X-TRA Spring 2018 20.3 by X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly

X-TRA Volume 20, Number 3 Spring 2018

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Cover: Lex Brown, time will come back to me (detail), 2017.

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Martine Syms, Incense Sweaters & Ice, 2017. Video still. Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York.

CONTENTS

Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space Met Breuer, New York Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Review by Leslie Dick

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Four Meditations on the Old and New Spirits of Capitalism David Weldzius

Needing Something, Hitting a Wall Sabrina Tarasoff

time will come back to me Lex Brown

The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw Review by Cora Gilroy-Ware

Juan Downey: Radiant Nature Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Review by Anuradha Vikram

Chris Kallmyer: Listening is a Luxury FraenkelLAB, San Francisco Review by Kim Beil ARTIST WRITES, No. 3 Incense Sweaters & Ice Martine Syms

106

127 + Insert

Leslie Dick

Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space

Marisa Merz: Not Available

Met Breuer, New York January 24–May 7, 2017 Hammer Museum, Los Angeles June 4–August 20, 2017

Marisa Merz knit copper wire and plastic thread to make simple forms; she used the most basic stitch (knit, or plain stitch) and refused to purl. When you knit one row in plain stitch and the next row in purl stitch, you make a flat stretchy fabric, known as jersey, with a front surface (v-shaped stitches) and a back surface (wiggly stitches). When you knit only the plain stitch, as Marisa Merz does, there is no reverse, and the fabric you create has less definition: it is more flexible, and can stretch and pull in all directions. Certain orientations (front/back, top/bottom, left/right) dissolve or disperse, as the fluid form of the plain stitch proposes an open structure, looping the line.1

Marisa Merz knit copper wire into small squares, and placed them on the wall, gently stretched between small steel or copper nails. Here they produce unexpected geometries, circles in the spaces between. They might remind us of those copper scrubbers from the hardware store; they might remind us of the small and often useless cotton potholders that children knit in kindergarten. Knitting is described as using one-dimensional thread to construct two-dimensional fabric. Yet Marisa Merz’s knitted squares are not two-dimensional: they are not surfaces. On the contrary, they have a kind of expansive flexibility and a depth that gives them an airy material presence. They are like sponges, a form that mostly holds emptiness, and can soak up all sorts of things or feelings. They take up space, although they are so small. They stack. They do not lie flat.

Eva Hesse wrapped her sculptures, taking strands of cotton string and gluing them down to make a three-dimensional form out of a onedimensional line. Here is a coincidence: two women making sculpture in the 1960s using a single line to make a three-dimensional object in space.2

1. I would like to thank Stephen Berens, Elizabeth Bryant, Lucas Quigley, and Audrey Wollen, who visited the Marisa Merz exhibition

2. Leslie Dick, “Eva Hesse: Random Notes,” X-TRA 5, no. 2 (Winter 2002), http://x-traonline. org/article/eva-hesse-randomnotes/.

with me at different times and contributed to this discussion of the work, and Rosanna Albertini, who encouraged my translations.

Marisa Merz wearing her scarpette, L'Attico Gallery, Rome, 1975. ÂŠ Claudio Abate/ Archivio Abate.

Marisa Merz, Bea, 1968. Nylon threads, metal sticks, 15 ¾ × 35 7⁄16 × 115⁄16 in. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Marisa Merz knit small shoes out of translucent nylon thread, or copper wire. They look like they might fit a child, but stretched to fit her own feet. There is a color photo from 1975 of the artist, wearing her knitted shoes, looking out the window into the Rome night. We might imagine how her daughter Beatrice would delight in these small shoes, fairy slippers they both could wear. A black-and-white photo of the knitted shoes placed on the wet sand at the beach makes them look like they are formed from sea foam, or seaweed, calling to mind mermaids, sirens, and other creatures. There’s a magical quality to these small shoes, or shoe-ettes: they are called Scarpette, a plural diminutive of scarpa, which means shoe. They are like tokens or signs from another realm, the realm of storytelling, or the space where women and small children spend time together, exchanging words and making things. The imaginary.

In Italian, the word trama means weft, the threads interwoven across a fabric; it also means plot, as in the plot of a story, or a plot against someone.

Marisa Merz also knit small, loose tubes, using three or four doublepointed needles. These too have an organic, undersea drift, like coral, or some other oceanic accretion. Sometimes she transferred the knitted tubing onto metal sticks, like stalks, or she simply left the knitting needles in. There’s more than one where the knitted material forms the name BEA, a diminutive for Beatrice. The knitted tubes are so simple they lack definition; they have a temporary quality: the tiny stitches could slip off the double pointed sticks easily; they could drift away into formlessness. They could unravel.

There’s a kind of knitted patchwork that is made out of remnants: the leftover yarn not needed for sweaters or other garments made by hand. Just as those who make clothes will have scraps of surplus fabric that can be configured into patchwork quilts, so those who make woolen sweaters, or socks, or scarves, can use the excess wool to make small squares that can then be stitched or crocheted together into a blanket or throw. Old sweaters can be unraveled and reconfigured: knitted up again into something new.

The knitted work marks time: the time of making, and the reverie or wandering associated with home craft activities, day-dreamy time spent in a room with a child.3 It’s repetition time, marked by the repeated stitches, each blooming out of the last. When Marisa Merz

3. Marisa Merz on spending time with her small daughter: “Lei era fantastica, ho imparato tanto da lei e lei niente da me, perché il poco che sapeva era bello. Inventava, faceva.” (“She was fantastic, I learned so much from her and she nothing from me, because the little

she knew was beautiful. She would invent, she would make.” My translation.) Annemarie Sauzeau-Boetti, “Lo specchio ardente—intervista a Marisa Merz, Carla Accardi, Iole Freitas,” Data 18 (September– October 1975) 53, 55. Cited in Lucia Re, “The Mark on

The Wall: Marisa Merz and a History of Women in Postwar Italy,” in Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, ed. Connie Butler (Los Angeles and New York: Hammer Museum and DelMonico Books•Prestel Publishing, 2017), 37–75.

leaves the pointed sticks and needles in the knitting, something else transpires: an attenuated, subtle note of aggression enters the field of meaning. It’s then that we remember that the fairy tale is not a happy story: it’s a story of kidnapping, loss, and transformation.4 9.

There’s the silent girl who spent seven years knitting six sweaters out of nettles to rescue her six brothers who’d been turned into swans by their malevolent stepmother. She ran out of time, and at the crucial moment one sweater was still missing a sleeve. Nevertheless, she threw them over the swans, and they were all saved, transformed, though one brother lived on with a swan’s wing instead of an arm.5

10. When I was a child, my mad mother said, “You could use all sorts of things as a weapon if a strange man attacks you.” (I was six or seven, sufficiently childish to be struck by this scenario: under what circumstances…? My mother never explained—anything.) She said, indelibly, “Remember, you can always use a pencil to stab him in the eye.” (Or a knitting needle.) 11. Marisa Merz made a swing for her daughter Bea that hung inside the house; it took the form of a slanted wooden platform with a pointed edge. A child would slide off it, or struggle to remain seated on it; any swinging would run the risk of the pointed corner sinking into whoever passed by. It is perhaps less a swing than a ride, a suspended seesaw. Like the knitting needles, there’s a frisson of danger. It is the opposite of a safe toy: it is a sculpture and also a difficult, risky, and exciting proposition. 12. Copper is a flexible conductor of electricity, representing the possibility of distant connections, or shocks. Copper fuse wire is familiar in European houses, where electrical systems are much more hands on. Knitting small squares with copper filament pulls in both directions: toward industry, electricity, technology—what we used to call the great outside world—and at the same time toward the domestic, marked as feminine. With the copper wire, the translucent nylon filament, and the heavy aluminum foil, what emerges in this work might be an aesthetic of industrial femme, undoing the cascade of antinomies that places knitting on the side of the woman, and the flow of electrons over there with the factory and technology.6

4. “Fairytales are not about gauzy frocks and ego gratification. They are about child murder, cannibalism, starvation, deformity, desperate human creatures cast into the form of beasts, or chained by spells, or immured alive in thorns. The caged child is milk-fed, finger felt for plumpness by the witch, and if there is a happy-everafter, it is usually written on someone’s skin.” Hilary Mantel,

“The Princess Myth: Hilary Mantel on Diana,” Guardian 26 (August 2017), https://www. theguardian.com/books/2017/ aug/26/the-princess-mythhilary-mantel-on-diana. 5. “The Six Swans” was originally published in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinderund Haus-märchen [Children’s and Household Tales], 1812. See The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm:

The Complete First Edition, trans. Jack Zipes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 159–62. See also Hans Christian Andersen, “The Wild Swans,” originally published in Eventyr, Fortalte for Børn [Fairy Tales Told for Children], 1837, http://www.andersen. sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/ TheWildSwans.html. 6. “The problem in the end, however, is how to find ways to

disentangle and deconstruct the cascade of antinomies that constituted the identity of modernism and whose threads I have been following: functional/decorative, useful/ wasteful, natural/artificial, machine/body, masculine/feminine, West/East.” Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), 29.

Marisa Merz, Altalena per Bea, 1968. Wood, metal hooks, dimensions unknown. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino. ÂŠ Paolo Pellion.

Marisa Merz, La Conta, 1967. Video still. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 2:44 min. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino.

13. Marisa Merz, “Come una dichiarazione” (Like a declaration), published March 1968: I do not respect Johnson, I do not respect the masters. I am not available any more, because I want to begin all over again. I could still be available to a child, but not to a man, no. If a man asks me to do something, I do that thing the way I want...7 14. In 1967, Marisa Merz made a black-and-white, silent 16mm film, La Conta (Counting), showing the artist in her kitchen in Turin, opening a can of peas and then counting each one. The kitchen is dark; the counting measures time. There is a silvery slinky metal sculpture looming in the darkness. Marisa Merz silently counts the peas. 15. The big works from the 1960s, the silvery metal things hanging from the ceiling, are all called Living Sculpture. There’s a bunch of them, a disparate set of different iterations. They are each made out of strips of heavy, industrial-grade metal foil, a more substantial version of the aluminum foil we use in the kitchen to wrap leftovers. Marisa Merz cut the foil into strips and wound it into tubular forms, stapling the strips together with an industrial stapler. The tubes pour and spill, opening up like an accordion, unfurling like a natural thing. Looking up at these suspended sculptures, the forms unwind, like duct work gone organic; they are bulbous, like garlic or mushrooms, like the involute and convolute whorls of the nautilus shell. Do they also fold up, like a paper fan? 16. Dressmaking verbs: crush, crease, crinkle, pucker, ruffle, frill, ruck, shirr. Furl. Long tubular metal ribbons hang in garlands, and momentarily the folds and swoops become baroque, a fashion statement. These metal flounces are pleated, tucked, gathered. The metal ribbons are sleeves, or stems, or roots. It might be the view of a hedgehog, looking up at flower bulbs, onions. It’s the view of the depths under the city, the crazy tubing that makes all the systems run.8 It’s visceral in form, intestinal, the first and last ductwork. It’s the stuff that’s inside somehow appearing on the outside. These sculptures reflect light in all directions. 17. Marisa Merz took a flat sheet of shiny metal and cut strips out of it, using giant scissors; she laid them over each other, forming shapes. I imagine she wrapped them around something: a ball, a tube, some

7. My translation. “Non rispetto Johnson, non rispetto i maestri. / Non sono più disponsibile, perché voglio cominciare daccapo. / Posso essere ancora disponsibile di fronte ad un bambino, ma di fronte a un uomo, no. /Se un uomo mi chiede di fare una cosa, io quella cosa la faccio come voglio.” Marisa Merz, “Come una dichiarazione” [Like

a declaration], Bit 2, no. 1 (March–April 1968), 29. For a brief consideration of Marisa Merz in the context of Italian feminism and autonomist workers’ movements, see Mariana Moscoso, “An(other) Marisa Merz: An alternative interpretation to the ‘feminized’ artworks of Arte Povera artist Marisa Merz,” a paper presented at the symposium Thinking

Gender 2014 (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for the Study of Women, 2014), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/834925d0. 8. In 1986, I visited Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories, Canada, which at the time was known as the only town north of the Arctic Circle with flushing toilets. This was possible because Inuvik had the Utilidor: a very large silvery metal square

tube on long legs that ran between all the buildings, containing within it the water, heat, and electricity supply, as well as the sewage system. It had to be above ground; otherwise, it would melt the permafrost and sink into the earth. I was told that one bill arrived each month for the Utilidor, and if the tenant failed to pay it, all the services were cut off at once.

piece of her household furniture. Her thighs? She stapled the strips together, building them out like the ridges of a shell. Then she tied them into groups, using simple cotton ribbon, what in England is called tape. One uses tape to sew hems, to bind raw edges, to tie a parcel. The knotted tape is briefly visible: in the museum, some of these metal sculptures hang from loose loops of cotton tape, of different lengths, others from transparent nylon or steel filament. The loops of tape are usually off-white, though in the conserved version, belonging to the museum in Turin, the tape is black.9 18. The one that’s been conserved is extremely reflective, like mirror; others are dully metallic, and some retain traces of the greasy dust that accumulates imperceptibly on kitchen surfaces that are out of reach. Marisa Merz stenciled flat flowers in primary colors on some of them, reminding me of the floral patterns of folk art and 1960s wallpaper, and Warhol’s flowers too. 19. The huge hanging sculpture is temporary: this configuration today, but rehang the thing and the configuration will shift, it has to. Time is built into it, an element both uncertain and provisional. These sculptures are light and heavy at the same time, both easily crushed and resilient. They are handmade, organic, embodied, and somehow plant-like, while being industrial, duct-like, manufactured metal. And the incremental accretion of the stapled metal strips is like bandaging, another spiral wrapping and looping of a line. 20. The metal forms are rhizomes: they are interconnected, without hierarchy or grid. They are alive and they reflect light, moving gently with the air. A photograph from 1967, which was used for the invitation card for her show at Galleria Sperone, in Turin, shows some of them suspended in a tree. 21. Living Sculpture hung in clusters in the Merz apartment, appearing in the kitchen, the hallways, the study. There are photographs of the television almost swallowed by the metal forms. There are photographs of the tubular structures emerging out of the kitchen ceiling, like the secret parts of the house squelching into view. It’s the return of the repressed: something the domestic scene hides has come out to play. It’s the metallic fungus that goes on growing and won’t be eradicated. It’s the other time/other space thing, a glimpse of a secret world.10 22. There’s a measuring of gravity that occurs in our bodies when we witness the ways the metal forms are thrown into space. Shiny tubes and bulbs fall, yet they hold their shapes, they resist gravity, like us.

9. See Living Sculpture (1966), in the collection of Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), in Turin. These works are originally titled in English. 10. Installed in the Merz apartment, Living Sculpture

was employed as a set for an experimental 16mm horror film, Il mostro verde (The Green Monster, 1966–67), directed by Tonino De Bernardi and Paolo Menzio. The work was also re-functioned as radical décor in the Piper Pluri Club, in Turin.

See Teresa Kittler, “Outgrowing the Kitchen: Marisa Merz’s Living Sculpture,” in Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, 229–45. The photographs that accompany Kittler’s essay are mind-blowing.

Marisa Merzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Living Sculpture pictured on the invitation card for an exhibition at Galleria Sperone, Torino, June 1967. ÂŠ Paolo Bressano. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino.

Marisa Merz, Living Sculpture, 1966 and Mario Merz, Fibonacci Santa Giulia, 1967. Installation view, casa Merz's kitchen, Turin, 1968. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino, ÂŠ Paolo Pellion.

The plunging forms drape, like our clothes, or an eighteenth-century wig, silvery metal ringlets. Looking again, I remember her little shoes, and the way knitted fabric rests against the surface of our bodies, another skin. 23. Reflection: in the bright reflective surface of the metal sculptures, immateriality and materiality coincide. It’s as if the shining metal becomes liquid, turning into light. In 1969, Eva Hesse suspended fiberglass threads from multiple ceiling hooks, making a sculpture that dissolves into light. It’s called Right After. Here is a coincidence: two women in the 1960s making big suspended sculptures that lose their weight and materiality to become light, while remaining metal, or fiberglass. 24. My daughter said: “If you leave me alone in the house with the child, when you return you will find giant silvery guts pouring out of the kitchen ceiling, and tiny fairytale shoes knitted out of reflective metal thread, shiny in the light. When you leave me alone in the house with the child, I will open a can of peas in the dark kitchen and carefully count each one while she sleeps. When you leave me alone in the house with the child, I will make a series of pictures of women, each one like the one before. I don’t want to go out, anyway. I’d rather stay home.” 25. Marisa Merz took old thin grey cotton blankets and rolled them up into tubular shapes; she tied the rolls with nylon thread or tape. Then she went down to the beach with her much more successful and renowned artist husband Mario Merz. Mario carried the rolled blankets over his shoulder; he threw them down onto the wet sand, while Claudio Abate took photographs. Something flat becomes tubular; something that is almost nothing becomes a strange offering to the gods. The tied blanket is like a fish, or a piece of driftwood, lying on the wet sand. 26. There are also works on paper, on canvas, mostly drawings of women’s faces. Here a pencil line meanders back and forth on the canvas, reminiscent of the knitted line of wire. A loose netting of lines over these heads suggests the drawing was slow, taking an indeterminate time to make; it suggests there was no model, no observation, rather a drawing from the imagination. The drawings employ a familiar midcentury dreaminess—meshwork of the afternoon—but Marisa Merz did so many of them, she must have meant it. 27. How to account for these faces, so many of them over the years, and most of them with no title, no date? Some are big; many are small; they are repetitive, insistent, they resist interpretation. Are they self-portraits, or something else? An evocation of the anonymous woman (anonymous was a woman, Virginia Woolf wrote), that nobody in particular who seems to be stuck on repeat.11 Through these drawings, we sense her erasure, reiterated, as well as her lack of definition, her tenuous identity,

11. “Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) (New York and Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1945), 42.

and her persistence in time. She’s always already almost formless, yet always also recognizably a woman, and very clearly undefined. In other words, she’s a paradox, living out the contradictions, like the rest of us. 28. Some of the drawings of girls’ faces are large, square, almost like an album cover blown up. Marisa Merz’s use of elements from commercial art speaks of the ways we are haunted by advertising, album covers, movie posters, billboards. As my friend said of one, “It could be a Campari ad.” Marisa Merz does these faces over and over, for decades; she really meant it. What did she mean? I imagine she meant to say something like, hey, hi, you know, being a woman in Italy, or anywhere, in 1962, or 1979, or 2012, is inevitably and deeply and inextricably connected to Campari ads. No apologies, no drama, no protest. Simply the facts. 29. The women’s faces in some of her drawings lean towards cliché, they seem empty and flat, with their lacy net of lines overlaid. Does that make femininity empty and flat? Sure. It’s a constant struggle (for us girls) not to fall into cliché, but here the fall is enacted over and over again. Is that what Marisa Merz meant? Is that the space she invites us into? 30. The repetition of the faces points back towards the knitting: a kind of repetitive time, where you keep doing the same thing, over and over again, with slight variations. It’s a psychic space where all sorts of things can pop up, treasures from the deep. (Years ago a friend insisted that the endless re-typing of our writing that we used to do, before we had computers and printers and word processing programs, was actually incredibly valuable because it was inside and within the sheer tedium and repetitive act of re-typing that the best ideas broke through.) 31. When I was seventeen I split up with my first boyfriend, and shortly afterwards my best friend came over to my house with needles and a ball of yarn, to teach me how to knit. She said, “I’ve come to teach you how to knit, because you need to think.” And we are still friends, despite and because of this. 32. Marisa Merz’s clay heads, like the drawings, are repetitive, uncommunicative, and somewhat obtuse. They sit in silence. Occasionally they’re funny, but much of the time they’re elegant or ugly lumps, molten. Marisa Merz made the heads with a single gesture, and then poked some eyes or a mouth into the shape, as if to say, there: a head. A human being, in its most reduced form. A woman. Almost nothing. 33. This is Lucy Lippard quoting a close friend of Eva Hesse: “Grace Wapner recalls that around this time Hesse found some object in the street—a broken pipe or something—which made an immense impression on her; she called it a ‘nothing’ and said that what she wanted to make was ‘nothings’…” 12

12. Lucy R. Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 56.

Marisa Merz, Untitled, n.d. Graphite and lipstick on canvas, 19 11⁄16 × 15 ¾ in. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino. Photo: Renato Ghiazza.

Marisa Merz, Untitled (part.), n.d. Unfired clay and metallic paint, 3 ¾ × 5 1⁄8 × 3 1⁄8. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino. Photo: Renato Ghiazza.

34. The ceramic heads are made of unfired clay; if you drop them or knock them, they will turn to dust. Marisa Merz arranged them with their formless faces on a steel table, recalling Giorgio Morandi’s paintings of vases and jars, or those stones from the beach arrayed on my windowsill. Or she placed them on the floor in a square lake of paraffin wax, three meters by three meters, as if slowly drowning or floating. Sometimes they are carved out of marble. Tacita Dean described how the heads are found propping open doors in the apartment where Marisa Merz lives.13 They may have gold leaf pressed onto their surfaces, or copper netting. They are part of the landscape of the house, her familiars. 35. Among the collaged works on paper that mostly seem to represent angels and Madonnas and girls, there is one that shows a printed black-andwhite photo of the face of Renée Jeanne Falconetti, in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Her face is raised in a quiet anguish, her eyes half closed. Some of the clay heads repeat this position: heads tipped back, their faces lifted for who knows what kind of ecstasy. Dreyer’s Joan of Arc consists almost entirely of extended close ups of Falconetti’s face as she is interrogated, tortured, and eventually executed; like Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, and other great silent film actors, Falconetti understood that the film’s power lay in the complex unfolding of distinct emotions, moving across her face. When I saw it, it was clear that this stunning film was devoted to what one might call the Spectacle of the Suffering Woman. I then realized that most films are constructed around this spectacle: the visualization of a woman in states of fear, loss, sorrow, shame, humiliation, distress, misunderstanding, torment, and/or as a victim of violence. When we’re not being Campari ads, or mad mothers, it seems we find ourselves in Falconetti. 36. These artworks belonged to the place where Marisa Merz lived and lives still, an apartment overlooking the market square in Turin; they are, perhaps, out of place, displaced, in the museum or the gallery. And the artist parted with some of them reluctantly, as if their meanings and resonance would change when they went out into the world for a year or more, to star in her retrospective. Certain things she refused to let go: the curators describe how they would put together a stack of drawings, and then go to lunch; when they came back, some of the drawings would have been withdrawn, taken back by the artist.14 She would not let them leave the house; at her great age, it would appear that Marisa Merz cares more about her lived reality within the house and the studio than she cares about the museum show, the retrospective.

13. Conversation between Connie Butler and Tacita Dean, Hammer Museum, June 8, 2017, https://hammer.ucla.edu/ programs-events/2017/06/ connie-butler-and-tacita-deanwith-a-screening-of-mariomerz/.

14. Conversation between Connie Butler and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hammer Museum, July 29, 2017, https://hammer.ucla. edu/programs-events/2017/07/ hans-ulrich-obrist-and-conniebutler/.

Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 4â&#x20AC;&#x201C;August 20, 2017. Photo: Brian Forrest.

37. These artworks are part of a series of installations that Marisa Merz made inside her domestic spaces, in Turin, in Milan, and only an approximation of their meanings or effects can be achieved by isolating the individual works and putting them on display in the museum’s vast white rooms. So many works have no title, no date, as if at a certain point the artist figured out a simple way to undo the historical record, to challenge the implied narrative of artistic development. This disregard for the significance of the archive, and the demands of the curators, underlines Marisa Merz’s interest in something other than her place within the history of contemporary art. Yet these works are all about time, and clearly Marisa Merz values her own lived time—the relatively short time remaining to her. She cares deeply about moments unfolding in space, about simultaneity; she cares about the ways material forms can contain and imply different temporalities. Still she doesn’t give a toss for the official history: she will not submit to that imperative. 38. For some years now, Marisa Merz has refused to allow herself, or her studio, to be photographed, or her voice to be recorded. There are people who find this beguiling, a kind of witchy eccentricity. They say things like she doesn’t like machines, as if she’s a medieval saint, or a madwoman. Then they show a photograph of her studio (that was apparently taken without her permission) and it contains a shiny new microwave oven.15 There’s another way to approach these questions, which is to ask, reflectively, why would a 91-year-old artist refuse to be photographed? Could it really be mere vanity, or some kind of phobia about machines? (If industrial femme means anything, it means that in some sense she makes her own machines, no? 16) My surmise is simple: being in touch with reality, Marisa Merz recognizes that she is near death, and she’s decided that she doesn’t want her recorded image, or her voice, to be available for infinite dissemination through the Internet, for post-mortem devouring. Possibly she thinks the photographs of her as a younger person should be sufficient proof that she existed. Perhaps she wants her voice to be something remembered by people who actually knew her, rather than accessed digitally by strangers. Her artwork is about embodiment, materiality, intimacy; controlling how close the world can come to her embodied self is a losing battle; she continues to say no, nevertheless.17

15. Ibid. 16. Thanks to Travis Diehl for this insight. 17. “Merz was born in 1926 in Turin, where her father worked at the Fiat plant. She may have studied dance. At some point in the nineteen-forties, she modelled for the neoclassical painter Felice Casorati. I have now conveyed all that is publicly known of Merz’s life before 1960, which the concerted efforts of the Met Breuer show’s curators—Ian Alteveer,

of the Met, and Connie Butler, of the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, where the show will travel in June—have been unable to supplement. (Even Merz’s maiden name is unknown: searches for a birth certificate yielded none.)” Peter Schjeldahl, “Marisa Merz’s Factory of Dreams,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/01/30/marisamerzs-factory-of-dreams.

Marisa Merz with Living Sculpture, Torino, 1966. Courtesy of Archivio Merz, Torino. ÂŠ Renato Rinaldi, Milano.

Marisa Merz, O sulla terra (O on the Ground), 1970. Woven nylon wire, knitting needles, exact dimensions unknown. Photo documentation from the action at Fregene. ÂŠ Claudio Abate/ Archivio Abate.

39. When I saw Marisa Merzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s show at the Met Breuer in New York, it was deep winter, very wet and cold. The trapezoidal windows that protrude from the faĂ§ade on the north side of the building had odd little sacks placed within them, resting up against the glass. Like cousins of the wrapped and rolled blankets lying on the wet sand, their purpose was to soak up the rainwater that slowly seeps into the building through the leaky windows. In the past, Marisa Merz would call up the presence of the sea by placing a bowl of water, or a small bowl of salt, in the gallery. Here the elements joined the conversation as if invited to take part. Leslie Dick lives in Los Angeles.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Four Meditations on the Old and New Spirits of Capitalism David Weldzius

In Hebrew, Bethlehem means the house of bread. And what do you need to make bread? Dough. That’s what we intend to make here.1 –Sheldon Adelson Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, provides an apt case study for considering the consequences of advanced globalization on the “forgotten men and women” of the twenty-first century.2 Ruminating on The Principles of Scientific Management, a formative model for industrial productivity that Frederick Taylor developed while a consultant at Bethlehem Steel; Walker Evans’s candid depictions of Bethlehem’s white working class in the thirties, during a time of grave economic hardship; and Bill Friedman’s groundbreaking trade volume Casino Management, in which the author likens casinos to mousetraps, my words and pictures will trace a sequence of technocratic and sociopolitical developments that led Bethlehem from boom to bust, and from jackpot to privation.

I. In April 1898, Frederick Taylor arrived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He had been tapped by Robert Linderman, the president of the Bethlehem Steel Company, to increase worker productivity. A decade earlier, Taylor had developed a plan that he called “differential piece rate.” Under this order, workers that met certain quotas were rewarded with higher wages, while workers that failed to meet these quotas were either fired or docked in pay until improvements were made in their performance and productivity.3

1. Matt Assad, “Bigger Things to Come?” Morning Call (Allentown, PA), June 10, 2009. Quoted in Chloe E. Taft, From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 12. 2. My title alludes to the last verse of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” (1920), which Joan Didion alluded to in the title of her essay

collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). Discerning a contemporary trend, Nick Tabor compiled a prudent inventory of homages to Yeats’s chefd’oeuvre manifest in literature, film, television, pop music, and beyond. Since Trump’s election, a deluge of “Second Coming” extracts and citations have made their way to press. Yet Taylor’s sample range (not to mention the essay’s date

of publication) suggests that common anxieties stretch back much further than November 8, 2016: “No Slouch,” Paris Review, April 7, 2015, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/ no-slouch/. The soon-to-be president Franklin D. Roosevelt first characterized the “forgotten man” in a 1932 radio address. Drawing comparison between volunteer soldiers who risked their lives during World

War I and the “economic army” who now found themselves “at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” Roosevelt insisted that the economy must be rebuilt from the bottom up vis-à-vis federal subsidies for farmers, homeowners, and community banks. 3. Frederick W. Taylor, “A Piece Rate System,” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, XVI (1895), 856–83.

By Taylor’s estimation, laborers were inclined to “soldiering,” or underperforming on the job. The reasons for this were numerous, including intimidation by fellow workers whose job security could be jeopardized by others’ over-performance, a lack of incentives for managers to push for increased productivity, and a general agreement among bosses and workers that expedience can lead to accident, injury, or a diminished quality in output.4 In The Principles of Scientific Management, a plainly written volume that became a template for a lasting genre of literature that explicates, through page-turning anecdote, shifts in “best practices” in the interest of previously unfathomable profits, Taylor envisioned a future where safety and quality are preserved in workers’ and bosses’ mutual pursuit of greater surplus and higher wages. Taylor devoted his first several chapters to recounting his interventions in the Bethlehem Steel Company’s oar yard. Workers there earned far less than all other workers at the plant. Their job was to lift 92-pound iron ingots from the blast furnaces and place them on railroad cars.5 Taylor’s main test subject was Henry Noll, a Pennsylvania German whom Taylor nicknamed “Schmidt.” Schmidt desired to work his hardest, but his efforts were thwarted by his foreman and coworkers. Once Schmidt saw that harder work would not result in better pay, he conceded to working at a more relaxed pace. Taylor calculated that, under the management of the time, each handler carried 12 and a half tons of ore daily. Under his leadership, he proposed that production could be increased to 45 tons. In return, Schmidt would see his wages increase precipitously.6 Taylor’s records indicate that there were fewer than 10 Bethlehem employees who could sustain carrying 45 tons for longer than a few days. Nonetheless, Taylor claimed that the men who occupied this elite bracket were far happier than their counterparts: with higher wages, they could provide for their families; they arrived at their jobs with a sense of purpose and had improved relations with their bosses; and they were less prone to alcoholism.7 Taylor provided no evidence for these claims, and it is worth noting that Schmidt subsequently lost his job at Bethlehem Steel after arriving at work intoxicated.8 In picking over the labor struggles of the nineteenth century and envisioning an economic order in which ruling and working classes succeed in reaching common prosperity, Taylor could not have predicted the labor struggles that would reshape the relationships between workers and their employers in the coming century. Bethlehem, of course, was not the only industrial center where workers protested, organized, and in due time brought their bosses to the bargaining table: four years before Taylor’s arrival in Bethlehem, railcar manufacturers had staged an aggressive strike in Pullman, Illinois. As this historical episode reveals, latent fears of socialism and anarchy, particularly in relation to an immigrant workforce that had largely been cast as 4. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1919), 13. 5. Ibid., 42. 6. Ibid., 42–45.

7. In the same breath, Taylor explains that first-class workers should not receive more than a 60% increase in their wages. Overcompensated workers “will work irregularly and tend to

become more or less shiftless, extravagant, and dissipated. Our experiment showed, in other words, that it does not do for most men to get rich too fast.” Ibid., 74.

8. Daniel Nelson, “Taylorism and the Workers at Bethlehem Steel,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 4 (October 1977), 500.

David Weldzius, Untitled (Parking lot, ironworks and blast furnaces, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), October 2017. Digital scan from 4 Ă&#x2014; 5 in. negative. Courtesy of the artist.

antithetical to the American project, were already palpable in civic society. Taylor’s writings on Bethlehem then should perhaps be reimagined as the ruling class’s last plea for radical individuation—a final attempt at soothing the underclass not through a systematized restructuring of socioeconomic relations, but through an elusive promise of mutual benefit vis-à-vis a greater partitioning of intellectual and manual labor.

II. Photographer Walker Evans arrived in Bethlehem in 1935. Working under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal subsidiary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Evans had been instructed to photograph several American communities. In just eighteen months, he constructed hundreds of exposures. Four of his photographs from Bethlehem were published in his book American Photographs (1938) and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in MoMA’s first exhibition concentrating on the work of a single photographer. Although not included in American Photographs, Evans’s A Graveyard and a Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, November 1935 (1935) is one of his best-known photographs. In this image, headstones, row houses, and blast furnaces are compressed into a single frame, allowing the viewer to perceive in equal measure the sites of production, consumption, and final rest of countless steelworkers. Evans never entered the Bethlehem Steel plant, however, or at least the Library of Congress’s dossier of 43 photographs provides no such evidence.9 The blast furnaces appear in just two of his images, and the oar yards are visible in neither. Evans’s human subjects return his gaze in exactly three exposures, two of which were selected for publication in American Photographs. Like many of the other portraits included in the book’s photo sequence, the facial expressions captured here suggest irritation at best and suspicion at worst. In fact, the reactions provoked by Evans’s camera seem to reiterate the dilemma of the New Deal project at large: principally, that Roosevelt’s “forgotten man,” a necessarily white industrial or agricultural worker who, as the FSA sought to evidence, prided himself on self-reliance, was fundamentally skeptical of the federal government’s capacity to ameliorate his hardships and equally suspicious of its motives.10 Certainly, some of the forgotten man’s suspicions were justified. In 1935, the year of Evans’s sojourn, Bethlehem Steel was experiencing record profits, with no tangible benefit to the men tasked with increasing its surplus. Despite Taylor’s directive for merit-based compensation, corporate policy kept wages unvaryingly low. It was not until 1941, after three decades spent 9. Walker Evans, “Bethlehem—Pennsylvania,” Library of Congress, http:// www.loc.gov/pictures/search /?q=walker+evans+bethlehe m&sp=1. 10. My thinking around

Roosevelt’s “forgotten” is indebted to art historian Sally Stein, who has expertly synthesized the “forgotten” with white poverty and FSA photography in her essay “Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant

Mother’ and the Paradox of Iconicity,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003), 344–55.

wrangling with upper management, local police, and the National Guard, that the Bethlehem workforce would join with the United Steelworkers union in an attempt to win a greater share of profits. Their eventual victory was due in no small part to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, a bill that Roosevelt signed into law weeks before Evans came to Bethlehem, which all but guaranteed American workers’ right to bargaining power. In proto-Cold-War fashion, Roosevelt was perhaps less invested in helping white workers reach the middle class than he was fearful of their capacity to align with radical political factions.11 Nevertheless, United Steelworkers in Bethlehem would soon migrate en masse from South Bethlehem row houses, the ethnic working-class neighborhood where Evans photographed, to freestanding homes in North Bethlehem, the middle-class neighborhood where he did not. With living wages, pensions, and property, these workers were no longer underclass Italians, Hungarians, and Czechs but rather joint beneficiaries of the surplus that stemmed from their collective labor. Now un-forgotten, they became white, middle-class Americans, members of the dominant class. In a clean reversal of Frederick Taylor’s mantra, “In the past the man was first; in the future the system must be first,” the Bethlehem employee ended his shift by casting off his boots and overalls and taking a hot shower, in an area that the bosses begrudgingly dubbed the “welfare room,” before returning home for supper.

III. The people of Bethlehem tend to agree that the first cracks appeared in 1967. Bethlehem Steel was underbid by a network of smaller steel producers to begin work on the World Trade Center towers. Domestic steel consumption peaked in 1977, and by the 1980s, a significantly higher percentage of American steel was “new,” or produced from scrap, rather than “old,” or derived from coke and oar. Today over 90 percent of new American steel is comprised exclusively of scrap.12 Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy protection in October 2001. Investor Wilbur Ross, the King of Bankruptcy, a moniker he earned after helping Donald Trump restructure his debt from three insolvent casinos in Atlantic City, purchased Bethlehem’s debts and assets in 2002. Under the umbrella of the International Steel Group, Ross consolidated several bankrupt steel companies, renegotiated union contracts, and restructured debt obligations, before selling ISG at a record profit. Over the next decade, Ross would repeat this model, purchasing, consolidating, and selling off a trove of companies. He would liquidate the last of these assets in 2016 before settling into his new position as Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, in early 2017. 11. For a meticulous investigation of New Deal-era legislation in relation to Communist fear, particularly the National Housing Act of 1934, see Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution:

A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 12. Many of my statistics on “new steel” have been gleaned

from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, “Old Steel: Reading the Remains of an American Industry,” Lay of the Land Newsletter (Winter 2013), http://www.clui.org/newsletter/ winter-2013/old-steel.

Walker Evans, A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, November 1935. Gelatin silver print, 7 11⁄16 × 9 9⁄16 in. Gift of the Farm Security Administration. © 2017 Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [1998018003].

Walker Evans, Sons of American Legion, 1935. Scanned nitrate film, 35mm. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-DIG-fsa-8a19592].

In late 2006, Sheldon Adelson, founder and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, purchased the land where Bethlehem Steel once sat with the intention of building a casino resort. Adelson aspired to create a Venetian East, a companion to his resorts in Las Vegas, Singapore, and Macao. But when gondoliers with “authentic Italian accents” arrived at Bethlehem’s summer Musikfest to promote Adelson’s concept, residents were enraged, and in time the plan was revised.13 An early Sands “BethWorks” promotional brochure reads: The historical and emotional importance of Bethlehem Steel argues against a Disney-esque interpretation. The design of the casino, hotel, and retail center combines gabled roofs, exposed steel structure, brick, and glass in ways that are compatible with the existing buildings and infuse the project with new energy and excitement now absent from the site. Coordinated dramatic lighting effects in the new building and existing ones will light the site with a glow that will recall the glowing furnaces of the plant circa-1942.14 Incidentally, the Sands Bethlehem Casino was slated to be built on the former oar yard, the very site where over a century earlier Frederick Taylor honed his theory of scientific management. The yard’s elevated track, once used to transport ore to and from the furnaces, became the scaffolding for the Sands’ commanding neon sign, a landmark that tourists must drive beneath to reach the resort’s six-level parking structure. No decorated shed, this spectacular ruin bears the weight of diametrically opposed yet entangled epochs: one where immigrants labored for a 70-cent raise in a community where, as Evans’s photograph suggests, they lived and worked until death, and one where an investment capitalist descended on a city as the lasting effects of globalization had become impossible to ignore and implemented a plan that, with the Pennsylvania Commonwealth’s enthusiastic backing, would rake in unceasing profits.15 Three aspects of the Sands Bethlehem enterprise resonate in this context: the decision to situate the casino on this parcel of land, fortuitously the site of Taylor’s canonic research; the decision to honor Bethlehem Steel’s legacy in the year 1942, a high watermark for workers’ protections and benefits; and the decision to build a structure than simulates the architecture of the Bethlehem Steel plant, rather than electing to recuperate one of the numerous existing structures.

13. Matt Assad, “Hotel and Casino Campaign Comes to Musikfest,” Morning Call, August 7, 2005. Quoted in Taft, From Steel to Slots, 57. 14. Las Vegas Sands Corp., Sands Bethworks, promotional brochure (2005), 12. Quoted in Taft, From Steel to Slots, 86. 15. In Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las

Vegas, the authors postulate that, architecturally, the casino resort is a drab industrial edifice that provides a material support for conspicuous signage—hence “decorated shed.” See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).

With little doubt, the Sands Bethlehem Casino, in neo-Taylorist fashion, manages its clients through an asymmetrical yet persuasive system of rewards and penalties. It honors the labor of those who built bridges and warships in the twentieth century even as it undermines the labor of those who deal blackjack in the twentyfirst, and it uses fond memories of the industrial era as a buffer against lingering criticisms of the new economy.16 Of course, this strategy is not new: I can think of several destinations that exploit their former industrial function in service to conspicuous consumption.17 And why not? After the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush unwittingly drove the last nail into the old economy’s coffin by telling Americans that their patriotic duty was no longer to conserve, to volunteer, or to enlist, but to shop. The military industrial complex, which in the previous century all but determined Bethlehem’s economic solvency, no longer demanded ordinary Americans’ commitment or labor. It is then both auspicious and appropriate that, in this century, consumers regularly exercise their patriotism in the brownfields-cum-shopping-and-entertainment complexes where goods were once produced. Yet where the raison d’être of Bethlehem’s derelict blast furnaces is to be photographed, either as a point-of-focus or as a selfie backdrop, visitors’ cameras are all but prohibited from the casino floor. Through state-ofthe-art surveillance systems, the casino is photographed more diligently and with greater precision and care than almost any other corner of civic society.18 Nonetheless, there is a clear reason why workers are more often photographed as they are leaving the factory, traversing from sites of production to consumption, than they are arriving or engaging in work.19 Since its invention, the consumer-grade camera has been called on to record acts of leisure and events of personal import: in short, almost every activity outside of labor and rest. August and Louis Lumière’s film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1885), then, in addition to signaling the synchronous births of cinema and workplace surveillance, marks the commencement of the worker’s playtime: the moment when workers are

16. Historically, Sands employees have not been successful in organizing with service unions. In 1999, Sheldon Adelson sued service workers for picketing outside of the Venetian, claiming that the sidewalk that surrounds the resort is private land. In 2002, the US Supreme Court refused to hear Adelson’s case. Nonetheless, a union was never formed. The land that constitutes the former Bethlehem Steel plant is privately owned— hence, Sands employees’ first amendment rights are not protected there. 17. Examples of brownfield revitalization projects in the Keystone state abound. Herrs Island, Pittsburgh’s former meatpacking and

18. To be sure, the surveillance system has been put in place to protect the casino from double-dealing, not to protect the citizenry from potential harm. Never mind the patron that enters the casino resort with an untold number of assault weapons, cardcounters will be apprehended and face criminal charges. 19. Company foremen Auguste and Louis Lumière encapsulate this consequential migration from the site of production to the site of consumption in their first motion picture, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (dir. Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1885; New York: Kino International, 1997). The subject is reexamined from

livestock district, was renamed Washington’s Landing Marina in 1987 and converted into mixed-use development. A vast open-air shopping mall called The Waterfront replaced Carnegie Steel in Homestead, Pennsylvania, once Bethlehem Steel’s main competitor, in 1991. Southside Works, a mixed-use development that includes entertainment, retail, offices, and condos, replaced LTV Steel in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood in 2002. For a comprehensive list of so-called “Brownfield Success Stories,” see Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection website: http:// www.dep.pa.gov/Business/ Land/Redevelopment/Pages/ Success-Stories.aspx.

an intermediary’s vantage point in numerous cinematic works: Jean-Luc Godard’s and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Pravda (1970), Allan Sekula’s Untitled Slide Sequence (1972), Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Camera Buff (1979), Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), and Sharon Lockhart’s Exit (2008), among others. By and large, these revisions contend that the origin of cinema must be assessed in tandem with workplace surveillance, the compartmentalization of industrial labor and non-labor, and the camera’s permission and/or restriction on the factory floor in strict alignment with socioeconomic class.

Previous spread: David Weldzius, Two-Family Houses in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (after Walker Evans), November 2016. Digital scan from 4 Ă&#x2014; 5 in. negative. Courtesy of the artist. Above: Workers from the last shift of Bethlehem Steelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Blast Furnace gather on the furnace's landing as the final molten iron pours into a submarine rail car, November 18, 1995. Digital scan from 35mm negative. Courtesy of The Morning Call, Allentown, PA. Photographer unknown.

David Weldzius, Untitled (Ore bridge, casino entrance, walking path, and blast furnaces, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), October 2017. Digital scan from 4 Ă&#x2014; 5 in. negative. Courtesy of the artist.

permitted to begin to construct mechanical reproductions of their own surroundings. Notwithstanding the vast machinery that provides the backdrop to Walker Evans’s Bethlehem, a space opens up as workers turn away from the factory door, directing their camera lenses outward, toward the domain of consumption and leisure. It now seems certain that Sands Casino resembles a workplace more conspicuously than it does a tourist destination, while the rest of the former steel plant, now ripe for #ruinporn, resembles a tourist destination more accurately than it does a workplace. Walter Benjamin wrote, “To the phantasmagoria of space, to which the flâneur was addicted, there corresponded the phantasmagoria of time to which the gambler dedicated himself. Gambling transformed time into a narcotic.” 20 Benjamin’s observation appears to invert the nineteenth-century worker’s relationship to time, particularly its slow, monotonous passage, which was once principal to the worker’s estrangement from industrial production. In contrast to that outmoded principle, the gambler does not need to be managed or compelled to work more efficiently. She is at once an entrepreneur, a contractor, and a free agent. No need to punch in, the gambler is identified by facial recognition software embedded in state-of-the-art surveillance software, the sensors that read her MasterCard chip, or both. Her labor is not burdened by salary requirements, benefits, or any other contractual obligations. A ceaseless servant, she will never demand more than she is given. She will not organize, picket, or strike. The narratives that play through the gambler’s head as she is engaged in endless rounds of blackjack, poker, and baccarat are wholly incompatible with the tenets of dialectical materialism, even as, like the nineteenth-century worker, she is scarcely a beneficiary of her own labor. In truth, for this arrangement to endure, the gambler must convince herself that she has a standing chance (at last!) to partake in the surplus that she herself produces. There is nothing cruel or misguided about this arrangement because, after all, what other activities under the new system of labor and capital present an opportunity, albeit quantifiably narrow, to transcend one’s socioeconomic class? Not coincidentally, Sheldon Adelson’s enterprises work closely with municipal and state governing bodies in perpetuating the get-rich-quick myth. The Pennsylvania Commonwealth once endeavored to provide a buffer for those steeped in economic distress but now must rely on gambling taxes to mitigate budget shortfalls.21 Indeed, the auspicious benefactors of the new economy require little more than languid approval from the masses for this arrangement to endure. In this century, many states have followed Pennsylvania’s example, passing bills and amending constitutions to favor state-regulated gambling while, in the same breath, warning their constituents that if gamblers are prohibited from wagering here, they will take their business elsewhere.

20. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 12. 21. Marc Levy, “Pennsylvania OKs Betting Online, in

Airports, at Truck Stops,” Washington Post, October 30, 2017. Among the 50 states, Pennsylvania ranks second to Nevada in gambling profits. In October 2017, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom

Wolf, signed a comprehensive bill into law expanding online gambling and lottery services and clearing the way for video poker and slot machines to reach airports and truck stops. Incapable of raising taxes with

a Republican-led congress, Wolf regularly relies on casino, lottery, and state liquor sales to circumvent acute deficit margins.

Bill Friedman, a Las Vegas entrepreneur, historian, and recovered problem gambler, is responsible for founding “casino management,” a field that seeks to maximize REVPAC (revenue per available customer) and TOD (time-on-device) via strategic management of the gaming economy’s lumpen-proletariat.22 Published in 1974, not long after Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s landmark Learning from Las Vegas, Friedman’s Casino Management contends that slot machines must greet gamblers at the door; ceilings must be low; lighting soft and subdued; no natural light or clocks; seating should be comfortable and inconspicuous; pedestrian flow should twist and turn like a labyrinth. Deep in Plato’s cave, the gambler should feel relaxed and focused, wholly insulated from the exterior.23 Friedman insists that all games should unfold quickly. Machine gamblers should enter into a symbiotic relationship with their devices whereby the touchscreen interface used to play poker or blackjack is as intuitive and seamless as the operating systems on the gambler’s smartphone, allowing one to reach “the zone” quickly and for prolonged time periods.24 While borrowing freely from Friedman’s playbook, however, the Sands Bethlehem does not follow Casino Management’s spatial directives in any precise sense: the gabled roofs, which allow natural light to pour in, are elevated high above the casino’s floor. Cylindrical orange lights recall, as the brochure suggests, the metallurgic ooze of yesteryear’s slag. Like a nineteenth-century factory, the floorplan promotes easy navigation and uncomplicated survey, hardly resembling a labyrinth or cave. Instead, the Sands’s design team has reimaged the casino as an “adult playground,” tailoring its decorum to ingratiate the everyday tourist or so-called weekend gambler, while systematically ignoring the slot-and-video-poker zombies that Friedman mobilized into a dedicated workforce.25 Walter Benjamin wrote: “Lafargue defined gambling as a miniature reproduction of the mysteries of the market situation.” 26 Gambling, in other words, invites the bourgeoisie to masquerade as unbridled marketeers, accruing wealth through high-risk capital gains rather than the cyclical platitudes of managerial labor, while the casino’s spatial and temporal phantasmagorias assure patrons that they too can partake in the opulence of the Old-World aristocracy (in the case of the Venetian), or the solidity of a New-World union contract (in the case of Sands Bethlehem). Abiding by these rules of engagement, however, the gambler must rely on repetitive actions that, in practice, recall the grating alienation of factory labor: spinning, rolling, pressing, pulling, turning, checking, and folding ad nauseam. Gazing up

22. Bill Friedman, Casino Management (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1974). 23. Ibid. While Venturi and Scott Brown focus on urban planning and the casino’s exterior and context (façades, signage, strip malls, parking lots, throughways, and freeways), Friedman trains his focus almost exclusively on the casino’s interior.

I could not confirm whether Venturi’s and Scott Brown’s research informed Friedman’s casino management doctrine. However, this trajectory, from one case study to the next, is rather serendipitous: while written with incongruent aims and for disparate readerships, the former volume seems to clear a discursive space for the latter volume to be

articulated and received. 24. Much of my research into casino management comes from secondary sources, in particular Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 2012). 25. Gambling researcher Karen Finlay has likened twenty-first century casinos to

“playgrounds for adults.” See Finlay, interviewed in Jonah Lehrer, “Royal Flush: How Roger Thomas redesigned Vegas,” The New Yorker, March 26, 2012. 26. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 12. Incidentally, Benjamin was writing of Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law (1842–1911).

Above: David Weldzius, Untitled (Sand Casino interior, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), October, 2017. iPhone photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Following spread: David Weldzius, A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (after Walker Evans), November 2016. Digital scan from 4 Ă&#x2014; 5 in. negative. Courtesy of the artist.

at the sky through the gabled glass ceiling, one might ask: how does the Bethlehem gambler, whose collar is likely bluer than her blood, succeed in posing as an investment broker when the reproduction that constitutes her workplace is in truth little more than a Disney-esque interpretation of a factory?

IV. Sheldon Adelson was the largest single contributor to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, a candidate who won the election on a promise to bring manufacturing jobs back to white working communities. With little doubt, Adelson made significant returns on his investment. During his first speech as president, Trump laid out his populist vision: “January 20 th 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening now.” 27 It was the first time in nearly 85 years that white Americans had been addressed this way by a major political figure. Not coincidentally, many of the voters that comprise the president’s active base reside in the same post-industrial towns that were subject to scientific management at the turn of the century, that Walker Evans documented during the Depression, and that benefited from union protections between the Second World War and the onset of advanced globalization. Somewhere along the way, we are told, the lopsided corollaries of neoliberal policy stirred white workers to replace their construction helmets with red caps emblazoned with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” And while it is anyone’s guess just when America was great, the floor of Adelson’s casino, which indeed celebrates industrial labor “circa-1942,” deals a plausible rejoinder. At this writing, fourteen months after Trump’s election, it remains to be seen whether Sands Casino can deliver the free enterprise prosperity that Adelson and Trump have envisioned, or if instead the forgotten men and women of Bethlehem will feel compelled to organize against their best-laid plans. In recent history, a cruel myth that assures the citizenry that radical deregulation and deeper tax cuts will elicit a more equitable distribution of global profits has been used brilliantly by policymakers to pacify those who stand to lose the most from their deliberations. Yet, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which the pendulum does not lose its momentum and decisively swing back. To my point, the Bethlehem Sands security guards successfully organized with the Local 522 last February, making them the first and only Sands employees in the United States or Asia to enjoy union representation and collective bargaining power.28

27. Donald Trump, “The Inaugural Address,” White House, January 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ inaugural-address.

28. Matt Assad, “Sands Casino Guards Make Union History,” Morning Call (Allentown, PA), February 23, 2017.

In a poem that dutifully resurfaces when the steadfast institutions of advanced democracy are at their most vulnerable, William Butler Yeats wrote: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; … The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. … The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 29 The forgotten men and women of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the tired, the weak, the poor, and all else who seek respite from—or indeed, resistance to—capitalism’s new spirit, should heed this poet’s call. David Weldzius is an artist based in Philadelphia.

29. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” The Dial (November 1920).

Sabrina Tarasoff Needing Something, Hitting a Wall

An island can be dreadful for someone from the outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon. —Tove Jansson, The Summer Book 1 When I first read Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson’s stories as a child, I realized one could devote an entire life to big dreams in small formats. This was not only because her tales were built from perspectives that I could identify with—those shared by the sweetly infantile, the squeezable, and the bite-sized. It was also because she was immersed—and immersed me—in the idea that the short story was the ideal form of writing, equipped as it was with precisely and only what it needed: one had to be able “to hold the tale enclosed in one’s hand.” 2 In retrospect, what I was negotiating probably belonged to something like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of that which “is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) [as] the background against which whatever I could express [had] its meaning.” 3 The world did end at those shores; I understood meaning only in their wake. Jessica Stockholder, who was raised on the coast of Vancouver, Canada, commented: “The way the water meets an island, or another piece of land, and forms a horizon line below the one made by the tops of the mountaintops meeting the sky—that particular horizon line has something to do with the kind of space that I am interested in.” 4 As on Jansson’s islands (in particular the one belonging to a little girl named Sophia, though more about that later), one can imagine ambling around Stockholder’s sculptures in casual whimsy—plastic bins woven with volumes of lime green tulle, mobiles of scallop shells, red wigs and copper wire tubing, endless lists of dangling stuff, basically—following a spatial ambition acutely in touch with its own precariousness. Such formalism is a stubborn flight of fancy that

1. Tove Jansson, “Berenice,” The Summer Book, trans. Thomas Teal, illus. Kathryn Davis (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 30. 2. Tove Jansson, quoted on the Sort of Books website: sortof.co.uk/books/letters-

4. Rice Gallery, “Jessica Stockholder: Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand Ran Over Sam,” press release, September 2004, www.ricegallery.org/jessicastockholder/.

from-klara/. See also Letters from Klara, trans. Thomas Teal (London: Sort of Books, 2017). 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Georg Henrik von Wright, “Culture and Value,” Culture and Value (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 16.

Jessica Stockholder, Set Eyes On, 2015. Wooden tables, plastic, mirrors, lamps, acrylic, carpet, 157 ½ × 275 ½ × 137 ¾ in. Installation view, Palpable Glyphic Rapture, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, January 22–March 14, 2015. © Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/ Brussels. Photo : Tutti Image / Bertrand Huet.

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book (New York: New York Review Books, 1972), 42–43. Reproduced with permission. © Tove Jansson, 1972, Moomin Characters™.

rouses the insecurity of not knowing how to tease out its meaning, let alone address its impressions. (This may be this writer’s specific angst.) Yet the idea is not to sweat the inexpressible, nor exalt its inevitable frustrations, as the post-modernists might have, but to readmit form as one aspect of meaning—which Stockholder seems to draw out of Wittgenstein’s wager that “the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged.” 5 Somethingas-this, something-as-that. That is, one can find family resemblance in mismatched experiences through changes in aspect—experiences such as visualization, model-making, practicing one’s imagination, flipping over a word in mind a million times to consider its meaning, or thinking about what meaning exists between non-sequiturs. (Think of Lewis Carroll’s riddles: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” 6) What is consistent is the form that expresses the experience. An island is an island is an island. Like so, Stockholder’s clusters of baskets become cloud castles, lamps cast kisses, and spaces themselves—the space of a gallery or the inside of a sculpture—form shorelines. She experiences space as a series of angular relationships idling where mood and façade meet in the word aspect, which literally, in collage, assemblage, papier-mâché and models, lies in how two materials touch, how they imitate one another, what they exchange. What her work solicits—what it anticipates, or fruitlessly desires—is then description: what is seen, what is experienced, what is felt. But if the goal is this (provisional) expression of the inexpressible, which is to say minor affects and subtle, seedy moods—nuances of experience, Stockholder’s task is to achieve exemption, as Roland Barthes would put it, “from meaning within a perfectly readerly discourse.”7 She recognizes the inexpressible as simply a different system of signification, which is much like haiku was for Barthes: “[A haiku] is not a rich thought reduced to form, but a brief event which finds its form.” 8 That form then exempts its object—in this case sculpture—from meaning toward the purpose of seeming “simple, close, known, delectable, delicate, ‘poetic,’ [but] insignificant nonetheless.” 9 The mundane objects striving to be seen as something other, even if just dressed in enamel paint for effect, can only be “described” in a series of reassuring adjectives (like Richard Serra’s rolling verbs for the quirky and cute 10 ) which ultimately only amble in a suspension of meaning. In Jansson’s words, the sculptures make for border experiences: “The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything.” 11 In Jansson’s short story “Playing Venice,” a little girl named Sophia lives on an island with her grandmother and her largely absent father. Sophia’s mother is dead, and the limits of Sophia’s existence, contained by both island and trauma, are matched by the boundlessness of her imagination.

5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology,” Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 65. 6. Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, “Alice’s Adventures

in Wonderland,” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Macmillan, 1899), 97. 7. Roland Barthes, “So,” Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 81. 8. Barthes, “Exemption from

Meaning,” Empire of Signs, 75. 9. Barthes, “So,” Empire of Signs, 82. 10. See Samantha Friedman, “To Collect,” Inside/Out: A MoMA/PS1 Blog, October 20, 2011, https://www. moma.org/explore/inside_

out/2011/10/20/to-collect/. 11. Boel Westin, “Ingen Bok Är Den Andra Lik. Mumins Mamma Fyller Åttio,” [No book is like another: The mother of the Moomins turns eighty], Dagens Nyheter (August 9, 1994).

One day, a Saturday, to be precise—and details are what truly matter here— Sophia receives a postcard from Venice in the mail. On the address side is her whole name, “with ‘Miss’ in the front”; the flipside sports an image of the slowly sinking city, all “pink,” “slim,” “shining,” “lonely,” “soft,” “slimy,” “elegant,” “doomed,” and “oozy.” 12 Sophia sinks into a Venice of her mind’s making, in which she becomes a “lovely” Venetian child, and her grandmother becomes “Mama.” Together, they build a model of the city, carving canals in the soft marshland; making tiny trattorias, campaniles, and palaces of balsa wood; and constructing a Piazza San Marco from wooden plugs and smooth skipping stones. Yet as Sophia roleplays, she sees not only a city sinking into a very real canal somewhere very far away, but also realizes the precariousness of her own being, as her creation sits in its small abysses of wet moss right in front of her. The fiction becomes too hard to hold in one hand; it just keeps seeping out. The significance is too much to carry. Sophia storms off just as a heavy rain sets in over their small island, and soon enough, the balsa Venice disappears beyond the heather and sinks into the dark sea. Jansson’s politic lies in minor affect and its ability to home in on all things pliant, soft, and bejeweled. But cuteness, like creatures so cute that you could just eat them up, swallow whole, or squeeze until they pop—cuteness that invites touch—cannot help but exalt its own “helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency.” 13 The expanse of childish thought can only refer back to its very limits and thus reveals “a number of distinctions present in the larger motif… It marks a crucial absence.” 14 To indulge in an affair between Jansson and Wittgenstein, the island acts as the inexpressible against which Sophia’s thought finds its form—the meaning of which must renew itself at each tide. Meaning becomes an event. This absence and its entailment in space undoubtedly accompanied Jansson as she was drafting The Summer Book. Conscious of the precarious balance between blissful oblivion and smallness wrought by violence, particularly in the wake of World War II, Jansson wrote in her diaries: “My first books were about happy childhood and the joy of being an amateur, with a little escapism. Now there’s no more material… I used to show the beautiful, abundant profusion of the world. But how do you set about showing an empty room?” 15 Stockholder’s work is motivated by a similar paradox: how to show the profusion of the everyday, with its conflicted or contrasting affects, yet do so with the fewest elements. Her work names, as Sianne Ngai said of Gertrude Stein, in “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” “an aesthetic encounter with an exaggerated difference in power that does something to ordinary or communicative speech.” 16 (Though speech here is that odd thing of unexpected semblances, like Stein’s Tender Buttons—just

12. Jansson, “Playing Venice,” The Summer Book, 40–41. 13. Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 819. 14. Frances Richard, “Fifteen Theses on the Cute,” Cabinet 4 (Fall 2001), www.cabinetmaga-

zine.org/issues/4/cute.php. 15. Madeleine Larue, “A Little Piece of Life: Tove Jansson’s Fiction for Adults,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2014). 16. Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” 828.

Jessica Stockholder, Assist #4: Carved Spaces, 2016. Painted steel, 87½ × 61 × 64 in. © Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY.

think!—“GLAZED GLITTER,” “A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION,” “A PLATE,” “A MOUNTED UMBRELLA,” 17 et cetera.) Pieces of the Assist series play with the “something-as-this, something-as-that” logic by imposing rules for their making, like a thought experiment. Each piece must contain two bases, two top parts, and nothing more, to be assembled as desired, upside down or sideways, or strapped to other things. The elements of Assist #4, Carved Spaces (2016)—a teal gate, metal netting, a cutout of aluminum—which looks like wobbly legs—and a Formica-looking panel are respectively tied to a plushy chair in too-tight an embrace. It’s uncomfortably cute, the Assist a pseudo-sociopathic teen lover squealing I’ll never let you go! as the chair chokes. (Jansson: “You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much,” 18 and vice versa.) The hard edges of formalism are softened with a smart-alecky qua cute sense of humor, and imbued with a childish immediacy that, à la Barthes, “reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is… [and] merely saying: that! ” 19 Stockholder points to a profusion extant in minimal gestures, like Beckett’s ascetic use of props, although hers are arguably happier ones. Her spaces fill with forms that are as improbable as they are inventive and as lacking of purpose as they are laden with small wisdoms. (The Assist sculptures are cases in point: a chair, as Hyperallergic’s John Yau commented, is not only a place to sit but also a clothing rack, diving board, and claustrophobic lover.20)This makes the leap from grandeur, big dreams, and giant leaps for mankind to what Ngai described as “a lighthearted aesthetic, an aesthetic of ineffectuality par excellence,” which she adds is “not only easily grasped or fondled physically but…easily grasped or fondled mentally.” 21 It is noteworthy that Stockholder’s ideas invite a following of descriptors: adorable, animated, artificial, available, bland, boring, charming, childlike, cloying, comfy, comic, consumable, cuddly, dainty, dilettantish, dippy, embarrassed, flirtatious, frolicking, girlish, guileless, helpless, infantile, innocent, itsy-bitsy, maudlin, miniature, nostalgic, pastel, pathetic, petite, pink, precocious, quaint, quiet, round, saccharine, sappy, saucy, sexy, shy, simple, soft, squashable, tiny, touching, vulnerable, waiflike.22 (What a blessing lists are.) The objects collected in her work fill rooms with a profusion of affects: ones that are embodied, exist at human scale, and reinforce the conditions of their own making. It is a willful imposition of cuteness, bearing in mind that “cute” is one letter short of the “acute”; its first meaning is that of a sharp wit, the foreshortening of which softens the threat of its message and renders it approachable. I can only imagine this is the result of stewing in that paradox between profusion and empty space, obstinacy and whimsy—the result of sauntering in one’s studio feeling both frustrated and desirous, feeling that all things, as Jansson wrote in her diaries, “are so very uncertain, [yet] that’s exactly what makes [one] feel reassured.” 23 Reassured and, as a particularly Jansson-esque friend recently added to my list of descriptors, pleased with oneself. 17. Gertrude Stein, “Objects,” in Tender Buttons (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1997), 3, 7, 10. 18. Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley, trans. Thomas Warburton (London:

Puffin, 2011), 16. 19. Barthes, “So,” Empire of Signs, 83. 20. John Yau, “The Party We Are All Invited To,” Hyperallergic, September 4, 2016, https:// hyperallergic.com/320775/

Jessica-Stockholder-theguests-all-crowded-into-thedining-room-Mitchell-Innesand-Nash/. 21. Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” 841. 22. My list is adapted from

Richard’s “Fifteen Theses on the Cute,” Cabinet 4. 23. Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter, trans. Thomas Warburton (London: Puffin, 2012), 28.

No pleasure, though, without a hint of violence: Stockholder’s series Kissing the Wall (1988–98) is a blushing rendezvous of form and affects, in which sculpture is staged like a lover’s discourse (albeit an adolescently awkward one). The pieces hinge on a teetering uncertainty, which is inevitable when relying on affects, particularly small ones, due to the fickle and slippery substance of feeling. (Just think how quickly the discourteous can be calmed down as just a joke [jk! jk!] or how the joke, when vamped, can be precocious enough to count as flirtation. The same flirt, when filled with self-doubt, becomes suspicious to the other; what is suspect is then swallowed as fear and teased out as impudence.) Side tables and chairs are stacked and wrapped with sweaters, swollen with papier-mâché, dressed up in pillows like pre-emptive Rei Kawakubo clothes, or covered in yellowpainted spools like clusters of Rice Krispies. Each is coated in enamel paint as though to bind the objects together, which bids attention to a precariousness enacted through small yet encumbered forms; they incite murky emotions, vulnerability, shyness, social awkwardness, first forays into infatuation. Placed against walls at arm’s length, the lights shining a spotlit “kiss,” things stacked on top of things make for delicate medleys, like the objects in Tender Buttons—especially those slightly disaffected, perturbed by minor affects. I can’t think about Stockholder’s Kissing the Wall without myself feeling what Stein’s objects also feel: “little,” “tender,” “hurt,” “shuddering,” “surrendering.” 24 The sculptures always seem at the risk of collapsing in parts, either literally or with a little imagination, because the “kiss” the sculpture is going for will inevitably remain unattained. Perhaps due to the scale or placement, the social awkwardness nevertheless elicits empathy, endearment, embarrassment, vulnerability, even some giggles. The wall is always just out of the work’s reach; the object’s caustic whimsy lampoons its own endeavor. (We’ve all been there, sometimes a kiss is more like hitting a wall.) It’s cute. As Frances Richard writes in “Fifteen Theses on the Cute”: “If beauty is symmetrical, proportionate, and shades toward perfection, while sublimity is awe-inspiring, jagged, and larger than life, then organic cute is disproportionate, asymmetrical, and smaller—lighter, more humorous, and less ironic—than life.” 25 (And apropos trespasses on high modernism’s eloquence, Stockholder’s amorphously cute sculptures also bid to a certain melodrama; think Shakespeare: “Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.” 26) These makeshift materials “kiss” with a clumsy amateurism. In their wily (qua crafty) interconnections, they make the mundane look almost mannerist. Though there is an element of excess, the profusion hinges on the mundane: just ordinary things, things that are messy, and always almost out of control—“jumbled,” 27 as the artist puts it. By marrying discrepant shapes and forms, creating shortcuts from one visual idea to another, Stockholder

24. Stein, Tender Buttons, 3. 25. Richard, “Fifteen Theses on the Cute,” Cabinet 4. 26. William Shakespeare, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009), 21. 27. Artspace Editors, “The

Phaidon Folio: ‘My Work Isn’t About Junk’: Jessica Stockholder on Debunking Common (Mis)Understandings of Her Work,” Artspace, July 7, 2017, www.artspace.com/ magazine/art_101/book_report/jessica-stockholderphaidon-54880; Lynne Tillman

and Jessica Stockholder interview excerpted from “Lynne Tillman in Conversation with Jessica Stockholder,” in Jessica Stockholder, Lynne Cooke, Barry Schwabsky, and Lynne Tillman, Jessica Stockholder (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).

Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the wall out of sequence, 1989. Small low table/cupboard, green newspaper paper cache, enamel paint, orange peels and small light fixture on the wall with a small orange light bulb. ÂŠ Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles. Photo: Jessica Stockholder.

Jessica Stockholder, Two Frames, 2007. Pink plastic, pink children’s chair, fake fur, miscellaneous plastic parts, vinyl, halogen light and fixture, weight, bracket, cable, extension cord, black garbage bag, yarn, beads, acrylic and oil paint, wooden drawer, metal frame, 93 × 51 × 22 in. © Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

points to the formal decision’s capacity to claim the attention that cuteness bids—making many mini-Venices, so to speak—and to make sense of those aspects of space. Like a game of Simple Simon, there is a deceptive easiness to it. Because meaning is presented as it. Because that! Because the visual ideas are pliant, affective; they reach out, shyly. Because Stockholder’s work, like Richard’s cute, “encompasses revealing distinctions that tend to be elided in normal conversation. [It is] defined by its excessive or self-conscious appeal to the unembarrassed core quality.” 28 This is quite apparent in Kissing the Wall, where the personification of stacked furniture stuck in a vexing tryst is plainly on display. However, considering Stockholder’s overall penchant for raw materials that imply a similar starkness or “unembarrassed” quality of being as-is, this thread also carries through the whole body of work (at times literally). It has to do with nakedness, vulnerability, but also of the pleasure found in being in such states. That is, it is the very lack of safety or structure that is understood by Stockholder as being as immensely pleasurable, exciting, and titillating as it is frightful. What Stockholder’s work bids is attention: it asks to be squeezed to death, carried, swallowed whole, and “ogled”—all in a violent desire for recognition. Look at me! That! Like all things cute, how it gains its audience is by acting out, by re-directing, displacing, and rendering ineffective all interactions with it. The cute compels, enchants, and ensnares like a pouty lip slightly bitten by a wanting child, or in the same gesture’s adult patois, like the porno-cute’s swollen mouth shaped in a big O, as in, Oh, boy! (The promiscuity of Stockholder’s work could also be discussed, perhaps in another essay.) Cute manipulates through a performance of its vulnerability, as Richard reminds, professing a capability to reclaim power at any minute in a crafty (pun intended) and possibly misleading promise of non-manipulation. As a colleague once commented on Vincent Fecteau’s papier-mâché sculptures, “They’re weirder than you even know.” Stockholder’s work sends out an equally affable invitation to indulge in the effervescence of piles and piles of collected objects bubbling up to heady result. (Think Stein: “A spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.” 29) The sculptures amp up their own coquettishness—blushing in shy ingénue pinks and oranges and violets—and whilst it may be indulgent to animate or personify Stockholder’s sculptures, they nevertheless engage one in reflections of what it means to surrender a portion of the self for scrutiny. And that quite literally. Consider all the lamps that brazenly light up what Stockholder wants us to see, as in Set Eyes On (2014), which also makes a final plea in its title; the lines and holes and angles that force the eye through in Two Frames (2007); and Buff Ambit (2006), which is in possession of all of the aforementioned Pixarcute, attention-seeking tools. As though hitting the wall again and again, needing something and not receiving it, Stockholder treats space as the inexpressible against which form finds meaning. (Her site-specificity, as she has humorously said, exists both at the level of address to the specific 28. Richard, “Fifteen Theses on the Cute,” Cabinet 4. 29. Stein, Tender Buttons, 3.

location and just because an object has to be somewhere and so is always specific.) Most importantly, she doesn’t sweat it—her work’s provisionality makes clear that a flimsy model can be enough. Her materials, like balsa wood, enamel paint, paper, found objects, yarn, and plastic, echo the flimsy shelter Sophia finds in the materials on her island; Stockholder too furnishes a setting for a fantasy, for roleplay, acknowledging all too well its practical ineffectuality. Against an art history often all too focused on overblown constructs like the sublime and the abject, Stockholder reckons with the inexpressible, with big ideas—big political ideas—simply by admitting to their real-world inefficiency. Let’s play Venice for a second. Not through a postcard image with a personal dedication, but through the glossy lens of Photoshopped national pavilions dating to the early twentieth century spilled out on Contemporary Art Daily and the like. The identities of each representing country are almost parodic: the hard-edged formal lines of the Swiss Pavilion, Britain’s imposing neo-colonial, neo-Palladian building; the United States’ bricked mini White House; and, on the other end of the spectrum, Finland’s funny mid-century sauna-esque hut; the toadstool-shaped book pavilion (okay, not a nation, but still); and China’s peculiarly lo-fi checkered MDF cube. The pavilions model nations, and, distributed throughout an increasingly alienated art world through endless images as they are, they have become idealized symbols of globalization. Both Massimiliano Gioni and Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennales made rather heavy-handed statements about art’s purpose as a “guerilla weapon against global imbalance,” as Artnet’s Andrew Goldstein put it.30 This observation was made in an interview with the biennale’s 2017 curator Christine Macel, whose exhibition, Viva Arte Viva, was a refreshing departure (at least in certain aspects). Most notably, it featured a handful of artists that would fit into Ngai’s description of a “cute” avant-garde: artists Nancy Shaver, Sheila Hicks, Judith Scott, Siri Aurdal, John Waters(!), Francis Upritchard, and Phyllida Barlow all in their own ways negotiate an interest “in ‘minor’ or non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency; in trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings [and in] the surprising power these weak affects and aesthetic categories seem to have… To call something cute, in vivid contrast to, say, beautiful, or disgusting, is to leave it ambiguous whether one even regards it positively or negatively.” 31 Though “cuteness” may not be the first word for all of these artists, each feels in touch with what Nancy Shaver referred to in her own work as the “used and abused, …purely wonderful and mesmerizing” and Phyllida Barlow described as not “beauty…because I’m so curious about other qualities, abstract qualities of time, weight, balance, rhythm; collapse and fatigue.” 32 In all of their works, smallness, orientation to detail, and emotional conflict

30. Andrew Goldstein, “‘Art Is the Place Where You Can Reinvent the World’: Christine Macel on How to Understand Her Venice Biennale,” Artnet (May 1, 2017), news.artnet. com/art-world/venice-biennalecurator-christine-macel-inter-

view-942749. 31. Adam Jasper and Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai,” Cabinet 43 (Fall 2011), www. cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/ jasper_ngai.php. 32. Mark Brown, “Phyllida

Barlow: An Artistic Outsider Who Has Finally Come Inside,” The Guardian (April 28, 2016), www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/28/phyllidabarlow-artist-success-2017venice-biennale.

Jessica Stockholder, Buff Ambit, 2006. Wood, plastic, fabric, paper mâché, lamps and other objects, oil and acrylic paint, 104 × 47 × 63 in. © Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Jessica Stockholder, Vortex in the Play of Theater with Real Passion: In memory of Kay Stockholder, 2000. Duplo, theater curtain, work site containers, bench, theater light, linoleum, tables, fur, newspaper, fabric, and paint, dimensions site-specific. Installation view, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, March 18â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 25, 2000. ÂŠ Jessica Stockholder. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY.

all foreground the act of making. After the two previous tech-heavy, art-asweapon (scary?) biennales, which were focused on stating—which is to say imposing—a purpose for art, much of Macel’s roster felt like an acknowledgment that a politic of minorness, domesticity, the quotidian, and the stated has a place in contemporary art. What was readmitted was a tactile experience of art and the conditions of its making, whether born of mistakes, an interest in provisional or mundane materials, or a quest to find profusion in simplicity. This is where Stockholder finds her politic—in show, not tell—not an imposition, but rather a shared experience between artist, artwork, and viewer. This experience is an effect of her preoccupation with small, concrete, and everyday things (wicker chairs, clouds of plastic baskets, loofas, lamps, brooms, plates, and umbrellas, all “not resembling” for being coated in swaths of paint and muddled). It is an aesthetic approach that solicits touch, physical contact, fondling. Stockholder’s work makes literal Jansson’s bid to “hold” a story: the sculptures embracing themselves, the objects each other, and—even more plainly—the approachable scale posed against the viewer. It’s human. Her ideas are all tactile and thus reproduce with the kind of touches only nakedness can imply. Think how quickly a kiss can become a tryst, and the tryst a relationship—a small fiction, as Jansson would have it: “concentrated and unified around a single idea.” 33 And that idea, whether contained inexpressibly in the kiss, the confrontation between light and wall, or the acute angle, exudes meaning that renews itself in each change of aspect. To participate in its discourse is to waken desire: “It is the other’s entire body which has been known, savored and which has displayed (to no real purpose) its own narrative, its own text.” 34 The that Stockholder’s sculptures point to is an affective politic within their composition and making, which is all too easily overlooked due to the common perception of the cute, soft, small, and quotidian as meaningless or empty. Ineffective, if nothing else. Think cuteness coopted by pink hair and knitted hats at women’s marches or Mattel-branded Bernie t-shirts, and that following five years of Instagram-famous girls, such as Petra Collins, reenacting their own powerlessness in cutesy photographs of sparkly dildos and coy nudity in order to draw attention to capital’s abstraction of the female body. These types of cute are gobbled up and squished by capitalism by taking pink or knitting as insignia (for women! In 2017!) or supposing that the male gaze will return with an apology because you posted a photograph of your cute butt online. Such cuteness fails to address how quickly such easily swallowed strategies are regurgitated into the status quo. Politics is collapsed with the cutesy without much context as to what that cuteness is or what it means. But, just as Ngai bids to acknowledge the difference between cuteness per se and the cuteness of the avant-garde, Stockholder’s work stabs at a convincing answer to Ngai’s question of what it means to be aesthetically overpowered.35 Stockholder’s sculptures literally overwhelm, 33. Jansson, quoted on the Sort of Books website, sortof. co.uk/books/lettersfrom-klara/. See also Letters from Klara. 34. Barthes, “Without Words,” The Empire of Signs, 10.

35. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Jessica Stockholder, Sex in the Office, 2007. Plywood, plastic floor liner, acrylic, oil and spray paint, glass, 2 pieces of stucco-finished table base, book shelf, 4 metal table legs, frame and plexiglass, yarn, plasticine, zip ties, thread, shells, spray paint, rubber car mat, tape, canvas from oil painting, 103 × 44½ × 47 in. Courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

though they also point out how formalism, particularly her own frivolous kind, has been dismissed as empty or all about surface. Yet tactile specificity carries affect like a surrogate, which in itself encompasses a desire to readmit emotion into the arsenale (that’s right) of art. The fatuous possibilities of escape Jansson found in the profusions of childhood motivate Stockholder’s spaces. The escape is still from the austerity of adulthood but also from the emptying tendencies of the market and political expressions that are little more than performative language. Stockholder understands that art does something life does not. Art imitates life, another childish form of learning, but it can also transcend life, as Adorno writes in his Aesthetic Theory, “by subordinating itself to it.” 36 Perhaps Stockholder’s work is then best considered as a model for new types of spaces and arrangements of images and materials that impart an affective politic on contemporary values and economies. This isn’t only implied nor left unexpressed, even if its affect stands against the inexpressible. Stockholder’s work clearly references friends and family (she has commemorated her deceased mother), and she has titled things Sailcloth Tears (2009), Angled Tangle (2014), and Sex in the Office (the ultimate hushhush, 2007). This may be the most conflicting part, the thing that makes Sophia run off in tears, the drive to keep producing: the desire for connection and reciprocity is often denied. You see this at base, in the predicament of sculptures that try to kiss walls but can’t or won’t, and in the big picture, in art’s slow uptake on formalism’s ability to impart meaning, even if it ties the tongues of certain critics. The small, the dilettantish, the inexperienced, the unstable, the whimsical, and the ambulatory in Stockholder’s work furnish a free-for-all setting for flirtation, shyness, debate, laughter, and quiet moments, all placing an emphasis on an incompleteness experienced at the level of installation. So, she stages a shrugging resignation to art’s practical ineffectuality in the face of political address—an address that nonetheless keeps on going, albeit in Stockholder’s idiosyncratic way. Because of pleasure. Because social reproduction ultimately hinges on insistence. “It’s funny about love,” Sophia says in The Summer Book, “The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.” Her grandmother says, “Yes, but what can you do about it?” “You go on loving,’ said Sophia threateningly. ‘You love harder and harder.’” 37 Sabrina Tarasoff is a Finnish writer currently based in Los Angeles. Together with Naoki Sutter-Shudo, she runs the independent exhibition space Bel Ami.

36. Theodor Adorno, “Aesthetic Theory,” Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 124. 37. Jansson, “The Cat,” The Summer Book, 54.

Cora Gilroy-Ware

The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest

Our Inner Siren

Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw March 25–June 18, 2017

I’m Parthenope I call for my sister Syren. Roads are now between us. Roads that rim the Adriatic and cut the Danube into strips. Via Venice the ghost. Vienna a gold stamp. Villach. Vyskov till the Vistula River where she has lived since the age of maps. The word hybrid originates in the context of livestock. Its Latin antecedent, hibrida, referred to the progeny of a tame sow and a wild boar. Over time, it came to signify a person of mixed parentage. The child of a Roman father and an itinerant mother was a hibrida, as was that of a freeman and a slave. Modern colonialism allowed the word to flourish.1 Hybrid became synonymous with other terms rooted in the creaturely idea of mixed-ness: mulatto, mongrel, half-breed. Although they are frequently described as such, mermaids are not hybrids. Rather than being the blended offspring of distinct elements, they are a kind all of their own. Yet the mermaid provides the perfect symbol of hybridity. Her composite form—the head and torso of a woman, the tail of a fish—embodies the same supernatural convergence of human and animal that was mapped onto the hybrid child. From her scales to her hair, she unites the polarities of foreign and familiar, wild and domesticated, beast and beauty. There is also a hybrid aspect to her representation in art and literature. Sirens, the bird-winged seductresses of Greek mythology, have been portrayed as mermaids ever since antiquity.2 As a result, romance languages do not differentiate between feathered and fishtailed maidens; sirena implies mermaid in both Spanish and Italian, sirène in French, sirenă in Romanian. Far more visible in our culture, the aquatic figure has eclipsed the avian girls who attempted to lure Homer’s Odysseus to the rocks. The same is true in Poland, where syrena is the common word for mermaid. This is an especially important setting, as the heraldic emblem of Warsaw, the nation’s capital, is the syrena herself. In the city’s Old Town Market Place, she holds court in the form of a bronze effigy elevated a few feet 1. For insight into the imperial deployment of the word hybrid, see Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 5–18.

2. The mythographic continuity between the mermaid and the siren is discussed in Meri Lao, Sirens: Symbols of Seduction (Rochester: Park Street Press, 1998).

A replica of Konstanty Hegel’s Syrenka Warszawska (1855) in the Old Town Square, Warsaw, June 2017. Photo: Cora Gilroy–Ware.

Justyna Górowska, FW JG, 2009–15. Video still. MPEG-4, 720 × 576 px., 15 min. © Justyna Górowska. Courtesy of the artist.

above the ground. Here, in the reconstructed quarter of a city that was once devastated by war, we learn that this particular mermaid is not the irresistible, long-haired creature that the word tends to conjure. With sword and shield in hand and tresses pulled back into a knot, the syrena of Warsaw is a warrior. Her latest feat is an exhibition inspired by her image at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. Entitled The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest, the exhibition uses the symbolic hybridity of the syrena as its point of departure. Inside a pristinely new exhibition pavilion, portrayals of fishtailed, feathered, furry, and generally bestial female figures proliferate across time and media. The syrena of Warsaw punctuates the display, reining it in when it strays from the theme. Outside, the Vistula river flows by, the syrena’s official home. Along the bank another bronze effigy, younger in age yet bathed in a mint green patina, marks her dominion. The title of the show is lifted from an ode to the city by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, one of Warsaw’s foremost nineteenth century poets. The poem, “Dedykacka” (Dedication, 1866), was written about ten years after Norwid went into self-imposed exile from Poland to Paris, where he eventually died.3 Influenced by the first stirrings of the women’s movement, his verse is suffused with meditations on feminine strength.4 Known as the Museum on the Vistula, the building containing the exhibition was designed by Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz in 2007. Originally, the oblong structure sat on the Spree River in Berlin, where it was used as a temporary Kunsthalle. After two years in Germany, it was disassembled and loaded onto trucks headed for Warsaw. It was then resurrected in time for The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest, its public debut.5 As cities that once were both part of the same empire, Berlin and Warsaw are reunited by the building, which has the clean, classical restraint of a Prussian barrack. Soon after entering the pavilion, one encounters FW JG (2009–15), a video by contemporary Polish artist Justyna Górowska, wall-mounted on a small screen. In black-and-white, the body of a woman appears, moving in slow motion. Crouching on all fours, she shelters inside a cove formed by upturned tree roots. We cannot see her head, just the geometry of her limbs: light angles against the dark crust of mud, liquid, and tree. As the two sets of initials in the title hint, the video is a tribute to the American photographer Francesca Woodman, whose body Górowska sought to inhabit while filming. To its credit, however, Górowska’s video is less immediately suggestive of Woodman than an invasive wildlife documentary that plants a night vision camera inside the burrow of a mysterious creature and waits

3. For one of the few thorough discussions of Norwid’s life in English, see Agnieszka Perlińska, “An Epistolary Triangle: Love, Friendship and Exile in Cyprian Norwid’s Private Letters,” The Polish Review 42 (1997), 201–14. 4. Norwid’s connection to

the women’s movement is mentioned in Iwona Węgrzyn, “A Maiden of Nobility Manor and Nihilism: Some Remarks on the Nineteenth Century Feminist Movements in Poland,” in Faces of Women: In Search of Positive Prospects, Marcin Godawa and Stank Gerjolj, eds. (Krakow,

Poland: Pontifical University of John Paul II, 2015), 124. 5. The pavilion was a gift of the Thyssen Bornemisza Collection Foundation, founded in Vienna by Francesca von Hapsburg in 2002.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2007. Ink and pencil on paper, 12 ½ × 34 in. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy of VAGA Inc., New York. Photo: Christopher Burke.

for it to emerge. Viewers are plunged into a damp, murky habitat that would otherwise be inaccessible, and in the process become acutely aware of the artificiality of their own environment, especially in an exhibition space as fresh as this one. The video sets the tone for what is to come. It lets us know, from the outset, that The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest plays on the fragility of the border between humanity and animal instinct: the poles brought together in the mermaid’s form. Next we find a cluster of works on paper by Louise Bourgeois. Untitled (2007) centers on the outline of a mermaid in ink over horizontal pencil lines. The double linearity of the work articulates the same fragile border. Blood red, the line describing the mermaid’s form is inconsistent, permeable. By contrast, the neat grey marks in the background read like a musical score: the epitome of human achievement designed to keep nature at bay. I’m Parthenope I call from a bay studded with islands. Capri. Coral and dried lava. Floating filth collected for my crown. Crested with a tincture of cholera. Her crown is new, made after the air stilled. But it looks just like it did when crinolines rustled like oak trees. Not until further in are we reminded of the exhibition’s muse, the syrena of Warsaw specifically. Another video, this time by Agnieszka Polska, a contemporary Polish artist of the same generation as Górowska, looms on a large screen on the back wall. Made purposely for the exhibition, Ask the Siren (2017) attempts to speak from the syrena’s perspective. A pale face made up of cushiony lips and heavily lashed blue eyes—no nose—is reflected twice across the screen, with one half rippled by scales. Fragments of a monologue spurt from the mouth, captioned with English subtitles: “I hate foreigners. I get sick at the thought of them.” More human than animal, Polska’s 2017 syrena has been caught in the net of fascism, which Klaus Theweleit characterizes as an ideology of extreme opposition to hybridity.6 Intermittently the face is replaced by dystopian shots of the city streets in winter, submerged underwater. Polska’s video is a key feature of The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest. In the piece, as throughout the exhibition, the syrena and her kind persist as subjects as opposed to objects. Again and again, over the course of the show, identification with such figures recurs. In I Will Survive (2015), a video by Berlin based artist Ming Wong, a group of four men transform themselves into a troop of mermaid-esque beings. Their luxurious, waist-length wigs—each in a different primary color, plus green, with an extra triangle to cover the groin—compensate for their lack of scales. After stripping off starchy white dresses, they frolic naked in a stream, pausing to pose among the rocks like Venus rising from the sea with her attendants, a Greco-Roman scene whose iconography intersects with the mermaid’s.7 Myth becomes a site of freedom. To be the mermaid, the nymph, or the waterborne goddess is 6. For Klaus Theweleit’s theory of fascism’s aversion to the hybrid, see Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 385–405.

7. The connection between Venus and the mermaid is noted in Tara E. Pedersen, Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Thinking (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 18.

Agnieszka Polska, Ask the Siren, 2017. Video still. HD video, 10:25 min. © Agnieszka Polska. Courtesy of ŻAK | BRANICKA, Berlin.

Ming Wong, Aku Akan Bertahan / I Will Survive, 2015. From a series of six Archival Pigment Prints, 31½ × 47 in., Edition 5+2AP. © Ming Wong. Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou and carlier | gebauer, Berlin.

to transcend a masculinity structured by reason. Instead of the animalistic dimension of the mermaid, Wong mines the sensuality that was traditionally considered the font of the figure’s power: “the treacherous mermaid,” in the words of Dorothy Dinnerstein, the “seductive and impenetrable female representative of the dark and magic underwater world from which our life comes and in which we cannot live.” 8 Identifying with this aspect, Wong reclaims the mermaid’s charged sensuality not for the purposes of seduction but as a universal human right, a way of being in the world, of surviving. A sculpture by the Los Angeles-based artist Liz Craft encourages a different kind of identification: empathy. Old Maid (2004) consists of a fishtailed figure, close to life size, curled up with her head pillowed on her hands. Does the mermaid age like we mortals do? What might a decayed mermaid look like, and what would be her fate? The closed, quiet composition is opposite to the resplendent gestures of Wong’s troop, who bask in the rays of desire. Placed directly on the ground without a plinth, Craft’s mermaid is striking precisely because she does not invite our gaze. Her torso is a conical lump with no undulating curves; her breasts are like fins. Tucked into fetal position, the figure calls to mind the uncannily elderly quality of a newborn baby. Although also cast in bronze, she looks nothing like the triumphant effigies of the syrena outside the exhibition walls. In these civic works, the hardness of the material suppresses the mermaid’s associations with sex and death. Unbreakable bronze contours serve to reinforce the border between human and animal nature, facilitating the subject’s appropriation into an emblem.9 With Craft’s Old Maid, on the other hand, the metal is treated in such a way that its monumental permanence is altogether denied. The mermaid has a temporality that goes against both the idealizing connotations of figural sculpture and the immortality of the subject in its archetypal guise. It is as if she is shriveling before our eyes. The theme of identification is especially relevant to the female surrealists, including Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini, whose works are afforded a special place in the exhibition. Fini was fixated not on the mermaid but the sphinx, another composite mythological creature. In the Egyptian tradition, the sphinx is androgynous, with a human head and lion haunches. Subsequent Greek adaptations made the sphinx more feminine and mobile, affording her breasts and a set of wings. As a girl in the northern Italian city of Trieste, Fini was captivated by sphinxes. Miramare Castle, the former residence of the Archduke of Austria, was occasionally open to the public. Here, in a garden facing the Adriatic, sat a stone sphinx from Egypt. Later, Fini recalled her reaction to the sculpture: “I remember I wanted to be like the sphinx… I wanted to think like it, to be strong and eternal, to be a living sphinx.” 10 One of seven works by Fini on display is The Veiled Sphinx (c. 1974), a lithograph. A lone female figure with lion haunches is placed against a deep green background, her form brought further into relief by

8. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Other Press, 1999), 5. 9. For a discussion of the materiality of monumental

sculpture in relation to the female body, see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1985), 258. 10. Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini (New York: Vendome, 2009), 102.

the silvery gauze that envelops her. Sphinxes are usually represented in a sitting position; Fini’s figure stands on her hind legs, looking out past the eye of the viewer. Surveying whatever she sees in the distance, she becomes self-conscious and folds her arms to cover her naked human chest. The blue eyes of the figure prevent it from being interpreted as a straightforward self-portrait, as many of Fini’s works are. Yet it is clear that the artist has placed herself in the position of the sphinx. She has fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming the sphinx, but the world beyond the pictorial space does not value the strength of the sculpture at Miramare. In the 1970s, entering the mind of the sphinx, “(thinking) like the sphinx,” brings alienation. The veil provides protection, albeit diaphanous, from the mechanized forces that threaten her mysteries. In her 1970 essay, “Female Human Animal,” Fini’s close friend and fellow surrealist Leonora Carrington reflects on the same confrontation between the modern world and mythic nature. She defines technology as “the astute extensions of the human body…hypnotic impressions of man.” 11 The future of life on earth, she argues, depends on some kind of rebellion against the growing sovereignty of these “thinking toys.” 12 We must return to the “nameless, unknown force” that “operates in the soul,” the same “pre-form of life” that “induced the serpent to grow feathers.” 13 The Italian Futurists famously declared: “War is beautiful because it establishes human domination over the subjugated machinery… War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.” 14 Witnessing the victory of technology over nature in her lifetime, Carrington seeks to restore the authority of organic life. In this struggle, however, there are no guarantees. Flora and fauna owe nothing to humanity; as John Berger writes, nature “lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.” 15 Still, it must be protected against the appropriation of its power, and its beauty, by machines. The key role given to the original female surrealists in The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest locates the exhibition less in Warsaw and more in this abstract zone of resistance. We must remember that these are relatively late works by Fini and Carrington, made long after the heyday of the movement. As such, untouched by fashion and at a distance from the more famous male practitioners with whom their creators are often linked, these works show that surrealists’ political vision was not merely cultural.16 Rooted in the conscious as opposed to the unconscious mind, these works are warnings. Protect your inner sphinx, your animal self, your inner mermaid-warrior, or disappear. The precise location of the show becomes newly relevant and compelling when we consider that the residents of Warsaw who fought back against fascism—the anti-hybrid ideology—may have tapped into a similar spirit.

11. Leonora Carrington, “Female Human Animal,” in Leonora Carrington: What She Might Be, Salomon Grimberg, ed. (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2008), 13. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. The Futurist Manifesto,

quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 242. 15. John Berger, “The White Bird,” in The White Bird: Writings by John Berger, Lloyd

Spencer, ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), 7. 16. Frederic Jameson makes this observation in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 167.

Liz Craft, Old Maid, 2004. Bronze, 9 × 53 × 27 in. Collection of Holly and Jonathan Lipton, New York. © Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw. Photo: Bartosz Stawiarski.

Leonor Fini, The Veiled Sphinx, 1974. Color lithography on paper. Collection of the Museum of Art in Łódź. © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Despite the sterile feel of the space, the exhibition has an erotic dimension. We are left with a sense of interconnectivity, of unity, that overrules the blocks of text that appear every so often to orient the visitor. Unfamiliar names hold their own next to the well established; works by Polish and non-Polish artists flow without interruption; contemporary and historic works are unsegregated; videos, drawings, paintings, prints, and a variety of sculptures come together to form one autonomous creature. Unlike the mermaid, the exhibition is a true hybrid. With its rational lines, the building is the Roman father. The art is the itinerant mother: boundless. Unspeakable, her tragedies I felt over the roads. Thicker than mine and louder. Heeled boots. Shod hooves clicking slapping on the square. I never thought sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d live like this. Tangled up in mortal dreams as they come and go. Cora Gilroy-Ware has recently finished a book on politicized representations of the body in nineteenth-century British art. She is currently working on a novel about Greek gods in exile.

Anuradha Vikram

Juan Downey: Radiant Nature

Phenomenology of a Cyborg: Biological and Technical Systems in the Art of Juan Downey

Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA September 9– December 8, 2017 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions September 13– December 3, 2017

A massive gray box stands at the center of the Nichols Gallery at Pitzer College. The work, Juan Downey’s Pollution Robot (1970), was recreated for the exhibition out of melamine and plywood from original drawings and sparse documentation. At eye level, a darkened sheet of one-way glass obscures the view inside. At the rear, a hinged door allows one to enter the robot’s innards. Where one might anticipate a tangle of wires is instead an empty space. Stepping in, visitors are encouraged to use handles to clumsily navigate the bulky vertical box around the space. Below the viewing screen, which affords a partial view of the surroundings from within, is a vintage 1970s hair dryer mounted to a vent. Its power cord trails upwards to the ceiling, acting as a tether that limits the box’s trajectory. “POLLUTION ROBOT,” reads the title card of a low-fi documentation video playing nearby. “Follows people…and breathes stuffy air on them.” The simple mechanisms of this absurd structure epitomize Downey’s technological ambitions and the grounding of his interest in the actions of the human body and our earthly habitat. Downey’s interest in humane and sustainable ecological and political systems, evident in his later, better known works, such as Video Trans Américas (1976), is already apparent in Radiant Nature’s collection of performances and objects, which were all created between 1965 and 1974. Though Downey’s work has many affinities with the techno-utopian culture of the West Coast, it has been little seen in the region. Radiant Nature, which is presented as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, seeks to redress this absence. Curated by Robert Crouch and Ciara Ennis, with cooperation from the artist's estate, the exhibition is divided into three sections: Electronic Sculptures (1967–71) and Life Cycle Installations (1970–71), at the Nichols Gallery and the Lenzer Family Art Gallery at Pitzer College, and Happenings and Performances (1968–75), at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Downey’s recreated installations at Pitzer College manifest his enthusiasm for merging the cybernetic with the biological. The concurrent presentation at LACE emphasizes the artist’s interest in theatricality and bodily integration, as manifested in his collaborations with performers in Happenings. The multi-part exhibition 90

Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, installation view, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA, September 9â&#x20AC;&#x201C; December 8, 2017. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Juan Downey, Life Cycle: Electric Light + Water + Soil → Flowers → Bees → Honey (detail), 1971/2017. Hives, lavender, rosemary, red apple ground cover, flowers, video camera, video monitor, retro grow lights, and bees. Installation view, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA, September 13–December 3, 2017. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

encapsulates Downey’s distinct and influential aesthetic, which is set apart by its humility and its playful energy. In these works, the artist’s abiding impulse to seek liberation through hybrid technological and organic systems extends beyond humans to other organisms, including bees, plants, and the ecosystem of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Downey proposes that political fascism and environmental destruction are to be equally opposed, not by resisting technology but rather by rethinking our expectations about what technology is meant to do and for whom. The Chilean-born Downey, who was active in the United States from 1965 until his death in 1993, attained a bachelor’s degree of architecture in Santiago before emigrating to Europe to study in 1961. He settled first in Paris, where the collective Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) was a formative influence. GRAV, known for immersive installations that responded kinetically and optically to the viewer’s presence, inspired Downey to apply his architectural knowledge of space and social interaction to artistic practice. Downey’s early artworks, developed after he arrived in Washington, DC, in 1965, exhibit the participatory ethics and utopian ideals of French intermedia art. The artist’s concern with a responsible ethics of participation in his work offers an alternative to the often-perfunctory online engagement of today, which has replaced the lucid dreamscapes imagined by the first generation of artist-technologists with whom he interacted. By 1969, Downey had moved to New York and become involved with the community of artists and performers affiliated with the Judson Church. This influential avant-garde performance movement informed his works of the period, which extended the bodies of humans, animals, and plants into technologically enhanced space through direct means. Circuits of systemic feedback between organic and inorganic sources of input became Downey’s focus. At Pitzer College, curators Ennis and Crouch commissioned reconstructions of a number of Downey’s foundational kinetic artworks from this period, in consultation with the artist’s estate. These systems might incorporate a human hand, motion sensors, and illumination, as in Information Center (1970/2017), at the Lenzer Family Art Gallery. Or they might incorporate a living philodendron, photosynthesis, and biosensors, as in A Vegetal System of Communications for New York State (1972/2017), at the Nichols Gallery. Life Cycle: Electric Light + Water + Soil → Flowers → Bees → Honey (1971/2017), also at the Nichols, is a symbiotic work in which bees travel from a hive to a flowerbed; their activities are observed and simulcast via closed circuit TV. For the utopian Downey, his artistic mediation of animal-human relations through technology represented a potentially emancipatory space for both. Against the backdrop of political upheaval in his native Chile and labor uprisings among arts and culture workers in New York and Latino farmhands in California, Downey, with characteristic idealism, imagined that his bees would be metaphorically liberated through the self-awareness enabled by media visibility. This expectation, which aligns with a liberatory Marxism that Downey saw in the striking laborers of the Art Workers Coalition and the United Farm Workers, goes beyond the promise of acknowledgement by the powerful, which “visibility” implicitly suggests, to propose an idea of emancipation through self-recognition that aligns with Lacan and his inheritors, such as Jacques Rancière. 93

Left: Juan Downey, Energy Fields, 1972. Portapak video transferred to digital media; black-and-white and sound, 14:25 min. Right: Juan Downey, Nazca, 1974. Enlarged photographic documentation of videoperformance, The Kitchen, New York, February 1974. Installation view, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA, September 13–December 3, 2017. © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, New York. Photo: Peter Moore. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Downey’s Life Cycles series prefigures recent tendencies in socially engaged art, from Rancière’s conception of “the emancipated spectator” to Pierre Huyghe’s use of live animals and insects in his environmental works. While these French examples share the utopian impulse that Downey took from GRAV and his Parisian years, they address ideas of liberated time and ecological decay within a discourse circumscribed by Western universalism. Radiant Nature covers a period in Downey’s practice when he began to connect his attempts to liberate contemporary life from the rages of capitalism to indigenous philosophies and ways of life. This line of inquiry would become more overt in Video Trans Américas. As is often the case with artists of his era whose practices integrate performance, technology, and language, Downey has been omitted from the established lineage of artists working with a social and performative framework for art and relegated instead to a separate, parallel “new media art history” that severs his connections to the body-based performance practices of his era. This is particularly egregious in Downey’s case, because his work addresses a key blind spot in the prevailing approach to socially engaged art—its tendency to instrumentalize participants in the service of an agenda set by artists and institutions, while promising liberatory experiences in exchange for their participation. The performance works shown as video and photographic documentation at LACE center on Downey’s involvement with the Judson Church, which had been germinating experimental body-based art and movement since the early 1960s.1 His arrival there at the decade’s end resulted in collaborations that were ongoing through the 1970s, such as with the choreographer Carmen Beuchat, who appears in much of the documentation in Radiant Nature. Her approach to movement mined the vein struck by epoch-making choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, the latter of whom appears alongside Beuchat in documentation of Downey’s Energy Fields (1972). Like the foundational performance artists, including Allan Kaprow and Yvonne Rainer, who had emerged from this community of artists, Downey adopted the categorical term Happenings to describe an improvisational, experiential mode of performance incorporating installation art and conceptual poetry. In keeping with his times, Downey’s performance works preserve the mimetic theatricality of the 1960s Happenings but address overtly political themes in a more pointed manner. The artist’s political and ecological awakening is evident in Nazca (1974), a ritualistic event performed at The Kitchen in New York, in which Downey and two white-faced female performers re-enact the destruction of ecosystems across Latin America resulting from the construction of the Pan-American Highway, which links the region’s industrialized cities with trade partners in the United States and Canada. In enlarged black-andwhite photographs, Downey is shown outlining the shape of a bird in black lumps of coal, then placing his prone body within the form. His collaborators, Beuchat and Suzanne Harris, slowly shuffle across the space, dragging white chalk dust in parallel tracks behind them. Their marks mimic the impressions that heavy machinery makes with its wheels and tracks upon

1. Jack Anderson, “How the Judson Theater Changed American Dance,” The New York Times, January 31, 1982, http://

www.nytimes.com/1982/01/31/ arts/how-the-judson-theaterchanged-american-dance. html?pagewanted=all.

Juan Downey, Three Way Communication by Light, 1972. Video installation with three monitors and three Portapak videos transferred to digital media; black-and-white and sound, 31:01, 32:29, 35:55 min. each and colored pencil, acrylic, and graphite on Bristol board, 39 3⁄8 × 59 ½ in. Installation view, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA, September 13–December 3, 2017. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Left and right: Juan Downey, Plato Now, 1973 . Enlarged photographic documentation of video-performance at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, January 6, 1973. Center: Juan Downey, Doing Things Together: Imperialistic Octopus, 1972. Portapak video transferred to digital media; black-and-white and sound, 58:27 min. Installation view, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA, September 13â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 3, 2017. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

the earth. The documentary photographs suggest a contrast between Downey’s constellational gestures, which emanate from his intuition, and the linear pathways of the two women, which are precise, organized by efficiency alone. At the end of the sequence, the straight white tracks have run through and bisected the bird form, which the artist has connected metaphorically, through his movements, to both his own body and to the land. The machine here is synthesized with the body of the colonizer, its totalizing power reflected in the performers’ whitened faces. The dynamic between organic and inorganic modes of being is the central conflict of Nazca, which represents these elements as oppositional while moving toward a ritualistic resolution—a tragic peace. Such themes are at the heart of Downey’s oeuvre. In addition to performance, Downey built interactive objects that engage haptic feedback loops triggered by living stimuli as another way to contrast and ultimately merge organic and inorganic elements in his work for a phenomenological effect. Works in this vein include Information Center (1970/2017) at Pitzer College’s Lenzer Gallery, a large low box outfitted with motion sensors that generates visual and auditory responses to viewers’ movements. In this respect, the artist can be situated within a techno-Romantic tradition more commonly associated with West Coast experiential artists such as Stewart Brand, Larry Harvey, and Gary Warne. In particular, Brand’s promotion of an environmentalist ethos gleaned from interactions with indigenous communities but achieved with high-tech solutions is contemporaneous with and echoed in Downey’s practice, while Warne’s adventuresome spirit finds parallels in Downey’s explorations of the Venezuelan rainforest. Nam June Paik, another artist of Downey’s generation, shares his concern with integrating organic and inorganic systems. Paik’s interest in incorporating live performance with real-time broadcasts or simulcasts parallels Downey’s Video Dances (1974) and Energy Fields (1972). (Both works are included in the LACE show.) A pronouncement repeats throughout Energy Fields: “For the only existing thing capable of intelligence we must call soul, and soul is invisible, whereas fire and water, earth and air, are all visible bodies.” Downey’s interest in invisible metaphysics and visible physicality is shared with Paik, who questioned and problematized embodiment. The artists share as well a curiosity about invented life forms, such as artificial intelligence (AI). At Pitzer, Downey’s text work, A Novel (1969/2017), pursues the possibility of AI while humorously highlighting its failures. The artist engages in a kind of reverse Turing Test, in which the novel’s plot is determined exclusively by questions that collaborators ask of him and the artist’s own yes or no responses. The ensuing drama stems from a recurring human desire to project inner feelings, such as infatuation or anxiety, onto others. In Three-Way Communication by Light (1972), at LACE, three participants serve as both performers and screens, their visages and voices projected onto one another in new and strange combinations. Plato Now (1973) takes the human-machine integration of the other performance works in a more philosophical direction. A group of students wearing headphones, on which play excerpts from Plato’s Dialogues, is enlisted to silently meditate, with their backs to the audience. They sit atop monitors on which their own facial expressions are simulcast. Enlarged documentary photos show the 99

students’ faces broadcast toward the audience, with the spectators seen standing behind. Captive in their contemplation, the performers introduce biofeedback into the system such that the video feed is altered by the participants’ states of consciousness, and the original stimulus (the Dialogues) begins to cut into the loop. This metaphysical cyber-action both humanizes broadcast technology and anticipates our contemporary era of mediated emotions and televised spiritual connections. As the political situation in Downey’s native Chile worsened throughout 1973, and as working-class Latinos in his adoptive country of the United States agitated for improved labor conditions, the artist began to introduce more overtly activist content. At LACE, works such as Chilean Flag and Publicness (both 1974) explicitly address the aftermath of the assassination of Chile’s president Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup d’état. Chilean Flag depicts the artist mimicking military displays of fealty: marching in place, singing patriotically, and waving a large flag to the point of exhaustion. Publicness, which originated as a program for Manhattan Cable Access broadcast, restages the flag-waving gesture with a different performer. The subject’s Chilean-style military dress and the video’s patriotic soundtrack underscore the violence underpinning the whole system. Both works embrace lo-fi broadcast media as a channel for communicating messages of freedom and solidarity in a politically restrictive environment. Downey’s grainy protest seems to propose that freeing the airwaves is a necessary step to freeing the people. Debriefing Pyramid (1974), documented in enlarged photographs at LACE, features Beuchat surrounded by an inverted pyramid of television sets. The sacred geometries of the ancients, represented by the structure in the form of the Great Pyramid of Giza, are married with the communicative power of the present, as 14 televisions broadcast video imagery of ancient pyramids in Mexico and Guatemala that the artist had visited. Beuchat performed at the center of the pyramid while a video feed recorded and played back her actions from a monitor on the floor, allowing her to adapt her movements on the basis of her video self-awareness, which activated the pyramid’s energy flows. The simultaneous presentation of related iconography from disparate corners of the globe recalls the worldwide interplay of cultures enabled by the Internet. This decolonial action is complemented by Doing Things Together: Imperialistic Octopus (1972), a work represented by video documentation that takes the form of street-based direct action to engage artistically with collective human activity. In the video, participants surge through the crowd at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s April 1972 peace march, each manipulating a long octopus tendril. An accompanying text panel explains that each tentacle equates to a corporate or state bad actor meddling across the US border to support Latin America’s then-proliferating right-wing ascendancy through undemocratic means. If the works in the exhibition at LACE seek to liberate a public through embodiment and open communication, another kind of politics pervades the installation at Pitzer, which highlights Downey’s ongoing concerns with global sustainability on ecological and creative terms. Here, ecologies of nature and of labor are placed in dialogue with one another. In addition to the Life Cycle works, the two-channel video work Monument 100

Juan Downey, Debriefing Pyramid, 1974. Enlarged photographic documentation of video-performance, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, April 1974. Photo: Harry Shunk. Installation view, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA, September 13â&#x20AC;&#x201C; December 3, 2017. Courtesy of the Estate of Juan Downey. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

to a River, Cambridge (1973), commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), considers the interplay of human, non-human, organic, and manmade elements within an ecosystem. The work was originally intended to be four channels, but Downey was unable to complete his epic study during the period of the fellowship. Still, his ambition to chronicle every aspect of the river’s life is evident in the two video streams that depict activities including commercial shipping, sport rowing, and wildlife behavior. In 2016, Kerry Tribe similarly used video to narrate an urban ecology centered on water, in Exquisite Corpse (2016), which chronicles each of the 51 miles traveled by the Los Angeles River in a single minute apiece. This recent work confirms the prescience of Downey’s approach. An adjacent work, A Vegetal System of Communications for New York State (1972/2017), further develops the artist’s interest in ecosystems while adding a twist reminiscent of Hans Haacke’s infamous MoMA Poll (1970), in which museum-goers were invited to cast votes voicing their opinions on the ongoing war in Vietnam. Downey offers a vote instead to the trees of New York State, whose welfare is seldom considered when decisions are made about land use or air quality. A copper box, roughly three by three feet square, contains a live ficus tree wired to receptors that cause the box to emit a sonic frequency, like a theremin. Viewers can attempt to affect the sound by touching and breathing on the box to influence the sonic feedback from the plant. In 1970, Downey engaged in an informal quantitative survey of his fellow New York artists and arts patrons, asking about their income, their working methods, and their collective art holdings. The results, in Research on the Art World (1970), take the form of a series of graph drawings based on survey forms the artist mailed to one thousand artists, collectors, and critics. The survey questions reflect concerns about influence, livability, and patronage also being raised by other artist-activists, such as the Art Workers Coalition. In her essay for Radiant Nature, Pitzer College Art Galleries director Ennis describes how the Art Workers Coalition reflected both the broad international, anti-war concerns of the time and the much narrower demographic makeup of the insider art world among the activists themselves.2 Downey, like many artists of his era, struggled to reconcile his own feelings of solidarity with indigenous cultures and causes with his relatively privileged position as a member of the educated, upper middle class of mostly European descent. Though Downey’s work emerges from artistic movements based in Europe and the United States, he shares this concern with other Latin American artists working with conceptual and performance forms who were also in New York in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, such as Cuban-American Ana Mendieta3 and Brazilian émigré Hélio Oiticica.4 Downey, Mendieta, and Oiticica were known for integrating audio/visual media into performances that reconfigured the audience-performer relationship, and they were concerned with the repercussions of 2. Ciara Ennis, “The Politics of Play in the Early Work of Juan Downey,” in Juan Downey, Juan Downey: Radiant Nature, ed. Ciara Ennis and Robert Crouch (Los Angeles: LACE, and

Claremont, CA: Pitzer College Art Galleries, 2017). 3. Jane Blocker, Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 1999), 54. 4. Cynthia Canejo, “The Resurgence of Anthropophagy: Tropicália, Tropicalismo and Hélio Oiticica,” Third Text 18, no. 1 (2004): 62.

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industrialized human activity on marginalized and indigenous peoples and on global ecosystems. Their works also share a certain resistance to being categorized, as their practices transgress conventional boundaries between historical and material approaches. Radiant Nature includes work that precedes Video Trans Américas, which Downey shot in the Amazon jungle while living with his wife Marilys Belt de Downey and his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter Titi Lamadrid alongside the native Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil. This later work marks another turning point for the artist because it directly takes on the politics of indigeneity and autonomy that his earlier works addressed only metaphorically. In Video Trans Américas, Downey must confront his own expectations and assumptions about indigenous people, while attempting to counteract the structural imbalance of power that is implicit in the traditional observersubject relationship inherent to ethnographic films. As with the bees in Life Cycle, Downey’s approach to video here is to turn the camera over to the one being documented as much as possible, and in doing so, to destabilize his own authoritative position. During the course of the narrative, conflicting anthropological narratives about these “uncontacted” people (who had by that time become internationally visible for their perceived “purity” 5) are inhabited and excavated. Downey’s deliberate shifting of the power dynamic, which renders the indigenous as co-creators rather than subjects, has made the work influential within anthropological discussions. Throughout his artistic output, Downey resisted the traditional hierarchies that situate artists above audiences, directors above performers, and scientific observers above the observed. His entire project aspires to be egalitarian, and he uses technology to level the playing field across individuals, races, and entire species. His approach to social interaction, as demonstrated by the interactive works in Radiant Nature, employs technology to enhance the attributes that participant-individuals already possess: their cognition (Dialogues), their locomotion (Octopus), their visages (ThreeWay), and their revolutionary potential (Pyramid ). That potential is cited by the majority of socially engaged artists working now, but it remains a rare occasion that such an artist’s intervention actually feels revolutionary, as Downey’s quiet reversal of the accumulative, excessive values of modern capitalism often does. Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. She is Artistic Director at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA, and a Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. Her research combines media studies, theory of globalization, and critical race discourse with international art history from the early modern to the present.

5. Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Helena Vilalta, “Yanomami, Let’s Talk,” Afterall 37 (Autumn/ Winter 2014).

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Listening for the Details Kim Beil

Chris Kallmyer: Listening is a Luxury FraenkelLAB, San Francisco May 18–June 17, 2017

Is listening a luxury? This question has plagued the Los Angeles-based sound artist and performer Chris Kallmyer for years. For the title of his 2017 show at FraenkelLAB, he turned the question into a statement: Listening is a Luxury. This is a medium specific version of the debate that surfaces time and again across all of the arts, especially during periods of economic and social instability: Is art a luxury? Is art frivolous? Can artists do something more forceful, and more effective, in response to crises? In a review of Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital, author, photographer, and The New York Times photography critic Teju Cole wrote of his own struggle with the art-as-luxury question in late 2016. “On those immediate postelection mornings in November when I lay in bed aphasic and estranged from myself, whatever did not address the current predicament seemed unworthy.” Cole praises Simon’s Paperwork, for which the artist reconstructed and photographed the flower arrangements that have been ubiquitous at international governmental meetings since the 1960s. Her seemingly innocuous flower photographs are captioned with not only the official name of the accord signed but also a clear description of its impact. Cole credits Simon’s meticulous attention to historical detail with inspiring him to continue making and writing about art in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Cole concludes, “[W]hat became clear was that ‘the current predicament’ was precisely this condemnation of detail [that Simon’s work challenges]. This erasure of historical nuance can be the anteroom to hopelessness.” 1 Cole argues that the questions asked by artists and the careful attention required of critics are worthy, even necessary, political responses. The central work on view in Kallmyer’s Listening is a Luxury is part of his Commonfield Clay project, a group of clay bells the artist made while an artist fellow at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. Kallmyer was

1. Teju Cole, “Capital, Diplomacy and Carnations,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/11/29/magazine/ taryn-simon-capitaldiplomacy-and-carnations. html?mcubz=1&_r=0.

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Chris Kallmyer, Commonfield Clay, 2015. Regional St. Louis clay, dimensions variable. Installation view, Listening is a Luxury, FraenkelLAB, San Francisco, May 18â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 17, 2017. Courtesy of FraenkelLAB.

Chris Kallmyer and Andrew Tholl, Commonfield Clay, 2015. Performance at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, September 5, 2015. Left to right: Darian Wigfall, Cheeraz Gormon, Michael Allen, and Kevin McCoy. Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Photo: Carly Ann Faye.

asked to create a piece for the foundation’s newly expanded Tadao Ando building. Many of Kallmyer’s previous projects have been site-specific, but this one is made, literally, of the site. With the help of the St. Louis ceramicist Dan Barnett, Kallmyer gathered red clay from local sources to fashion a collection of clay bells, including wrapped cone-shapes and thrown bells, which resemble wide, shallow serving bowls. The bells are a toasted orange color, partially glazed in abstract swathes of deep red. In places the red drips, tracing the bowls’ contours. In their presentation at FraenkelLAB, six triangular bells hung head-high from the ceiling above two low supports. Four of the bowls were suspended from the long crossbar of these three-legged racks, inverted so that their sound echoed off the floor. At events throughout the duration of the exhibition in San Francisco, Kallmyer performed on the bells, bringing the typically hushed space of the gallery to life with sound. St. Louis presented a particularly charged context for site-specific work during Kallmyer’s residency in the late summer of 2015. Just a year after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb barely ten miles north of the Pulitzer, Kallmyer struggled to make sense of his role in the city as an outsider and as an artist. Thus, he began his residency by listening to others. Kallmyer invited a group of St. Louis artists, activists, and preservationists to meet at the Pulitzer and share their historical knowledge and present experiences of the city—from its nineteenth-century prominence to its sharp decline, starting in the 1970s, which has had a disproportionate impact on the city’s black residents. The group then collaboratively authored and performed a composition using the clay bells. Analysis of structural injustice doesn’t typically focus on listening, since more physical consequences are often at stake. But one could describe the imbalance of power in Ferguson also as a failure of communication. The need for empathetic listening by people in power to historically disenfranchised populations is urgent both in the machinations of the political process and on an individual level, especially in interactions between police and citizens. In Ferguson, at the most basic level, the police department did not listen to the citizens it was sworn to protect. Instead, as described by the Justice Department’s later inquiry, the Ferguson Police engaged in ongoing civil rights abuses.2 In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, the militarized police force denied citizens the right to congregate and provoked the otherwise peaceful protesters. On the second day of protests, the police used teargas without warning to break up crowds. Using brute physical actions rather than words, the possibility of listening was foreclosed by force.

2. Office of Public Affairs Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Findings of Two Civil Rights Investigations in Ferguson, Missouri,” March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ justice-department-announcesfindings-two-civil-rights-investigations-ferguson-missouri.

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Chris Kallmyer collects raw clay from the banks of the Mississippi during his residency at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2015. Courtesy of Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Above: A house destroyed by brick thieves at 4207 W Evans Avenue in the Greater Ville, St. Louis, Missouri in 2009. Courtesy of Preservation Research. Photo: Michael Allen. Previous spread: Chris Kallmyer, All Possible Music, 2017. Opening performance, Listening is a Luxury, FraenkelLAB, San Francisco, May 18, 2017. Courtesy of FraenkelLAB.

Prior to the grainy news footage of protests in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, some of the most widely seen images of St. Louis emphasized its depopulation. For example, St. Louis-born photographer Demond Meek’s images, tagged #slumbeautiful, attracted significant attention on Instagram in 2012.3 Although Meek’s images were not the first examples of the widespread photographic trend that would come to be known as ruin porn,4 they were emblematic of its characteristics: crumbling buildings pictured from street level, isolated on overgrown lots and centered in the square frame. Instagram’s filters provided moody atmosphere through heavy vignetting, high contrast, and desaturated colors that mimicked old film. The positive aesthetic responses from international journalists and bloggers complicated Meek’s intent to bring attention to the problems of St. Louis’s ongoing deindustrialization and population decline. The photographs seemed old, the city already depopulated; it was easy to appreciate the pictures for their romantic beauty rather than see them as a call to action. As Susan Sontag wrote in 1973, “To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a good picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that’s the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.” 5 Regardless of Meek’s intentions, casual viewing of his photographs renders them metaphoric, at a geographic and temporal remove from the reality of contemporary life in St. Louis. Despite decay, many of St. Louis’s buildings are still standing, indicating the resilience of the city’s red brick architecture. Some of these buildings have suffered from an insidious form of vandalism, particularly in the Old North neighborhood. Brick theft has been a problem in St. Louis since the first major waves of depopulation in the 1970s. Thieves chisel away at buildings’ corners, or even set fire to them to collapse their walls and separate the bricks.6 The bricks are then trucked away and sold at recycled brickyards. For decades, the onus was primarily on the brickyard owners to confirm that bricks were obtained legally, which was hard to accomplish in a city with such a vast supply of similar brick. Although recent legislation has made it necessary for brick “rustlers” to obtain permits, enforcement still presents a challenge for a city facing ever-declining federal support and local tax revenue.7 In a pamphlet produced for the exhibition, Kallmyer alludes to the synecdochic relationship of the distinctive red clay to the city by including writings by St. Louis residents that describe the geologic history of the city alongside personal memories. Using red clay as the core material of his

3. Laura Pullman, “City of Ghosts: Haunting Abandoned Buildings of St. Louis after the City’s Population Fell by 70% in a Century,” Daily Mail, July 6, 2012, http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-2169773/ Stunning-photographstransform-St-Louis-landscapecrumbling-buildings-abandoned-

homes-slum-beautiful-art.html. 4. For an analysis of the term’s original coining, by the Detroitbased blogger James Griffioen in 2009, and its subsequent use, see Richard B. Woodward, “Disaster Photography: When Is Documentary Exploitation?,” Artnews, February 6, 2013, http://www.artnews.

com/2013/02/06/the-debateover-ruin-porn/. For an excellent investigation of the significance of contemporary ruins in Detroit, see Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 5. Susan Sontag, “Photography,” The New York

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Review of Books, October 18, 1973. 6. Malcolm Gay, “Thieves Cart Off St. Louis Bricks,” The New York Times, September 19, 2010, http://www.nytimes. com/2010/09/20/us/20brick. html?mcubz=1. 7. Ibid.

art, Kallmyer signals this historical continuum: the local clay deposit predates the city by more than 200 million years. According to Michael Allen, a St. Louis preservationist whose remarks Kallmyer reproduced in the Commonfield Clay pamphlet, the city’s high-quality clay derives from part of a subterranean fold that runs north to south where the Mississippi River cuts through the metropolitan area. This central location in the city meant that clay could be harvested, formed, and fired close to building sites during St. Louis’s boom years in the mid-nineteenth century, making bricks accessible and affordable, as well as durable. Stately homes, civic buildings, and small cottages all used brick and terra cotta decorative elements drawn from the local clay source. Following a large fire in 1849, the tendency to build using fire-resistant brick was legislated by the city government, further solidifying the city’s distinctive architectural character. The deep red bricks can also be seen throughout the Midwest, as the St. Louis brick industry sold to other rapidly growing cities, such as Chicago, which lay far from natural clay deposits.8 Like many Rust Belt cities, St. Louis experienced a period of sharp population decline with the departure of manufacturing in the 1970s. The city’s population peaked in 1950, when it was the eighth largest city in the nation. At the time of the 2010 census, it had shrunk by nearly 63%, a drop slightly greater than the more widely publicized population decline in Detroit.9 The architectural character of what remains in the city of St. Louis differs from Detroit, in that much of the construction in the latter city was timber framed, which decays quickly when not maintained. The brick buildings in St. Louis remain standing, even when there are few people to fill them. The fate of these empty buildings is an ongoing question. Some residents, including Cheeraz Gormon, a St. Louis-born poet and activist who worked with Kallmyer during his residency, decry the demolition of the old houses. In a spoken word performance, titled “Who Moved My Memories,” Gormon describes the unsettling experience of driving through her old neighborhood, only to find empty lots where her friends’ and family members’ homes once stood.10 Today, brick rustlers in St. Louis cart off bricks and resell them to luxury developers as a charmingly distressed vintage building material. In this act of spoliation, the victors’ racial and economic advantages dismantle the history of the defeated, brick by brick. Like the medieval appropriation of ancient marble from that convenient quarry—the Coliseum—these bricks go on to lead other lives, with little to identify their origins. Recycled brick, prized for its patina, is cleansed of any specific history and instead summons a generalized aura of the past. What was once indigenous and utilitarian is now an imported luxury item. The problem is not limited to St. Louis. Advocates for Houston’s historic Freedmen’s Town have also been working to protect their neighborhood’s streets, whose bricks were formed

8. Chris Kallmyer, “Commonfield Clay, Or How I Came to Wonder If Listening Is a Luxury” (FraenkelLAB: San Francisco, 2017), exhibition pamphlet.

9. United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts: St. Louis City, Missouri,” n.d., https:// www.census.gov/quickfacts/ fact/table/stlouiscitymissouri/ PST045216.

10. Who Moved My Memories: TEDxGatewayArch (St. Louis, MO, 2014), https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=swwZWt8IiTg.

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and laid by freed slaves and their descendants more than a century ago, when the city refused them such basic infrastructure as street paving.11 Despite years of negotiations with the city and the intervention of preservationists, the Freedmen’s Town bricks are still at risk.12 By transforming raw clay dug from the banks of the Mississippi into a sonorous form, Kallmyer allows the history of the city to resonate in new sites, without destroying its material past, as an artwork made of recycled brick would have done. What is unique about this contemporary pillaging in the United States is our response—or, rather, lack of response. Accelerating the decay of these buildings makes them more photogenic, their crumbling facades ripe for reflection on the passage of time and the ephemerality of humanity’s presence on earth. Like Nathanial Hawthorne, who, in the Italian Notebooks, denounced the damage done to the Coliseum, criticism of this practice of pillage is often less for the sake of the historical record than for preserving a suitably Romantic ruin. Hawthorne wrote, “The general aspect of the [Coliseum], however, is somewhat bare, and does not compare favorably with an English ruin both on account of the lack of ivy and because the material is chiefly brick, the stone and marble having been stolen away by popes and cardinals to build their palaces.” 13 Whereas Hawthorne takes aim at the looters, today there is little condemnation—and even less visibility—of those involved in the pillage of brick. On the market, these bricks are paradoxically “vintage,” but without identifiable history. During the first Bourbon Restoration in France, crown-commissioned paintings depicted Revolutionaries carting away treasures from royal palaces and churches as foolish and barbaric. Only years prior, Napoleon’s armies had greedily made off with art and architectural fragments from Western Europe and Egypt. Needless to say, these were not returned after Napoleon’s defeat by the Bourbons. Such appropriation was already a widespread practice among wealthy “antiquarians” of the eighteenth century, whose personal acquisition of antiquities found in the Roman world led to their subsequent dispersal throughout the West. The French painter Hubert Robert (1733–1808) depicted many such acquisitive travelers, though his stance on their activity is not always clear. As the official perspective on the looting of national or religious monuments changed during the tumultuous post-Revolutionary years in France (from Revolutionary fervor for dismantling the old regime to later calls for its resurrection), Robert’s perspective, too, may seem flexible.14 Clearly there is an appreciation for the ruin, as the great quantity and popularity of Robert’s paintings suggest. Still, in Robert’s late painting Demolition of the Château of Meudon (1806), he depicts not a raucous scene of looting, but an organized destruction of a

11. Florian Martin, “Preservationists Upset About Accidental Damaging of Freedmen’s Town Brick Street,” November 23, 2016, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/ news/2016/11/23/178487/ preservationists-upset-about-

accidental-damaging-of-freedmens-town-brick-street/. 12. In 2016, a City of Houston contractor accidentally tore into the bricks and removed them from the site, leaving residents fearful of their disappearance (the bricks have since been returned).

See: Florian Martin, “City of Houston Reinstalls Misplaced Freedmen’s Town Bricks,” April 28, 2017, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/ news/2017/04/28/198349/ city-of-houston-reinstalls-misplaced-freedmens-town-bricks/. 13. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The

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Marble Faun and the French and Italian Note Books (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1888), 135. 14. I am grateful to Issa Lampe for sharing her insights into this period by email. Any errors of interpretation are my own.

once-great French monument. In Meudon, an artist surveys the scene, preparing to record it. What of this practice does he (and by extension, Robert) wish to represent: the lost, elegant ruin or the industrious, forward-looking pillagers? These are pictures we don’t see of St. Louis brick. The crumbling corner of a red brick building is easy to read as simply the process of nature taking over, in the grand Romantic tradition. We don’t have a contemporary photographic equivalent to Château of Meudon, which shows workers, overseen by a gentleman, deliberately preparing marble for removal. There may, in fact, be many images that feature new, decorative uses of pillaged brick in shelter magazines, such as Dwell, but the bricks’ origins are never so clearly identified as they are in Meudon. Kallmyer’s clay bells emphasize the silence of these inert materials. By starting with fresh material dug from the banks of the Mississippi, Kallmyer’s bells summon these layers of history without fetishizing either vintage bricks or decrepit houses. Putting contemporary brick theft in conversation with the history of spoliation in the ancient world or Revolutionary France—all of which is now universally condemned—is exactly the kind of historical perspective that we lack in contemporary discussions of brick theft and ruin porn. The great strength of Kallmyer’s work is its openness to this long view of history. And when the bells are played, they seem to sing the entirety of this history in a way that a more representational work of art could not. While the bells may be owned individually (most of the original series was distributed among the participants in the Pulitzer workshop), the music they make is meant to be shared. As Kallmyer said after one of his performances at FraenkelLAB, “Music is interesting because it’s invisible and it surrounds us and it takes up space. We also take up space, but [that’s] a lot more confrontational. Music is a way we can bump into each other and negotiate our presence with one another.” 15 If the story of the bricks is predominantly one of loss—the city’s history being disassembled and sold off piece by piece—Kallmyer’s objects create something new, in the form of a communal musical experience. Unlike the bricks, which are rendered anonymous when stacked in new construction, Kallmyer’s recontextualized use of the original material invites explanation, making room for history to be remembered, whether in the St. Louis workshops or in the San Francisco performances and pamphlet. Kallmyer’s Commonfield Clay project brings together two prevalent images of the St. Louis area: the streets crowded with protestors and the crumbling houses void of residents. Hanging in the gallery, the clay bells are empty and silent, but they come to life when played by Kallmyer and his collaborators. That the bells are silent without human intervention is a poetic reminder of the need to listen to the world around us, perhaps especially to those things—and people—whose voices have historically been silenced.

15. Fraenkel Gallery, Chris Kallmyer: Listening Is a Luxury— Solo Performance, 2017, https:// vimeo.com/221821400.

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Hubert Robert, Demolition of the Château of Meudon, 1806. Oil on canvas, 44 5⁄8 × 57 ½ in. Purchased in part with funds realized from the sale of paintings donated by Peter and Iselin Moller, Dr. Walter S. Udin, and Howard Young. Courtesy of the Getty Center.

Chris Kallmyer, All Possible Music, 2017. Handmade book, 24 × 16 ½ in. (open). Courtesy of the artist.

Listening is a Luxury also includes All Possible Music (2017) a large, clothbound book with three separate sets of pages that turn independently of one another. The top page generally offers an adjective; the middle and bottom pages describe a type of sound or situation. In various combinations, the book’s pages describe music that is not only “country western music” or a “choir,” but may also be “distant,” or “beautiful,” or “preachy,” and is as likely to be found in an “orchard” as in a “busy farm-to-table restaurant.” It’s revealing of Kallmyer’s approach that both assessment and place are built into the understanding of music. In a performance using the book as a score, Kallmyer and six other musicians rang their handheld ceramic bells continuously, rapidly striking the inside, outside, or rim of the bowls to create a bright mosaic of tones. One by one, the performers stepped up to the large book, turning its pages to compose their music, then reading aloud: “Distant herd of sheep set in a fragrant orchard,” and “Beautiful choir with very good vibes.” One of the spoken word pieces, “Preachy conceptual art for an audience of careful and devoted listeners,” inspired laughter in the gallery audience. It’s true; Listening is a Luxury is conceptual art, and we were a stereotypical art gallery audience, wearing mostly black, Levis, and leather. But the abstraction of the music made on the bells, as well as the collaborative and fundamentally open nature of Kallmyer’s practice, saves it from preachiness. All Possible Music aptly raises the question of just how much the performance and its audience can change a work’s tenor. How important is it to activate the music of Commonfield Clay, to transform the bells from objects of sculpture into tools for conversation? How does the experience of the bells, in a white-walled San Francisco art gallery across the street from the farm-to-table pioneer Zuni Café, differ from the experience of the St. Louis collaborators for whom the red clay is central to the visible and tangible qualities of home? These questions, and the histories to which they allude, are central to Kallmyer’s work. As Teju Cole contends, this criticality and attention to historical detail is an essential activity, one that promotes hopefulness and aids in resistance. In practice, the bells propose a response to Kallmyer’s question: Listening is not a luxury. Listening is a necessity. Kim Beil is the associate director of ITALIC, an interdisciplinary arts program at Stanford University, where she also teaches courses on the history of photography and modern and contemporary art. Her writing has appeared in Afterimage, Art in America, Artforum.com, Museums and Social Issues, and Visual Resources, among others.

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ARTMARGINS ARTMARGINS IS IS DEVOTED DEVOTED TO TO ART PRACTICES AND VISUAL CULTURE CULTURE IN IN EMERGING EMERGING GLOBAL MARGINS. RECENT HIGHLIGHTS RECENT RECENT HIGHLIGHTS HIGHLIGHTS (from Issue 6:3, October 2017) (from (from Issue Issue 6:3, 6:3, October October 2017) 2017) ARTICLES ARTICLES ARTICLES Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage and the Aesthetics Vik Vik Muniz’s Muniz’s Pictures Pictures of of Garbage Garbage and and the the Aesthetics Aesthetics of Poverty of of Poverty Poverty Christopher Schmidt Christopher Christopher Schmidt Schmidt Juan Downey’s Downey’s Ethnographic Ethnographic Present Juan Juan Downey’s Ethnographic Present Present Ben Murphy Ben Murphy Murphy Ben ROUNDTABLE ROUNDTABLE ROUNDTABLE Responses to to “Art, Society/Text: Society/Text: A Few Few Remarks on on the Responses Responses to “Art, “Art, Society/Text: A A Few Remarks Remarks on the the Current Relations Relations of of the the Class Class Struggle Struggle in in the the Fields Fields of of Current Current Relations of the Class Struggle in the Fields of Literary Production Production and and Literary Literary Ideologies” Ideologies” Literary Literary Production and Literary Ideologies” Karen Benezra, Benezra, editor Karen Karen Benezra, editor editor REVIEW ARTICLE REVIEW REVIEW ARTICLE ARTICLE Pop on the Move (International Pop, Minneapolis/ Pop Pop on on the the Move Move (International (International Pop, Pop, Minneapolis/ Minneapolis/ Dallas/Philadelphia, 2015–16) Dallas/Philadelphia, 2015–16) Dallas/Philadelphia, 2015–16) Alex Kitnick Kitnick Alex Alex Kitnick ARTIST PROJECT ARTIST ARTIST PROJECT PROJECT Colophon as aa Marginal Witness Colophon Colophon as as a Marginal Marginal Witness Witness Faride Mereb Faride Faride Mereb Mereb DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT Introduction to to Amir Esbati’s Esbati’s “The Student Student Movement of of May 1968 1968 and the the Fine Art Art Students” Introduction Introduction to Amir Amir Esbati’s “The “The Student Movement Movement of May May 1968 and and the Fine Fine Art Students” Students” Morad Montazam Morad Montazam Montazam Morad The Student Student Movement of of May 1968 1968 and the the Fine Art Art Sudents The The Student Movement Movement of May May 1968 and and the Fine Fine Art Sudents Sudents Amir Esbati Esbati Amir Amir Esbati EDITORS: Sven Spieker, Spieker, Karen Benezra, Benezra, Francesca Dal Dal Lago, Octavian Octavian Eşanu, Anthony Anthony Gardner, EDITORS: EDITORS: Sven Sven Spieker, Karen Karen Benezra, Francesca Francesca Dal Lago, Lago, Octavian Eşanu, Eşanu, Anthony Gardner, Gardner, Angela Harutyunyan, Harutyunyan, Andrew Andrew Weiner Weiner Angela Angela Harutyunyan, Andrew Weiner ISSN: 2162-2574 || e-ISSN: 2162-2582 || Triannual ISSN: ISSN: 2162-2574 2162-2574 | e-ISSN: e-ISSN: 2162-2582 2162-2582 | Triannual Triannual

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Diane Christiansen and Jeanne Dunning

Birth Death Breath

Image: Birth Death Breath, Elmhurst Art Museum, Illinois (2016)

February 18 - June 10, 2018 Opening Reception February 17, 6-8 pm

Open 12-5 pm (closed Tuesdays). Admission is always free. armoryarts.org/exhibitions

Armory Center for the Arts 145 North Raymond Avenue Pasadena, CA 91103

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Stories of Almost Everyone January 28-May 6, 2018 Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Jason Dodge

Jill Magid

Lutz Bacher

Latifa Echakhch

Dave McKenzie

Darren Bader

Haris Epaminonda

Shahryar Nashat

Fayçal Baghriche

Geoffrey Farmer

Henrik Olesen

Kasper Bosmans

Lara Favaretto

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Carol Bove

Ceal Floyer

Amalia Pica

Andrea Büttner

Ryan Gander

Michael Queenland

Banu Cennetoglu

Mario García Torres

Willem de Rooij

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda

gerlach en koop

Miljohn Ruperto

Fiona Connor

Iman Issa

Tino Sehgal

Isabelle Cornaro

Hassan Khan

Mungo Thomson

Martin Creed

Kapwani Kiwanga

Antonio Vega Macotela

Cian Dayrit

Mark Leckey

Danh Vo

Klara Lidén 1 MUSEUM | Los Angeles | Free Admission | hammer.ucla.edu KASPER BOSMANS, GEORGE IV KILT HOSE, 2017. TWO SOCKS OF 80% WOOL AND 20% NYLON. 22 1⁄16 × 6 11⁄16 IN. (56 × 17 CM) EACH. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; MARC FOXX GALLERY, LOS ANGELES; AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK/BRUSSELS

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ARTIST WRITES, No. 3

In this third installment of Artist Writes, we present Martine Syms’s script “Incense Sweaters & Ice.” 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.

Incense Sweaters & Ice

Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles) uses video and performance to examine representations of blackness and its relationship to American situation comedy, black vernacular, feminist movements, and radical traditions. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively; recent exhibitions include Projects 106: Martine Syms, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Easy Demands, CONDO: Bridget Donahue, hosted by Sadie Coles, London; Borrowed Lady, SFU Galleries, Vancouver; Fact and Trouble, ICA London; and Vertical Elevated Oblique, Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York. She is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.