)/The Publication (2017), 18.

Michelle Grabner One World

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art Queens Museum, New York September 18, 2016– February 19, 2017

On Christmas Day in 1968, ten months before Mierle Laderman Ukeles sat down to write her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “Care,” Apollo 8’s manned space mission sent back to NASA paradigm-altering images of Earth. In one of those photographs, Earthrise, our shadow-cloaked planet looms in darkness beyond the desolate lunar horizon. “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of sheer homesickness surging through me,” expressed astronaut Frank Borman. He followed up his emotional statement with a more philosophical observation: “[R]aging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance. We are one hunk of ground, water, air, clouds, floating around in space. From out there it really is ‘one world.’” 1 When confronted with a view of Earth as a single, contained sphere rotating in space, Borman’s pronouncement oscillates between the hyper local and the global, between emotion and practicality. The breadth and scope of this “one world” deliberation also resonates with Ukeles’s comprehension of what she calls art’s “Real Job”: “that which saves the planet/home.” 2 In 2016, she described writing her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! in a state of “quiet rage, in one sitting… From the beginning, I name three levels of Maintenance as Art: Personal; Society/the City; the Planet. With limited resources from our finite planet, how do we do this? How do we survive?” 3 Earthrise was not the first photograph of the entire planet recorded from space. A colored image captured by NASA’s satellite ATS-3 (in 1967) appeared on the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog, in fall 1968. However, Earthrise was the first to be generated within the technological feat of a manned space mission and therefore the first to appear with a commentary from participant observers. Earthrise, together with The Blue Marble (1972), sent to earth from the Apollo 17 mission, unmistakably captured the imagination of environmental activism, a movement that peaked between 1968 and 1972.4 The organizers of the historic 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment asserted that The Blue Marble “had 1. Frank Borman, quoted in Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2.

2. Miele Laderman Ukeles, “Precis, 1990,” reprinted in

Patricia C. Philips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art (Munich: DelMonico Books; New York: Queens Museum, 2016), 218.

3. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, MANIFESTO FOR

MAINTENANCE ART 1969! — PROPOSAL FOR AN EXHIBITION “CARE,” in Philips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, 210.

4. See Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, the Globalization

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of the World Picture,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011), 602–630, https:// doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.3.602.

The Blue Marble, 1972. View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon.

Astronaut photograph AS17-148-22727, http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov. Courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ten Sweeps Light Path, 2016. Installation view, Queens Museum, September 18, 2016–February 19, 2017. © 2017 Queens Museum. All rights reserved. Photo: Hai Zhang.

initiated a shift in human consciousness akin to the Copernican revolution” and claimed that the image itself had “brought about a comprehensive change in consciousness and promoted new notions of a planetary unit and the ‘earth system.’” 5 In preparation for the United Nations conference, the UN General Assembly commissioned economist Barbara Ward and scientist René Dubos to co-author a report that resulted in the lauded publication Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet.6 In the book, Ward argues for the “dual responsibility” of caring for the environment’s “outer limits” as well as the “inner limits” of humankind. Ward states, “[T]he careful husbandry of the Earth is sine qua non for the survival of the human species, and for the creation of decent ways of life for all the people of the world.” 7 For Ward and Ukeles alike, it was simple; an attentive practice of “care and maintenance,” on both a personal and global level, was the means to surviving on a finite planet with limited resources.

Ukeles’s early maintenance performances included housecleaning, washing dirty diapers, and dressing children. By framing domestic tasks as art making, she transformed the routine of private labor into a question of social responsibility and public work. As artworks these maintenance activities can also be understood symbolically, as an act that reaches far beyond the broom closet. The same sort of diligent “maintenance” applied to the household can also be a metaphor for civic-minded work. And responsible civic work is always environmental and global. Ukeles’s engagement with maintenance and care may have originated in the home, but its ethical scope is not confined to the contours of the domestic institution. “Think Globally, Act Locally,” another remnant of the 1972 Stockholm conference, is an axiom that is deeply embedded in Ukeles’s practice, and the NASA photographs made this concept visually conceivable to the world’s inhabitants.

Also in 1972, the Queens Museum opened in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Its enduring feature attraction is the Panorama of the City of New York, an accurate 1:1200 (one inch = 100 feet) scale model of the city’s five boroughs, constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair.8 Today, visitors to the museum can navigate above the perimeter of the large-scale model and enjoy a topographical god’s-eye view detailing 320 continuous square miles of water and densely urbanized landscape. This replica offers human proximity that is distinct from the radically incomprehensible distances that frame NASA’s Whole Earth images. But the New York panorama also assumes an aerial perspective that effectively mediates between the individual and the local in ways that parallel the mediation between the individual and the universe.

5. Thomas M. Lekan, “Fractal Earth: Visualizing the Global Environment in the Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014), 80.

6. Barbara Ward, René J. Dubos, and United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Only One Earth:

The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).

7. Ibid., xviii.

8. “The Panorama of the City of New York is the jewel in the crown of the collection of the Queens Museum and a locus of memory for visitors from

all over the globe. Conceived as a celebration of the City’s municipal infrastructure by urban mastermind and World’s Fair President Robert Moses for the 1964 Fair, the Panorama was built by a team of more than 100 people working for the great architectural model

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makers Raymond Lester & Associates over the course of three years.” http://www. queensmuseum.org/2013/10/ panorama-of-the-city-of-newyork.

The Queens Museum’s Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art is a major survey exhibition that features work from 1962 to 2016, much of which coincides with Ukeles’s nearly 40-year unsalaried tenure as the official artist-in-residence of New York City’s Department of Sanitation. A powerful inclusion in the document-heavy exhibition is Ten Sweeps Light Path (2016). Using a path of flickering lights, the piece maps, onto the museum’s Panorama of the City of New York, Ukeles’s routes through New York’s boroughs, as she performed Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80).

This project, in which the artist shook the hands of 8,500 city sanitation workers, was an immense yet intimate action that acknowledges an integral metropolitan workforce. Propitiously, the lights that flash along the streets of the miniature city reinforce a statement that Ukeles made to artist Linda Montano about the performance: “I felt I had absorbed eighty-five hundred volts of electricity through my right hand from shaking that many hands, and the energy was residing inside of me.” 9 Trax for Trux and Barges (1984) is a two-part soundtrack that fills the museum’s panorama hall. Produced by sound designer Stephen Erickson and Ukeles, the racket of utility trucks and other heavy equipment dumping trash is interspersed with recorded conversations between Ukeles and “sani” workers inside the cabs of garbage trucks during Touch Sanitation Performance.

Social Mirror (1983) opens up a playful rupture within an exhibition dedicated to the ethical ramifications of work and routine. This garbage truck with mirror-cladded sides pulls up to the museum’s entrance on weekends during the run of the exhibition. The juxtaposition of a truck reflecting the classical architecture of the museum upends the illusion that timeless cultural institutions produce no waste and need no maintenance. Equally advantageous, the location of the parked truck perfectly aligns with the Unisphere, the iconic stainless steel representation of the Earth in nearby Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Its diameter measures 120 feet, and it was erected as a symbol of global interdependence in 1964, at the beginning of the space age. This fortuitous juxtaposition of a garbage truck and the Unisphere draws a direct relationship between regional management and planetary guardianship. Reflected on the broad sides of the rear-loader, the image of this globe does not float in the vastness of space but instead is tethered to a maintenance vehicle.

Seemingly in contrast with the monumentality of a rigged garbage truck, the four typewritten pages of onion-skin paper that make up Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! are of equal force and momentum, and not solely for the work’s influence on women’s rights, cultural work, and labor. “This is a structure that is actually a sculpture though it looks like a text,” writes Ukeles in 2015.10 Understanding her manifesto as possessing the same authority as sculpture parallels her full endorsement of maintenance activities as art. Moreover, the manifesto is also a serious and

9. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, quoted in “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Ritual/Death,” in Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties, compiled by Linda M. Montano (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2000), 455.

10. Ukeles, MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! in Philips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, 38.

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Social Mirror, 1983. Installation view, Queens Museum, September 12, 2016– February 19, 2017. © 2017 Queens Museum. All rights reserved. Photo: Hai Zhang.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, July 23, 1973. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

well-crafted exhibition proposal. Comprised of two sections: “I. IDEAS” and “II. THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION,” Ukeles’s language is declarative, blunt, and on occasion discursive. Under “IDEAS,” she writes: “Maintenance is a drag, it takes all the fucking time (lit.).” She follows with “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art.” 11 Here Ukeles equates art with the repetitious nature of labor simply by emphatically claiming Art twice in each sentence. Ukeles thus registers philosophical and pragmatic views on maintenance and human development, life and death, art and the avant-garde.

In “Section II. THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION,” Ukeles manifests her thesis into a well-reasoned exhibition proposal for an art institution, presumably one with cultural clout. Her pitch is organized around three themes—Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance. She starts “A. Personal Part” by introducing herself as an artist, woman, wife, and mother (in what she describes as “random order”) who does “a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I ‘do’ Art. …Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. …I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. ‘floor paintings, dust works, soap-sculpture, wall-paintings’)… The exhibition area might look ‘empty’ of art, but it will be maintained in full public view. My working will be the work.” 12 Under the “B. General Part” heading, Ukeles details her plans to interview exhibition spectators, asking questions such as “what is the difference between maintenance and freedom; …what is the difference between maintenance and life’s dreams.” In addition, she states that the exhibition will also include printed interviews with the “‘maintenance man,’ maid, sanitation man, mailman, union man, construction worker, librarian, grocerystore man, nurse, doctor, teacher, museum director, salesman, baseball player, child, criminal, bank president, mayor, movie star, artist, etc.” Finally, the last part of her proposal, “C. Earth Maintenance,” describes the daily delivery of refuse to the museum, including the contents of one sanitation truck, containers of polluted air and water, and some “ravaged land.” These containers would be “serviced” by the artist or “scientists”: their contents “purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved.” 13 An exemplary work of feminist art making, Ukeles’s manifesto is an ambitious and bold declaration of subject and intent. Perhaps even more than the temerity of maintenance art is the manifesto’s pragmatic clarity as a spot-on pitch directed at enticing institutional authorities. Ukeles decided early on that for maintenance to be framed as art she would need to practice its routines within the hallowed walls of the museum. Or on its front steps. At the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1973, she performed Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 22, 1973), mopping the exterior of the museum and the inner Avery Court. The photographic documents of that work have become the visual emblems of Ukeles’s manifesto. A black-and-white image of the artist 11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, September 16â&#x20AC;&#x201C;October 20, 1976.

Performance with three hundred maintenance employees, day and night shifts over the course of six weeks at 55 Water Street, New York. Installation view at Whitney Museum, Downtown NYC. 720 Polaroid photographs mounted on paper, printed labels, color-coded stickers, seven handwritten and typewritten texts, clipboard, and custom-made buttons, overall: 12 Ă&#x2014; 15 ft. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

on her knees dumping soapy water from a mop bucket down the steps of the gothic revival building, in which Ukeles’s sturdy frame cradles the discharge of liquid, evokes archetypal Madonna with Child imagery. With purpose and youthful comportment (and wet jeans), she looks down at her work with a sense of responsibility. The photograph’s triangular figural composition is solid and unyielding. From the photographer’s point of view, we see the figure situated above the public plaza, lending the subject a status of importance that effectively elevates both the quality of work and its endless nature. This photograph graces the cover of the Queens Museum exhibition catalog and has become synonymous with her oeuvre.

Other photographic records of maintenance work include Ukeles’s earlier Dressing to Go Out / Undressing to Go In (1973). Here, a grid of 95 small photographic prints narrates the domestic routine of dressing and undressing young children. Hats, scarfs, boots, and snow coats cover and uncover little bodies who are knowingly aware of the camera in the room. Mounted at pre-school height, the camera cuts off Ukeles’s adult body while perfectly framing the action of dressing and undressing the kids. With no indication in the photographic series of an outdoor event, Ukeles emphasizes of the physical and temporal nature of the quotidian in ways similar to the multiple photographic frames employed by Muybridge to study anatomical locomotion. The work commemorates the process of dressing and undressing children in a daily routine shaped by seasonal conditions and champions the representation of repetitive care.

I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (September 16–October 20, 1976) was a collaboration with 300 maintenance employees at the enormous office building at 55 Water Street, which housed the downtown annex of the Whitney Museum of Art. With the approval of supervisors, Ukeles asked shift workers to consider allocating one of their eight hours of work as “maintenance art” instead of “maintenance work.” It was a thought experiment that did not change the nature of the work, only the cultural framing of it. She took Polaroid photographs of the individual employees and gave each a white button printed with blue sanserif text, “I make maintenance art one hour a day.” In the Whitney Museum’s downtown gallery, she displayed the resulting 720 Polaroids as if on a bulletin board. She mounted the photographs on white paper if the employees worked during the day and on midnight blue paper if they worked the night shift (two thirds of the photographs are mounted on midnight blue) and hung them in a grid that constitutes an immense index of otherwise invisible human industry.

Ukeles decorated the populous snapshot display with paper cutouts of the sun, moon, and stars. In a comprehensive and perceptive catalog essay, Patricia Phillips observes that this project “informed and inspired the process, planning, and deployment of Touch Sanitation Performance.” 14

14. Philips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, 83.

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Above and previous spread: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1980. Citywide performance with 8,500 Sanitation workers across all fifty-nine New York City Sanitation districts. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Photo: Marcia Bricker.

In the letter introducing Department of Sanitation workers to the Touch Sanitation Performance project, Ukeles wrote empathetically, “It’s about holding up your end of the truck team; about people swearing at you, not looking you in the eye; about doing a good job anyway.” 15 “Thank you sanman. Thank you for keeping New York City alive!” Starting on July 24, 1979, as a newly installed artist-in-residence in the Department of Sanitation, Ukeles sent daily greetings via telex from the Department of Sanitation’s headquarters to the department’s entire workforce. In these messages, Ukeles informed sanitation workers in which district she would be working that day. Over the course of 11 months, the work she performed was to shake hands with the department’s 8,500 workers. She looked each one in the eye and thanked him or her.16 In addition to being an extension of maintenance and occupational art, Touch Sanitation Performance was a feat of durational art.

Ukeles’s project was informed by her predecessors’ practices, including Vito Acconci’s conceptualism, Hans Haacke’s political practices, Adrian Piper’s Catalysis performances, and Lucy Lippard’s feminism. For example, Acconci followed people around the streets of New York for 23 days. “Every day I pick out a person in the street—at random, any location—and follow that person as long as I can (until he/she enters a private place—home, office, etc.).” 17 Photographic documents and notes, including accounts of Acconci’s daily episodes, comprise Following Piece (1969). Ukeles’s extensive and rigorous research, coordination, and administration in preparation for Touch Sanitation Performance is herculean by comparison to Acconci’s cache of artifacts. Lucy Lippard describes Ukeles’s project: “The spatial organization [of the 59 sanitation districts]…was organized by rhythm, intonation, and cadences of mobility (people, equipment, vehicles) and fixed forms and infrastructure (marine transfer stations, incinerators, landfills).” 18 As a tool for recording and managing the personal time and labor necessary to execute Touch Sanitation Performance, Ukeles developed diagrams with notations inquiring about the availability of babysitters, her husband’s work calendar, and her children’s schedules. Yet her dogged persistence foregrounding the real forms of labor necessary to sustain the household, the neighborhood, the metropolis, and the world reached numerous people in their own workplace. Thus the municipal workplace became Ukeles’s base of production, and she embedded herself in New York City’s Department of Sanitation, where she has remained as artist-in-residence since 1978.19 The versatile range of ambition and scale in Ukeles’s work has always reflected her belief that maintenance is an action that is intimate and formal, inconspicuous and observable, personalized and bureaucratic. For this 15. Ukeles, quoted in Philips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, 101.

16. The vast majority of sanitation workers were men. It wasn’t until 1987 that women started working on the trucks.

See http://www.nytimes. com/1987/01/31/nyregion/2female-sanitation-workersearning-high-marks.html.

17. See http://www.vitoacconci. org/portfolio_page/followingpiece-1969/.

18. Philips, Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, 97.

19. See Randy Kennedy, “An Artist Who Calls the Sanitation Department Home,” New York Times, September 21, 2016. “[Ukeles] and her husband, Jack, now live in Tel Aviv, to be closer

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to their three adult children and seven grandchildren there. But Ms. Ukeles is back at her Beaver Street office often enough that workers still greet her in the halls like an old friend. And she still knows the department’s inner mechanisms almost as well as any of the eight commissioners who have run it during her time as its artistic soul.”

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, installation view, Queens Museum, September 18, 2016– February 19, 2017. © 2017 Queens Museum. All rights reserved. Photo: Hai Zhang.

exhibition, she took measures to engage the formidable architecture of the Queens Museum as a signifier for the magnitude of institutional and systematic maintenance. For example, the west façade of the museum was outfitted with 14 sets of salvaged blinking lights harvested from obsolete sanitation trucks. Thus the full girth of the building is transformed into the back end of a city utility vehicle. The artist’s sense of humor surfaces in other works too, including Social Mirror and Work Ballets (1983–2012). In the latter, heavy-duty trucks and barges enact enthralling rhythmical dances. Much of the playful absurdity in these works is the result of the artist’s use of incongruent scale and her inversion of the design and function of maintenance equipment. Setting this project apart from her maintenance practices, the ballets transform the tools of municipal upkeep into aestheticized cultural material that claims unesteemed public space as theater.

Inside the main hall viewers are confronted with a wall graphic with gradations in color from lime green to cherry red. One Year’s Worktime II (1984/2016) organizes the abstract idea of a full year’s work through the grid deployment of clock faces printed over the color spectrum that represents the annual seasons. Ceremonial Arch IV (1988/1993/1994/2016) is also a memorial to work: used work gloves gleaned from city workforces jubilantly extend out of the top of an arching armature as if applauding, while collections of artifacts familiar to labor, such as gauges, truck handles, and mailbags, are grafted to the monument’s foundation. Peace Table (1997) foregrounds another type of work. A circular, transparent blue glass table is suspended under the skylights in the vast central hall of the museum. Sixteen wooden chairs host roundtable conversations with artists, city workers, and activists. The large-scale physical presence of these works stands in contrast to the intimacy of the exhibition’s countless documents displayed on gallery walls and in vitrines that record Ukeles’s 50-year career of examining and enacting service work and organized labor.

Not coincidentally, the Queens Museum exhibition comes at a point in time when the nature of work has radically shifted. New manufacturing and distribution technologies have yielded to the gig economy, so-called rightto-work laws, and the steep decline of unions. In addition, climate-change deniers are shaping state and national legislation while political leadership is reversing environmental protections. From this vantage point, Ukeles’s foregrounding of labor and the environment looks historic and lapsed, a progressive-era agenda that was forged by understanding the Earth as vulnerable and in need of compulsory maintenance and care. Perhaps today’s equivalent may be found in what is called the slow movement. “The slow movement is not a counter-cultural retreat from everyday life, not a return to the past, the good old days…neither is it a form of laziness, nor a slowmotion version of life… Rather it is…a process whereby everyday life—in all its pace and complexity, frisson, and routine—is approached with care and attention.” 20

20. Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig, Slow Living (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2006), ix.

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Understanding that all work has a local, regional, and global impact, Ukeles has dedicated a life’s work to platforming ordinary, ignoble, and invisible labor. She has influenced a generation of artists who have critically expanded her ideas, including Ben Kinmont, Andrea Fraser, Harrell Fletcher, and N.E. Thing Co. In my own work, I too am deeply indebted to Ukeles’s elevation of domestic routine and repetitive actions. Profoundly grasping that all work is greater than the individual who performs it, her entire practice is aimed at helping individual laborers understand and celebrate that too.

An “artist, woman, wife, and mother,” Ukeles never loses sight of the Blue Marble inside of our mop buckets, garbage cans, and landfills.

Michelle Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an X-TRA contributing editor. She lives in Milwaukee, WI.

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Kavior Moon Fiona Connor and Others: An Unfolding Text

In early 2016, artist Fiona Connor visited the archive of photographer Frank J. Thomas in Portland, Oregon. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Thomas was the go-to photographer of the Los Angeles art world, regularly hired by artists, dealers, collectors, galleries, museums, and publishers to photograph artworks, exhibitions, and events related to the lively art scene growing in and around the city.1 While seeking documentary photographs of site-specific works by Los Angeles artists such as Maria Nordman, Michael Asher, and Robert Irwin, Connor encountered Thomas’s photographs of paintings by John McLaughlin. This was Connor’s first introduction to McLaughlin’s work.

Thomas was hired to document a series of McLaughlin’s works in preparation for the painter’s first East Coast retrospective, organized by James Harithas and held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1968.2 The black-and-white photographs, taken with a large format camera, show each austerely abstract painting propped on an easel placed among everyday objects in various locations around McLaughlin’s home, in Laguna Beach, California. There is an ironic disjuncture between the artist’s intended program and what the documentary photographs picture: Whereas McLaughlin used a vocabulary of “neutral forms” in his paintings to “free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular,” in these photographs, we see only particularities within the frame.3 This vivid contrast between McLaughlin’s abstract paintings and their lived-in setting captured Connor’s interest.

1. Frank J. Thomas (1916–1993) was active as a commercial photographer from around 1945 to 1982 in Los Angeles, where he and his wife Phyllis lived after moving from Philadelphia. Thomas’s first assignment to photograph artwork came in 1950 from the art dealer Felix Landau, who had recently opened an art gallery; Landau represented John McLaughlin from 1952 to 1972. See the pamphlet “Frank J. Thomas in Los Angeles,” compiled by Alberta Mayo, Frank J. Thomas Archives. The pamphlet was made available during the exhibition Ma held at Chateau

Shatto, December 10, 2016, to January 14, 2017.

2. In the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas was hired to photograph McLaughlin’s paintings

by Felix Landau, Nicholas Wilder, and others. McLaughlin joined Wilder’s gallery after Landau’s closed in 1972. A number of these photographs were taken outdoors, and they are believed to have been made in preparation for McLaughlin’s 1968 retrospective. The photographs taken indoors, using artificial light, are thought to have been taken in the back rooms of the Nicholas Wilder Gallery around 1979 (Fiona

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Connor, email to author, May 16, 2017). Alberta Mayo, who has managed and conducted her own research into the Frank J. Thomas Archives since the late 1990s, noted a degree of uncertainty around the dates of Thomas’s photographs, since many of his negative sleeves only provide the name of an artist or a commissioning person or institution (Alberta Mayo, email to author, May 16, 2017).

McLaughlin’s first retrospective was organized by Walter Hopps and held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963.

3. In a statement published in his first retrospective catalog for

the Pasadena Art Museum, John McLaughlin wrote: “My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract.

I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer’s natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle. I must therefore free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular by omitting the image (object).

This I manage by the use of neutral forms.” John McLaughlin: A Retrospective Exhibition (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1963), n.p.

Frank J. Thomas, Documentation of "No. 17, 1965" by John McLaughlin, Laguna Beach, n.d.. Courtesy of Frank J. Thomas Archives.

In Thomas’s photographs, it is impossible to view McLaughlin’s paintings apart from the manifold details that surround them. Multiple potted plants and cuffed khaki pant legs and white tennis shoes (presumably belonging to the artist) appear in some of the photos, all suggestive of a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. In other images, the house’s window shutters and panes echo the rectangular forms found within the paintings themselves.

Although the mundane details that surround each of the paintings in the photographs were incidental, meant to be cropped out when reproduced in catalogs or other printed matter, these documentary photos nevertheless reframe our perception of McLaughlin’s paintings, counteracting the artist’s claim to “total” abstraction by making palpable the paintings’ relation to their maker in a particular time and place.4 Connor was struck by how the paintings in the photographs seemed to act as “reverse frames,” directing her eyes to their margins and bringing into view their surrounding context.5 Her initial search for documentation of site-specific works uncovered another type of specificity, one in which the documentation of a work, or the mediation of a work through documentation, itself embodies the concept of specificity, by binding an object to a situational moment in time from a particular point of view.

Connor’s mediated encounter with McLaughlin’s work in Thomas’s archive led to an ongoing project. In the artist’s words, the project is “roughly about the way art is documented and how it lives past its primary physical form.” 6 Since encountering the photographs, Connor has researched and analyzed a range of materials related to McLaughlin’s work, from photo documentation and old magazine articles to condition reports of existing paintings. She has examined papers saved in the artist’s archive and traveled to Orange County to see the houses (still extant) in which the artist lived and painted.7 Connor has responded to her findings by producing uncannily precise replicas of found objects—such as newspaper reviews on McLaughlin and window frames from the artist’s longtime home—and exhibiting them alongside works by other artists and photographers. She has given public talks, updated for each occasion, that reflect the current state of her evolving thinking and research.8 In these pages, Catherine Wagley wrote about “the young female artist as historian,” a young woman artist, often in her twenties or thirties, who comes across and is inspired by the work of a forgotten or lesser-known older woman artist.9 The older artist’s “unruly” work resists integration into 4. Ibid.

5. Fiona Connor, “McLaughlin In Print,” talk presented at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, September 20, 2016.

6. Fiona Connor, “Brown Accretion,” talk presented at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, December 17, 2016.

7. In 1946, McLaughlin and his wife moved to Laguna Beach, where they built a house and studio in Dana Point. From 1967 to 1972, they lived in another

house in Laguna Beach that was bequeathed to them by their friend Ruth Peabody. In 1972, the McLaughlins moved back to their home in Dana Point, where John lived until his passing in 1976. See Lauren Bergman, “Chronology,” in John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, ed. Stephanie Barron and Lauren Bergman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: DelMonico Books / Prestel, 2016), 127–30.

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8. Connor’s public talks on her project include the following, in chronological order: “McLaughlin in Print,” at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, on September 20, 2016; three different versions of “Brown Accretion,” at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, on December 17, 2016, and January 7 and January 14, 2017; and, most recently, “John McLaughlin in Print,” at Los Angeles County Museum of

Art, on April 9, 2017. Connor continually revises the text of her talks in a significant manner; the content is never the same. Connor has integrated a performative component to her project since its beginning.

9. Catherine Wagley, “The Conversation: The Young Female Artist as Historian,” X-TRA Vol. 17, No. 3 (Spring 2015), http://x-traonline.org/ article/the-conversationthe-young-female-artist-ashistorian/.

dominant art historical narratives; the goal of the younger artist is to figure out how to write a non-revisionist history that remains faithful to the spirit of her work. Wagley argues: “The younger woman’s task becomes preserving that complexity, and narrating the artist’s life in a way that allows her to remain outside of the limiting frame of canonical narratives. It also becomes acknowledging a personal stake while giving her subject space and autonomy.” 10 Like Wagley’s “young female artist,” Connor’s approach to history is not revisionist, in that her object is not to replace one dominant narrative of the art historical canon with another. Rather, Connor’s approach to history is to de-center her subject by bringing into view the discourse that surrounds it: John McLaughlin as the discursive production of “John McLaughlin.”

Whereas the task for Wagley’s “young female artist” is ultimately one of recovery (a model of history writing that will, when most effective, instigate a “fundamental reorganization of the institutions that govern us” 11 ), the task for Connor is one of deconstruction. And while the writing on woman artists such as Marjorie Cameron, Eve Babitz, and Barbara T. Smith is now gaining momentum,12 McLaughlin was recognized by the art world during his lifetime—for example, his work appeared on the January 1964 cover of Artforum—before sliding into obscurity after his passing in 1976.13 Interest in McLaughlin’s work has grown since the Getty-sponsored initiative Pacific Standard Time in 2011 and 2012, and it received another boost recently with a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which closed in April 2017. Yet one could argue that his work has not quite entered the mainstream. For example, it is significant that Connor, who received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, did not know of McLaughlin’s paintings before seeing the photos of them in Thomas’s archive.

Connor’s project has produced work that is significantly historical, but what kind of historical work is this? Clearly, Connor is not a historian in a strict sense, but she diverges even further from that tradition by not constructing historical narratives, at least not in the forms that the project has taken to date. Instead of writing history by abstracting an object from its context into language and using narrative strategies, such as cause-and-effect, Connor has set up an arena that allows objects to speak for themselves, while keeping them tethered to their specificity and historicity as much as possible. In December 2016, Connor curated a group exhibition titled Ma, at Chateau Shatto, in Los Angeles. In this most recent installation of her larger project around McLaughlin, Connor placed Thomas’s photos of McLaughlin’s paintings, a painting by McLaughlin, and her own work on McLaughlin into conversation with historical and contemporary works by 10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Wagley mentions these women as examples of older female artists.

13. Christopher Knight highlighted McLaughlin’s lapse into obscurity in his review of John McLaughlin’s 2016–17 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum

of Art, pointedly titled “Go to LACMA for John McLaughlin, possibly the most important postwar artist you don’t know,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2016. Knight also lamented McLaughlin’s lack of visibility in his review of an earlier McLaughlin retrospective at the Laguna Art Museum in 1996: “Of course, we have never been

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in much danger of knowing too much about McLaughlin and his art. The painter has been dead for 20 years, but his place as a pivotal, even seminal figure for the remarkable postwar history of art in L.A. has remained obscure.” Knight, “The Plain and Simple Truths Within,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1996.

other artists and photographers. What model of history is this, and how does a viewer experience such a paradigm? What might be at stake in this historical model?

— Before Ma opened, Connor presented three related works.14 The first two were a presentation of objects and a public lecture that took place in New Zealand. In the fall of 2016, Connor installed a mini-exhibition, titled John McLaughlin in Print (2016), in a display case at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Six of Thomas’s photographs of McLaughlin’s paintings were displayed in a row. Below these photos were three works by Connor—full-scale reproductions of reviews on McLaughlin published in the Los Angeles Times during the artist’s lifetime. The reviews were scanned from archived microfiche that Connor found at the Los Angeles Public Library. She silkscreened facsimiles of the newspaper pages onto aluminum foil that was coated and tinted to appear yellowed and worn with age. At the bottom of the case were two exhibition catalogs on McLaughlin, an article featuring McLaughlin in Life magazine, and a didactic text that included the title of Connor’s installation, a statement about her project, and her name and the work’s date (“September 2016”). On September 20, 2016, Connor gave a lecture on her project at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.

The third work in Connor’s project was a group exhibition that she curated at Minerva gallery in Sydney, Australia, from October 29 to December 10, 2016. This group exhibition, titled Fiona Connor, Sydney de Jong, Audrey Wollen, featured one work by each of the artists in the show’s title.15 In one room of the gallery, a projector played Wollen’s Objects or Themselves (2015), a video that interweaves narratives about the suffragette Mary Richardson’s slashing of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51) and the experience of procedures that Wollen underwent for cancer treatment as a teenager. For All the Doors in the Walls (2016), Connor had all of the gallery’s doors removed from their hinges and embedded into the walls of the gallery for the course of the exhibition. De Jong’s contribution was Colored Clay Pieces (2016), a set of multi-colored ceramic cups and plates meant to be used by the gallery staff, not for display purposes only. As a supplement to the works in the exhibition, Connor commissioned five people to write five different press releases for the show and sent them a selection of Thomas’s photos of McLaughlin’s paintings. It was up to the writers to decide whether or not to address Thomas’s photos in their texts. Only one writer—Harry Dodge—did.16

14. I should note that I did not experience these three earlier works in person, only through materials sent to me by the artist and found online. The more immersive and fleshed out description of Ma that follows reflects my own visits to the exhibition. The difference between interpreting a work based on

experiencing it in person versus through documentation seems important to distinguish in the context of Connor’s project.

15. See Claudia Arozqueta, “Fiona Connor, Sydney de Jong, Audrey Wollen at Minerva,” Critics’ Picks, Artforum.com, https://www.artforum.com/ picks/id=64617.

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16. The other four writers were Catherine Dale, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Hans-Jacob Schmidt, and Bedros Yeretzian.

For PDFs of the press releases, see http://www.minervasydney. com/#fiona-connor-sydney-dejong-audrey-wollen.

Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image.

Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

Fiona Connor, John McLaughlin in Print, 2016. Installation view, Research Library display case, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, September 19–Oct 19, 2016. Courtesy of E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image. Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

The exhibition Ma included Wollen’s video Objects or Themselves and de Jong’s Colored Clay Pieces, as well as works by Judy Fiskin, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Bedros Yeretzian, and Connor.

To produce a visual frame for the show, Connor worked with Sebastian Clough on its exhibition design.17 The contributors to the exhibition were heterogeneous and diverse, representing different generations, professions, and sexes. All have participated in the Los Angeles art world, past and present.

The exhibition’s point of departure was the Japanese concept of ma—the interval between two or more things. Ma can refer to physical space, such as a room or an opening between two walls, or a temporal one, such as a rest or pause between notes in music. Ma implies an inherently relational dynamic—something perceived as between things—and conveys both objective and subjective meanings: it can signify a gap existing in space and/or time as well as one’s perceptual recognition of this gap.18 This multivalent concept was of crucial importance to McLaughlin, who was interested in the use of “empty” or negative space in traditional Japanese artworks; he cited the influence of fifteenth-century painter Sesshū Tōyō and his concept of the “Marvelous Void” in particular. McLaughlin wrote: “Certain Japanese painters of centuries ago found the means to overcome the demands imposed by the object by use of large areas of empty space. This space was described by Sesshu as the ‘Marvelous Void.’ Thus the viewer was induced to ‘enter’ the painting unconscious of the dominance of the object. Consequently there was no compulsion to ponder the significance as such. On the contrary, the condition of ‘Man versus Nature’ was reversed to that of man at one with nature and enabled the viewer to seek his own identity free from the suffocating finality of the conclusive statement.” 19 In his paintings, McLaughlin sought to provide the viewer with spaces for contemplation. His paintings are not meant to be deciphered and interpreted, but rather experienced.

Extending the concept of ma into a spatiotemporal realm, Connor set up in her exhibition a constellation of objects that did not illustrate a curatorial thesis per se but rather offered the viewer a space in which to consider how objects, images, and ideas are mediated through modes of representation and how one’s reading of them is dependent upon their context. The impossibility of perceiving an exhibited work apart from its surrounding context is the defining characteristic of the exhibition Ma.

17. Sebastian Clough also designed the mobile cart used

by Connor and Wollen for their talks presented at Chateau Shatto. This cart was on view in the back of the gallery during the course of the exhibition and was used by Connor for her talk at LACMA. 18. See Richard B. Pilgrim’s article “Intervals (‘Ma’) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan,” History of Religions 25,

no. 3 (February 1986): 255–77.

Pilgrim’s article was written after visiting the exhibition MA: Space–Time in Japan, organized by Arata Isozaki and held at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York in 1979. See the exhibition catalog of the same title by Isozaki et al. (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, n.d.).

19. Raised in Massachusetts, McLaughlin developed an early interest in Japanese art. He lived in Japan for a number of

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years, sold Japanese prints as an art dealer, and worked as a translator for the US Army during World II. See John McLaughlin: A Retrospective Exhibition, n.p. For a discussion of the influence of Japanese art on McLaughlin, see Peter Selz, “Abstract Classicism Reexamined,” in John McLaughlin: Western Modernism Eastern Thought (Laguna Beach, CA: Laguna Art Museum, 1997).

A stack of press releases printed on marbled pink paper on a ledge greeted visitors as they entered the gallery. Resting on top of the pile was a crystal paperweight with beveled edges, about the size of a large bar of soap.

When I picked it up to grab a sheet of paper, I could see that the exhibition’s title, dates, and the gallery’s name were etched onto its surface, and a decorative border traced its inner edge. A glance at the floor plan-cum-checklist printed on the reverse side of the press release revealed that this object was Mutual Enemy Arousal Souvenir: ‘Ma’ Chateau Shatto, 12/10/16–01/14/17, 2016 (2016), by Bedros Yeretzian.

Two floating shelves painted white and lined with beige linen cloth were built into the left wall. Each shelf held five eight-by-ten-inch black-andwhite photographs from Thomas’s series that documents paintings by McLaughlin, taken at the painter’s home in Laguna Beach and in other locations in the 1960s and 1970s. The light-colored lines in some of McLaughlin’s paintings were echoed by the white borders framing each photograph, which in turn mirrored the white framing the beige shelf surfaces, which emulated the white ceiling and wide white border along the top of the gallery’s walls, which were painted beige below. The photographs were not protected by a cover, so one could bend down and look very closely at the prints.

Six works by Connor hung on the opposite wall of the gallery: Ma #4–9 (Newspaper article featuring John McLaughlin from the Los Angeles Times) 1956–87 (2016). Each work consisted of tinted aluminum foil on which a review of McLaughlin from the Los Angeles Times was silkscreened (three of these had been included in the display case at the Auckland Art Gallery the previous fall). The thin pieces of foil were taped directly onto the wall and their edges curled inward, which allowed me to see the untinted silver surface of their backs. I had to stand rather close to the works in order to read them, and even then not all of the text was legible. Most discernible were the articles’ titles and sometimes their authors’ bylines, such as “John McLaughlin’s Search for the Infinite by Henry Seldis,” “McLaughlin’s Works Encourage Meditation by Constance Perkins,” or “McLaughlin’s Work, Based on Rectangles, Gives Thrill.” Often degraded reproductions of McLaughlin’s paintings and numerous advertisements accompanied the texts. Like Thomas’s photographs across the way, these exposed surfaces conveyed a sense of fragility despite being made of durable material.

A freestanding wall occupied the center of the main gallery space. On one side, closer to the gallery’s entrance, I could see Wollen’s video Objects or Themselves playing on a loop. As I sat down on a bench-like structure extending from the wall to view this work, I realized I had been hearing her video since I walked into the gallery, but not listening to it. In the video, textual fragments of the voiceover periodically appear over an image of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, allowing a word or phrase to linger. I learned about the phenomenon of the “Venus effect,” in which a painted figure gazing into a mirror, such as the one in Rokeby Venus, is assumed by viewers to be gazing at herself, although the figure is actually looking out at you, the viewer. I heard about the British suffragettes in the early twentieth century, Richardson’s decision to slash the Rokeby Venus as a feminist statement, and the “successful” repair of the painting that followed. Weaving in and out of 140

Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image. Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

this historical narrative was a personal account of Wollen finding a lump on the side of her chest and the difficult and drawn out process of being diagnosed, treated, and finally having the tumor removed. The poignancy of the artist’s emotionally and intellectually charged tale left me feeling momentarily stunned.

On the opposite side of the freestanding wall was McLaughlin’s painting #13 (1964). Symmetrically composed, with one half painted black with a white vertical line and the other half painted white with a black vertical line, the painting shared the center point of the exhibition with Wollen’s Objects or Themselves. On the one hand, the two works could not be more opposed: McLaughlin’s abstract formal program of colorless rectangles and lines versus Wollen’s audio and visual time-based meditation on gender, violence, and the politics of looking. On the other hand, as I stood in front of McLaughlin’s painting, residual emotions and thoughts from my experience of Wollen’s video (which was starting to play again) colored my perception of it. I couldn’t help but see McLaughlin’s painting as a kind of body, its aging skin-like canvas marked by fine cracks and scratches accumulated over time.

A series of five photos from Judy Fiskin’s Military Architecture series (1975) and Connor’s sculptural installations Ma #1 and Ma #2 (2016) were installed in the back of the gallery. In Fiskin’s diminutive black-and-white photographs, buildings in the shape of repeated or elongated geometric forms stood silhouetted against bright skies.20 Connor’s Ma #1 and Ma #2 replicated two adjacent bedroom windows in McLaughlin’s former home in Dana Point. The rectangular window frames and the geometric division of their panes recalled the compositions of McLaughlin’s paintings. The glass panes and window frames were installed directly into the gallery’s walls, revealing found compositions of more rectangles created by the vertical wooden studs and horizontal supports within the wall. Exposing a portion of the gallery’s inner skeletal structure, Connor’s sculptures underlined the perceptual and conceptual inseparability of a work from its context.

Making literal the timeworn metaphor of “painting as a window,” the two works also asked the viewer to examine McLaughlin’s windows as intently as one might examine his paintings. In proximity to McLaughlin’s #13, Fiskin’s and Connor’s works drew the abstract painting into the language of architecture. The trio of works spoke to the ubiquity of rectangles in modern art and modern industrial construction—for military and non-military use alike—thus drawing connections between abstract forms, mass production, and the built environment.

20. See Judy Fiskin’s discussion of her early photo series, including Military Architecture, in her interview with John Divola, in Virginia Heckert, ed., Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011), 15–21.

Thanks to Connor for pointing me to this text.

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Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image.

Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image.

Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

Above and following spread: Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image. Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

Finally, in the gallery’s back room was de Jong’s Colored Clay Pieces (2016), a set of nerikomi cups, plates, and a large bowl, which the artist invited the gallery staff to use during the run of the show.

The nerikomi technique involves creating bold patterns by taking different colored clays and pounding them together into a mold or throwing them on a wheel.21 A combinatory method was also apparent in Ma #3 (Inspiration Board of Sydney de Jong) (2016).

In this work, Connor utilized her silkscreen-on-coated-foil technique to faithfully reproduce arrangements of photographs pinned on a cork board in de Jong’s studio.22 In his 1971 essay “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes proposed a model of a “text” that offers a key to navigating Ma and Connor’s project more generally.23 Barthes differentiates between what he calls a “work” and a “text”: whereas a work takes the form of an object, a text takes the form of activity.

A work can be “held in the hand,” whereas a text is “held in language.” 24 A text is intrinsically intertextual and depends on what Barthes calls the “stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers.” 25 He evocatively likens the act of reading a text to passing through a foreign landscape already richly inhabited: The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at loose ends (someone slackened off from the “imaginary”); this passably empty subject strolls (it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text) on the side of a valley, an oued flowing down below (“oued” is there to attest to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children’s voices from the other side of the valley, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founding the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be itself only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts—no “grammar” of the text), and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes: cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which traverse it through and through in a vast stereophony.26

21. See the pamphlet “A Conversation with Sydney de Jong and Sasha Portis, December 26, 2015,” made available during the exhibition Ma at Chateau Shatto. See also the presentation of de Jong’s works and description of the nerikomi process in Fiona

Connor and Liv Barrett’s artist project “Sponsored Post,” X-TRA Vol. 16, No. 2 (Winter 2014).

22. Connor also used this technique to produce works for her exhibition Community Notice Board, 1301PE, Los Angeles, January 24–March 7, 2015.

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23. See Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–64.

24. Ibid., 157.

25. Ibid., 159.

26. Ibid., 152–60.

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This description of reading a text as a semelfactive experience woven with “citations, references, echoes” recalls my own sensory experience of Ma as a “stroll” through a multidimensional space composed of formal and textual references that comprised the exhibition’s installation. The exhibited works in Ma were presented in a strikingly non-hierarchical manner—traditionally fine art mediums next to traditionally commercial mediums, non-functional objects next to functional objects, originals next to copies, and copies presented as originals.

Another important feature of a “text” is how it fuses together space and time: a text exists in motion. Barthes places particular emphasis on this aspect: “[T]he Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example, on the library shelf ); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).” 27 This lateral movement of “cutting across” is most apparent in the final work included in Ma. Connor commissioned photographer Fredrik Nilsen to document his experience of the exhibition as a contribution to it.28 Nilsen’s position as a photographer of artworks and exhibitions in Los Angeles is comparable to Thomas’s from the 1950s to 1970s. These photographs were not physically displayed at Chateau Shatto and are publicly presented here in X-TRA for the first time. Connor’s inclusion of this last work raises a series of questions: How should we understand the material, temporal, and conceptual form of this exhibition? Does it continue to be “on view” in some sense, for example, in this very instance as you read this text and see Nilsen’s images? The inclusion of his photographs in Ma draws attention to and blurs the boundaries between the exhibition and its discursive reception. In this way, Connor’s project opens up a new, dilated historical perspective, one that frames the “work” as a text, something that is ongoing and forward looking, set to expand through future sites of reception. But what or where are the boundaries of this text that Connor has put into play?

The recent retrospective John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, held from November 13, 2016, to April 16, 2017, at LACMA, offers an instructive contrast to Ma. That Connor’s exhibition ran concurrently with LACMA’s was, according to the artist, purely coincidental. The LACMA exhibition, co-curated by Stephanie Barron and Lauren Bergman, included about fifty paintings by McLaughlin as well as a selection of his drawings and paper collages. The works were arranged chronologically and demonstrated his stylistic development over the years—from his early paintings with colorful biomorphic compositions to his final paintings with black and white rectangular forms. A variety of supplemental materials—from video interviews playing on a monitor to a homage titled “Appreciation” by Edward Albee and quotations by McLaughlin printed on the exhibition’s walls—all served to reinforce a notion of the artist as the single—and by implication, final— author of his work.

27. Ibid., 157. Emphasis in the original.

28. Fiona Connor, email to author, March 22, 2017.

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Fredrik Nilsen, Documentation of Ma at Chateau Shatto with works by Fiona Connor, Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen and Bedros Yeretzian, 2016–17. Digital image.

Courtesy of Fiona Connor and Fredrik Nilsen.

Connor’s project undermines such a perception of the solitary artist and instead opens up a view of authorship that is inherently multiple and collective. In her own works, she replicates pre-existing objects that are often on the periphery of art making and extends a sense of authorship to the makers of the found objects and the contexts from which they were extracted.

Her collaboration with Nilsen and the other artists in Ma can be seen as “play, activity, production, practice,” in which reading and writing collapse into “a single signifying practice.” 29 Nilsen made the documentary photographs of Ma, and Connor has provided the captions for the photographs reproduced here. Who is framing whom? Whose work are we seeing? This blurring of boundaries—spatially, temporally, and conceptually—and the movement from object-based work to collectively authored text, understood dynamically in the present tense, characterizes the project set into motion

by Connor.

By not reifying the work as an object, Connor’s project carries out one of McLaughlin’s essential goals. In an interview, McLaughlin explained: “The response that I would hope a viewer would get—and this is a very critical thing—is that he is supposed to respond to the wonder of the omission of an object. When you look at a painting with an object in it, you assess it by its value as an object. So I take the object out and you’re in a position to worry about yourself, not whether this artist was a good one or is telling you anything worthwhile.” 30 Elsewhere, McLaughlin wrote, “Art is not in the canvas but in the mind of the beholder,” which seems akin to Barthes’s declaration that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” 31 In her ongoing project, Connor situates her work in proximity to the works of others in order to create a kind of (art) historical “text” that unfolds into the future, waiting to be received.

Kavior Moon is an art historian and writer living in Los Angeles. She teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

29. Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 162.

30. This excerpt from McLaughlin’s oral history is quoted in Michael Duncan, “Driving Home in Neutral,” in John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, 58.

Duncan cites Paul Karlstrom, “Transcript of Oral History, John McLaughlin,” held at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. 31. John McLaughlin, letter draft to Jules Langsner, March 11, 1959, in California: 5 Footnotes to Modern Art History (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1977). See also Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image Music Text, 148.

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Carolina Caycedo Clarissa Tossin September 9 — October 21, 2017 Gala Porras-Kim Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (NuMu) November 4 — December 23, 2017

w w w. c o m m o n w e a l t h a n d c o u n c i l . c o m

XX-TRA 1997–2017 CELEBRATING TWENTY YEARS AVAILABLE FOR BROWSING ONLINE at X-TRAONLINE.ORG FLASHBACK 5 YEARS AGO VOLUME 15 NUMBER 1 FALL 2012

Object/Poems: Alison Knowles’s Feminist Archite(x)ture Nicole L. Woods Dark-Side Minimalism Jan Tumlir Wallace Berman: Desolation Angel Glenn Harcourt Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972 Vanessa Place Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970–1983 Megan Hoetger It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, Siglio Press, 2011 Anna Mayer Populism, Art, and the Future of Our Museums Nizan Shaked Letter from the Editors Artist’s Project: Set Ups 153 Kate Costello

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Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico Más abajo que el underground: Arte renegado y acción en el México de los noventa armoryarts.org/renegades October 15, 2017 - January 21, 2018 Opening October 14, 2017, 7-9 pm Armory Center for the Arts 145 North Raymond Avenue Pasadena, CA 91103

Lead support provided through grants from the Getty Foundation. Additional support provided by Jumex.

Image: Andrea Ferreyra, Torbellino (detail), Photographic documentation of street performance, Mexico City, January, 1993.

18TH STREET ARTS CENTER IN COLLABORATION WITH LACMA PRESENTS:

A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY: VIRTUES OF DISPARITY A Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA Exhibition SEPTEMBER 9 - DECEMBER 15, 2017 18th Street Arts Center Main Gallery OPENING RECEPTION September 9, 2017 5-8 PM

FEATURING WORKS BY: Mariana Castillo Deball Gala Porras-Kim Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Josefina Guilisasti Ángela Bonadies Carla Zaccagnini Runo Lagomarsino Michael Linares Zinny and Maidagan Oscar Santillan 18th Street Arts Center presents "A Universal History of Infamy: Virtues of Disparity," curated by LACMA's Rita González and José Luis Blondet with Pilar Tompkins Rivas of the Vincent Price Art Museum. This is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty Foundation with arts institutions across Southern California.

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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.

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ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO, POR UM FIO (BY A THREAD), FROM THE FOTOPOEMAÇÃO (PHOTOPOEMACTION) SERIES, 1976, ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT, 22 3/8 X 31 1/8 IN. (57 X 79 CM), PHOTO BY REGINA VATER

Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at MOCA

Anna Maria Maiolino August 4–November 27, 2017 | MOCA Grand Avenue

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. September 9–December 31, 2017 | MOCA Pacific Design Center

Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance October 22, 2017–February 26, 2018 | The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Anna Maria Maiolino is organized by Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator, and Bryan Barcena, Research Assistant for Latin American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Major support is provided by Hauser & Wirth.

Generous support is provided by Tom and Lisa Blumenthal, Betty and Brack Duker, and Alice and Nahum Lainer.

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. is organized by David Evans Frantz, Curator, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and C. Ondine Chavoya, Professor of Art and Latino/a Studies at Williams College in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Lead support for MOCA Pacific Design Center is provided by Charles S. Cohen.

Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance is organized by Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator, and Bryan Barcena, Research Assistant for Latin American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Major support is provided by Marian Goodman Gallery, inc., and Charlie Pohlad and the Pohlad Family.

Generous support is provided by Kaitlyn and Mike Krieger.

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with lead annual support provided by Sydney Holland, founder of the Sydney D. Holland Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by Allison and Larry Berg, Delta Air Lines, and Jerri and Dr. Steven Nagelberg.

Make-Readies Assembled by Rakish Light

Typically relegated to the refuse pile at a print shop, “make-readies” are the scrap sheets sent through a printing press to get the machine running cleanly and to register images. To avoid wasting too much paper, make-ready sheets are re-used and re-run through the press multiple times. The make-readies reproduced here are all from Real Print, a project of artist-designed posters organized by Rakish Light in advance of January 20, 2017.

Rakish Light is a small press that started in Los Angeles in Spring 2016; or rather, we, Rakish Light, spent much of 2016 in our garage resuscitating an offset lithographic printing press, trying to gain control over a near-obsolete means of production. In the early days of 2017, as the US presidential election’s surprise results were about to be actualized, we knew a lot of people felt the need to do something. And our press could print 6,000 sheets an hour—nothing compared to the rapidity of internet clicks, but something “real.”

We contacted artist friends by email on January 4: “As many of you know, last March we bought an old offset press that we’ve been restoring and learning to use under the name Rakish Light. In the same time period, the world went wrong. Early on, we joked that our reinvented, almost obsolete form of analog reproduction might be a necessary tool in dark times. Now we’re cringing at those jokes, but glad to have the press. We have a high-capacity means of production, and we would like to ask you to participate in a last-minute collaborative project to express the combination of urgency, anxiety, and ultimately hope for renewed commitment born of the present moment.”

We asked contributors for designs scaled at 9 by 12 inches, horizontally or vertically oriented, that could be printed using no more than two plates, with a choice of one color per plate (red, yellow, blue, green, purple, or fluorescent orange) plus the white of the page. We needed the designs within a week, and promised each contributor a hundred copies of their print by January 19, to distribute as they wished with the understanding that the back of each print would be marked “not for sale.” Many responded, glad to get something out quick.

We moved the press itself to Valentine’s, a project space in Cypress Park, and invited the contributors to stop by to take part in the printing process. The amount of labor required to get the project done was daunting, but we were motivated by something that felt like panic.

In the days after the inauguration, we sorted, less energetically, through piles of make-readies, palimpsests of the 51 contributions to Real Print. What is reproduced here is salvaged and sorted trash; revived Dada, barely recognizable nonsense. We submitted the make-readies gathered here to X-TRA in March 2017, well aware that they might induce nostalgia by the time they hit newsstands in the fall.

— Brian O’Connell and Deirdre O’Dwyer, Rakish Light

Real Print Contributors: Kristin Beinner James, Pall Björnsson, Todd Bourret, Kate Brown, Lola Bunting, Amina Cain, Tuni Chatterji, Mario Correa, Barb Choit, Matt Connolly, Dana DeGiulio, Kate Dollenmayer, Chris Fallon, Luke Fischbeck, Corey Fogel, Victoria Fu, Paul Gellman, Jeff Gibson, Liz Glynn, Jason Gouliard, Michelle Grabner, Katie Grinnan, Melissa Guerro, Margaret Honda, Violet Hopkins, Claire Iltis, Christopher James, Shaun Johnson, David Karwan, Chris Kasper, Olga Koumoundouros, Zachary Leener, Haven LinKirk, Jen Liu, Caitlin Lonegan, Elizabeth Lopez, Thea Lorentzen, Suzanne McClelland, Susan Morris, Ragen Moss, Laurie Nye, Brian O’Connell, Deirdre O’Dwyer, Philip Ording, Matt Rich, Heather Parlato, Amara Ravva, Kay Rosen, Jenny Salomon, Aram Saroyan, Jonathan Silberman, Vivian Sming, Cal Tabuene-Frolli, Dan Torop, J. Parker Valentine, and Mark Verabioff