X-TRA Winter 2018 20.2

X-TRA CONTEMPORARY ART QUARTERLY

VOLUME 20 NUMBER 2 www.x-traonline.org DISPLAY UNTIL MARCH 2018 $10.00 U.S . / CAN

X-TRA Volume 20, Number 2 Winter 2017

To subscribe or donate to X-TRA, become a Project X Member at x-traonline.org/Membership.

Copyright 2017 by Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism

Members receive one year (4 issues) of X-TRA, with additional gifts and benefits offered at higher levels: X-TRA Reader: $36 X-TRA Reader (Canada and Mexico): $60 X-TRA Reader (International): $95 X-TRA Special Friend: $75 XOX-TRA Friend: $150 X-Tended Family: $300 Project X Patron: $600 X-TRAordinary: $1,000 X-Tremely Special: $2,500

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.

X-TRA is collectively edited by an independent board of artists and writers. Our mission is to provoke critical dialogue about contemporary art.

X-TRA is published by Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, which was founded in 2002.

Please contact us at editors@x-traonline.org for further information about X-TRA or to submit material for publication. Unsolicited materials cannot be returned.

Cover: Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez, building: a simulacrum of power (detail), 2014. Rafa Esparza performs on the site of Michael Parker’s The Unfinished (20124) at the Bowtie Project, Los Angeles August 24, 2014. Courtesy of Clockshop.

Photo: Dylan Schwartz.

Library and institutional subscriptions: Four issues (U.S.): $55 Four issues (Canada and Mexico): $65 Four issues (International): $120 Advertising rates for print and web are available by request to ads@x-traonline.org.

X-TRA is indexed by ARTBibliographies Modern, H.W. Wilson Art Index, Bibliography of History of Art (BHA), and EBSCO Publishing.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior written permission from Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism.

Rights to individual articles remain the property of their authors.

Articles and artists’ projects are archived on our website at http://x-traonline.org.

£

Jacqueline de Jong, Peeing Hamlet, 2012. Oil on canvas, 74 ¾ × 51¼, 1½ in. Courtesy of Château Shatto.

Photo: Sara Gerns Bacher

CONTENTS

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.–Mexico Boundary, by Ronald Rael Review by Travis Diehl

4

ARTIST WRITES, No. 2 Toward a Reflexive Resistance Andrea Fraser

19

Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request), edited by Mark Allen and Rachel Seligman Review by Anna Mayer

38

One I Know: Sherin Guirguis’s One I Call and the Durability of Form Andy Campbell

52

Emergency, Resistance, Futurity: Aesthetic Responses to Trumpism Andrew Stefan Weiner

66

Senbikigoi 千匹鯉 (One Thousand Carp) Devon Tsuno Text by Jon Leaver

81

Adobe, Dust, and Water: Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez’s building: a simulacrum of power Gwyneth Shanks

89

Jacqueline de Jong: Imaginary Disobedience Château Shatto, Los Angeles Review by Daniel Spaulding

108

Travis Diehl

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.– Mexico Boundary

The Other Wall

Ronald Rael University of California Press, 2017

“It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.”

—Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper “Proposals for the other wall were due from potential offerors on April 4, 2017 and low hundreds of submittals were received.”

—Other Border Wall RFP, Solicitation Number HSBP1017R0023 It didn’t take much foresight, only a little faith in government, to anticipate the two new requests for proposals (RFPs) posted to FedBizOpps.gov the night of Saturday, March 18, 2017: Solid Concrete Border Wall RFP and Other Border Wall RFP. The former stipulated that the wall “shall be reinforced solid concrete,” the latter that the bottom 12 feet shall be “see-through,” but the requirements were largely the same. Both called for designs “physically imposing in height,” impossible for “a human” to climb or tunnel under, and that should “prevent/deter” breach by pickaxe or torch for between thirty minutes and four hours.1 Designs shall be big; designs shall also be beautiful: “The north side of wall (i.e. U.S.-facing side) shall be aesthetically pleasing in color, anti-climb texture, etc., to be consistent with general surrounding environment.” 2 As of this writing, not an inch of new wall design has been realized. Yet a rhetorical “fortification” is well underway. “On the fence—it’s not a fence.

It’s a wall,” the President told the press on January 11. Two weeks later, on January 25, he signed an executive order to “secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall…” 3 But when he says “wall,” does he mean “wall”? Within that very executive order: “Sect. 3. Definitions. … (e) ‘Wall’ shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier.” 4 (Emphasis mine.) The EO was not law itself, of course, but relied in large

1. See Other Border Wall RFP, Solicitation Number HSBP1017R0023, FedBizOpps. gov, https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DHS/ USCS/FPSB/HSBP1017R0023/listing.html; and Solid Concrete Border Wall RFP, Solicitation Number HSBP1017R0022, FedBizOpps.

gov, https://www.fbo.gov/spg/DHS/ USCS/FPSB/HSBP1017R0022/ listing.html.

2. Ibid.

3. Executive Order 13767 of January 25, 2017, Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements, Code of Federal

4

Regulations, title 3 (2017), 8793, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/30/2017-02095/ border-security-and-immigrationenforcement-improvements.

4. Ibid., 8794.

Patrick J. Balcazar, San Diego Project Management, PSC, concept design for Security Curtain Wall, 2017.

Courtesy of Patrick J. Balcazar.

Residents of Naco, Arizona, and Naco, Sonora, play volleyball during the Fiesta Binacional in 2007.

Copyright Rael San Fratello; used with permission from University of California Press. Photo: unknown.

part on a 2006 piece of legislation called, with that era’s relatively quaint fidelity to language, the Secure Fence Act. Of the President, journalist Selena Zito observes, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously. His supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” 5 There is another function, then, to this insistence that lies and evasions are literally true—that a fence is a wall. Maybe it was worth a laugh to tally up how much concrete, steel, and labor—and how much money—it would take to actually build a border wall that pundits took literally, but not seriously. Indeed, contractors and architects vying to realize the Solid Concrete Wall will need to solve the problem of moving that much concrete to distant, difficult terrain, then casting it in arid climates that regularly reach triple digits and swing forty degrees in an afternoon.

But if we take him metaphorically, the unbuilt wall becomes much more formidable. Not an inch of new construction, yet the administration has already taken credit for a reduction in border crossings.6 Perhaps rightly: the economy looks dim and the locals appear virulent. The number of ICE deportations is holding at or below 2016 levels, although the renewed thoroughness of immigration raids, coupled with greater publicity and the open contempt of some agents, has enhanced the climate of fear.7 This symbolic obstacle has been hardening steadily since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, formally known as the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic. In Ronald Rael’s Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.–Mexico Boundary, scholar Norma Iglesias-Prieto notes that, as the border demarcations changed from a sparse string of obelisks along an “imaginary line” to “a light barbed fence” to “a series of aggressive metal fences and enormous concrete posts,” the Spanish word shifted, too: What was “el cerco, la malla, la barda” became “el muro (it went from ‘fence’ to ‘wall’).” 8 Accordingly, when the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)

5. Salena Zito, “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally,” The Atlantic, September 23, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2016/09/ trump-makes-his-case-inpittsburgh/501335.

6. “It’s likely that his rhetoric so far has had a stronger effect than his policies, as on-the-ground changes and implementation takes longer.”

Miriam Valverde, “Donald Trump Trumpets 40 Percent Decrease in Border Crossings.

Is He Right?,” PolitiFact, March 14, 2017, http://www.politifact. com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/mar/14/donaldtrump/trump-says-after-executive-orders-illegal-immigrat.

7. In February and March 2017, immigrant communities

were increasingly on edge, and bracing for a crackdown (see Delphine Schrank, “Trump’s season of fear: inside the devastation left by immigration raids,” The Guardian, March 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2017/mar/13/ undocumented-immigrationraids-ice-impact). Yet statistics released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicate that, on average, the current administration is deporting undocumented immigrants at a rate below that of its predecessor (see Tal Kopan, “Despite Tough Talk and More Arrests, Deportations Slow under Trump,” CNN, April 28, 2017, http://www.cnn. com/2017/04/28/politics/ trump-deportations-slow/

index.html). Jonathan Blitzer reports that ICE agents feel emboldened to voice anti-immigrant views (Blitzer, “A Veteran ICE Agent, Disillusioned with the Trump Era, Speaks Out,” The New Yorker (July 24, 2017), http:// www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/a-veteran-iceagent-disillusioned-with-thetrump-era-speaks-out). See also Alicia A. Caldwell, “Fact check: Are Recent Immigration Raids Result of Trump policy?,” Chicago Tribune, February 10, 2017, http://www. chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/factcheck/ ct-fact-check-immigrationraids-trump-20170210-story. html. Then there are the “ICE checkpoints.” Unsubstantiated

7

reports of law enforcement systematically checking papers in cities from Chicago to Los Angeles have been widely circulated on social media.

See Leon Neyfakh, “Everyone Needs to Stop Passing Along Facebook Rumors about ICE Checkpoints,” Slate, February 24, 2017, http://www.slate.com/ blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/24/ stop_passing_along_facebook_rumors_of_ice_checkpoints.html.

8. Norma Iglesias-Prieto, “Transborderisms: Practices That Tear Down Walls,” in Ronald Rael, Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.–Mexico Boundary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 23.

drafted their RFPs for new barriers, they needed two: the Solid Concrete Wall that insists wall means physical wall; and its pragmatic counterpart, sheathed in its own rhetorical contortion: not to say fence, it is an Other Wall. Together, real fence and rhetorical wall keep others out. − There is some question about the seriousness of the proposals submitted in response to the RFPs and profiled in the press near the April 4 deadline. Since experienced contractors and sober-minded companies normally would not risk sharing their plans with their competition, the designs publicized by news outlets around the world smacked of self-promotion, protest, artistic intervention, or a crackpot mix of all three. In a proposal represented by a single rendering seemingly made with MS Paint, Pennsylvania’s Clayton Industries offered to build a “moat” of radioactive waste between two fences.9 An Illinois firm, fairly new to the construction business, submitted a “Castle Wall” design that resembles an actual medieval fortification—crenellations and all—plus a bike path on top.10 Another group submitted a wall made of panels cast from local soil and embellished with colored glass on both sides, exceeding the RFPs’ requirement that only the US side need be beautiful.11 Proposals like these took the directives of the US Department of Homeland Security and CBP literally, even in terms of their aesthetics—offering dressed up or themed variations on an ancient technology long vulnerable to ladders and ropes. In 2005, thenGovernor of Arizona Janet Napolitano quipped, “You show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.” 12 The border patrol has modified their rhetoric to match: the border wall, such as it is, is meant to delay passage for five minutes or so—enough to increase the odds of making an arrest. In other words, all this for five more minutes.

This idea of a propositional architecture, an architecture that need not be built to achieve some degree of political efficacy, is at the heart of the walls, designs for walls, and stories of walls that Rael collects in Borderwall as Architecture.

Many of the stranger interventions Rael describes already exist in some form, such as the Horse Race Wall (two horses, one in each country, running parallel to the border fence) and Wally Ball (at least two volleyball games have used the wall as a net, although Rael notes it was impossible to spike the ball).

Others, such as proposals to either incorporate solar panels into a wall design or effectively deploy solar farms as barriers (since they are already, by their nature, highly secure), are echoed by publicized wall proposals and, subsequently, by the administration’s own greening insinuation that the wall might go solar.13 “This book no longer seeks to intervene in the wall’s construction,” 9. Philip Molnar, San Diego Union-Tribune, March 31, 2017, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/economy/ sd-first-look-proposed-borderwall-designs-201-004-photo. html.

10. The company is called Crisis Resolution Security Services. Their Castle Wall is profiled in Robert Channick,

“Illinois Contractor Bidding to Build Trump’s Border Wall— With a Tourist Draw,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2017, http:// www.chicagotribune.com/ business/ct-trump-border-wallbuilders-0404-biz-20170403story.html.

11. Colin Dwyer, “The Many Possible Shapes of Trump’s Border Wall,” NPR,

April 5, 2017, http://www. npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2017/04/05/522712279/ photos-the-many-possibleshapes-of-trumps-border-wall.

12. See Marc Lacey, “Arizona Officials, Fed Up with U.S. Efforts, Seek Donations to Build Border Fence,” The New York Times, July 19, 2011, http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/

8

us/20border.html.

13. Olivia Solon, “Trump’s pitch for making the Mexico border wall ‘beautiful’: add solar panels,” The Guardian, June 8, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/08/ mexico-border-wall-solar-panelplan-donald-trump.

writes Rael, “but instead to consider its transformation…into something that would exceed its sole purpose as a security infrastructure.” 14 What Rael offers in his book aren’t blueprints (although his innovative wall proposals are feasible in a physical sense) but rather a corrective to the twenty-first century US/Mexico border wall’s glaring failure of imagination.

If words can put up walls, they can also perforate them. In an effort to détourne white European priorities at the level of the word, Rael structures his book after the model of the Grand Tour, “the tourism route for young male European aristocrats” from London to Rome—which, he observes with relish, is roughly the length of the US/Mexico border. “Grand Tourists brought home…books, paintings, and sculpture,” he writes—in other words, art objects, cultural possessions—which “symbolized their wealth and freedom.” 15 Borderwall as Architecture likewise frames the border wall as an aesthetic proposition—not in literal terms of decorative glass, but in terms of ideas deployed as metaphorical structures. He writes, “The recuerdos [souvenirs] created for this chapter are unsolicited counterproposals for the wall, both tragic and sublime, that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning.” 16 Rael’s proposals sometimes preempt “actual” (that is to say, solicited) proposals. He describes not only a typology of fences and other vehicular and pedestrian barriers, but also some of the more esoteric “solutions” already implemented, so that they become propositional by virtue of their own weirding weight. In one example, where no “fence” would do, a particular canyon used by migrants was filled with tons of dirt; but a culvert necessary to handle flooding will probably be route enough for people, too.17 (“Walls won’t work,” writes Michael Dear in his contribution to Borderwall as Architecture, “as their creators now concede.” He recalls a visit to the so-called Smuggler’s Gulch project: “The engineer turned his back on the massive earthworks, sighing, ‘Ninety-five percent of this is politics.’” 18) Then there is the Sand Dragon, a run of rust-colored steel tubes supported on both sides by long, angled struts, which resembles a giant serpentine ribcage. The design is meant to “float” on the “migrating” sand dunes that stretch between Calexico, California, and Yuma, Arizona. Every so often, a special truck pulls the fence back to the top of the surface, post by post, then it slowly sinks again.

The border wall was a quixotic project from the start, and Rael allows its extant absurdities to smooth the transition to his wackier ideas. Because, perhaps, the tenor of the debate has come down hard, it seems impossible to imagine a Tecate stand straddling the border, or a BP agent buying tacos through the fence. Rael assures us that both have already occurred. These are humanizing moments and evidence of the “third nation” made up of those people with lives split between two countries. The Teeter-Totter Wall, meanwhile—a row of long seesaws with their fulcrums integrated in the fence beams—is too literal to take seriously, since it embodies the balance already found in stranger, more real ways. The Swing Wall, a kind of cage

14. Rael, Borderwall as Architecture, 4.

15. Rael, “Recuerdos/ Souvenirs: A Nuevo Grand Tour,” Borderwall as

Architecture, 26.

16. Ibid.

17. Rael, Borderwall as Architecture, 147.

18. Michael Dear, “Why

9

Walls Won’t Work,” in Rael, Borderwall as Architecture, 164.

Above: Ronald Rael, concept drawing for Swing Wall, n. d. Swinging from nation to nation in a binational park. Copyright Rael San Fratello; used with permission by University of California Press.

Following spread: Ronald Rael, concept drawing for Cactus Wall, n. d. Replacing the steel wall with a cactus wall in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument could help to re-introduce native plants to a fragile ecology denuded by vehicles. Copyright Rael San Fratello; used with permission from University of California Press.

that rocks back and forth between nations, becomes a carnival version of the extant Friendship Park, a circular plaza in San Diego / Tijuana where families can meet across the border that has become increasingly hard to access—increasingly cage-like—on the US side.

Rael writes that, on a 1971 visit to the park, Pat Nixon had the Secret Service take down the barbed wire so she could mingle more easily with the Mexicans on the other side. Years later, safely back in Washington, George W. Bush added another layer of fence. The 2017 border wall proposal from Otra Nation to create a utopian “third nation” along the border that issues its own passports, manages migration through biometric security, and features a hyperloop seems a pragmatic statement of how the border region functions despite itself—or how people function in it.19 Rael is also not the first to suggest a Cactus Wall. The idea follows from an interest in sustainable, ecologically sound design; “site-specific” aesthetics; and the fact that the CBP considers natural barriers sufficient. Rael goes further, describing the extent to which Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which abuts nearly thirty miles of the Arizona/Mexico border, is being carved up—both by smugglers and by the border patrol, who claim sweeping exemptions from environmental regulations. (Nationalism, it seems, is the preeminent land use. Rather than working to avert [or even acknowledge] the looming catastrophes of manmade climate change, the present administration would rather build a bulwark against the mass migrations from the global south that heat and drought will inevitably bring—the sort of humanitarian crisis Europe already faces and that America First enthusiasts fantastically dread.)

The way Rael illustrates the Cactus Wall is emblematic of his larger project: a grayscale sketch of cactuses, a few migrants wandering toward an impenetrable swath of succulents, a border patrol truck waiting on the other side.

The illustration is a concept drawing, populated by the peculiar ghosts that inhabit architectural renderings; it is also, literally, a map—the dense cacti are overlaid on a map of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and surrounding region, so that they appear to grow out of the section of border where they would be planted. The map’s title, BOUNDARY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO, is hard to make out against a background of shaded organ pipe cacti. The image superimposes two scales: the territorial and the human, the nationalistic and the individual. And this dissonance is illustrated in a double geographic register: the abstract map and the artistic proposal—one imbricated in the other. − Back in 2006, on the occasion of the Secure Fence Act, The New York Times invited thirteen architects to participate in a “classic design challenge” to “devise the ‘fence.’” 20 Five agreed. The article in which the Times presented

19. “If there is going to be a wall, let it be this collaboration.”

See the Otra Nation website, http://www.otranation.com.

20. William L. Hamilton, “A

11

Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs,” The New York Times, June 18, 2017, http://www. nytimes.com/2006/06/18/ weekinreview/18hamilton.html.

the results (with the revealing title “A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs”) quotes one of the abstaining architects, Ricardo Scofidio, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro: “It’s a silly thing to design, a conundrum,” he says. “You might as well leave it to security and engineers.” For Rael, this is the crux of the problem. If a case for obstruction can be made for engineers and contractors, as Darshan Karwat argued in Slate shortly before the CBP’s 2017 deadline, the same can’t be said for architects.21 “Wall design and construction will, without question, continue,” wrote Rael in March 2016, “but should it continue without the input of architects? Does not participating in the design of the wall make architects as complicit in its horrific consequences as does participating in its design?” 22 Rael names the problem common to designing or not designing the wall: an apolitical gloss: Recently, Archdaily announced, on behalf of the Third Mind Foundation, a competition called “Building the Border Wall.”

Perhaps in response to emerging criticism about the ethical implications of such a call to architects, the competition website later added a question mark to the title, changing it to “Building the Border Wall?” Since the competition was announced, as noted by Archdaily, several other edits have been made to the competition website, creating some controversy about the clarity of the competition’s agenda, the position of the organizers, and moreover, the moral implications of the competition itself. What further raises questions about this competition is the organizers’ insistence that they are “politically neutral” to the issue of building a wall along the border and that [they] wish to remain anonymous.23 Quoting Scofidio’s response in Borderwall as Architecture, Rael suggests that firms like DS+R “declined the challenge because they felt it was a purely political issue, something from which many architects shy away.” 24 But it’s clear that, as with the wall itself, no one can be on both sides at the same time.

Karwat and Rael reach opposite conclusions for their respective professions, but they agree on an essential point: the wall is unavoidably political, unavoidably public, and therefore unavoidable. In his preface to Borderwall as Architecture, architect Teddy Cruz reiterates that the border wall is a major public work, and a delineation of public space. “In fact, the borderwall is a concrete symbol of an ‘administration of fear,’” he writes, “the most clear evidence of our obsession with private interests at the expense of social responsibility and the erosion of public thinking in our institutions today.

This is how the public as an ideal is collapsing within a political climate still driven by inequality, institutional unaccountability, and economic austerity.” 25 Rael and Cruz argue that the border wall belongs to the public realm.

It is therefore a responsibility for citizens, and for architects in particular, to engage a border wall that is, after all, architecture.

21. Darshan Karwat, “Why Engineers Should Refuse to Work on Trump’s Wall,” Slate, March 30, 2017, http://www. slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/03/ why_engineers_should_refuse_

23. Ibid.

24. Rael, Borderwall as Architecture, 16.

25. Teddy Cruz, “Borderwall as Public Space?” Borderwall as Architecture, xii.

to_work_on_trump_s_wall.html.

22. Rael, “Building the Border Wall?” The Architects Newspaper, March 18, 2016, https://archpaper. com/2016/03/designing-theborder-wall.

14

Ronald Rael, a souvenir from the Teeter-Totter Wall, n. d. Copyright Rael San Fratello; used with permission from University of California Press.

With the results of the 2016 election known, President Thomas Vonier of the preeminent American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued a statement pledging to work with the new administration on infrastructure. The organization’s members, including Rael, lashed back. “The statements by the leadership of the AIA can easily and embarrassingly be construed as consistent with Van Jones’ conception of a ‘whitelash,’” wrote Rael, “where the historically white and male dominated profession [of architecture], who’s [sic] diversity is quickly changing, is now attempting to re-align itself with its historic base, rather than embrace its growing diverse constituency.” 26 Rael’s letter compares the AIA’s kowtowing response with the priorities of the Europeanstyle nationalists he later characterizes in his book’s citation of the Grand Tour—before appealing to the better angels of that same culture. “It has been estimated that the 700 miles of borderwall currently dividing the U.S. from Mexico will require $49 billion dollars to maintain over the next 25 years,” he writes. “If we contextualize that amount in comparison to recent major architecture projects in the U.S., $49 billion dollars could finance 300 Seattle Public Libraries, 204 Disney Concert Halls, or 500 Miles of the High Line.” 27 Rael devotes a few lines of his book to DS+R’s popular High Line park, again applying a budgetary logic but arriving at slightly different figures.

(Rael’s cursory math is somewhat speculative, too; it’s not clear, for example, if he factors in how much of the High Line is refurbished rail bed, renovated warehouse, preexisting stairway, etc.) “It is difficult not to imagine what else an investment of $49 billion could fund along the border,” he writes, “when we compare this cost to recent architecture projects, such as New York City’s High Line—an elevated vertical public park through Manhattan. With capital expenditures expected to be $90 million for the 1.45-mile project, approximately 725 miles of High Line could have been constructed along the southern border, nearly the same amount proposed by the Secure Fence Act.” 28 The point remains. Even if DS+R would rather their projects float in a rarefied aesthetic realm—as if the High Line (and their other major public urban commissions, from the Lincoln Center renovation to the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and The Broad museum) had no political dimension—Rael reinscribes their park back into the world.

So much for a design challenge issued by a newspaper. But what if the RFP is “real”—an opportunity for a government contract to, indeed, build that wall? Between four and eight finalists will construct 20-foot segments of their designs at a testing ground near San Diego. Their prototypes will be blowtorched, hit with trucks, and climbed by government agents with hooks and tall ladders. Then there are the artists. Jennifer Meridian reportedly submitted a handful of designs seemingly hand-drawn on napkins, including for a Pipe Organ Wall and a barrier comprised of Artists Redrawing Border Walls, to the Other Border Wall RFP. 29 The #ArtThatWall initiative

26. Rael, quoted in “AIA Pledges to Work with Donald Trump, Membership Recoils,” The Architects Newspaper, November 11, 2016, https:// archpaper.com/2016/11/

aia-pledges-work-donaldtrump-membership-recoils.

27. Ibid.

28. Rael, Borderwall as Architecture, 14.

29. See Jennifer

Meridian, Other Border Wall Proposals, 2017, http://jennifermeridianstudio.com/ the-other-border-wall.

16

J.M. Design Studios (Tereneh Mosley, Leah Patgorski and Jennifer Meridian), Artists Redrawing Border Walls, 2017. From the series The Other Border Wall Proposals, 2017. Ink on paper and text, scanned and submitted as a PDF document to U.S. Customs and Border Control Agency on April 4, 2017.

Courtesy of the artists.

tried to slow down the wall process by flooding the CBP with silly questions about the call for entries, such as whether fake cacti could stand for real ones in the tests.30 It’s unclear to what degree artists contributed to the general chaos of the RFPs’ uncoordinated rollout, but the initial deadline was pushed back nearly two weeks. The function of these artists’ proposals is not that they were seriously considered or ever had a chance of being built. (Nor, I’d argue, are artists well served by reiterating the stereotype of whimsical artistic interventions in “serious business.”) Instead they function something like the wall itself—as cognitive barriers that give us maybe five, maybe thirty minutes, in a journey where seconds count.

There is another reason to single out DS+R in this regard. Even before becoming starchitects with university buildings and private museums to their credit, the team fielded ephemeral projects like the Blur Building, a temporary pavilion with mist for walls, and Mural, a 2003 project at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (The latter project took place a decade prior to the construction of the Renzo Piano-designed Whitney building that is linked directly to DS+R’s High Line.) In Mural, an automated drill gradually poked holes in the sheetrock, destroying the walls over the course of the exhibition.31 Based on experimental walls of mist and a self-demolishing museum space, the firm was given the chance to design buildings such as The Broad in Los Angeles, which they fitted with a perforated scrim they called the Veil.32 In other words, if ever architects can claim to be mere tools, DS+R never can. They have always worked in the non-neutral territory of the cultural sphere. Further, they have demonstrated again and again a particular attention to challenging our notion of walls—specifically by way of their perforation, literal and otherwise.

It remains to define architecture as any structure that guides or controls our actions. The figurative, conceptual dimension of DS+R’s practice brings it close to Rael’s own project. Good architecture is good not because it gets built, but because it proposes something better than itself. Another wall is possible, says Rael. Words are words, deeds are deeds. Then some words in a budget say the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, as if the arts and humanities have no real value, no real effect, no “architecture.” Throughout his book, Rael puts the idea of the border wall into play as an aesthetic proposition with tangible consequences. Thus, the border wall as architecture: Don’t design it, don’t not design it; do the third thing: design the wall that will come next.

Travis Diehl lives in Los Angeles. He serves on the X-TRA editorial board.

30. Andrew Becker, “Cacti, Foxes, Solar Panels, and Other Bids to Unmake Trump’s Wall,” Mother Jones, March 31, 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/ politics/2017/03/border-wallbids-resist-trump.

31. See Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mural, 2003, http:// www.dsrny.com/projects/mural.

32. See Travis Diehl, “Veil & Vault,” Frieze, August 19, 2015, https://frieze.com/article/ veil-vault.

18

ARTIST WRITES, No. 2

In this second installment of Artist Writes, we present Andrea Fraser’s essay “Toward a Reflexive Resistance.” Part of X-TRA’s Twentieth Anniversary Programming, Artist Writes is a series of commissioned essays and public programs by four contemporary artists who write: A.L. Steiner, Andrea Fraser, Martine Syms, and Pope.L. X-TRA is publishing their texts serially in Volume 20, and each author will present a corresponding public event in Los Angeles.

Artist Writes is 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.

Support for this series has been 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.

Toward a Reflexive Resistance Andrea Fraser

But to indict anti-intellectualism, which is almost always based on ressentiment, does not exempt the intellectual from this critique to which every intellectual can and must submit himself or herself or, in another language, from reflexivity, which is the absolute prerequisite to any political action by intellectuals. The intellectual world must engage in a permanent critique of all the abuse of power or authority committed in the name of intellectual authority.

—Pierre Bourdieu, “For a Scholarship with Commitment” (1999) 1 I have never missed Pierre Bourdieu more, in the fifteen years since his death, than in the months since the 2016 election. I imagine that Bourdieu would be uniquely equipped to make sense of the disastrous and seemingly incomprehensible rise of Donald Trump and the populist Right. As an activist in the struggle against neoliberalism, he would be able to reveal the link between right-wing populism and free-market fundamentalism and show the way to resistance. As a researcher and theorist of the role played by culture and education in social stratification and by symbolic struggles in social contestation, he would be able to uncover the secret of the success of the culture war the Right has waged so effectively. Above all, Bourdieu would be able to apply his “reflexive sociology” to sift through all the representations that have accompanied this global disaster, from the Right to the Left through the Center, not only to parse their relative truths and falsehoods but also to reveal the truth of the social structures and dynamics they enact, producing and reproducing the very world they ostensibly abhor.

Reading analyses of the election from the Left to center-Right (I can’t bring myself to read the far-Right press), I am reminded of Bourdieu’s assessment that “neither the ‘sociology of the intellectuals,’ which is traditionally the business of ‘right-wing intellectuals,’ nor the critique of ‘right-wing thought,’ the traditional specialty of ‘left-wing intellectuals,’ is anything more than a series of symbolic struggles” that “tacitly agree in leaving hidden what is essential, namely the structure of objective positions” from which they are waged and on the basis of which they contest their respective representations of the social world.2 Moving beyond these symbolic struggles to effective resistance would require escaping the trap of “mutual lucidity and reflexive blindness” to recognize the complicity between social positions 1. This keynote address, which Pierre Bourdieu delivered via video to the Modern Language Association Meeting in Chicago, in December 1999, is quoted here from Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against

21

the Tyranny of the Market 2 (London: Verso, 2003), 19.

2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 12–13.

and “position-takings” on the Left as well as the Right; between social structures and the internalized modes of perception and systems of classification through which they are understood and enacted.3 Many of the positions taken since the 2016 election seem to oppose reflexivity and resistance. I found myself unable to add my name to a statement by feminist scholars circulated shortly after the election and signed by over 1000 women, including Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and many other notable feminist academics and artists. I could agree that “our number one priority is to resist.” I could not agree that “we must also reject calls to compromise, to understand, or to collaborate.” 4 I think it is essential to understand Trump and the people who voted for him. I think it is even more essential to understand ourselves, reflexively, and the hidden forms of collaboration and compromise that may contribute to the production of Trump voters, including the rhetoric and representations of anti-Trump constituencies that have been used by Trump and his supporters in the effective mobilization through which they have claimed political power.

“Who are these people who voted for Trump?”

In the opening to her powerful post-election statement, Judith Butler captured what was torturing so many of our minds on November 9. “There are two questions that voters in the US from the left of center are asking themselves: Who are these people who voted for Trump? And why did we not prepare ourselves at all for this conclusion?” 5 She answers: “We did not know how widespread anger is against elites, how deep the anger of white men is against feminism and the civil rights movement, how demoralized by economic dispossession many people are, how exhilarated people are by isolationism.” But, she continues, “we are now seeing how misogyny and racism overrides judgment and a commitment to democratic and inclusive goals.” These are the “unleashed hatreds,” “sadistic, resentful, and destructive passions driving our country.”

Butler expressed my own feelings of devastation and fear after the election, while articulating the widespread sense that Trump’s rise was propelled by poor, misogynist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic white men. Indeed, the virulently racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynist views of many Trump supporters have been on parade since before the start of his candidacy. However, in the post-election crunching of exit-polls and other data, the assumption that Trump’s elevation to the White House was driven by these voters quickly broke down. Comparisons between Trump voters in 2016 and Romney voters in 2012 found that Trump polled no better (and according to some, slightly worse) among white voters than Obama did in

3. Bourdieu, Distinction, 12.

For the best introduction to Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, see Pierre Bourdeiu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

4. “A STATEMENT BY FEMINIST SCHOLARS ON THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,” https://docs. google.com/document/d/15m_4 zMfvp1x2ADkJVOfd1rlGXyqXv HkhSdD1NfAxc0M/edit.

5. “A Statement from Judith Butler,” e-flux, November 9, 2016, https://conversations.eflux.com/t/a-statement-fromjudith-butler/5215.

22

2012. Even more surprising, Trump did better than Romney among Black, Latino, and Asian voters by 7, 8, and 11 points respectively. Misogyny may hold up better in explaining Trump's Electoral College advantage, but his five-point gain over Romney among men does not appear to have been decisive.6 The biggest shifts from 2012 to 2016 were related to education and income.

Among the college educated, Clinton widened Obama’s advantage from two to nine points, the widest gap going back to 1980. While Clinton still lost among college-educated whites, she did 10 points better than Obama in that group. Trump, however, did 14 points better than Romney among whites without a college education. Clinton did win the lowest income brackets, but by 16 points less than Obama in 2012, while gaining only 9 points with higher-income voters.7 Far from being economically distressed casualties of globalization and deindustrialization, the mean household income of Trump supporters was almost $82,000 a year.8 Puzzling through the data on education and income levels in key counties with populations over 50,000, the statistician Nate Silver found a particular decline of support for Clinton relative to Obama in the 50 of these counties with the lowest education levels. Silver compared predominantly white counties with high-income and medium-education levels against white counties with medium-income and high-education levels, finding that while the former shifted to Trump (Clinton’s only big win in this category was Napa, California), the latter shifted to Clinton. Further controlling for race and ethnicity, he compared low-education and high-education counties with majorities of “minorities,” finding, once again, that the former shifted to Trump while the latter shifted to Clinton. Silver concluded that “educational levels are the critical factor” predicting the shifts in vote that “won Donald Trump the presidency.” 9

“The Revolt Against Elites” 10

Among Trump supporters, this data on income and education levels has been seized upon as confirming the view that Trump’s ascendance represents a popular revolt by the non-college educated against the “obnoxious arrogance” of college-educated liberals and leftists “who have patronized them for decades.” Among those opposed to Trump, this data is most often evoked to confirm the view that, as the title of one article in the journal 6. Jon Huang et al., “Election 2016: Exit Polls,” New York Times, November 8, 2016, https-//www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/ election-exit-polls.

7. Alec Tyson and Shiva Maniam, “Behind Trump’s Victory: Divisions by Race, Gender, Education,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-

by-race-gender-education/.

8. JoAnn Wypijewski, “The Politics of Insecurity,” New Left Review 103 (January–February 2017), 11.

9. Nate Silver, “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, November 22, 2016, http://fivethirtyeight.com/ features/education-not-incomepredicted-who-would-vote-fortrump/. Silver notes that he has no way of knowing which

23

voters shifted to Trump in these low-education majority-minority counties, although other studies suggest that the white vote for Trump was concentrated in the most racially homogeneous areas.

10. P. J. O’Rourke, “The Revolt Against Elites, and the Limits of Populism,” The Weekly Standard, February 3, 2017, http://www.weeklystandard. com/the-revolt-against-theelites/article/2006641.

Foreign Policy put it, “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally,” 11 and this “ignorance” explains why so many low-income Trump supporters “voted against their own interests and especially economic interests.” 12 Further to the Left, the education data is largely ignored, while the income data is embraced to support a range of interpretations. For some, it confirms that it “wasn’t the economy, but racism and xenophobia, that explains Trump’s rise.” 13 For others, it exonerates the working-class, confirming “The Notion That White Workers Elected Trump Is a Myth That Suits the Ruling Class.” 14 For others still, it confirms the authoritarian character of the Trump phenomenon, locating his support in “fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie.” 15 The further one goes to the Left and Right, the more agreement one finds on at least one key point: elites are to blame. However, the Left and Right define these elites in antagonistic ways. On the Left, the elite is defined above all as the economic elite: the 1%, the billionaire plutocrats, the ruling class whose rule is ensured by ownership of the means of production and monopolization of wealth and resources, and sometimes also the “professional class” that manages “various segments of the financialized economy.” 16 If these elites are “liberal,” they are fundamentally neoliberal, with their social and cultural liberalism of individual rights seen as limited to what furthers their new-economy economic interests. On the Right, the elite is defined almost exclusively as the cultural elite, or educated elite, or meritocratic elite, or cognitive elite,17 whose “despotism of permanent experts, bureaucrats, pundits and academics” 18 is enforced by the control of cultural institutions—above all universities, the “fake news” media, and the entertainment industry. (Museums are rarely mentioned.)

On the Left, the Right’s characterization of elites as cultural and educational elites is largely dismissed. In one of the early efforts to unpack this component of new-Right rhetoric, Thomas Frank describes right-wing representations of the “liberal elite” as no more than a “repackaging of class” that “falls apart under any sort of systematic scrutiny.” He argues that the “culture war” was created by the Right to replace and repress class war.

The culture war is, of course, itself a class war, but one in which “material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances” and the real economic basis of social class is subject to “systematic erasure.” 19 11. Jason Brennan, “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally,” Foreign Policy, November 10, 2016, http://foreignpolicy. com/2016/11/10/the-danceof-the-dunces-trump-clintonelection-republican-democrat/.

12. Paul R. Pillar, “Foreign Policy in an Ignorant Democracy,” November 12, 2016, The National Interest, http://nationalinterest.org/ blog/paul-pillar/foreign-policyignorant-democracy-18392.

13. German Lopez, “Survey: The Poor White Working Class Was, If Anything, More Likely

Than the Rich to Vote for Clinton,” Vox, May 9, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-andpolitics/2017/5/9/15592634/ trump-clinton-racism-economyprri-survey.

14. Paul Street, “The Notion That White Workers Elected Trump Is a Myth That Suits the Ruling Class,” Truthdig, July 7, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/ report/item/blaming_working_ class_for_trump_is_myth_that_ suits_ruling_class_20170707.

15. Jesse A. Myerson, “Trumpism: It’s Coming from the Suburbs,” The Nation, May 8, 2017, https://www.thenation.

com/article/trumpism-its-coming-from-the-suburbs/.

16. Peter Lavenia, “The Revenge of Class and the Death of the Democratic Party,” Counterpunch, November 16, 2016, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/16/the-revenge-of-class-and-the-deathof-the-democratic-party/.

17. Nicholas Lehmann provides a useful overview of the emergence of these representations in “A Cartoon Elite,” The Atlantic, November 1996, https-//www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/1996/11/acartoon-elite/376719/.

24

18. Andrew Sullivan, “The Reactionary Temptation: An Open-Minded Inquiry into the Close-Minded Ideology That Is the Most Dominant Political Force of Our Time—and Can No Longer Be Ignored,” New York Magazine, April 30, 2017, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/andrew-sullivan-why-the-reactionary-rightmust-be-taken-seriously.html.

19. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Picador, 2004), 114–15, 121, 127.

However, the success of the right-wing culture war and its identification of elite status and domination with culture and education, rather than wealth and income, may lie in the degree to which it captures the perception and experience of a great many people and is, at least partly, true. If so, it is true not only in the sense that it describes an aspect of social reality, but also because it has produced this reality—with significant assistance from the parts of the Left. Indeed, much of the US Left itself long ago ceased defining social dominance exclusively by way of economic power. Struggles against oppression based on race, gender, and sexual orientation often have focused more on the cultural than the economic aspects of identitybased domination—a tendency bemoaned by others on the Left as making “identity politics” safe for economic elites and pushing the white workingclass toward right-wing populism.

From Class War to Classification War

Bourdieu may be best known for his research linking social class and status—and social domination—to cultural dispositions and practices, which he developed in his monumental study, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979). Bourdieu’s work has not been taken up widely by the American Left. As I was working on this essay, however, his work was evoked by one of the United States’ most committed culture warriors, David Brooks, whose contribution to the theorization of “the New Upper Class” includes the term “bobo” (bohemian bourgeois).20 Brooks followed up on an editorial decrying the cultural insensitivity of “the college-educated class” 21 by offering a gloss of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and distinction to support his characterizations of class hierarchies as defined by culture and education.22 In Distinction and elsewhere, however, Bourdieu argues that all formulations of class rooted in substantively defined populations and attributes fall prey to an intellectualist fallacy: the confusion of conceptual formulations with concrete phenomena. Social scientists, pollsters, pundits, and even amateurs like me can “separate out classes in the logical sense of the word”—i.e. people “placed in similar conditions and subjected to similar conditionings.”

However, these “classes on paper” do not necessarily exist as subjectively experienced, much less politically constituted, groups. Rather, classes in this sense are produced through active and ongoing “acts of classification” that people perform “incessantly, at every moment of ordinary existence, in the struggles in which [they] clash over the meaning of the social world and their position within it, the meaning of their social identity.” 23 In this sense, “what individuals and groups invest in the particular meaning they give to common classificatory systems...is infinitely more than their ‘interest’ in the

20. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

21. David Brooks, “How We Are Ruining America,” The New York Times, July 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.

com/2017/07/11/opinion/howwe-are-ruining-america.html.

22. David Brooks, “Getting Radical About Inequality,” The New York Times, July 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/18/opinion/inequality-pierre-bourdieu.html?_

r=0. Brooks misreads Bourdieu in a number of ways, including describing cultural capital and symbolic capital as subsets of social capital (for Bourdieu these are all distinct) and essentializing and moralizing the “drive to create inequality” as an

25

“endemic social sin.”

23. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (November 1985): https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/ opinion/inequality-pierrebourdieu.html?_r=0, 729.

usual sense of the term; it is their whole social being, everything which defines their own idea of themselves, the primordial, tacit contract whereby they define ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them,’ ‘other people,’ and which is the basis of the exclusions…and the inclusions they perform.” 24 These classificatory systems and categories are “the stakes, par excellence, of political struggles, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which it is perceived.” 25 Far from affirming the representations of class offered up by right-wing culture warriors like Brooks, Bourdieu’s theory suggests that the culture war waged by the Right as an instrument of political mobilization is effective precisely because it is less a class war than a classification war: a war over the very attributes that underlie principles of social division, differentiation, and distinction, which, like everyday classificatory systems themselves, encompass much more than economic status and stratification.26 More fundamentally, Bourdieu’s theory suggests that these attributes themselves are weapons in symbolic struggles waged over the distribution of social power that they primarily perform and only secondarily describe. And these struggles themselves attest to the fact that not only economic power is at stake.

From the Ruling Class to the Field of Power

If Bourdieu’s theory of the social world is rooted in a rejection of substantive definitions of class, it is also rooted in the rejection of any particular substance as primarily defining class, whether wealth, occupation, or education. Instead, Bourdieu understands the social world as a multi-dimensional space organized through of all of the active principles of differentiation and all of the properties capable of conferring power and other benefits within it. He identifies four basic “species” of capital, including—along with economic, social, and symbolic capital—the knowledge, skills, and competencies which, to the extent that they are unequally distributed and confer social benefits, function as cultural capital.

To account for these different forms of social power and their interactions, Bourdieu replaces the concept of a singular ruling class with that of a dominant field or “field of power.” One of Bourdieu’s most concise accounts of the field of power can be found in his study of elite schools, The State Nobility (1996).

24. Bourdieu, Distinction, 478.

25. Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6, 729.

26. “For decades, Democrats have treated blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, Jews, and nearly every other ethnic and sexual constituency as an independent voting bloc... Trump

was the first major Republican candidate to see non-collegeeducated white voters as a distinct voting bloc.” Ben Shapiro, “The Lessons from—and the Myths about—Tuesday Night,” National Review, November 10, 2016, http://www.nationalreview. com/article/442074/donaldtrumps-election-victory-mythslessons.

26

The field of power is a field of forces structurally determined by the state of the relations of power among forms of power, or different forms of capital. It is also, and inseparably, a field of power struggles among the holders of different forms of power…in which those agents and institutions possessing enough specific capital (economic and cultural capital in particular) to be able to occupy the dominant positions within their respective fields confront each other using strategies aimed at preserving or transforming these relations of power...(principally through the defense or criticism of representations of the different forms of capital and their legitimacy).27 The power of the “dominant class” over “dominated classes” still may be understood in terms of the concentration of capital, but all social classes are subject to internal divisions or “class fractions” according to the type of capital at their disposal, and all exist in a social continuum in which the divisions, boundaries, and hierarchies within and between them are subject to continual contestation. And Bourdieu suggests that the most contested of these boundaries is between the economic and cultural fields within the field of power.28

Bourdieu’s theory of the field of power allows us to recognize the competing representations of “elites” offered by the Left and the Right—cultural versus economic elites, “educated” versus “ruling” classes—as enactments of classificatory struggles between “dominant class fractions” over the basis of social power and their own positions within its hierarchies. (And, of course, the very definitions of “the Left” and “the Right” are subject to similarly intense contestation, rendering my use of the terms in this essay as largely conditional markers of relative positions, not conclusive characterizations of individuals, groups, or ideologies.)

Bourdieu first developed his theory of the field of power to account for particular features of artistic and literary fields. As a primary site of concentration of cultural capital as well as tremendous financial wealth, the artistic field can be located firmly within the field of power. Nevertheless, Bourdieu noted a tendency in the artistic field to reject economic values and even invert economic principles of hierarchization. This led him to theorize that the field of

27. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 264–65.

28. Bourdieu argues that social positions and positioning can only be understood by taking into account at least three intersecting axes: not only the volume of capital and the composition of capital but also trajectory. Trajectory is the point at which social space intersects with social time: the time of realized and unrealized

aspirations and social mobility that extends through life and even across generations. He emphasized trajectory as particularly important in understanding political orientation, which is so often rooted in an opposition between an orientation toward the future and an orientation toward the past, between ascending and declining trajectories. In these terms, Trump voters might be characterized as the threatened and declining fractions of the petite bourgeoisie. See Bourdieu, “The

27

Specific Effect of Trajectory,” Distinction, 453–59. For overviews of Bourdieu’s theory of class, see Loïc Wacquant, “Symbolic Power and GroupMaking: On Pierre Bourdieu’s Reframing of Class,” Journal of Classical Sociology 13, no. 2 (May 2013): 274–291, 1–18; and Elliot Weininger, “Foundations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Class Analysis,” in Erik Olin Wright, ed., Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 82–118.

Figure 3, from Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), page 124.

Courtesy of Stanford University Press.

power is organized as a chiasmatic structure in which hierarchies defined by economic capital and hierarchies defined by cultural capital appear inverted as they confront each other in social space. 29 He also found this inversion at work more broadly in a range of occupations, between those whose position depends on economic capital, usually inherited, such as employers, and those less endowed with economic capital, whose position mainly depends on cultural capital, such as artists and teachers.30 He also found this chiasmatic structure at work in political orientation, as “the propensity to vote on the right increases with the overall volume of the capital possessed and also with the relative weight of economic capital” compared to cultural capital, while “the propensity to vote on the left increases in the opposite direction.” 31

Cultural Versus Economic Capital

What accounts for the correspondence between high cultural capital and a Left-leaning political orientation, even among the wealthy, who thus may appear to vote against their economic interests? In Bourdieu’s analysis, it is not due to any link between political orientation and intelligence, erudition, level of information, or even cultural awareness. Rather, it is because cultural capital exists as a dominated form of power in societies dominated by economic capital, even among elites. Thus, elites who owe their position and status to cultural capital “occupy a dominated position in the dominant class,” 32 which leads them not only to contest economic power within the field of power but also “to feel solidarity with the occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions” 33 in society at large. For Bourdieu, this is what explains the sometimes “paradoxical coincidences” that occur “between the dominated fractions of the dominant class, intellectuals, artists or teachers, and the dominated classes, who each express their (objectively very different) relation to the same dominant fractions in a particular propensity to vote on the left.” 34 Bourdieu’s model predicts exactly the kind of inversion of political orientation according to income versus education levels that Nate Silver uncovered in the 2016 election. A recent survey by Pew Research Center also found evidence of this inversion in a significant divide between favorable attitudes toward colleges and universities among Democrats and unfavorable views among Republicans. The divide increases from 20 points at the lowest income levels to 48 points at upper income levels, with favorable views among Republicans overall plunging by 20 points since 2015.35

29. Bourdieu elaborates this theory in a number of texts, most notably “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed” and “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

30. Bourdieu, Distinction, 115.

31. Ibid., 438.

32. Bourdieu, “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” The Field of Cultural Production, 164.

33. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” The Field of Cultural Production, 44.

29

34. Bourdieu, Distinction, 438.

35. “Sharp Partisan Divide in Views of National Institutions,” Pew Research Center, July 10, 2017, http://www.people-press. org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisandivisions-in-views-of-nationalinstitutions/.

Why is the inversion of economic and cultural capital intensifying, at least with respect to political orientation? Why is “overall volume of capital” and income at all levels declining as factors predicting political orientation while education level alone is increasingly predictive? It would seem to suggest both an intensification of struggles between economic and cultural elites and a shift in how those struggles are mobilized in the political field to rally and realign voters.

Bourdieu suggests that homologies of position between economically dominated cultural elites and economically dominated working classes can account for their sometimes “paradoxical” alliance in political struggles against economic elites. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, Bourdieu never developed an analysis of what would be the corresponding alliance between the economically dominant but culturally dominated in the field of power and the more or less economically but above all culturally dominated in the social field. If he had, I imagine it would account for much of the discourse, and electoral success, of right-wing populists in the United States, whose message of domination by “educated classes” and “cultural elites” clearly has resonated with some of the economically dominated who have traditionally voted on the Left.

Cultural Domination

Pursuing this hypothesis requires taking cultural domination seriously as a form of social domination—not only in specific, racist, misogynist, homophobic, colonialist, or even classist representations or institutions, such as those identified by emancipatory movements, but also, more broadly, in distributions of cultural resources, cultural competence, and access to cultural institutions, and the dispositions and systems of classification that manifest, perform, and legitimize those distributions. Above all, it requires vigilance in recognizing the correspondences between cultural and economic power that are denied in both left-wing representations of elites as purely economic elites and right-wing representations of cultural elites, especially in populist politics that aim to mobilize dominated populations with attacks on (other) “elites” and by disowning and demonizing all the attributes by which those elites are defined.

I need not look further than my own fields of art and higher education for overwhelming evidence of the concentration of cultural resources and their correspondence to financial wealth. If Bourdieu developed his theory of the field of power to account for the paradoxical inversion of “the dominant principles of domination”—especially of economic power—in artistic and literary fields, the contemporary art world seems to have resolved much of that paradox by dissociating social domination from economic power.

Arguably, museums have been at the forefront of struggles over the politics (or at least the politics of the representation) of gender, sexual orientation, and race, as the most visible and prestigious institutions to recognize in theory, if not in practice, the values of diversity, inclusivity and tolerance. The fact that they have done so while remaining the repositories of immense wealth and social power has served these struggles by lending them legitimacy and even prestige. But this identification of progressive 30

culture and cultural politics with wealth and power in museums has made them a primary site of the division between economic and other forms of social and cultural domination, effectively splitting off the forms of cultural domination associated with economic status from the forms of cultural domination associated with other aspects of social identity—even while they enact that domination in continuing patterns of economic exclusion that are evident in their audiences, programs, and personnel. As museums are more widely identified with the progressive cultural politics of their programs, these politics may be more widely identified with the extreme wealth of museum patrons.

The social impact of museums is minor compared to institutions of higher education. A significant portion of Bourdieu’s research was devoted to understanding how education can reproduce the very social hierarchies it is supposed to open up, if not overturn, revealing how educational systems often only consecrate advantages derived from “the original milieu” of family and community. The putative oppositions of merit versus birthright and earned versus inherited advantages are at the basis of the American ideology of equality of opportunity and social mobility, which serves to legitimize social hierarchies rooted in enormous inequalities of condition.

However, the research of Bourdieu and many other sociologists suggests that educational and cultural capital may be inherited to as great a degree as, if frequently in tandem with, economic capital. In his massive study of Ivy-League admissions policies, Jerome Karabel found that, despite their role as guardians of the ideal of success based on merit rather than family background, the very definitions of merit applied by elite colleges are rooted in “attributes most abundantly possessed by dominant social groups,” making these colleges a realistic possibility only for those “whose families endow them with the type of cultural capital implicitly required for admission.” 36 While higher education may still offer a path to social mobility, with students from lower- and upper-income backgrounds who attend the same college ending up with similar income levels, less than one-half of 1% of children from families in the bottom 20% by income level attend the elite colleges associated with the highest economic benefits.37 Despite the substantial evidence of educational advantages—and disadvantages—derived from social background, the feature of cultural capital that may contribute most to the success of right-wing populism is not the degree to which it is inherited through the family but rather the degree to which it appears as innate and inborn. While both economic and cultural capital can be objectified in things or institutionalized in social structures and organizations (markets, banks, universities, museums), cultural capital exists, above all, internalized, incorporated, and embodied in people, in the

36. Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Boston: Mariner Books, 2005), 549.

37. The Upshot, “Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent Than

31

the Bottom 60. Find Yours,” The New York Times, January 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2017/01/18/ upshot/some-colleges-havemore-students-from-the-top1-percent-than-the-bottom-60. html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_ r=0.

Interactive graph from "Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours,� The Upshot, The New York Times, January 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-thebottom-60.html?mcubz=1. Courtesy of PARS International.

competencies, dispositions, modes of practice, systems of classification, and schemes of perception that Bourdieu calls habitus. Economic capital in its objectified (if not institutionalized) forms may seem at least potentially free for redistribution at any time, being alienable as property. But cultural capital appears instead as innate qualities that are inseparable from the individuals who embody it. Thomas Jefferson famously hoped that America would replace the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth” with a “natural aristocracy of talent.” 38 Bourdieu suggests that the meritocratic ideal, “just like the belief in nobility, [is] based on birth and nature, but restored beneath a democratic facade of an ideology of natural gifts and individual merit.” 39 The arts, in which highly valorized cultural competencies are idealized as inborn gifts of nature in representations that disavow the social conditions of their acquisition, are only the most prominent example.

The “Racism of ‘Intelligence’”

Embodied forms of cultural capital, more than economic status, serve as the basis for essentialized and naturalized forms of social classification that appear as classism. Bourdieu identifies one of the most prevalent and insidious contemporary forms of such classism in what he calls the “racism of ‘intelligence.’” 40 Like all racisms, in Bourdieu’s view, the racism of “intelligence” is an essentialism that serves the need of a group to justify existing as it exists. Unlike “petit-bourgeois racism,” which traditionally is associated with differences of skin color and ethnicity, the racism of intelligence is a racism of “a dominant class deriving its legitimacy from educational classifications” and cultural capital. It is the means through which its members “aim to produce a ‘theodicy of their own privilege,’” to justify their domination and the social order they dominate, above all, by allowing them to “feel themselves to be essentially superior” by way of embodied competencies and dispositions that appear innate. Class differences are thus transmuted into “differences of ‘intelligence,’ ‘talent,’ and therefore differences of nature,” that are “legitimized and given the sanction of science.” 41 The racism of intelligence is in no way opposed to racisms of skin color and ethnicity, which, in the United States in particular, it has long served to justify. In his study of intelligence testing in the United States, JeanClaude Croizet suggests that the fact that the racism of intelligence “is not subjectively experienced as targeting any particular group...makes its expression totally compatible with anti-discrimination values.” However, because the racism of intelligence appears “rooted in cultural practices and not the byproduct of racist individuals” or racist attitudes, “many people who define themselves as ‘non-racist,’ as ‘liberal,’ can nevertheless have a 38. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http:// press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s61.html.

39. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 373.

40. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Racism of ‘Intelligence,’” Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993).

41. Ibid., 177–78. Bourdieu also renders the political dimension of this racism of “intelligence” explicitly, revealing that rightwing hostility toward science— or at least the seduction of this hostility to those it helps mobilize—may be rooted in more than just the economic interests of their fossil-fuel fractions.

“A power that believes itself to be based on science, a technocratic type of power, naturally asks science to be the basis of power; because intelligence is what gives the right to govern when government claims to be based on science and on the scientific competences of those who govern.” Thus science

33

appears as a form of power that justifies power, above all that of “‘leaders’ who feel themselves to be legitimized by ‘intelligence and who dominate a society bounded on discrimination based on ‘intelligence.’”

strong derogatory attitude toward the people that occupy the lowest positions in society.” 42 The degree to which highly educated white liberals subscribe, consciously or not, to a meritocratic belief that their own advantages are rooted in their intelligence and other innate capacities may help account for the fact that liberal regions have dramatically higher levels of some forms of institutional racism than conservative regions, despite apparently lower levels of racist attitudes.43 The “color-blind” racism of intelligence may produce the same effects as color-based racism, that is, of naturalizing and justifying historically determined and systemic advantages and disadvantages. As Michelle Alexander argues, “callous colorblindness” and “racial indifference” toward those who have “failed” may—“far more than racial hostility—form the sturdy foundation for all racial caste systems.” 44 While covertly, if not overtly, serving to justify racisms of skin color and ethnicity, the racism of intelligence also may play a role in fostering them.

In our “economy of intelligence,” Bourdieu argues, Today’s poor are not poor, as they were thought to be in the nineteenth century, because they are improvident, spendthrift, intemperate, etc.—by opposition to the “deserving poor”—but because they are dumb, intellectually incapable, idiotic... The victims of such a powerful mode of domination, which can appeal to a principle of domination and legitimation as universal as rationality (upheld by the education system) are very deeply damaged in their self-image. And it is no doubt through this mediation that a relationship—most often unnoticed or misunderstood—can be traced between neoliberal politics and certain fascistoid forms of revolt among those who, feeling excluded from access to intelligence and modernity, are driven to take refuge in the national and nationalism.45 Indeed, the rhetoric of idiocy has dominated the center-Left discourse on Trump and his supporters, from the “Stupid Party,” “Trump and the True Meaning of ‘Idiot,’” “A Conspiracy of Dunces” and “Who Ate Republicans’ Brains” (all editorials in The New York Times); “America’s Golden Age of Stupidity” and “Trump Might Be the Dimmest President Ever” (Washington Post); to “America Is Turning Into a Confederacy of Dunces” and “Donald Trump Is Proving Too Stupid to Be President” (Foreign Policy). Daily Kos reported on the Pew survey mentioned above with the headline, “Orwellian Progress, Most Republicans Convinced Education Is Bad for U.S. So Let’s Call Them Stupid.” 46

42. Jean-Claude Croizet, “The Racism of Intelligence: How Mental Testing Practices Have Constituted an Institutionalized form of Group Domination,” in H. L. Gates, ed., Handbook of African American Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 805.

43. For example, California, New York, and Massachusetts incarcerate black men at a much higher rate (seven times

the rate of white men) than Louisiana, Mississippi, and most of the other states in the Deep South (which incarcerate black men at twice the rate of white men). Liberal Vermont incarcerates 1 in 14 black men in the state, while conservative Mississippi incarcerates 1 in 33. Ashley Nellis, “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons,” June 1, 2016, The Sentencing Project,

34

http://www.sentencingproject. org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparityin-state-prisons/.

44. Michelle Alexander, “Against Colorblindness,” The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 240–44.

45. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Invisible Hand of the Powerful,” Firing Back, 33–34.

46. Idontknowwhy, “Orwellian Progress, Most Republicans Convinced Education Is Bad for U.S. So Let’s Call Them Stupid,” Daily Kos, July 11, 2017, https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/11/1679874/-Orwellian-progress-most-republicans-c onvinced-education-is-bad-forU-S-So-lets-call-them-stupid.

The racism of intelligence was evoked by one of the few observers to challenge the condescension and classism performed in many assumptions about Trump voters, and not only because they affirm the rightist view of liberals and leftists as arrogant, Ivy-League snobs. Serge Halimi called out the tendency to ascribe to “protest voters” a range of “psychological or cultural deficiencies that disqualify their anger.” 47 The alternatives of “frustration versus reason”—or “sadistic, resentful, and destructive passions” versus “judgment” in Butler’s seemingly (to me) unimpeachable assessment—belie a conviction by “educated people” that “their preferences are the only rational ones.” 48

A Realpolitik of Cultural Capital

Is institutional critique or, more broadly, critical reflexivity of any use in the struggle against the radical Right today? If I have characterized institutional critique as an ethical more than a political practice, Bourdieu’s belief that reflexivity is the prerequisite to any political action by intellectuals is rooted, above all, in a Realpolitik of cultural capital. The fact that Donald Trump was elevated to the White House, not only against the will of the majority of voters but also against the warnings of almost every media outlet, editorial page, and cultural figure of note who took a public position on the election (including virtually the entire casts of the Star Trek and Avengers franchises), raises serious questions about the impact of intellectual and cultural producers and other opinion makers on electoral politics. It suggests that such efforts to influence public opinion may serve to reproduce and reinforce political and cultural polarization, especially to the extent that the meaning and perception of these position-takings, as Bourdieu might call them, are fundamentally rooted in the social positions of those who produce and consume them, and in the struggles between these positions. Understanding our own positions and investments in those struggles is thus essential to any political action that would not simply reproduce them.

Bourdieu affirms the capacity of cultural producers “to put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize the potential strength of the dominated classes and subvert the order prevailing in the field of power.” 49 However, to the extent that both the capacity and the disposition to engage in such contestation is rooted in the paradoxical position of dominated members of the dominant class, he warns that such alliances are liable to mystification and bad faith. In his typically acerbic style, he warns against the confusion between class struggles and class-fraction struggles that enables “dominant class members who are dominated in one or another of the possible respects—intellectuals, the young, women—to experience the sum of their necessarily partial challenges as the most radical assault on the established order” and confers the “gratifications of a simultaneously ethical, aesthetic and political snobbery which can combine,

47. Serge Halimi, “Trump, the Know-Nothing Victor,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 5, 2016, http://agenceglobal.

com/2016/12/05/serge-halimitrump-the-know-nothing-victor/.

48. Ibid.

49. Bourdieu, “The Field of

35

Cultural Production,” The Field of Cultural Production, 44.

in a sort of anti-bourgeois pessimism, the appearances of intellectual vanguardism, which leads to elitism, and political vanguardism, which leads to populism.” 50 If such fractional struggles often boil down to symbolic subversions, it may be because they are not, in fact, struggles to overturn the established order, but rather competitive struggles for succession within it that are redistributive only within the narrow margins of access. In cultural fields in particular, the dynamics of distinction and differentiation through which these competitive struggles unfold tend to produce political discourses that, despite the radical egalitarianism of their content, are fundamentally oriented toward exclusivity as they contest competing positions within their own fields.

While artists, intellectuals, and other “dominated fractions of the dominant class” may believe that they are engaged in emancipatory and egalitarian struggles, the most culturally dominated members of society may see these struggles for what they often are: competition for power among the powerful from which they are excluded. At best (or worst) they become weapons in these struggles: symbolically, as “the working class,” “common folk,” “the multitude” in whose name (other) elites are attacked, or politically, through mobilizations that isolate specific forms of domination (most often cultural versus economic) from the full complex of social power.

Paradoxically, Bourdieu’s theory suggests that the intensification of struggles between economic and cultural elites may be due to the diminishing opposition between them. This is not only because struggles are often most intense between positions adjacent in social space, but also because, as many on the Right and Left have noted in their characterization of “liberal elites,” the current economic regime has developed through an “unprecedented coalition of the smart and the rich,” 51 pushing those at either extreme to increasingly narrow margins. This also may account for some of the success of right-wing populism as well as the diminished influence of cultural producers in mobilizing the economically dominated. For Bourdieu, the critical capacity of cultural producers derives not from any essential characteristic of the aesthetic, artistic, or intellectual, but rather from their autonomy relative to dominant and, above all, economic principles of power. As this autonomy diminishes through the corporatization of higher education and museums, the financialization of the art market, the rise of cultural celebrities to the apex of compensation pyramids, and monopolization in the media, cultural producers are more persuasively cast and more likely to perform as bad-faith participants in what Bourdieu calls “the division of the labor of domination” between the owners of material and symbolic means of production.

The greatest and most damning intellectual and political failure of the Left may be the failure to recognize cultural capital not only as a socially effective form of power but also as a form of domination, not only substantively, in its particular forms, but also structurally and relationally, in its distributions 50. Bourdieu, Distinction, 451.

51. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, quoted in Nicholas Lehmann, “A Cartoon Elite,” The Atlantic

(November 1996), https-//www. theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/1996/11/a-cartoonelite/376719/. See, for example, Eric Alterman, “‘Thought

Leaders’ and the Plutocrats Who Love Them,” April 12, 2017, The Nation, https-//www. thenation.com/article/thoughtleaders-and-the-plutocrats-

36

who-love-them/https-//www. thenation.com/article/thoughtleaders-and-the-plutocratswho-love-them/nd.

and through the social differences and hierarchies that it articulates and performs. While the myopic focus on the 1% may be effective symbolically, it not only lets the remaining 99% off the hook but also reduces social power to economic wealth lodged in a single, one-dimensional dominant class.

Like many Marxist traditions, in Bourdieu’s estimation, such representations provide a “revolutionary theory with a purely external usage, which questions all powers save for that which intellectuals wield”—cultural capital—and thus allow intellectuals to be “very critical without themselves being concerned by their critique.” 52 However, the most mystifying strategies of competitive, fractional struggles may be that of disowning and negating social power. The Right effectively took this strategy over from the Left to drive its conservative “resistance” and now “revolution”—which the Left now counters with renewed resistance of its own. Disowning power and casting one’s own group as marginal, dominated, and oppressed does triple service by delegitimizing competing forms of power, justifying fractional struggles as egalitarian and emancipatory, and aiding in the mobilization of the (more) disempowered. If “elite,” “privileged,” and “establishment” have emerged as almost universal terms of vilification employed across the political spectrum, the most consistent feature of their use may not be the partial and selective forms of social power they frame, but rather that this power is always evoked only as the power of others. From Ivy-League-educated conservative pundits, who attack the educated elite, to highly compensated artists and academics, who attack the 1%, and down through the 10, 20, and 30% with access to urban cultural resources and the booming plutonomy of the super-rich,53 one finds an anti-elitist discourse that serves not as reflexive critique but rather as a means of self-justification. Waged only from the standpoint of relative disadvantages rather than advantages, privations rather than privileges, and subordination rather than dominance—without reflexivity—resistance politics risk being reduced to no more than a cover for the politics of power.

It may be my own bias that leaves me pessimistic that even the most intellectual of anti-Trump conservatives will be willing to confront the economic violence that contributed to his rise. I would like to believe, however, that the Left does have the reflexive capacity to recognize the impact of cultural and symbolic violence and their contribution to the success of right-wing populism.

Andrea Fraser is an artist and professor of art at the University of California Los Angeles. Her book 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, co-published by Westreich Wagner Publications, Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, and MIT Press, is forthcoming in 2018.

52. Loïc Wacquant, “From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La noblesse d’État,” Theory, Culture & Society 10 (1993), 39.

53. The term plutonomy (plutocratic economy) was coined by Citigroup analysts in a now-notorious report that

was subsequently pulled from the Citigroup website. See Ajay Kapur, et. al., “Plutonomy Symposium—Rising Tides and Lifting Yachts,” The Global Investigator, September 29, 2006. The report’s authors note: “The Uber-rich, the plutonomists, are likely to see net worthincome ratios surge, driving

luxury consumption... Beyond war, inflation, the end of the technology/productivity wave, and financial collapse, we think the most potent and short-term threat would be societies demanding a more ‘equitable’ share of wealth.”

37

Endnote: Many thanks to Rhea Anastas and Harbour Fraser Hodder for their supportive and incisive feedback and to the X-TRA editors for their patient and rigorous editing.

Anna Mayer

Review: Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request)

Artist-as-Consultant, Monograph-as-Transparency

Mark Allen and Rachel Seligman, editors The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and DelMonicosPrestel, 2017

The idea that our art institutions need reorienting has been especially pressing this spring. Recent controversies, such as the Hannah Black-initiated call for the removal and burning of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016), in the Whitney Biennial,1 the protest by four Dakota tribes and their supporters against Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012), which resulted in the work’s removal from the Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden,2 and the protests around the traveling exhibition of Carl Andre’s retrospective,3 all highlight the view that museums need to expand their programs to present more works that address intersectional issues with sensitivity to subjects such as racial subjugation, gender disparities, class differences, and (post)colonial histories. It appears equally pressing that sensitivity to those subjects must be woven into the curatorial practices of the museum. Indeed, in all of the above controversies, the museums and the curators who work there were called out and called upon as much as the artists involved. In the case of the Walker, the museum’s executive director, Olga Viso, stated publicly, “There’s no question that the Walker’s process in placing this structure in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was flawed…”4 It is in the context of more rigorous expectations for contemporary institutions that I consider Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request), the documentation of Machine Project’s 2015 exhibition at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Platinum Collection makes clear Machine’s goal of affecting the inner workings of museum culture, one invitation at a time.

1. Randy Kennedy, “White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests,” The New York Times, March 21, 2017.

2. Shelia Regan, “After Protests from Native American Community, Walker Art Center Will Remove Public Sculpture,” Hyperallergic, May 29, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/382141/ after-protests-from-native-

american-community-walkerart-center-will-remove-publicsculpture/.

3. A summary of the protest at the Tate Modern’s exhibition of the Andre retrospective can be found here: Charlotte Ryan, “As protesters take on the Tate, is the fear of demonstrations causing galleries to take fewer risks?” New Statesman, June 15, 2016, http://www.

newstatesman.com/politics/ feminism/2016/06/tatemodern-protesters-call-cubanartists-work-be-displayed-0.

The protest at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’ iteration of the show is detailed here: Caroline A. Miranda, “Why Protestors at MOCA’s Carl Andre Show Won’t Let the Art World Forget About Ana Mendieta,” Los Angeles Times,

38

April 6, 2017.

4. Olga Viso, “Learning in Public: An Open Letter on Sam Durant’s Scaffold,” Walker Art Center Centerpoints blog, May 27, 2017, http://blogs.walkerart. org/centerpoints/2017/05/26/ learning-in-public-an-open-letter-on-sam-durants-scaffold/.

Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request), installation view, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, September 19, 2015–January 3, 2016. Courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request), installation view, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, September 19, 2015– January 3, 2016. Courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Musuem and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Machine Project is a Los Angeles-based arts organization created

by Mark Allen that serves as an umbrella for individual and collective projects by artists and non-artists alike. Working out of the same storefront space for 15 years, Machine Project is a “feral institution,” presenting installations, theatrical productions, pedagogical workshops, tours of its oft re-configured interior, and a multiplicity/ superabundance of other offerings.5 The storefront also serves as a headquarters for administering off-site projects, including largescale programming realized at and with other venues. Los Angeles is home to several projects founded by artists desiring to produce extra-institutional spaces for criticality and innovation. Mark Bradford’s Art + Practice, Noah Davis’s The Underground Museum, and Sara Velas’s Velaslavasay Panorama come to mind as endeavors that thrive outside of established museums, galleries, and universities.6 While Art + Practice, for example, works within an urban neighborhood as part of an expanded field of art, Machine often works within more conventional art world parameters. Its innovation is in the practice of inserting itself (back) into established institutions. The museum-based projects allow Machine to concoct scenarios on a scale not allowed by its modest space. They also function as a trickle-up experience for the hosting institution—a training, of sorts, in how to facilitate artworks that are participatory, ephemeral, and/or durational. Most importantly, that training often involves publicly processing the experience after the fact, an exercise museums don’t typically undertake.

Two early and ambitious projects were especially formative for Machine’s training credentials: a festival-style, one-day residency at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in 2008, and a year-long inhabitation of the Hammer Museum, from 2010 to 2011. The LACMA occupation consisted of at least 53 happenings that took place over 10 hours.7 The Hammer residency involved a greater number of more substantive projects—75 of them, with 300 artists participating—which was a quantity heavy enough to tax the museum’s infrastructure and personnel. The stress incurred by the hosting institution while enacting such extensive programming over so many months was registered publicly in the 182-page report produced after the fact by the museum and Machine. In an interview between Allen and Allison Agsten, the Hammer’s former Curator of Public Engagement, Agsten revealed: “One thing, last year, that became difficult internally was the number of programs we were producing. It became really clear for this year that we needed to consider ways we could moderate flow. We had the period from August to September—do you remember?—it was madness: we had Soundings: Bells at the Hammer, we had Houseplant Vacation, and then we had Brody’s Level5 over Labor Day weekend. By the end of that, people were beat.” 8

5. Margaret and Christine Wertheim coined the term “feral institution” in 2002, in reference to several DIY organizations in Los Angeles, including their own Institute For Figuring. See Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim, “House of Squiggly

Lines: Audience Becomes Authority in LA’s ‘Feral Institutions,’” LA Weekly, September 27–October 3, 2002.

6. Of course, conventional institutions eventually may want to bring these projects into their spaces in order to capitalize on their credibility and

different constituencies, as was the case with The Underground Museum’s recent partnership with MOCA. 7. For a list of all the elements of Machine’s LACMA residency, see “A Machine Project Field Guide to the LA County Museum of Art,” April 22, 2008,

41

http://machineproject.com/ archival/projects/lacma/.

8. Hammer Museum and Machine Project, Machine Project 2010/11: A Report (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2012), 38.

Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request) (Munich, London, and New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and DelMonico BookssPrestel, 2017), page 30. Exhibition catalogue. Email correspondence between Mark Allen and the museum’s curator Rachel Seligman.

Courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore Collge and Content Object.

At other junctures in the report, Agsten refers to “friction” and “conflict” between the two organizations, but ultimately credits the relationship as allowing the museum to “make a quantum leap forward in a way that I can’t imagine we could have otherwise.” Specifically, she mentions that, after working with Machine, she became sensitized to “the power that intimacy can have.” She also comments, “Sort[ing] through so much was really good, accelerated learning. It showed us what our limits were, what we could handle here, what we couldn't handle here.” The Museum’s ability to utilize its interstitial spaces for programming also improved during Machine’s tenure there.9 Since those initial residencies, Machine has been invited to put other institutions through their paces, including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Colgate University and the town of Hamilton, New York; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco. In Charlotte Cotton’s essay “Field Guide to Machine Project,” in The Platinum Collection, she describes this period in Machine's history as “Collaborations with major cultural institutions across the country to reimagine forms of public engagement and accessibility.” 10 Indeed, Machine has received more of these invitations than it can accept, and at one point tried working with institutions in a straight consulting capacity, off the exhibition record. The strategy of the organization Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) comes to mind. W.A.G.E. has undertaken a very direct approach to addressing how institutions compensate artists, by offering annual certification to institutions that meet its few requirements. Started by a group of artists, it has remained, since its inception, in the realm of bureaucracy and regulatory bodies.11 Its methodology rejects the idea that artists should have to negotiate with an institution in isolation, instead taking the preemptive route of advocacy. Machine’s approach, even in the experimental consultancy, lies within a Venn diagram that comprises collective organization, creative production, and institutional advocacy.

At the same time that it is staging multiple artists’ projects, it’s also modeling a different kind of curatorial method—one with heavy emphasis on subsequent processing of the experience by Machine and the hosting organization, in publication form.

Machine’s recent exhibition and residency at the Tang Museum, for which it produced the book Machine Project: The Platinum Collection, was intended to be a retrospective of sorts. A primary feature of the physical exhibition was a proscenium theater, with a replica of the stage in Machine’s Los Angeles storefront and chairs sourced from a local Waldorf School. The exhibition also included a Machine administrative office; a poetry phone; a beanbagged lounging area beneath a multitude of the posters created for events 9. Ibid., 9–10, 36, 41, 40.

10. Charlotte Cotton, “Field Guide to Machine Project,” in Mark Allen and Rachel Seligman, eds., Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request) (Munich, London, and New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery

at Skidmore College and %FM.POJDP #PPLTs1SFTUFM 2017), 149.

11. Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), “How to Get Certified,” W.A.G.E., http://www.wageforwork.com/ certification/3/how-to-getcertified.

44

Machine Project, explanatory diagrams, 2014. Reproduced in Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request) (Munich, London, and New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and "SU (BMMFSZ BU 4LJENPSF $PMMFHF BOE %FM.POJDP #PPLTs1SFTUFM Ɯ QBHF Courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Asher Hartman and Cliff Hengst, Mr. Akita, 2015. Cliff Hengst performs at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, September 27, 2015. Courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.

from Machine’s history; and a to-scale model of the Tang Museum mounted on a Roomba, which roamed through the space. Throughout the run of the show, artists—many of whom have worked extensively with Machine in the past—arrived on campus to enact workshops (Dawn Kasper), performances (Asher Hartman), wanderings (Joshua Beckman), sonic massages (Carmina Escobar), perception exercises (Krystal Krunch), and so on. Most of the artists engaged students, staff, and faculty with varying degrees of intensity. The Tang exhibition had all the hallmarks of a Machine endeavor: multiple artists presenting multiple non-object-based, participatory experiences; an effort to expose the process of arts administration; references back to its storefront in Los Angeles; engagement with locals and the locale; a humorous self-consciousness about the exhibition-making process; and a certain buoyancy of affect. Indeed, the Tang show and accompanying monograph document how Machine Project has honed its methodology into something that can travel outside of its home city into different-sized institutions.

The focus on pedagogy is fitting for a show at the Tang, a teaching museum at Skidmore College with a remarkably large number of faculty who engage with its programming each academic year.12 In the world of social practice art, this museum represents an institution well oriented to its surrounding community, serving it as well as learning from it. The Tang’s methodology and allocation of resources facilitate durational, socially engaged work, as well as ample opportunities for feedback and evaluation after the fact. Over the years, Machine has given an unusual emphasis to reflection and analysis of its endeavors, and here the two organizations’ practices dovetail in a book that is both ambitious and illuminating.13 Especially apparent in The Platinum Collection is the sheer quantity of programming that is central to Machine’s strategy. The book contains the list “Every Machine Event 2003–2015,” with reproductions of every poster produced for those events. Less long, but still ample, is the list of “Every Poetry Project Ever” produced by Machine, as remembered by writer Joshua Beckman and Mark Allen. The book’s introduction, by Ian Berry, is a compilation of 45 quotes from sources including artists, a baseball player, and Nike ad copy.14 The abundance factor is also in full force in Allen’s essay, “Hello, have you been here before,” an annotated version of an audio guide to Machine’s Los Angeles storefront space which revisits many past projects and moments big and small. Chatty and intimate annotations take up a majority of the visual space, and offer a wealth of background information on Machine’s hallmarked methodology. Modeling a casual enthusiasm and performatively sincere pursuit of wonder, the writing itself feels like a lesson in affect: in the footnote about the power of the reveal, Allen writes, “The lecture that becomes a meal that becomes a legal deposition that becomes a

12. Annually, 25% of Skidmore faculty engages with the Tang Museum’s programming. Rachel Seligman, email correspondence with the author, June 9, 2017.

13. Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by

Special Request) was deftly organized by designer Kimberly Varella, of Content Object.

14. The sources for these quotations are only cited in the very back of the book, creating a document of anonymous voices. The emphasis is on the

smorgasbord, and potentially conflicting ideas are presented simultaneously in an attempt to instigate and inspire. For a book devoted to a project that at its essence combines the contributions of many, the deemphasizing of credit is

47

at best unnecessary and at worst insensitive. Obscuring the name of an already underrecognized thinker (Corita Kent) is not equivalent to doing so for a canonized one (Frank Lloyd Wright).

Dawn Kasper rehearses EVERYTHING (2015) at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, October 24, 2015. Reproduced with Kasper’s notes in Machine Project: The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request) (Munich, London, and New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and DelMonico BookssPrestel, 2017), pages 114–15. Courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and Content Object.

dance performance that becomes an art installation that becomes a lecture that becomes your parents’ anniversary party. A good reveal is the definition of underpromising and overdelivering!” 15 Allen’s essay also articulates Machine’s insistence on transparency about its process and intent. Many of the footnotes seem pointedly aimed at educating institutions, reorienting curators, and encouraging individuals to create their own feral organizations.

There are notes about why Machine remains a small organization, despite the “metastasizing logic of the art world;” details about the practice of “giving prompts to artists as a curatorial approach;” tips on how to start an art space; ideas about how to work across disciplines (“What does a geologist have to say about a marble statue?”); an explanation of why “game face is super important” for organizers; a discussion about event documentation; a discussion about event promotion; and an eight-item list of what has “helped [Machine] make better, more satisfying work with the public.” 16 Multiple transcriptions of emails between Machine and the Tang provide further examples of how an exhibition can be made and administered. We get glimpses at the beginning stages of the relationship, when Allen deftly and discreetly probes to determine the Tang’s desired scale and available budget, then middle-stage correspondence that documents the piling on of ideas for what could be included in the exhibition, and finally some after-thefact missives about de-installation practicalities that reveal an affectionate dynamic between the two organizations. These inclusions provide insight into stages of arts administration that are not usually accessible.

Artists’ projects always have the potential to destabilize entrenched practices and herald paradigm shifts. But the institutional re-orientation that they produce might only become apparent in a future shift in programming, a decision to work—or not to work—with an artist who has a certain kind of practice, or a staff member’s spontaneous disclosure in a panel discussion. For instance, in 1971, Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was canceled by the museum after its board characterized his work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which chronicles the fraudulent dealings of two New York City slumlords, as “muckraking,” rather than art.17 This was an early instance of a major museum refusing to allow the work of an established artist to directly implicate its inner workings, choosing instead to censor the work. In most cases, including Haacke’s, the intricacies of the negotiations around challenging works and an acknowledgement of the growing pains they can produce typically remain restricted to private conversation and correspondence. Unique to Machine Project’s endeavor is the way it prompts institutions to reflect publicly on their challenges and shortcomings.

The fact that curators and arts administrators have elected to learn new ways of working via Machine-led exercises, such as the Tang exhibition, is especially significant at this point in time. It is in sharp contrast to the

15. Allen and Seligman, eds., Machine Project: The Platinum Collection, 63.

16. Mark Allen, “Hello, have you been here before,” in Allen

and Seligman, eds., Machine Project: The Platinum Collection, passim.

17. Grace Glueck, “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s

50

Show,” The New York Times, April 7, 1971, http://www. nytimes.com/1971/04/07/ archives/the-guggenheimcancels-haackes-show.html.

reorientation-through-trauma model that Durant's Scaffold induced, where the Walker’s response and subsequent outreach about the problematic artwork occurred at the last minute, amidst turbulent protests, threats, and intense online debate. It is different again from the straight certification model offered by W.A.G.E. Machine’s consistent emphasis on public documentation and meta-consciousness around the administration of the work (publishing emails, exposing paths not taken, engaging in group analysis after the fact, explicating the already annotated practice) offers a model for how organizations can be more transparent in their times of reorientation. As a collective that draws on the work of many artists, Machine is uniquely situated to enact the artist-asadministrator or artist-as-consultant role within an institution. The pains of growing are diffused, or maybe even deflected, by Machine’s ultimate role as artist-as-curator. With this one move, Machine situates itself to meet (other) curators and administrators on a different playing field than a singular artist might. The loose group of practitioners that constitutes Machine for any one of its residencies or exhibitions provides a framework for the artists that helps ameliorate the disparity of scale between an individual artist and a museum.

Machine models this strategy of solidarity while offering a plethora of programming to the institution. The prevailing metric for socially engaged art practice, when it is taken up by conventional institutions, is still “bums in seats,” where quantity counts, with funders looking at the number of viewers (and artists) served. Machine measures up well in this calculation, giving museums what they want—sometimes too much. Its friendly approach allows institutions to feel comfortable entering into the after-the-fact accounting of the administrative process.

One wonders what would it look like if there were a book-length documentation from the recent crisis involving Durant’s sculpture at the Walker, which is unfolding as I write? It might include candid contributions from the curator(s), the artist, independent curators with relationships to the local Native American communities, and the Dakota Elders, who could have been consulted before the artwork was made in 2012 for three European exhibitions or, at the very least, before it was installed this year in Minneapolis.

We are finally at a moment when institutions must consciously elect to undertake a re-orientation process with regards to issues of race, gender, and economics. The transparency and reflection extensively documented in The Platinum Collection offer a model for how museums can make these changes accessible and available for circulation. Perhaps then the process of learning how to be truly post-colonial, inclusive, and humane can be more widely understood and taken up within the art world. What were institutions thinking, we ask? It can be shown.

Anna Mayer is a Los Angeles-based artist who works sculpturally in her solo practice and socially as CamLab, her 11-year collaboration with Jemima Wyman. She has been the Assistant Director of the Institute For Figuring since 2009.

51

Andy Campbell One I Know: Sherin Guirguis’s One I Call and the Durability of Form

My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless; ’Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.

I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.

—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi Standing in the center of Sherin Guirguis’s One I Call (2017), a modest SuperAdobe structure sited in Whitewater Preserve in California’s Coachella Valley, one noticed an absence of pigeons.1 This was not a strange observation to make considering that Guirguis patterned her sculpture after the pigeon towers that dot the countrysides of the Middle East and North Africa like giant tapered beehives made of earth and plaster. Everything about these pigeon towers has a purpose: the sticks thrusting out of the top are there to support anyone wishing to make repairs; the oculus in the roof allows birds to fly in and out; cubby holes where pigeons might roost are placed decoratively around the interior. But Guirguis’s sculpture breaks from the morphology of pigeon towers. First, where the towers’ purpose (dubbed “useful but unromantic” by one historian 2 ) is to collect the birds’ droppings, which are used to add nitrogen to fields, their interior would normally be inaccessible save for these collection times. Yet here the artist has placed three large oval apertures at ground level leading into the interior of One I Call. Guirguis has also applied gold leaf to the inside of the roosts, a flourish missing from the pigeon towers of Iṣfahān or Siwa. Due to heavy rains in early 2017, this leafing wept down the inside walls, like the droppings of the animals so conspicuously absent.

Although the interior of One I Call is bare, its media and form are replete with history and meaning: medieval Persian poetry, the colonial history of the Middle East and North Africa, the utopic projections of lunar architecture, and the Western discourse of land art. It calls forth particular personages, from the Iranian-born earth architect Nader Khalili to the poet Rumi—while also marking the expansion of Guirguis’s politically oriented practice. In its form, materiality, and site-specificity, One I Call presents a 1. SuperAdobe is the name of a construction system developed by architect Nader Khalili, who plays an important role in the development of Guirguis’s work and consequently in this essay. See Ebrahim Nader

Khalili, “United States Patent: 5934027—Earthquake Resistant Building Structure Employing Sandbags,” August 10, 1999.

2. Elisabeth Beazley, “The Pigeon Towers of Is.fahān,” Iran 4 (1966): 105.

52

Sherin Guirguis, One I Call, 2017. Earth, burlap, PVC pipe, barbed wire, gold leaf. In collaboration with Bob Dornberger, wHy Material Experts, Hooman Fazly, Don Worley. Whitewater Preserve, Whitewater, CA. Š Sherin Guirguis. Courtesy the artist and Desert X. Photo: Lance Gerber.

Sherin Guirguis, One I Call, 2017. Earth, burlap, PVC pipe, barbed wire, gold leaf. In collaboration with Bob Dornberger, wHy Material Experts, Hooman Fazly, Don Worley. Whitewater Preserve, Whitewater, CA. Š Sherin Guirguis. Courtesy the artist and Desert X. Photo: Lance Gerber.

useful counter to the imperial durabilities and neocolonial impulses of the large-scale art biennial that commissioned the work—Desert X (which ran from late February through April 2017). Instead, Guirguis’s sculpture asks viewers to become familiar with a history that references and acknowledges the politics of postcolonial critique.3 This essay attempts to take up this challenge, and so circles around the myriad histories opened up by One I Call, crisscrossing disciplines, geographies, and temporalities—before coming to roost upon it. − “The desert is god without man.” With this quotation, Neville Wakefield, curator and artistic director of Desert X, introduced the inaugural edition of the biennial across a variety of media platforms—web and print.4 The quote makes for good copy, but it is not sui generis; like the idea of the desert, it has a context. These words end a short story written by Honoré de Balzac, entitled “A Passion in the Desert” and published in 1830, the same year France invaded Algeria. Balzac’s story is a frame narrative in which a man relates to his beloved the tale of a French colonial soldier escaping capture. This soldier is subsequently cornered in a cave by a panther, whom the soldier must kill to escape. Filled with “tireless Arabs” and the “dark, forbidding sands of the desert,” the work is a textbook orientalist fantasy, wherein the dangers and erotic pleasures of Egypt are manifested in the figure of the blood-smeared panther, referred to as both an “enemy” and a “courtesan.” 5 We find an echo of Balzac’s closing line in the infamous final words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness—“The Horror! The Horror!” Both represent a fantasy of the sublime inhumanity of the other place: there are no people in the desert, or, perhaps, the people who are there are more panther-like than human—shifty like sand.

It’s a predictable quote to begin any desert endeavor with, but a telling one, nonetheless. And so we must turn, perhaps just as predictably, to Orientalism, Edward Said’s signal study on the colonial literatures of France and Germany in the nineteenth century. Said notes, “The Arabian desert is thus considered to be a locale about which one can make statements regarding the past in exactly the same form (and with the same content) that one makes them regarding the present.” 6 In other words, the desert’s mythology is that of timelessness and its character, at least in the colonial imagination, is that of an uninhabited and uninhabitable place. We might add to this Romantic fallacy the way that the desert is framed as a place of opportunity by virtue of its untapped mineral resources.7 Desert X’s publicity campaign traded on this understanding of land, ignoring or marginalizing any history of habitation by indigenous groups, preferring instead the mindset of the later settler colonialists travelling west, swayed by the imperatives of manifest destiny—land and gold.

3. James Wines, “Public Art— Private Art,” Art in America (January 1970).

4. Neville Wakefield, Desert X, 2017, https://www.desertx.org/ about-more/.

5. Honoré de Balzac, “A Passion in the Desert,” trans.

George Saintsbury (New York: The Review of Reviews, 2012), https://archive.org/stream/ APassionInTheDesert/balzac_

honore_de_1799_1850_passion_in_the_desert_djvu.txt.

6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 235.

7. Said later remarks in his

55

book that early Zionists often saw Palestine as “an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom.” Ibid., 286.

Douglas Aitken’s Mirage (2017) became the emblematic project of Desert X.8 The piece was a purpose-built ranch-style house of which every surface—interior and exterior—was covered with mirrors. Mirage accelerated the already clichéd use of reflective surfaces endemic in public art projects since Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2004) opened in Chicago’s redeveloped Millennium Park.9 Indeed, Aitken’s structure was received as “A Funhouse Mirror for the Age of Social Media,” as one headline aptly put it, and was the most photographed artwork among Instagram posts tagged with the #desertx hashtag.10 To reach Mirage, visitors drove through a security gate and up newly constructed roads for a speculative housing development called Desert Palisades, which was one of the major sponsors of Desert X. The development’s online promotional materials describe it, in high-colonial fashion, as “the last hillside enclave in Palm Springs.” 11 In this imagining of an affluent neighborhood, homes “choreograph fluently with their surroundings,” buyers are encouraged to “enlist the world’s most prominent architects,” and the development as a whole “blend[s] with the landscape rather than reshape[s] it.” 12 Aitken’s Mirage makes an appearance several times on the Desert Palisades website as a literal stand-in for the homes to be built there.

While Desert X’s didactic materials acknowledge Mirage’s relationship to land development, describing it as a “latter-day version of manifest destiny,” I would deny that this amounts to a critical stance on the part of either the biennial or the artist. Rather, Mirage cynically reproduces the logic of land use, exploitation, and development intrinsic to manifest destiny. In this way, the surface of Mirage not only reflects the exterior landscape and the people moving in its interior, but also the class fantasies of the thousands of people who visited it—whether virtually through social media or directly in person.

In her 2016 book, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler describes the reiterative character of postcolonialism—that is to say, colonialism’s continuing presence—via a sequence of Foucauldian genealogies. She asks: What have been the boundaries between camp and colony? How do concepts such as security, race, and truth mutate and come to mean differently in different eras? How have colonialist and imperialist formations rested on the enduring notions of states of exception? Duress is a key concept for Stoler, being “neither a thing nor an organizing principle so much as a relation to a condition, a pressure exerted, a troubled condition

8. Christopher Hawthorne, “Doug Aitken’s ‘Mirage’: A Funhouse Mirror in the Age of Social Media,” Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2017, http:// www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-buildingtype-aitken-mirage-house20170402-htmlstory.html; Janelle Zara, “Desert X: The Arid Exhibition That’s Bringing Land Art to Coachella,” The Guardian, February 28, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2017/feb/28/ desert-x-palm-springs-land-

art-doug-aitken; Karen Orton, “Watch Doug Aitken’s Mirrored Ranch House Transform Over Time,” The New York Times, March 21, 2017, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/03/21/tmagazine/art/doug-aitken-desert-x-mirage-ranch-house.html; and Henri Neuendorf, “Doug Aitken Brings Mind-Blowing ‘Mirage’ Installation to Desert X,” artnet.news, February 24, 2017, https://news.artnet.com/ exhibitions/doug-aitken-miragehouse-871748.

9. One might be tempted to

56

begin such a history with Dan Graham’s mirrored pavilions, a series begun in the late 1960s of sculptural/architectural forms in which the walls are variously made of glass and one-way or two-way mirrors. While it is true that these sculptures are sometimes placed outside, they are rarely site-specific or site-responsive, unlike Anish Kapoor’s “bean” and the Desert X projects. In Graham’s pavilions, the play between transparency, opacity, and reflectivity forces phenomenological and embod-

ied responses to an architecture that sometimes subverts its own solidity. This, I would argue, is much closer to the goals of minimalist and post-minimalist sculptural discourse than those of public art, to which it might be opposed.

10. Hawthorne, “Doug Aitken’s ‘Mirage.’”

11. “Vision,” Desert Palisades, http://www.desertpalisades. com/#vision.

12. Desert Palisades, http:// www.desertpalisades.com.

Doug Aitken, Mirage, 2017. Acrylic mirrors, steel, plywood, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Desert X. Photo: Lance Gerber.

Sherin Guirguis, Untitled (lahzet zaman), 2013. Mixed media on hand-cut paper, 108 × 72 in. Š Sherin Guirguis. Courtesy the artist.

borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and mind. It may bear no immediately visible sign or, alternatively, it may manifest in a weakened constitution and attenuated capacity to bear its weight. Duress is tethered to time but rarely in any predictable way.” 13 We might therefore surmise duress and its lexical mutations—endurance, durability, and duration—as a performative language naming the tensions and flexions of colonial power and its linguistic post-conditional. And as the writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, points out, colonization is something that happens not only in the external world, but in the mind and imagination as well.14 Describing the places where these colonial presences are felt is a key component of Stoler’s project, as she productively pushes against the notion of colonialism’s “abstract ‘legacies,’” instead preferring to “make room for the complex ways in which people can inhabit enduring colonial conditions that are intimately interlaced with a ‘postcolonial condition’ that speaks in the language of rights, recognitions, and choices that enter and recede from the conditions of duress that shape the life worlds we differently inhabit.” 15 But the potential pitfalls of such postcolonial projects are many. For example, one might only look for the places in which the colonial mimics the nation-state from which it sprang, rather than the other way around.16 Notions of internal/external—so important to a world order in which we are always home, and the other is always from elsewhere—would therefore be produced as stable and unconditional. Thus, we might want to invest some energy into thinking about the core difference between building a sculpture in the form of a three-bedroom house sited in the midst of an actual housing development, and building a home for pigeons on a nature preserve, a place protected (for the time being) from development.17 − One way in which the architecture of everyday life can be reformatted is through acts of political dissent, which transitions a familiar place into a site of extraordinary significance and enduring cultural relevance. This process is alluded to in Guirguis’s 2013 series Passages // Torroq, which reproduce architectural details from Cairo’s main train station. Untitled (lahzet zaman), (Untitled [moment in time] ), is fashioned after one of the most prominent features of the station, the windows and clock of the corner tower. In making this work Guirguis cut intricate patterns similar to those appearing in the screens of the station’s many windows into large sheets of paper. She then used an air pump to blow a multitude of colored inks around the paper, forming organic, branching structures. These ink passages encrust the otherwise carefully reconstructed geometric ornamentation. The edges of these architectural details of Cairo’s train station, are leafed in gold, like the pigeon roosts in One I Call, and the fluorescent-colored backside of the paper emits a glow when floated off the wall or frame.

13. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 7.

14. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African

Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), 71.

15. Stoler, Duress, 33.

16. Ibid., 193.

17. This is not to say that the logics of preserves, or national monuments (to namecheck

a protectionist form that has recently come under duress from the current administration), does not also play into colonial presence. It could be argued that preserves and monuments mark out a kind of

59

exceptional place, one that sidelines discussions of the ethics of land reservations “given” to America’s indigenous nations.

These works are not just formal reiterations of a place; they also connect to the continuing political presence of Egyptian feminism. The Cairo train station is notable because, in 1922, it became the site where Huda Sha’rawi publicly removed her veil upon her return from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance conference in Rome. A year later, Sha’rawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union. The act of Sha’rawi’s unveiling is often overinterpreted by Western feminists as an ur-feminist performance—a removal of the patriarchal structures that would otherwise cordon women’s bodies.

In this interpretation, veiling is assumed to be the central sign of women’s oppression, standing for more structural inequalities such as access to education, limits on property ownership and finances, and familial piety.18 As Leila Ahmed notes, the veil is “fraught with ancient patriarchal meanings,” but at the same time, Ahmed grants that “it also serves as a banner and call for justice—and yes, even for women’s rights.” 19 Most accounts of Sha’rawi’s unveiling fail to mention that she was already well known in nationalist and anti-colonialist movements. (Sha’rawi had organized an anti-British women’s rally in 1919.) She was also a widow. Both gave her greater social flexibility in public expression.20 More than an uncritical celebration of Sha’rawi’s act, Guirguis’s series renders in dichotomous geometric and organic forms—ruly and unruly—the ambiguity and ambivalence with which Sha’rawi’s act has been interpreted.

Two works in a parallel series, called Coops (also 2013)—Untitled (Noor El-Huda I) and Untitled (Noor El-Huda II)—stand out in this regard as well, and they arguably mark a transition from Passages // Torroq to One I Call.

The cut-paper matrices in these works resemble both Egyptian pigeon towers and covered bodies. As such, these works speak to the presence of people, in particular veiled people—women—as vital and necessary as indigenous architectural forms. Here, the gold-leafing of the figure’s edge breaks out of its strict architectonic deployment, and bleeds to the paper’s border. The boundaries—between wall and window, between figure and ground—are called into question.

Like the Cairo train station, the pigeon tower is not without political significance in Egypt. Most noteworthy are the events of 1906, when a clutch of British soldiers in the village of Dinshawai found easy sport in shooting pigeons as they emerged from their towers. To defend their livelihood, 18. For a more thorough analysis, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

19. Leila Ahmed, “Veil of Ignorance,” Foreign Policy, April 25, 2011, http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/04/25/veil-ofignorance-2.

20. Julia Lisiecka, “Rereading Huda Shaarawi’s ‘Harem Years’—Bargaining with the Patriarchy in the Changing Egypt,” The SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research 8 (2015): 46–58.

60

villagers attacked the British troops; during the clash, a soldier shot and wounded a local woman. Another soldier, running back to camp from where the fighting was taking place, collapsed and died—most likely of a heart attack. The British Consul-General of Egypt used this as a convenient opportunity to quash growing Egyptian nationalism, executing four villagers and sentencing dozens more to life imprisonment, hard labor, and public torture.21 Pigeon towers also have a long history in Persia—and their feathered inhabitants were likewise the subject of colonial appetites. The number of pigeon towers increased during the Safavid Dynasty at the end of the sixteenth century, with the reign of Shāh Abbās, who was known as a great builder of infrastructure.22 When Thomas Herbert, a minor aristocrat traveling with a party of royal ambassadors from England (and thus welcomed into Abbās’s court), published the first English-language account of Persia, in 1634, he made note of the pigeon towers outside Iṣfahān.23 His observations were echoed by subsequent travelers, such as James Justinian Morier, who journeyed through Persia in the early nineteenth century and noted: “In the environs of the city to the westward, near the Zainderood, are many pigeon-houses, erected at a distance from habitations, for the sole purpose of collecting pigeons’ dung for manure… The Persians do not eat pigeons, although we found them well-flavoured.” 24 To build her pigeon tower, Guirguis called upon the ingenuity of architect (and Rumi-translator) Nader Khalili. Born and raised in Tehran, and subsequently educated in Turkey and the United States, Khalili was an innovator in the realm of earth architecture. One I Call is made using Khalili’s SuperAdobe construction system, wherein burlap bags packed with an admixture of wet earth and stabilizers (such as lime or cement) are layered on top of one another, and the entire structure is covered with a mud and straw or lime plaster. For the project, Guirguis worked with a crew of the architect’s apprentices. (Khalili passed away in 2008.) This choice to reference Khalili through the sculpture’s production and materiality marks one of the primary ways in which One I Call diverges from the modus operandi of Desert X’s organizers. −

21. Details of the Dinshawai Incident related here come from the following sources: Wilfred Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: 1888–1914 (London: Martin Secker, 1932), 560–61; Laura Etheredge, “Dinshaway Incident,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, September 8, 2008, https://www.britannica. com/topic/Dinshaway-Incident; and Kimberly Alana Luke, “Peering Through the Lens of Dinshawai: British Imperialism

in Egypt 1882–1914,” PhD Dissertation, Florida State University, Tallahassee, 2010.

The fallout from the “Dinshawai incident” was swift and intense, sparking vigorous debate about the state of administration of England’s colonies, which can be tracked in a spate of angry and impassioned editorials in London’s papers.

22. R. M. Savory, “’Abbas I,” Encyclopædia Iranica I/3, 71–75, http://www.iranicaonline.org/

articles/abbas-i. Abbās consolidated land, controlled the silk trade, increased the standing army, and centralized the administration of the Persian empire. He also moved the Persian capital from Qazvin to Is. fahān in 1598, and thus the city became an important point of contact and habitation for outside traders and diplomatic parties from such far-flung places as England, Turkey, Georgia, China, and India (amongst others).

61

23. Ibid., and Thomas Herbert, Travels in Persia: 1627–1629 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 120.

24. James Justinian Morier, A Second Journey Through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to Constantinople, Between the Years 1810–1816 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 140–41.

In a 1984 conference sponsored by NASA, entitled Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, the majority of presenters merely transferred the logics of mining, military base-building, and industrial materials onto the new landscape of the moon. As if to highlight the colonialist rhetoric on display in the presentations, the published volume of the conference proceedings closes with a Ben Bova science fiction story, “Address Given at a Tricentennial Celebration 4 July 2076, by Leonard Vincennes, Official Historian of Luna City,” in which the narrator compares the settling of the moon with “Columbus’ landings in America that actually awakened the Europeans to the fact that a whole new world existed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.” 25 The volume’s cover is aptly illustrated by Pat Rawlings, who describes his image, in part, thusly: “Two inhabitants of the Moon overlook an advanced lunar installation from a museum construction site.” These two inhabitants, an adult and a child (evidenced by the Radio Flyer wagon filled with moon rocks), are the speculative fruits of NASA’s Apollo missions, now memorialized in said museum. The cover fancifully compresses the central tenets of the colonial imagination and familial transmission. Following Stoler’s genealogical excavation of camps and colonies, it would be interesting to add bases and installations to the list of colonial concepts that continue to signify—not to mention museums.

In contrast to his peers, Nader Khalili presented a paper at the same conference in which he elaborated his observations of adobe building techniques that he encountered in rural Iran. In that paper, “Magma, Ceramic, and Fused Adobe Structures Generated In-Situ,” his aim was to apply these centuries-old techniques to the lunar surface. Because of the lack of atmosphere and water on the moon’s surface (eliminating two of the four elements central to Khalili’s mystic notion of Yekta-i-Arkan, or unity of elements in architecture 26 ), Khalili proposed that focused sunlight could be used to heat and melt the lunar surface, creating shelter and roads. He also proposed a “giant potter’s wheel” for the “dynamic casting of ceramic and stoneware structures.” 27 But his real breakthrough was surmising that housing could be built from the principles of earth architecture—dry-packing, corbelling, and leaning-arches.28 He counters the confabulist fantasies of his scientific colleagues with a proposal grounded in the indigenous building traditions of Persia—of which the pigeon tower is but one example. In characteristic style, Khalili spoke the academic language of his audience (“ceramic-glass and/or other lunar fluxes may be added to the main composite for lowering the melting temperature”), but also pushed them toward more plainspoken arguments for a responsive architecture made from lunar regolith: “Each 25. Ben Bova, “Address Given at Tricentennial Celebration, 4 July 2076, by Leonard Vincennes, Official Historian of Luna City,” in Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, edited by W. W. Mendell (Houston, TX: Lunar and Planetary Institute, 1985), 857.

26. This notion of the unity of elements originates with a mystical experience that Khalili narrates in his second memoir.

He is on the beach, and says, “Spinning and dancing is not enough anymore. I jump out of my circle and run along the water a long long way. Stop when exhausted, then run into the sea. I dive into the cool water. Now the cool fire. Deep down in my heart I know that my discovery is right. I know from this moment on that water is fire. I am blessed to see a reality, the reality that: water is fire, fire is water, earth is water,

fire is earth, earth and air are water and fire, and that there are no four elements of earth, air, water, and fire. They are all the same. There is only one and not four or five or many elements. All things in the universe are but one. And the truth of unity is hidden behind a heavy locked door. I have no key. To see beyond I must break the door. I am the door.”

Nader Khalili, Sidewalks on the Moon: The Journey of a Mystic

62

Architect Through Tradition, Technology, and Transformation (Hesperia, CA: Cal-Earth Press, 1994), 150.

27. Nader Khalili, “Magma, Ceramic, and Fused Adobe Structures Generated In-Situ,” in Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, 401.

28. Ibid.

Pat Rawlings, Two Inhabitants of the Moon overlook an advanced lunar installation from a museum construction site. The original, primitive lunar base lies to the left of a large electromagnetic launch facility, which dominates the vista. An array of solar dynamic generators on the horizon supplement the power from a nuclear reactor to operate greenhouses, industrial processing plants, scientific research laboratories, and a spaceport, 1985. Cover illustration for Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, edited by W. W. Mendell (Houston, TX: Lunar and Planetary Institute, 1985). Š Pat Rawlings. Courtesy of Andy Campbell.

person going to the moon, regardless of his or her work, must be aware of these fundamental [earth-architecture] principles and techniques to participate in creating an indigenous architecture to form their communities, not only because of economic benefit but also because of spiritual reward.” 29 Khalili’s ideas, expounded upon five years later, in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering, was illustrated with a drawing of the “giant potter’s wheel” and mock-ups of shell structures. Also included was an architectural detail from the nineteenth-century Borujerdi House built by Ustad Ali Maryam in Kashan, Iran. This image is left strategically uncredited in the journal, and is accompanied instead by the caption: “Natural Lunar Contours Sculpted Using Magma Flows to Create Shielded Light Scoops and Radiation Vestibules.” In eliding the historical origin of the image, Khalili allows his audience to envision a future lunar architecture. Likewise, Khalili’s “Plan for Crater Base with Habitation and Workspace for 70 People,” a circular structure with radiating apses, shares much in common with the floor plans of Persian pigeon towers. In both instances, Khalili relies upon the visual and material culture of Persia without explicitly pointing to a place that was still aligned, in the minds of many US scientists, with religious fundamentalism and the hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran.

It was Khalili’s hope that this lunar architecture would spur an interest in earth-architecture on Earth proper. As he remarks in his memoir, Sidewalks on the Moon: “To put it very simply, if I can prove that to build with soil or rock is valid on the moon, it will become valid on the earth. …It means they will once again seriously use and improve on earth as a material to create shelters for the homeless. …The Third World does not need to buy building systems, it needs to get a cleaning job on their brain-washed opinions.” 30 In this respect, decolonization underlies Khalili’s revival and rearticulation of the vernacular building traditions of his homeland as filtered through the utopic imaginings of a lunar architecture. By making his work available to the galactic colonial ambitions of the United States, he hoped to accomplish something else altogether. This circuitous route towards solving some of the enduring concerns of global poverty evidences above all a resourceful rerouting of colonial logics.

Khalili could not afford to wait for others to catch on. In 1991, he founded the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (CalEarth) in Hesperia, California, an hour’s drive away from the Coachella Valley, site of Desert X. There he, his family, and his apprentices built prototypes of emergency housing, lunar and Martian shelters, communal meeting rooms, and, to prove to the American consumer that these techniques could result in a habitable first-world domain, a traditional three-bedroom, twobathroom house (named, perhaps winkingly, Earth One), all utilizing his SuperAdobe system. In 1998, Khalili and his academic collaborator Madhu Thangavelu (conductor of the Space Concepts Studio at University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering) staged a series of photographs around the exterior of Mars One, a structure built on CalEarth’s 29. Ibid., 403.

30. Khalili, Sidewalks on the Moon, 200.

64

land simulating what a lunar or Martian shelter might look like. In these images, Thangavelu, outfitted in a NASA space-suit, poses peering out of the window of the SuperAdobe domicile, looking as at home as the parent and child on the cover of the Lunar Bases book. Yet this speculative photoplay in San Bernadino County is an attempt to redirect the colonialist impulses displayed by the visuality of that book cover and the many papers contained therein. This brown spaceman, feet planted firmly on the ground, has brought lunar knowledge back to the galactopole, making a decolonial case for the work yet to be completed on Earth. − Guirguis’s One I Call operates similarly. Its presence among the sixteen projects commissioned by Desert X is unique in that it points to a history of building at once ancient and contemporary, and tied to the politics Khalili’s decolonial building practice. When it came time for the structure to be demolished, Guirguis insisted that the construction team, comprised of Khalili’s apprentices and the artist herself, demolish the structure. The hands that made One I Call were also the ones that unmade it, returning earth to earth. The sculpture’s temporal existence, unlike Aitken’s Mirage, won’t be replaced with a parody of mid-century modern design. Rather, it was there, and now it’s gone. The discourses of speculative development (one of colonialism’s favorite forms) ventriloquized and promoted in Aitken’s project are as likely to endure as any other colonialist project, but under these conditions of duress, those of us who seek a better world turn toward rethinking and reengaging with the past. In doing so, we make a far more durable home.31 Andy Campbell is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at USC-Roski School of Art and Design. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

31. Special thanks are due to Sherin Guirguis who, over the course of several conversations, shared some of the thinking behind One I Call, and to Sheefteh Khalili, daughter of Nader Khalili, whose sustained enthusiasm for this essay and gracious permission to reproduce her father’s work here is something I won’t soon forget.

65

Andrew Stefan Weiner Emergency, Resistance, Futurity: Aesthetic Responses to Trumpism

Late in the twentieth century, at a moment that now seems both impossibly distant and uncannily close—a moment when Donald Trump was merely a national embarrassment, not a global nightmare—Jean-François Lyotard compared the Holocaust to an earthquake so powerful as to destroy the very instruments meant to record it.1 While Trumpism and Trump bear only a limited resemblance to Nazism and Hitler, Lyotard’s analogy is nevertheless useful as a way to reframe the election as a kind of limit-event: a quasi-unforeseeable occurrence whose causes and consequences resist or exceed the concepts by which one tries to grasp them.

Commentators from across the ideological spectrum have lamented how many of Trump’s actions transgress long-established bipartisan limits by either ignoring or assaulting the codes governing typical political conduct. The fact that this compulsive norm-breaking has itself in many ways been normalized—Trump supporters tend to regard these transgressions as negligible, as “politics as usual,” or as entertainment—is one of the most disturbing developments of the last year, insofar as it speaks to the ignorance, apathy, or alienation of tens of millions of Americans, not to mention the widely shared, barely sublimated wish to destroy the institutions of liberal democracy.

That said, it is equally troubling (but less often noted) that Trump and Trumpism—the toxic mixture of interests, fantasies, and ideologies that bind together the president’s most fervent proponents—seem to have affected American politics at the level of its most fundamental relations to the sensible and the intelligible. It is not an exaggeration to say that the election altered people’s very ability to imagine or recognize what sort of events are possible, whether in electoral politics or in the public sphere more generally.

Last year’s ubiquitous discussions of “post-election trauma” made it clear that countless people felt a sense of invasive injury or anxious disorientation, as if their innermost beliefs had somehow been harmed or falsified.

Such responses indicate that the effects of the election are aesthetic in the most general, least art-specific sense, in that they concern the connections that link sensation with representation, recognition, imagination, and action.

1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 56.

66

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Who will write the history of tears?), 2011. Archival pigment print, 32 Ă— 50 in.

Courtesy of the artist and Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

The problem is not just that the events of the last year seem weirdly weightless and unreal, as if such things should be impossible; it’s also that unthinkable events happen every single day. Even though many of these incidents are laughable, their ceaseless accumulation exerts subtle, powerful, and malign effects on our senses and thoughts, which in turn structure our most fundamental feelings about ourselves and each other. Many of us have developed even more obsessive relationships with the phones that we carry with us everywhere: we lie awake anxiously ruminating after getting a news alert at 3:00 a.m.; we conduct impassioned Facebook debates from the toilet. Others rage, or go numb, or do their best to unplug. Most of us seem to suffer from the uncanny feeling of having been cast in a fourth-rate reality TV show.

It is not just American society or politics that have been irreversibly damaged, but something as abstract as our relationships to time and to each other, even to reality itself (assuming that term means anything anymore).

If the present often feels like too much to process, or even to acknowledge, the near-past now appears to exist on the far side of an unbridgeable gap.

Emails from October, photographs from last summer’s vacation—these now look like artifacts of a different, pre-“post-truth” historical era. Much as recent memories now seem to have been retroactively contaminated, one struggles to anticipate a familiar, livable future. It is all but impossible to imagine the conditions under which this text might be read some months from now. Will the current regime manage to stay in power and beat back the metastasizing challenges to its legitimacy? If not, what sort of future exists for Trumpism without Trump? Most troublingly, what kinds of lasting or irreversible damage might yet be set in motion?

While it is still too soon to hazard any kind of guess how these changes will develop in the longer term, or even about six months from now, we are far enough into Trump’s presidency to begin to discern clear tendencies in the evolving relations between art, aesthetics, and politics. In venturing such an assessment, this essay proceeds from the hope that this kind of critical thinking might still be relevant in the near future, and that a concern for sustainability will outlast the current conjuncture, in which the very concept of collective survival seems threatened.

— For countless people worldwide, the immediate aftermath of the election was marked by shock, revulsion, and intense and constant scrutiny.

Despite all the complicated issues in play—including the demographic shifts and voter suppression efforts underlying Trump’s electoral college victory, the errors that caused Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse, the culpability of the mainstream media, and the impact of seemingly exogenous factors (Russian hacking and quite possibly collusion, fake news, social media bubbles, James Comey’s October surprise)—a small group of simple questions quickly became the most urgent: What the hell just happened?

What comes next? And what can I/we possibly do? For people working in different sectors of the art world, these considerations were augmented by concerns about what, if anything, art and its institutions might be able to do under such conditions.

68

Although people answered these questions in any number of ways, one common response resembled triage, in that it sought to identify and address the gravest, most immediate threats posed by the incumbent regime. For those who made decisions according to something like a hierarchy of needs, matters pertaining to art and culture were generally preempted by concerns for the safety and rights of others: friends, colleagues, neighbors, strangers.

It was almost instantaneously clear that the dangerous and injurious effects of the election were not being felt equally. Instead, they more or less tracked the highly uneven distribution of vulnerability and dispossession within the United States.

This imbalance is of course present in the art world, and it is especially acute in contemporary art institutions, many of which transfer massive amounts of cultural and financial capital while depending on different forms of unwaged or unsustainable labor. While condemnation of Trumpism has been virtually unanimous in this sphere (apart from a few high-profile instances of trolling), it has only seldom been recognized that many members of the self-designated “resistance” are effectively shielded by various kinds of privilege.2 The prevailing assumption is that Trump’s election was a universal trauma, but not everyone suffers from an increased risk of hate crimes or potential deportation or loss of necessary health care.

It is telling that some of the most incisive thinking about these discrepancies has come not from the likes of established art critics Peter Schjeldahl and Roberta Smith, but rather from women of color working largely outside mainstream institutions. In a trenchant text from early January 2017, the Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh emphasized the need to “align more intentionally with those who have had no choice but to stand up against white supremacy and xenophobia, institutional erasures, sexual violence, or strangling economic policies, beyond the United States as well as in our backyards.” 3 Against the idea that such threats are somehow new or come solely from red states, Ganesh called attention to the ways in which they are manifested within and across the contemporary art world and urged a bolder confrontation with the realities of privilege and complicity.

Before Hannah Black penned her much-publicized open letter about the Whitney Biennial, she argued that liberal outrage about Trump’s supposed fascism concealed his essential continuities with prior presidents and with the constitutive links between slavery and the American state: “The U.S. [has been] a white supremacist state since its foundation... Capitalists have been eating us alive for a very long time.” 4 As such analyses made clear, protest would be merely symbolic if it could not contest Trumpism along multiple axes: not just in its many contingent manifestations, but also at the level of its structural determinations.

2. For a critical discussion of the controversies surrounding the reactionary provocations of the London art space LD50, see Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Artwashing: NRx and the Alt-Right,” Texte

zur Kunst 106 (June 2017), 162–70.

3. Chitra Ganesh, “Unpresidented Times,” Artforum. com, January 11, 2017, https:// www.artforum.com/slant/

69

id=65829.

4. Hannah Black, “New World Disorder,” Artforum.com, February 27, 2017, https:// www.artforum.com/slant/ section=slant#entry66897.

We need to talk…, installation view, Petzel, New York, January 7–February 11, 2017. Courtesy of the artists and Petzel, New York.

Such distinctions are essential if one wishes to navigate the waves of anti-Trump activity that continue to sweep through the art world, in that they suggest criteria for critically evaluating tactics of resistance: Do such practices help us understand and oppose Trumpism in terms of its constitutive aesthetic and political conditions of possibility? Or are they ultimately more concerned with specific symptoms than with a more systematic pathology? Can they elucidate the ways in which art institutions have enabled or stand to profit from Trump’s ascendancy? Could they be used to develop scalable, easily replicated strategies for combatting Trumpist ideology, or for assisting those who now find themselves at increased risk?

When Richard Prince went on Twitter to annul his authorship of a 2014 painting of Ivanka Trump’s Instagram feed (which Ivanka had subsequently Instagrammed), the gesture was characterized as a rebuff to the First Daughter and her father.5 Insofar as Prince’s renunciation troubled basic assumptions about aesthetic value, cultural capital, and intellectual property, it was more interesting than any work he has produced in recent memory. As politics, however, it reeked of bad faith, recalling the psychoanalytic sense of disavowal as the denial of a potentially traumatic perception. Prince attempted to publicly purify himself and his brand, but he said little about the circumstances under which the original painting was commissioned. He also did not confront his art advisors or gallerists with questions about their dealings with the Trump family or call on other artists in Ivanka Trump’s collection—prominent names include Christopher Wool, Nate Lowman, and Dan Colen—to follow his lead in disavowing their works and returning the money she had paid for them.

Other responses from within the commercial art world exhibited fewer compromises but nevertheless ran up against similar constraints. One of the few blue-chip New York galleries to alter their programming after the election was Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The gallery hosted a group show in January called We need to talk...; the proceeds benefitted activist organizations chosen jointly by the artist and purchaser. Inviting a considerable amount of visitor participation—through hosting open conversations on relevant subjects and screening videos submitted through an open call—the exhibition broke with typical Chelsea protocol. Despite these efforts at topicality, however, the show struggled with the fact that few artists were able to respond quickly enough; much of the art in the show predated the election, some of it by decades. While some work came across as newly relevant—this was the case with lesser-known but searing text pieces by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer—much of it was either weakly connected to the moment (flags, more flags) or reliant on bumper-sticker messaging and easy caricature.

This ultimately kept the show from getting much beyond a well-intentioned but largely impotent sentiment of liberal urgency: Something must be done, but what?

5. See, for example, Randy Kennedy, “Richard Prince, Protesting Trump, Returns Art Payment,” The New York Times, January 12, 2017.

72

Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays (detail), 1979–82. Lithographs offset prints (12 prints), 10 × 10 in. (each). Courtesy of the artist.

In contrast, the most powerful and promising early initiatives refused institutionalized conventions and acted from a more expansive, transversal idea of what aesthetics might mean in this conjuncture and how that could matter. One crucial objective of such projects was to develop a much more trenchant analysis of the political economy of contemporary art. Working alongside fair housing activists, a group of artists in California scored an important early victory in December when they successfully petitioned the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to remove Steven Mnuchin from its board. Mnuchin, now Secretary of the Treasury, had previously led OneWest Bank, which was notorious for aggressively pursuing unethical foreclosures in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.6 One of the organizers of the Los Angeles-based group APAN (Artist Political Action Network), artist Andrea Fraser, is currently researching a book documenting other plutocratic influences on U.S. museums. One prominent example is Museum of Modern Art president Marie-Josée Kravis, whose financier husband donated lavishly to Trump’s inauguration fund.7 In a sign of how class disparities can nevertheless structure even the more progressive sectors of the art world, in February, activists opposing local gentrification picketed an APAN meeting at an art space in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. A tense debate about the art world’s relationship to gentrification has played out in the subsequent months.8 A parallel project was developed in New York by the collective Occupy Museums, which collaborated with the Guerrilla Girls on a campaign targeting BlackRock CEO and MoMA trustee Larry Fink, who served as an adviser to the Trump transition.9 Building on momentum generated by the #J20 Art Strike, an effort to organize a coordinated demonstration of noncompliance through mass closures of art institutions (and another flashpoint for anti-elitist grievances), the collective also helped organize the antifascist Speak Out on Inauguration Day at the Whitney Museum. Drawing together an exemplary roster of speakers—artists alongside activists, curators, writers, and others working between these fields—the speak-out functioned not just as a kind of counter-inaugural event but also as an effort to jointly develop an alternative public sphere premised on active resistance.10 The event made it compellingly clear that such opposition would need to negotiate incommensurable differences while establishing sustainable forms of solidarity, and that the ambiguity and opacity of art might provide valuable resources for inventing new modes of ungovernability.

—

6. See Matt Stromberg, “Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Pick, Resigns from LA Museum Board,” Hyperallergic.com, December 7, 2016.

7. See Dan Duray, “Andrea Fraser Tracks Down Museum Trustees’ Political Donations,” The Art Newspaper, June 7, 2017.

8. One flashpoint was an open letter written by the artist Charles Gaines, which circulated on the APAN Listserv; a rebuttal of Gaines’s claims, along with a link to his original letter, can be found here: https://hyperallergic. com/382283/a-boyle-heightsalliance-challenges-charlesgaines-and-other-artists-for-

ignoring-local-voices/.

9. See, for example, Hrag Vartanian, “Protesters Demand MoMA Drop Trump Advisor from Its Board,” Hyperallergic. com, February 22, 2017.

10. Full disclosure: I took part in this event in my capacity as one of the organizers of the activist group Sense of Emergency, and later wrote a

74

critical text from the standpoint of a participant-observer. See Andrew Weiner, “A Showing of Solidarity on Inauguration Day,” Hyperallergic.com, January 30, 2017. For a list of participants, see http://whitney.org/Events/ SpeakOut.

Occupy Museums and Guerrilla Girls call for Larry Fink's removal from the Board of Trustees at Museum of Modern Art, February 17, 2017. Courtesy of Noah Fischer. Photo: Zaid Islam.

Pamela Sneed at Speak Out on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Organized by Occupy Museums and Education Department at the Whitney Museum. Courtesy of Noah Fischer.

Photo: Noah Fischer

In the months since the inauguration, it has become painfully obvious that there was real reason to treat Trump’s election as a massive emergency. Working in conjunction with a Republican Congress, the administration has been able to steal a Supreme Court seat for the arch-reactionary justice Neil Gorsuch and to ram through the nominations of utterly unqualified ideologues to key cabinet positions. The Republican administration has initiated the unilateral rollback of important regulations concerning education, foreign policy, and environmental protections, the most egregious example being the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Given the administration’s determination to overturn the Affordable Care Act, it remains quite possible that over 20 million Americans will lose health insurance; nonpartisan sources quoted in the Washington Post estimate that over 20,000 of them would die as a result.11 As of this writing, major government agencies are still so understaffed that some commentators have wondered whether the failure is actually part of a plan to realize Steve Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction [sic] of the administrative state.”

Yet Trump’s first months in office have also been ludicrous, a grotesque pageant of greed, fecklessness, idiocy, malice, pettiness, delusion, and ineptitude.

Even though the president theoretically poses just as much or more danger than he did in January, the more he acts like a parody of his already selfparodic persona, the less people are able to take him seriously. Following a disastrous period of self-inflicted wounds in May, references to impeachment and Watergate became commonplace in the mainstream media.

Whether or not Trump’s enablers manage to keep him in office, political observers give the administration little chance of realizing any of its most threatening objectives. People don’t speak so much any more about Trump as a fascist; it would seem that actual fascists command more respect, or are at least more skilled at being fascist. Although no one on the left is exactly feeling relieved—and it would be a huge mistake to discount the threats still posed by the administration—there is nevertheless a sense that at least some of the attention that has been so intently directed toward the White House can be focused on long-term strategies that could neutralize Trumpism, which now appears certain to outlast its namesake.

For those who think about this problem in terms of the politics of representation, perhaps the most important post-inauguration development has been the emergence of a broad-based and hotly contested set of debates about white supremacy in American culture and society. Although disagreements over what is now called “cultural appropriation” have a long, tortuous history, in recent years they have become ever more frequent, charged, and direct, in large part due to the ascendance of the Black Lives Matter movement. Whereas, until recently, terms like white supremacy,

11. See Philip Bump, “The Hard-To-Answer Question at the Core of the Health-Care Fight: How Many More People Might Die?”, The Washington Post, June 27, 2017.

77

structural racism, and intersectionality were only used by critical race theorists and activists, they now appear regularly in more mainstream venues, like Artforum and The New Republic.

The controversy surrounding Dana Schutz’s painting in the recent Whitney Biennial—Open Casket (2016), which depicts the 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till—and Hannah Black’s aforementioned response highlighted the implications of these questions in the contemporary art world.

An enormous amount of attention has already been devoted to this episode and its relation to Trumpian politics, as well as to larger questions about censorship and free speech.12 Most of this debate centered on questions about Black, Schutz, the Biennial’s curators, and the painting, displaying a strange aversion to thinking critically about how art institutions perpetuate (and in some sense are organized around) different forms of inequality, exclusion, and structural racism. It is hard not to regard the Schutz affair as a huge missed opportunity to engage the much more difficult and necessary process of confronting this subject.

As with the analogous controversy that played out in 2016 around Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis—in which Walker’s appropriations of photographs depicting police violence against black civil rights protesters were denounced as offensive, spurring demands for a boycott—the racism of the institution seemed to reside not so much in any particular curatorial decision but rather in its unwillingness to engage its critics swiftly and seriously.13 Instead of initiating a real reckoning with social and cultural injustice, these museums bumbled around for weeks in damage-control mode, generally acting as if they had something to hide.

One encouraging sign that such defensive dynamics might be loosening their hold came in May, after members of the Dakota community protested the exhibition of Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012) at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The community claimed that the work disrespected the history of racist murders of their ancestors by the American state. Immediately after learning of these charges, Durant joined with Olga Viso, the Walker’s executive director, in publicly reaching out to Dakota representatives to negotiate a way forward; together they decided to remove the sculpture and let the Dakota dispose of it however they saw fit.

Despite initial indications that the situation might occasion another misguided “free speech” debate, there were substantial differences between the events at the Walker and those at the Whitney, starting with the fact that Durant has a record of addressing histories of racial violence in his practice. The most important difference is not that Durant acted “woke” or that he somehow “caved” to the complaints of a marginalized group but rather that he and the museum were willing to openly consider the fact that the most basic elements of the work in question are themselves inextricable 12. For one representative survey of this controversy, see Brian Boucher, “Social Media Erupts as the Art World Splits in Two Over Dana Schutz Controversy,” artnet.com, March 24, 2017.

13. For an overview of the controversy, see Brian Boucher, “Artist’s Depiction of Police Brutality Sparks Boycott at St. Louis Museum,” artnet.com, September 23, 2016.

78

Parker Bright protests in front of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till at the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Courtesy of Parker Bright. Photo: Michael Bilsborough.

from the history the work meant to criticize. In this case, the problems are even more deep-seated than in Open Casket, since they concern not just the privilege or right to select a certain subject, or the power to determine its meaning, but rather the incommensurable differences between culturally specific ontologies of art.

One might ask whether Scaffold therefore somehow “succeeded” as a work of art, despite its original conception. But the essential question should be how this movement toward a more rigorously self-reflexive analysis might be extended and replicated elsewhere. The relatively unprecedented nature of the response to the Dakota complaints has foregrounded a crucial problem: namely, how it might be possible for white artists and historically white institutions to develop something like an immanent critique of white supremacy, and how such efforts could be best aligned with the sometimes divergent cultural politics of different anti-racist movements, especially among people of color.

However necessary and well-intentioned these efforts might be, they will likely amount to little unless they can effectively respond to any number of complicated demands. It remains to be seen how (or even whether) such work might be carried out without enabling essentialisms, reproducing certain kinds of privilege, or perpetuating a kind of “white savior complex.”

Neither is it at all clear how resistance might be nurtured in the places where it is most needed: outside isolated enclaves of cultural and economic privilege, in the huge swaths of exurban and rural America whose dispossession and downward mobility have catalyzed emergent forms of toxic white nationalist politics, a phenomenon that includes but isn’t limited to the mediagenic tactics of the alt-right.

A related issue concerns the sort of burdens that art assumes when it is basically enlisted in the service of restorative justice. How can art serve such a purpose and still account for its constitutive limitations, if not its own tendencies toward purposelessness? Can this kind of cultural remediation advance independently of political and economic reform? Or might it somehow be acting to compensate for American society’s general failure to adopt these more significant types of change? And at what point do such radically democratic aspirations come into conflict with the fact that even ostensibly “populist” forms of contemporary art still tend to require highly exclusive levels of education and class privilege? The fact that such questions don’t lend themselves to simple or definitive responses suggests that they are the ones that most deserve our attention, and they are the ones that might yet harbor some generative potential at a moment when all that seems certain is further uncertainty.

Andrew Stefan Weiner is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU–Steinhardt, and an editor of the journal ARTMargins.

80

Devon Tsuno Senbikigoi 千匹鯉 (One Thousand Carp)

Text by Jon Leaver

Devon Tsuno’s work developed out of his recreational and artistic relationship with the waterways of Los Angeles. For most of his life he has fished the various ponds, creeks, and tributaries of the L.A. River, but more recently he has also looked there to find the subject matter for his paintings— diaphanously layered, intensely colored images of water and vegetation. Other aspects of Tsuno’s fishing inform his work too, most notably the conservationism he attributes to being in nature so frequently from a young age. Many of his recent projects have a social, activist element, encouraging participants to appreciate and conserve the unique ecosystem of the L.A. watershed. His work highlights the history and diversity of these aquatic habitats (often, significantly, rich in species introduced from elsewhere—notably, the common carp), but also their ecological precariousness.

The current project for X-TRA is part of Los Angeles River Carp Fishery Sustainability Act (C.F.S.A.), an ongoing series of works by Tsuno that invite viewers to reconsider their relationship to the L.A. River, its flora and fauna. Here, Tsuno invites X-TRA readers to participate in the project by folding origami carp using the patterned paper you will find overleaf. The paper approximates the smallest sizes of traditional origami—three-inch and six-inch squares. Readers are invited to cut out four pieces of paper and fold each of them into miniature Los Angeles River Carp following the instructions provided. The accompanying text alludes to the history of the practice of origami in Japan as well as the more troubling associations it has in the recent history of the United States—tying together personal narratives with the intersecting histories in which they played a part.

A boy and his father set out with rods and tackle to fish a lake in a park in Baldwin Hills. The park is not far from La Cienega Boulevard, which cuts through the center of Los Angeles. During the long dry periods of the summer, lakes and streams grow murky, but the boy and his father catch carp, which thrive in this habitat—unlike some other species, they have a natural inclination to persevere in adverse conditions. One can track the city’s water to many sources—lakes like this one, reservoirs, native aquifers, the Colorado River; each of these watercourses traces unseen histories across the landscape. Follow one of them, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, two hundred and fifty miles north and it skirts the site of the Manzanar camp where, during World War II, more than ten thousand Japanese Americans were incarcerated under armed guard. There, kids snuck out of camp at night to fish for trout in the tributaries of the Owens River.

On another day, the boy’s grandmother gives him Sakura oil pastels and washi paper. He folds origami fish and makes patterns with the pastels.

The grandmother’s parents came from Japan, but she does not mention the cultural origin of the materials to her grandson, and the significance of the gesture only occurs to him many years later. Fittingly, traditional origami animals often have hidden meanings: carp, for example, stand appropriately for perseverance; the most traditional shape of all, the crane, for longevity. This symbolism is an undercurrent of the first extant book on the subject, Hiden Senbazuru Orikata (The secret of folding one thousand cranes), published in Japan in 1797, which contains illustrated instructions on how to fold interconnected chains of origami cranes; each illustration is accompanied by a poem reflecting on each chain’s veiled significance. Its author envisions multiplicities of arrangements, each one resonant with social, familial, and personal meaning: cranes are grouped in complex, cascading flocks; others fly side by side; some are set in intimate groups, beaks touching as though kissing. Yet the essence of origami is that it unites the practical and the metaphysical. Hiden Senbazuru Orikata is at once a set of instructions on how to manipulate a material and a meditation on the fundamental mutability of the physical world. It emphasizes the way the seemingly simple sheet of washi paper in your hand can be transformed through the act of folding into something radically new and different—something almost alive. 82

Washi paper has been produced in Japan using traditional methods for over a thousand years, but making a sheet involves a similarly pivotal moment of change that is central to the nature of the material itself: as the saturated cellulose fibers are gathered into a frame and set to dry, their delicate tubular structure collapses, becoming flat and ribbon-like. The microscopic framework resulting from this collapse—randomly dispersed, flattened fibers, woven minutely together—gives the paper its distinctive qualities: its strength and pliability and the sheen of its surface. In spite of its deep historical roots, these characteristics make washi paper feel like a distinctly modern material. The fibers themselves, made from the bark of the mulberry or gampi trees, are never allowed to dry out during the preparatory phases of the paper-making process, during which they are soaked, boiled and beaten. Water is a critical element; if the fibers dry prematurely the process must begin again.

In the period before the sheet is formed, they are suspended in water in large wooden vats, the fibers only a tiny fraction of the solution’s volume. Their removal from the water is a moment of gathering and dispersion, of coalescence and distribution.

There is an allegory in this, of course. The fibers are traditions and the water the social currents that shape them; at decisive moments, traditional practices coalesce, cultural forms solidifying when removed from the flow of habitual social life. For Japanese Americans, paper folding was one such form, brought to the surface at a time of crisis. While interned, Japanese Americans folded paper wagasa umbrellas using only the materials available to them in the camps. They fashioned these delicate objects out of cigarette packet wrappers, using toothpicks as a frame.

When camp authorities prohibited overtly Buddhist and Shinto religious practices, origami, steeped as it was in traditional symbolism, became a way to honor and pass on religious ideas and traditions. I make a point of these intersecting histories, but origami is also a form that draws us into the ever-evolving present.

It forces its maker to pay attention to the now of the fold, and its transformative potential, fulfilling the quintessential modernist imperative of uniting the transient and the eternal.

—Jon Leaver

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Cut out origami paper into four and fold each piece into Los Angeles River Carp. Post photos of your origami carp on Instagram #larivercarp #xtraartjournal @larivercarp @xtraartjournal.

Devon Tsuno is a native of Los Angeles. His recent abstract paintings, social-practice projects, artist’s books, and print installations focus on the Los Angeles watershed, water use, and native versus non-native vegetation. Tsuno is a 2017 Santa Fe Art Institute Water Rights artist-in-residence, the 2016 SPArt Community Grantee, and was awarded a 2014 California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship for Visual Art. His long-term interest in bodies of water in the Los Angeles area has been central to his collaborations with the Department of Cultural Affairs, Big City Forum, Theodore Payne Foundation, grantLOVE Project, and Occidental College. Tsuno has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Venice Beach Biennial, Venice, California; Current: LA Water Public Art Biennial, Los Angeles; the US Embassy in New Zealand; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indiana; and Roppongi 605, in Tokyo. He received an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2005 and a BFA from California State University Long Beach in 2003 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Dominguez Hills.

Jon Leaver is Professor of Art History at the University of La Verne. His research focuses on nineteenth-century art and criticism as well as the contemporary art of Los Angeles.

Gwyneth Shanks Adobe, Dust, and Water: Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez’s building: a simulacrum of power

Visiting the Bowtie in the spring, I stood on the expanse of asphalt that dominates the public park and greenway and looked out across the nearby Los Angeles River. The cracked surface—once a roadway—stretched ahead of me, following the curves of the river. A former rail yard and switching station, the Bowtie was purchased by the California State Parks Department in 2003. Eighteen acres in total, the public park abuts the section of the L.A. River known as the Glendale Narrows, a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of the river that is “soft bottom,” meaning water flows atop a natural dirt bed rather than concrete. The day I visited it was hot, and the palm trees offered little respite from the sun. Still, the river was swollen with water and clogged with vegetation after the winter rains of January and February 2017. It was here, in summer 2014, that Los Angeles-based performance artist Rafa Esparza and choreographer Rebeca Hernandez performed their collaborative piece, building: a simulacrum of power. The piece was presented at the height of California’s drought, when the Bowtie was a dusty stretch of asphalt and quickly browning plants.

Building merged Esparza’s durational performance practice with Hernandez’s training as a contemporary dancer and choreographer. The work was performed atop an expanse of adobe pavers—handmade by Esparza and his friends and family in the months leading up to the performance—which blanketed Michael Parker’s sculptural work, The Unfinished (2014). Parker’s earthwork was created by excavating several feet down through the road’s surface, leaving behind an obelisk-shaped outline. The performance began with Hernandez and three additional dancers—Victoria Wolfe, Olivia Orozco, and Devon Stern—performing a set piece of choreography that was largely contained within the excavated trench around The Unfinished. Their movements, slow and sustained, seemed an attempt to enshroud themselves in a fine layer of dirt and dust. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and plaid shirts, the dancers’ costumes offered protection from the hard cracked earth and were also meant to reference the informal uniform of many day laborers in Los Angeles and across the southwestern United States. Hernandez’s half of building proposed, if not an equivalence, a relationship between the dancers’ movements and the low-wage and often racially delimited work of day laborers.

The second half of building was a solo durational performance by Esparza.

Throughout Hernandez’s piece, he stood at the tip of Parker’s obelisk holding a one-foot diameter mirror, refracting the sun’s setting rays onto the adobe and his collaborators’ bodies. Esparza, half naked, wore a skirt made 89

Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014. Rafa Esparza performs on the site of Michael Parker’s The Unfinished (2014) at the Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, August 24, 2014.

Courtesy of Alexis Chanes. Photo: Alexis Chanes.

of fabric remnants embroidered with Aztec motifs. In his hair was a bundle of long feathers, and chachayotes, or rattles, around his ankles sounded with each of his steps. Esparza began with a modified Danza Azteca water dance that carried him around the crowd of spectators. Finishing his circuit, he stepped back onto the performance space and began an excruciating crawl on his stomach down the length of the adobe-covered obelisk, which brought to mind Pope L.’s performance Tompkins Square Crawl (1991).

Reaching the end of the playing space, he performed a series of concluding ritual gestures, culminating in the burning of a sage plant.

This is an essay on water, which is to say it is an essay about watersheds, municipal management, urban development, and environmental restoration efforts. Water, or its absence, has long played a defining role in Los Angeles’s aesthetic imaginaries and its urban planning. Over the past decade, municipal leaders and real estate developers have worked in concert, reimagining the city’s relationship to water, in particular the Los Angeles River, which since the 1930s has been almost entirely encased in concrete, to control seasonal flooding. Radically transformed from any sort of “natural” state, the river is also polluted.1 Not until 2010 was it declared fully and entirely protected under the 1972 Clean Water Act. Following this ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency, the city of Los Angeles and the US Army Corps of Engineers, as well as a host of private real estate developers, have begun to reimagine the river, aiming to position Los Angeles as a leader in urban environmental restoration.

Such efforts have included public art commissions, biennials, and programming in waterfront spaces. From September 2014 through September 2015, Project 51, a collective of artists, designers, urban planners, writers, and educators, organized a series of community events and performances on or near the L.A. River, titled Play the LA River. In summer 2016, Los Angeles launched its inaugural public art biennial, Current: LA; the theme of the biennial was water. Since 2015, Clockshop, an artist-run organization that commissions artworks, has managed the Bowtie, which now contains a number of semi-permanent sculptural installations, including Parker’s The Unfinished. The Glendale Narrows, in particular—ideal for environmental restoration—has garnered much of the city’s attention. Indeed, on my recent visit to the Bowtie, the river’s eyots were lush with vegetation, and gulls, ospreys, and swifts circled above the river. But the Bowtie still bears the infrastructural traces of its industrial past. The cracked asphalt road is chief among these traces, but, also, on the other side of the road is a

1. The Los Angeles River has been nominally protected since the landmark Clean Water Act passage in 1972. However, a 2008 petition from a rancher in the Santa Susanna Mountains, who was hoping to build a roadway over tributaries that fed the river, threatened the nominal protections the act assured communities who lived near the river. Through an odd quirk of the Clean Water Act’s provi-

sions, the only way to ensure that the rancher’s request was turned down and the river was firmly protected from future similar requests was to prove that the Los Angeles River—for much of the year barely a trickle of water over concrete embankments—was fully navigable.

Heather Wylie, a frustrated Army Corps employee, and a small group of environmental activists successfully charted a

course to kayak down the entire length of the river in 2008. Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the river “fully navigable-in-fact,” ensuring that it and the larger watershed that impacts the river would remain protected by the Clear Water Act. At the press conference announcing the ruling, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson proclaimed, “We want the L.A.

91

River to demonstrate how urban waterways across the country can serve as assets in building stronger neighborhoods.” Hayden Coplen, “How Kayaking Saved the L.A. River,” Gear Patrol, February 2, 2016, https://gearpatrol. com/2016/02/02/how-kayaking-saved-los-angeles-river/.

rusted chain-link fence, abandoned railroad lines, and further, the graffiti covered walls of a block of bleached-out warehouses. Dotting the roadway are some half-dozen art installations, though, curated by Clockshop, which have begun to transform the largely industrial-looking space into something resembling an art park.

An important element of projects like Current: LA or Play the LA River is a focus on environmental restoration: on re-greening post-industrial urban spaces through art. But urban environmental revitalization can occlude the interrelated concerns of racial and ethnic justice and thus function as a neocolonial project.2 By analyzing building, which was curated by Clockshop, this essay expands upon an emerging body of post- and neo-colonial scholarship that imagines anew the relationships between water, power, and dispossession.3 Building drew upon Azteca iconography and a gestural vocabulary that evoked pre-Columbian ritual practices, variously surfacing the racialization of manual labor in Southern California and histories of colonization, questioning to whom the L. A. River belongs. This essay, then, is also about histories of colonization, forms of municipal exclusion and segregation, and the ways in which a set of urban imaginaries that runs counter to those of municipal or corporate interests rises to the surface of intelligibility through performance.

In 2014, California was in the second year of its historic drought, and little water was flowing in the adjacent river. Hernandez recalls that clouds of dust filled the dry air throughout the summer, blanketing the roadway and scant vegetation with a thin layer of brown.4 That dust, as well as Esparza’s adobe pavers, created a performance filled with and grounded by brown particle matter. The interaction of Esparza, Hernandez, and spectators’ bodies with the material and elemental components of the performance— dust, dirt, and asphalt—drew stark attention to the thing that was absent: water. To follow performance and queer studies scholar José Muñoz, building was a performance of brown-becoming, located in the elemental space between absent water and dust clouds, cracked asphalt, and adobe brick.5 As Muñoz argues, feeling brown is grounded in the ways certain historically delimited communities “feel” differently or, rather, “don’t feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.” 6 To feel brown, in Muñoz’s conception of the term, is not necessarily tied to one’s racialized identity, but rather indicates an affective position toward normative notions of affect and comportment, power and agency linked to whiteness and straightness. My use of Muñoz’s brown feelings, or brownbecoming, is not meant to map onto Hernandez and Esparza’s own subject

2. May Joseph and Sofia Varino, “Aquapelagic Assemblages: Performing Water Ecology and Harmattan Theater,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, nos. 1–2 (2017): 151–66.

3. See, for example, May Joseph, Fluid New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013) and Christina Sharp, In the Wake: On Blackness and

Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

4. Rebeca Hernandez, interview with the author, March 24, 2017.

5. José Muñoz draws upon a notion of becoming funneled through the writings of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Becoming for Deleuze and Guattari indicates an ongoing transformational

process in which new relationships, or assemblages, between elements are produced. While, aptly, never fully or definitively defined in Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvres, becoming has been taken up across the humanities and critical theory as a means of challenging the fixity of representational thought or normativity.

See Gilles Deleuze and Felix

92

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987).

6. José Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31.2 (2006): 676.

formation as artists of color but rather is a means of theorizing how the political positionality of their performance vis-à-vis labor, race, and colonization is importantly and intentionally literalized through their use and manipulation of adobe, asphalt, and dirt.

As Esparza has described it, his use of adobe is a means of “building up… space out of brown matter.” 7 Building space of and from brown matter— those brown colored adobe pavers—creates a relay between the politicized intentions of their collaborative work and the performance’s materials.

Brown adobe, in other words, becomes a means of articulating the politics of post-coloniality that animated their movements. Brown-becomings indicate a desire for a future different from the now, a now that is overly determined by Muñoz’s notion of feeling brown, or not feeling quite right, and mark a mode of transformation in which that different future is made actual, if only for the duration of a performance.8 Building ’s use of dust, dirt, and adobe offers a means of expanding Muñoz’s conception of feeling brown by exploring how affective sensations are activated through materially felt ones. How, in other words, did the dust and dirt of building activate the sense or feeling world of brown-becoming?

As building draws my analysis through the politics surrounding the revitalization of the L. A. River and a deeper history of water rights in Los Angeles, it frames a constellation among the materiality of the felt world, affect theory, and urban planning. Such a constellation asks us to surface the affective pleasures and traumas of urban sites and as well as the ways affect is produced through the built dimensions of public space. Brown affect, Muñoz writes, is “the sharing out of a brown sense of the world… that…maintains the urgencies and intensities we experience as freedom and difference.” 9 Dust and dirt, I argue in this essay, are such material means of sharing out a brown sense of the world.

Some fifty miles long, the L. A. River begins in Simi Hills and the Santa Susana Mountains. It winds its way east through the San Fernando Valley, before curving south and cutting through Atwater Village, Echo Park, Boyle Heights, Vernon, East Compton, and then washing out into the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach Harbor. The L. A. River, which yearly overflowed its banks, was transformed into a concrete system of flood control channels following the 1938 flood, which claimed an estimated 144 lives.10 The largescale engineering project, undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers and funded through the Works Progress Administration, also opened up swaths

7. “Whitney Biennial 2017: Rafa Esparza,” Whitney Museum of American Art, May 15, 2017, http://whitney.org/ WatchAndListen/513.

8. Brown-becoming also intersects with Muñoz’s theories of queer futurity. Futurity expands upon Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben’s theories of potentiality—a nascent or eminent eventuality. It is not yet here, but it lingers at the

threshold between actualization and inaction. Potentiality thus indicates a transformational process but also a momentary opening in which it becomes possible to imagine a future different from one’s present—or a means of becoming. José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 9.

9. José Muñoz, “Vitalism’s

93

After-burn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 21, no. 2 (2011): 197.

10. Kelly Simpson, “Los Angeles Flood of 1938: The Destruction Begins,” KCET, February 27, 2012, https:// www.kcet.org/history-society/ los-angeles-flood-of-1938-thedestruction-begins.

of land previously too dangerous to build on, due to the threat of flooding. Long before it became a concrete river, the Tongva and Chumash tribes occupied the flood basin. Later, the abundance of fresh water made the area ideal for Spanish colonizers.

It was briefly the capital of Alta California under Mexican rule and, eventually, the final respite for later waves of American settler colonialists moving westward. Today, it offers little water to the city or county. Instead, Los Angeles imports most of its water from other parts of the state via aqueducts.

Parker’s The Unfinished, Esparza and Hernandez’s “stage,” is 137 feet long and was achieved by digging down through the road’s asphalt surface. The Unfinished is a full-scale replica of an Egyptian archaeological site known as The Unfinished Obelisk, which was abandoned after a fissure was discovered running through the granite. The title of Esparza and Hernandez’s performance—building: a simulacrum of power—draws inspiration from Parker’s work. An obelisk, their title indicates, is merely a simulacrum of power. This naming of the representation of power challenges the pharaonic authority of the original obelisk to which Parker’s earthwork alludes. It also, if obliquely, references the Bowtie’s history of industrial use. It took six months for Parker to get clearance from the parks department to drill down into the asphalt surface of the roadway, due to concern about lingering soil toxicity resulting from the site’s former use as a rail yard and switching station.

For their performance, Esparza and Hernandez covered the asphalt surface of Parker’s piece with a layer of adobe pavers made from a mixture of dirt, straw, L. A. River water, and horse dung (necessary for ensuring the mixture adhered). Since 2012, Esparza has incorporated adobe bricks or pavers into his performance and sculptural works. With the help of his family, he made by hand the 1,500 pavers that cover the obelisk’s surface, and the material has special significance for him. Prior to immigrating to Los Angeles from Durango, Mexico, as a young man, Esparza’s father Ramon constructed his first home from handmade adobe.11 As Esparza describes it, his own use of bricks is a way of honoring his father’s specific history.

Esparza describes his practice of using adobe as a means of “transform[ing]… [the] environment both artistically and politically,” be it a traditional white cube gallery or the cracked asphalt of a former rail yard.12 As Julia Pelta Feldman writes in her entry on Esparza in the 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalog, his practice materializes a phrase often attributed to Emiliano Zapata: “la tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos.” (The land belongs to those who work it with their hands.)13 The adobe in building was a kind of conjuring ground, making possible the felt experience of a different place (and time). To lay one’s bare hands or feet or, indeed, largely naked body, as Esparza did during the performance, on the adobe was to feel a textural

11. Julia Pelta Feldman, “Rafa Esparza,” Whitney Biennial (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2017), 97.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

96

Above: Rafa Esparza and his father, Ramon Esparza, make adobe pavers for building: a simulacrum of power.

Video still. Courtesy of Clockshop.

Previous spread: Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, April 2017. Photo: Gweneth Shanks.

Michael Parker, The Unfinished, 2014. Installation view, Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, April 2017.

Photo: Gwyneth Shanks.

world different from that of the asphalt. It is a feeling brown made possible through the felt textures of the adobe. To understand the pavers in this way is to foreground their ability to perform meaning beyond their materiality, precisely because of their earthen composition. Across his various performance and installation works, Esparza describes staging situations in which he can “attempt to experience a time and space inaccessible to” him and, thus, linger in a “different now, a different future.” 14 The adobe pavers and bricks, now such an important element to his practice, offer a way of materially transforming the space in which they are installed.

For example, the artist’s 2016 installation, tierra, at the Hammer Museum, was composed of a layer of adobe pavers placed on top of the museum’s white marble floor. Visitors were invited to walk on the pavers, experiencing the embodied sensation of making their way across the uneven bricks.

By covering over the museum’s white marble with the hand-hewn pavers, tierra proposed, I argue, a counter future for the museum. It was a future in which the marble, so evocative of the histories of authority, privilege, masculinity, and whiteness that ground Western museums, was obscured by the adobe bricks. The work imagined a future in which such histories are buried beneath layers of mud and dirt. Tierra’s expanse of adobe bricks created a new ground from which to imagine a museum predicated upon alternative aesthetic practices, cultural histories, and models of acquisition and display. Such a future might honor art of the global south, minoritarian artists and museumgoers, and challenge museums’ practice of claiming ownership over objects, artists, and art movements through conventional acquisition and archival procedures. Esparza’s adobe pavers frame a materialized desire for a future different from the now, marking a mode of transformation in which that future is made actual, if only for the duration of a performance.

The Unfinished used archaeological excavation as a conceptual tool for revealing how power, in the abstract, accrues like so many layers of sediment, the form of it only becoming visible by digging down into the dirt.

Dirt then—across Parker’s trenches, the toxic soil, and Esparza’s pavers— bears witness to its own history of occupation and degradation. By covering over the cracked asphalt surface of The Unfinished, Esparza offered a different ground from which to move, proposing a counter future for the Bowtie, the nearby river, and the city. It was a future in which the asphalt—which gestures toward Los Angeles’s history of colonization and industrialization— was obscured by mud, and shit, and water.

Throughout the opening section of building, Hernandez and the three additional dancers stirred up clouds of dust. The majority of their movements were performed in the excavated trench that encircled the obelisk. Only once during their performance did one of the dancers, Stern, stand and move atop the adobe pavers. Making her way down the length of the pavers,

14. Rafael Esparza, “Artist Statement,” Rema Hort Mann Foundation, May 1, 2017 <http:// www.remahortmannfoundation. org/project/rafael-esparza/>.

99

Stern sliced her arms back and forth, seeming to trace the geometric contours of the rectilinear obelisk. Mostly, though, the four stayed in the trench, kicking up plumes of dust clouds with their feet and sliding down the steep embankment. Hernandez characterizes their movements as attempts at envelopment.15 While this term was meant to describe the phenomenological sensation of sliding across the dirt embankment, the plumes of dust generated from the dancers’ movements ensured that all who viewed the piece were likewise enveloped in a fine layer of brown.

The relationship between dust and absent water in California extends well beyond the environmental conditions of Bowtie in the summer of 2014 and the state’s recent five-year drought.16 Owens Lake, in Owens Valley, was largely drained in 1913 to feed the first of Los Angeles’s two aqueducts. The land was acquired in the early twentieth century through a series of subterfuges, in which Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) agents posed as ranchers and farmers to buy land and water rights. A little over ten years later, the valley was desiccated. The LADWP, together with the California State Lands Commission, still owns the vast majority of the largely dry Owens Lake bed, which is now a large salt flat. Periodic winds whip across the area and stir up huge alkali dust storms that rain some four million tons of dust on the surrounding areas. Settlements reached a little over ten years ago between LADWP and the Mono Lake Committee returned some water to the valley and required the department to instigate a series of land management measures aimed at mitigating the dust storms.

Nevertheless, Owens Lake bed remains the single largest source of dust pollution in the United States. While dust is an ongoing environmental and health concern in California, the fine particulate matter is also metonymic, gesturing toward neo-colonial practices of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and environmental devastation.

Within the context of California and water rights, dust carries specific historical and environmental meanings. Dust and dirt also connote a more broadly defined set of assumptions about poverty, disease, deprivation, lowliness, and mortality. Meanwhile, its absence connotes not only cleanliness but also morality. The dust Hernandez and her dancers generated not only evoked the fraught history of water rights in California but also challenged Euro-American—and by extension white—perceptions of morality, which cling so perniciously to notions of cleanliness. The dust in building thus formed a signifying matrix in which the plumes of grit surfaced narratives of neo-colonial territorial dispossession at the same time as they countered the affective and cultural privilege that attaches to the material and imagined absence of dirt and dust.

15. Hernandez, interview with the author, March 24, 2017.

16. On April 7, 2017, Governor Brown of California declared the state’s five-year drought was officially over. He cautioned, however, that the need for water conservation and innovative measures to preserve the

state’s water supply was ongoing. Bettina Boxall, “Gov. Brown declares California drought emergency is over,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2017, http://www. latimes.com/local/lanow/la-mebrown-drought-20170407-story. html.

100

Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014. Performance on the site of Michael Parkerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Unfinished (2014) at the Bowtie Project, August 24, 2014. Courtesy of Clockshop.

Photo: Dylan Schwartz.

Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014. Rebeca Hernandez performs on the site of Michael Parkerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Unfinished (2014) at the Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, August 24, 2014.

Courtesy of Clockshop. Photo: Dylan Schwartz.

Following the conclusion of the four women’s dance, Esparza began his solo, and Hernandez took her place at the tip of the obelisk, with the mirror held in her arms for the duration of his performance. The majority of Esparza’s performance was taken up by his slow crawl down the length of the obelisk. As he inched forward, he loosened the ties securing the loincloth wound round his waist; he arrived at the point of the obelisk clothed in only a jock strap. Once there, he penetrated himself anally with the sharp tip of the small triangular adobe brick positioned at the tip of Parker’s obelisk, in a gesture evocative of Los Angeles performance artist Ron Athey.17 Afterward, Esparza dressed in slacks, a button-up shirt, tie, and blazer and poured a small bucket of water over his head, drenching his face and chest in the cooling liquid. Finally, he removed the adobe triangle and replaced it with an offering of white sage. The piece ended as he burned the sage plant, in a ritual of smudging, or readying, the space for ceremony. Coming at the end of his and Hernandez’s performance, the gesture seemed to connote a different notion of ceremonial time, leaving the obelisk and the Bowtie open to receive embodied acts distinctly different from those of the rail yard or investment-driven revitalization of the river.

However inadvertently or obliquely, organizations like Clockshop, Play the LA River, and Current: LA play a vital role in the success of large-scale redevelopment plans for the L.A. River and its surrounding neighborhoods.18 Current: LA, for example, was largely sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the philanthropic arm of Michael Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP. The company opened offices in Los Angeles in 2015, and is financially backing real estate projects along the L.A. River that aim to transform such riverfront properties into high-end condos and mixed-use developments. While such projects draw attention to the river’s environmental devastation through curating progressive art, they nevertheless depend upon the gentrifying logic of cultural capital. In other words, the more appealing the Bowtie becomes through increased parks department attention or ever more art installations, the more property and rent prices in the surrounding neighborhoods go up. Such shifts are already transforming Frogtown, the area around the Bowtie. Largely Latino and working-class, the neighborhood has attracted development over the past six years, as new residents move in and post-industrial properties are purchased and

17. Ron Athey began creating work in the early 1980s, as part of Los Angeles’ underground queer club scene. His performances, which question identity, masculinity, and queerness, draw upon S & M subculture and religious iconographies, and often include extreme forms of bodily manipulations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Athey and artists Tim Miller, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andres Serrano drew the ire of conservative politicians and the re-

103

ligious right. A large-scale shift in how the National Endowment for the Arts funded projects resulted, in which individual artist grants were eliminated.

18. In 2014, the Army Corps of Engineers recommended a $1-billion plan to revitalize the L.A. River.

Bianca Barragan, “Feds Now Recommending Best and Biggest LA River Restoration,” Curbed Los Angeles, July 21, 2017, https://la.curbed. com/2014/5/29/10094090/ feds-now-recommending-bestand-biggest-la-river-restoration.

earmarked for redevelopment. (In 2014 alone, five riverfront properties were purchased.19 ) An 80-page report published by LA-Más, a non-profit organization that helps underserved communities shape the futures of their neighborhoods through policy creation and architectural projects, revealed longtime Frogtown residents’ concerns about their neighborhood’s shifting landscape and affordability. In light of the rapidly changing constitution of certain neighborhoods, Esparza’s concluding gesture can be viewed as one that surfaced epistemologies of land and water use of formally colonized or dispossessed communities. His final ritual practices formed a relationship of sorts between his imagined communities and the current long-term residents of areas like Frogtown. Esparza transformed conventional narratives around urban revitalization to privilege a brown-becoming.

Building offered a performative means of lingering over and remembering the nearby, yet nearly empty, L. A. River. It also asked viewers to imagine how the river and its surrounding earth remember us. Such a framing is not simply a metaphoric personification of the river but rather is an assertion of the vitalness of the material and elemental world. It is a means of, as performance scholar May Joseph writes, articulating water as “a substance whose political agency participates in the public sphere, shaping the everyday lives and the futures of humans and nonhumans alike.” 20 To imagine, across these distinct registers of water epistemologies, the river as vital and embodied illuminates a different notion of temporality. The river, if now largely contained and managed by flood channels and concrete, nevertheless draws us backwards in geological time and to different eras of human occupation. The river as flowing political agent articulates not the passing away of these periods of occupation but rather their contemporaneousness with our present. Building performs a sharing outwards of this sense of the river and the land surrounding it that, to return to Muñoz, “maintains the urgencies and intensities we experience as freedom.” 21 Water is life. And in its absence, only dust and dirt and cracked asphalt remain. In writing about what brown-becoming might mean in and through Ana Mendieta’s work and biography, Muñoz located vitalness as key to its enunciation. Brownness, he wrote, produces a “vital materialist afterburn.” 22 This notion draws together French philosopher Henri Bergson’s vital force—which sought to link all of life together through a “single invisible embrace,” or creative principle—with the historical precarity of dispossessed peoples. This turn in Muñoz’s work offers a way to draw the phrase “water is life” into critical theory, imagining the truism as at once an epistemology, an activist rallying cry, and a means of articulating a brown sense of the world. Such a sense acknowledges the phrase’s epistemological specificity, which challenges corporate and municipal interests at the same time that it grapples with the historical and ongoing conditions of precarity that produce modes of brown feeling. “Water is life” articulates the affective 19. Curbed, “Here’s How Frogtown Wants its Inevitable Gentrification to Go,” Curbed Los Angeles, July 21, 2017, https://la.curbed. com/2015/5/12/9961792/ heres-how-frogtown-wants-

its-inevitable-gentrificationto-go-1.

20. Joseph and Varino, “Aquapelagic Assemblages,” 153.

21. Muñoz, “Vitalism’s Afterburn,” 197.

22. Ibid., 191.

104

Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014. Rafa Esparza performs on the site of Michael Parkerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Unfinished (2014) at the Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, August 24, 2014.

Courtesy of Alexis Chanes. Photo: Alexis Chanes.

Rafa Esparza and Rebeca Hernandez, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014. Rafa Esparza performs on the site of Michael Parker's The Unfinished (2014) at the Bowtie Project, Los Angeles, August 24, 2014. Courtesy of Clockshop. Photo: Dylan Schwartz.

tension between a material present and an aesthetic and, perhaps more utopic, symbolic order. If fights concerning access to and sovereignty over water, like those animating the construction of underground crude oil pipelines, like Dakota Access Pipeline and Pipeline 3, have often privileged corporate interests, municipal water departments, and affluent communities, then Esparza and Hernandezâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s building frames a way of expanding what might be meant by waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s symbolic order and offers a way into the brownness of dust and dirt and adobe.

Gwyneth Shanks is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walker Art Center. She earned a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA, and her work has appeared in, amongst other places, Third Text, Performance Matters, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

107

Daniel Spaulding

Jacqueline de Jong: Imaginary Disobedience

Situating Jacqueline de Jong

Château Shatto, Los Angeles March 18–May 20, 2017

The periphery of the Situationist International is in danger of coming to look more interesting than the main event. Jacqueline de Jong—whose condensed but potent retrospective Imaginary Disobedience was on view at the Los Angeles gallery Château Shatto—belonged to the group from around 1960 to 1962, when she was either expelled or resigned (the difference appears to be academic). The nub of the dispute was de Jong’s support for her fellow artists in Munich’s Gruppe SPUR, the erstwhile German branch of the SI, in defiance of Guy Debord’s increasingly stringent anti-aestheticism. Whether the Situationist allegiance matters at all would be a less pressing question if de Jong had not then gone on to publish a magnificently heterogeneous journal, which she dubbed the Situationist Times, much to the consternation of Debord and his remaining allies.

The Situationist Times ran from 1962 to 1967. It represents de Jong’s signal contribution to the avant-garde culture of the decade. Visually speaking, at least, the Times has little in common with the sober pages of its rival, Debord’s Internationale Situationniste. De Jong’s journal overflows with a congeries of hand-written text, drawings, and appropriated images. A few recurring motifs—labyrinths or knots, the Situationist concepts of détournement and the dérive, and a fascination with “primitive” mark-making being some of the most noticeable—provide rough orientation. Yet the published texts have little in common, except the red thread of de Jong’s interests.

Technical papers on mathematical topology sit cheek-by-jowl with musings on medieval Nordic art by Asger Jorn (de Jong’s partner at the time) and the Danish writer Virtus Schade’s essay, “Forgotten Knowledge of the Universe in the Children’s Hopscotch,” to take a few more or less random examples.1 It need not be derogatory to observe that the Situationist Times seems to have been constructed exactly not to be coherent.

1. In fact, all three of the aforementioned articles are found in issue no. 5 (1964), which was dedicated to the topic of “rings and chains.” For an analysis of topology in The Situationist Times, see Karen Kurczynski, “Red Herrings: Eccentric Morphologies in the

Situationist Times,” in Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, eds., Expect Anything, Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, and Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2011), 182.

108

Jacqueline de Jong, The Situationist Times, Issue No. 5, December 1964. Edition 1600. Edited by Jacqueline de Jong. Courtesy of Jacqueline de Jong and Château Shatto.

The Times was absent from de Jong’s Château Shatto show, which consisted of paintings and a small number of sculptures bearing dates from 1960 to 2015. Nothing like a straightforward course of development was detectable here. What emerged, instead, was a counterpoint between recurrent preoccupations. De Jong’s earliest works—for example, a muddy untitled abstraction (or is it?) from 1962—are close to Jorn’s contemporaneous style: excretory streaks of oil deface a raw canvas ground, out of which forms emerge and disappear. The drabness of this painting is unusual, however.

De Jong has an instinct for color that tends to primaries modulated with fleshy pinks, bolts of green or purple, and a dry, black line that approximates charcoal. In the most striking instances, the artist opts for a flickering, vital stroke that veers toward the non-representational.

De Jong’s idiom is expressionist, in a broad sense. Sex and violence are everywhere. Yet the overall effect is more often playful than lugubrious. The largest work in the show, De achterkant van het bestaan (The Backside of Existence) from 1992 is an unframed, double-sided banner; at Château Shatto, it was suspended in the middle of the gallery space, which it cut just about in half.

Each side of the work depicts two large forms (one more or less human, the other more or less not) engaged in dubious battle, whilst organisms that could be angels or demons flitter about to the sides. The scene may be one of existential conflict, if not the Apocalypse itself. Peeing Hamlet (2012) grafts a few extraneous limbs onto a skeletal figure that holds a skull, presumably Yorick’s. The picture is garish, funny, and unsettling all at once, and in its wry attitude towards human embodiment it has something in common with the work of more celebrated painters such as Amy Sillman and Maria Lassnig. Le Salau et les Salopards (Bastards and Scumbags, 1966), a three-part construction that resembles a Japanese folding screen, is in turn a veritable panorama of bodies without organs. De Jong uses clearly differentiated colors and textures to separate her figures. Yet they overlap and recombine all the same.

Each is possessed of an individual presence yet none resolves into anything so fixed as an identity, and as a result the entire field is riotously alive.

This is a mode that Hal Foster has named “creaturely,” with reference to Jorn and his comrades in the postwar CoBrA group.2 The word seems useful enough, although in de Jong’s case what we see might just as well be an earthy Netherlandish taste for the grotesque, straight out of Hieronymous Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In another picture, Big Foot Small Head (for Thomas) (1985), an ominous figure stomps on a green dragon. I cannot help reading the aggressor here as de Jong’s bad subject par excellence— the (male) human who secures his difference from the beastly by way of crude dominance. I am also reminded of a quotation in Jorn’s 1950–51 text, “The Human Animal,” which is a short reflection on Kafka: “Why does the

2. Hal Foster, “Creaturely Cobra,” October 141 (Summer 2012): 4–21. Properly speaking, CoBrA only existed from 1948 to 1951. Its name is derived from the three cities in which its members then resided: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

110

Jacqueline de Jong, De achterkant van het bestaan (The Backside of Existence), 1992. Oil on sailcloth, 72 × 261 in. Courtesy of Château Shatto. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

Jacqueline de Jong, De achterkant van het bestaan (The Backside of Existence), 1992. Oil on sailcloth, 72 × 261 in. Courtesy of Château Shatto. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

dragon,” he asks, “continue to be the holy sign of China and the Orient, while the dragon killer has become the most popular symbol of the West, the symbol of the struggle against ‘evil’?” 3 For de Jong, too, St. George remains unforgiven.4 The chance to see more than half a century’s worth of this underexposed oeuvre in a single space was revelatory, if for no other reason than that de Jong connects the dots between a number of widely separated artistic phenomena. It would be eminently possible, for example, to draw a line from de Jong’s early CoBrA-like works to the resurgence of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s, perhaps via a detour through her Pop-inflected imagery of the later 1960s and 1970s. (Some of these last pictures are not unlike the contemporaneous output of Gruppe SPUR associate Uwe Lausen, another painter in the Situationist orbit.5 ) Chambre d’Hotel and Rhapsodie en Rousse, 1980 and 1981, respectively, are film noir pastiches; their resurrection of genre, narrative, and fictive space links them to a kind of postmodern painting that would have just been coming into vogue in cities such as New York and Cologne at that very moment.

The point, however, is that de Jong’s career neither seems to have followed such trends, nor ever to have fit very straightforwardly into them.

Emblems of this mobility include the folding suitcase-like paintings (or are they sculptures?) that de Jong made around the turn of the 1970s, in the wake of her breakup with Jorn. These pieces combine quotidian, diary-like texts with unnervingly explicit sexual and violent imagery (my favorite contains a scene of anal penetration, evidently with a wine bottle) and also pinball machines, or “flippers,” as she calls them, an obsession the significance of which is hard to parse. In their goofy comic-book style, these diptychs stand apart from the earlier CoBrA-influenced paintings as well as from the neoexpressionist work of the 1980s and beyond. (The remainder of the 1970s, I should note, was an unexplained gap in the Château Shatto exhibition.) It may be, however, that the “suitcases” are not opposed to the larger paintings so much as they bring to the fore certain attitudes toward sex, animality, and violence that had been latent in her production from the start.

The suitcase works feel very much like a sublation of art into everyday life. This was a broadly avant-gardist ambition at mid-century, as well as a specifically Situationist one. But to observe that the works are quotidian is not quite to say that they are comfortable or sedentary. The fact that the suitcases are built for travel is a reminder not only of de Jong’s precarious position at the close of the 1960s—during which time she was politically engaged but disconnected from Jorn and many of her former comrades, after the cessation of the Situationist Times—but also, perhaps, of her childhood as the daughter of Jewish parents in Nazi-occupied Holland, three decades earlier.

3. Asger Jorn, “The Human Animal,” trans. Niels Henriksen, October 141 (Summer 2012), 56, emphasis in the original.

4. Given his blue clothing, the central figure in Big Foot might instead be a refraction of the

Archangel Michael in Bruegel’s 1562 Fall of the Rebel Angels in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels.

5. Lausen died in 1970. On his work, see the catalog of his 2010 retrospective: Selima

113

Niggl, Pia Dornacher, and Max Hollein, eds., Uwe Lausen: Ende schön alles schön (Bremen, Germany: Hachmann Edition, 2010).

Jacqueline de Jong, Op het land waar het leven zoet is (In the Countryside Where Life Is Sweet), 1972.

Acrylic on canvas, wood, 21½ × 40 × 1 in. (open), 21½ × 20 × 3 in. (closed). Courtesy of Château Shatto.

Photo: Renato Ghiazza.

De Jong and her mother in fact were apprehended while fleeing to Switzerland during World War II, and only survived because members of the French Resistance rescued the pair from the Drancy deportation camp, outside of Paris, and conveyed them to the border. Her father, meanwhile, remained in hiding in Amsterdam. Although she was born in 1939 and thus likely only has inchoate memories of the war, it is reasonable to assume that its impact on her was profound. Her later internationalism— the Situationist Times was published in English, and she spent much of the 1950s and 1960s in France and Scandinavia—might be another echo of wartime displacement. (After returning to the Netherlands, de Jong reportedly had to re-learn Dutch, her native tongue.6 ) At Château Shatto, the matter of trauma was present in a recent series about World War I. These pictures are frankly dour. But they are not entirely devoid of the artist’s sense of humor. In her uncanny Horsemen 1918 (2014), for example, both the soldiers and their mounts wear gas masks. One of de Jong’s achievements is to have made room for the twentieth century’s horrors within a body of work that nonetheless radiates an almost Nietzschean positivity. Or, indeed, a joie de vivre.

— To date, art history has had almost nothing to do with de Jong, which is a shame. But this is probably at least in part because her career resists the discipline’s systematizing parameters. It may not be necessary to “locate” de Jong at all. She seems comfortable enough following her own path; it just happens that the rest of us have taken a long time catching up. Yet the issue of her place within a broader postwar artistic and political milieu is important, not least because the attempt to answer the question may well change our understanding of that milieu itself. What would it look like to place de Jong at the center of such an (art) history, rather than at its edges?

For starters, it might look a bit like a diagram that de Jong’s friends, the artists of Gruppe SPUR, distributed as a flyer in 1960.7 At the middle of a loose spiral, which is also a map of Europe, we find SPUR itself. Lines run from here to various allies, such as Asger Jorn in Copenhagen, the artist and architect Constant in Amsterdam, and the painter Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio in Italy, as well as to historical forerunners (Surrealism, Die Brücke, and the Baroque).

Jackson Pollock alone makes it across the Atlantic. And there, pushed off towards the upper left, is Guy Debord: just one point in a network. De Jong herself is not in the picture. 1960 was too early, perhaps, for her to have made an impression, and in any case the exclusively male SPUR members, like most bohemian groups of the time, retained a quite traditional chauvinism that has no doubt contributed to her relative obscurity even to the present day.

Yet this is very much her world. And to de Jong, at least, it was—and remains— a Situationist world, regardless of formal membership or lack thereof.

6. This detail was reported in Adrian Dannatt, “Undercover Agent,” The Guardian, June 6, 2003, https://www.theguardian. com/music/2003/jun/07/classicalmusicandopera.artsfeatures.

7. For the most thorough account of Gruppe SPUR, its successor groups, and its connections to the European avant-garde, see Lauren Graber, Gruppe SPUR and Gruppe

116

GEFLECHT: Art and Dissent in West Germany, 1957–1968, doctoral dissertation, The University of Michigan, 2012.

Jacqueline de Jong, Big foot small head (for Thomas), 1985. From the series Upstairs-Downstairs. Oil on canvas, 74¾ × 51¼ × 1½ in. Courtesy of Château Shatto. Photo: Sara Gerns Bacher.

De Jong’s place in this history is uncertain. Even in McKenzie Wark’s revisionist 2011 book, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, which makes a point of rehabilitating artists in the SI orbit—and Jorn in particular—de Jong receives only glancing attention.8 Recent writing on the group’s forerunners, such as the Lettrist International, as well as its non-French branches (above all the Scandinavian outpost, in which not only Jorn but also his brother, Jørgen Nash, were central figures), has tended to be marked by an impulse to redress Debord’s overbearing tendencies, or indeed, by a hostility to Debord, which is not quite the proper note either.9 A more holistic account need not be a zero-sum game. One way to get closer towards this perspective is to recognize that the Parisian SI was embedded within a larger artistic and political counter-public sphere, within and against which Debord launched his attacks. The word “Situationist” was a battlefield as much as a totem.

In effect, it seems that Debord’s alignment with the Situationist label was more contingent than is usually perceived. It was less so than de Jong’s, of course, but these are matters of degree rather than kind. In the early stages of his academic reception, Debord seemed the high priest of a church to which he alone held the keys. Now, instead, it has become more evident that he maneuvered in and through the existing networks of the European neoavant-garde, without which his project would have been dead on arrival.

He made use of that avant-garde’s techniques. He gathered and directed its energies, for a time, before absconding with the group’s name and then transforming its mission into something quite different from what it had been. Which was not necessarily for the worse.

One could phrase it more polemically: there would not have been such a thing as “Situationist theory” without Debord; there would only have been a far more diffuse, but not necessarily less interesting, “Situationist movement,” of which de Jong was an integral part. The task for historians now is to understand how these two aspects of a definitively non-unitary “Situationism” (an umbrella term, it bears noting, that the Parisian Situationists themselves were careful to avoid) mutually constituted each other—how they interacted and, eventually, diverged. Scholarship over the past decade has come some way towards decentering the latter if not the former manifestation of the phenomenon. In the study of the visual arts, at least, we have become more used to seeing Jorn (if not de Jong—although perhaps that will change) as Debord’s equal, rather than his subordinate. The same goes for SPUR, the “Nashists,” and all the rest. On their departures, the SI

8. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London and New York: Verso, 2011).

9. This is the case of two important volumes edited

by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen: Expect Anything, Fear Nothing, cited above, and Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the

Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, 2015.)

The former contains useful interviews with de Jong, in addition to secondary texts. For another recent interview, see Amy Sherlock, “The Life and Times of Jacqueline de Jong,” Frieze 186 (April 2017), https:// frieze.com/article/life-andtimes-jacqueline-de-jong.

118

Jacqueline de Jong, Horsemen 1918, 2014. From the series War. Oil and ground pumice stone on canvas, 51 × 67½ in. Courtesy of Château Shatto. Photo: Sara Gerns Bacher.

Gruppe SPUR, Die Zeitschrift SPUR... (detail), 1962. Mixed materials, 11½ × 11¾ in. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University and © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

became something much less unruly. Even in the Parisian group, however, tensions persisted long after the expulsions of 1961 and 1962. One has only to read The Society of the Spectacle side by side with Raoul Vaneigem’s wildly romantic Revolution of Everyday Life to see what a high degree of divergence the Situationist trademark could still encompass as late as 1967.

Who, exactly, was on the “right” side, then? Well, Debord, obviously. The letdown here should be palpable, but to say anything else would be dishonest.

Of all Situationist artifacts, it is Debord’s profoundly Hegelian reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy that remains most crucial to thinking about any root-and-branch opposition to capitalism today. This is true even if the author’s achievement would have been impossible without his passage through the movement’s “expanded field.” And really, fuck art, anyway: another Situationist lesson. Most of what de Jong did falls neatly in line with Debord’s concept of recuperation, which is to say, revolt’s capture by the apparatus of the aesthetic. De Jong’s politics are opaque. But at this late hour, who is left to care? I, for one, find it impossible to begrudge a life well lived. In a better world, there would be no need to choose.

Daniel Spaulding is an art historian who lives in the Los Angeles area. He recently completed his PhD in the Department of the History of Art, Yale University.

121

Since 1997

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

A R · T X X Browse back issues from the last 20 years at x-traonline.org

Gala Gala Gala Gala Gala Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Porras-Kim November November November November November 4, 2017—January 4,4, 2017—January 4, 2017—January 4, 2017—January 2017—January 6, 2018 6,6, 2018 6, 2018 6, 2018 2018

C C

M M

Y Y

CM CM

MY MY

CY CY

YCMYCMY

K K

Carmen Carmen Carmen Carmen Carmen Argote Argote Argote Argote Argote Carolina Carolina Carolina Carolina Carolina Caycedo Caycedo Caycedo Caycedo Caycedo Danielle Danielle Danielle Danielle Danielle Dean Dean Dean Dean Dean Patricia Patricia Patricia Patricia Patricia Fernández Fernández Fernández Fernández Fernández EJEJ EJ Hill EJ EJ Hill Hill Hill Hill Alice Alice Alice Alice Alice Könitz Könitz Könitz Könitz Könitz Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Koumoundouros Koumoundouros Koumoundouros Koumoundouros Koumoundouro Young Young Young Young Young Joon Joon Joon Joon Joon Kwak Kwak Kwak Kwak Kwak Kang Kang Kang Kang Kang Seung Seung Seung Seung Seung Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee Jennifer Jennifer Jennifer Jennifer Jennifer Moon Moon Moon Moon Moon Gala Gala Gala Gala Gala Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Porras-Kim Jen Jen Jen Jen Smith Jen Smith Smith Smith Smith Julie Julie Julie Julie Julie Tolentino Tolentino Tolentino Tolentino Tolentino

with tête-à-tête, an installation curated

by Mickalene Thomas January 25–May 13, 2018

POMONA COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART Claremont, California www.pomona.edu/museum Open: Tuesday through Sunday, 12–5 p.m.

Closed: Monday Art After Hours: Thursday, 5–11 p.m.

(January 25–April 26, 2018)

The exhibition, Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs, is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York and is supported, in part, by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Mickalene Thomas, Le leçon d'amour, 2008, C-print, 47.5 × 59 in. Copyright Mickalene Thomas. Courtesy the artist; Lehamann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

MICKALENE THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHS

Stories of Almost Everyone January 28–May 6, 2018

Hammer Projects: Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Hammer Projects: Molly Lowe

January 20–May 20, 2018

January 20–May 6, 2018

New Video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection January 20–May 13, 2018

1 MUSEUM | Los Angeles Free Admission | hammer.ucla.edu ANDREA BÜTTNER, HAP GRIESHABER / FRANZ FÜHMANN: ENGEL DER GESCHICHTE 25: ENGEL DER BEHINDERTEN, CLASSEN VERLAG DÜSSELDORF 1982, (HAP GRIESHABER / FRANZ FÜHMANN: ANGEL OF HISTORY 25: ANGEL OF THE DISABLED), 2010. XEROX AND CLIP FRAMES, SET OF 9. EACH: 16 5⁄8 × 23 3⁄8 INCHES (42 × 59.2 CM). COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, HOLLYBUSH GARDENS, LONDON AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES. © ANDREA BÜTTNER / VG BILD-KUNST, BONN 2016

Joseph Cornell, Untitled, 1966, collage on paper, 13 1/4 × 10 1/4 × 1 in. (33.66 × 26.04 × 2.54 cm), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation

Selections from the Permanent Collection

On View Now | moca.org