XTRA Winter 2017 19.2 by X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly

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X-TRA Volume 19, Number 2 Winter 2016

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X-TRA PO Box 41-437 Los Angeles, CA 90041 www.x-traonline.org T: 323.982.0279 editors@x-traonline.org ISSN 1937-5069 X-TRA is a contemporary art quarterly that has been published in Los Angeles since 1997. X-TRA is collectively edited by an independent board of artists and writers. Our mission is to provoke critical dialogue about contemporary art. X-TRA is published by Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, which was founded in 2002. Please contact us at editors@x-traonline.org for further information about X-TRA or to submit material for publication. Unsolicited materials cannot be returned.

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Waswo X. Waswo and R. Vijay, Chaos in the Palace (detail), 2015. Suite of 18 miniature paintings, gouache and gold on wasli. Courtesy of the artists.

Cover Interiors: Patrick Staff, 5 for those who deserve it (detail), 2016.

Artist’s Project Biography: Patrick Staff is an interdisciplinary artist who works with film, installation, dance and performance to investigate dissent, labor and the queer body. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. Staff is currently part of British Art Show 8, which tours UK venues throughout 2016, and their first US solo exhibition will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2017.

Erratum: In X-TRA vol. 19, no. 1, the image featured on the cover and page 30 should have been credited to Deborah Farnault. The editors apologize for the error.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Tendinitis freelance, of The Manual Labour Series, 2013. Woodcut on paper, 25¾ × 18¾ inches. Courtesy the artist.

CONTENTS

Aria Dean Written and Bitten: Ulysses Jenkins and the Non-Ontology of Blackness

Kate Wolf Picturing La Petite Mort Review: Aura Rosenberg: Head Shots (1991–1996) JOAN, Los Angeles

Josephine Graf and Dana Kopel Andra Ursuta’s (Anti-)Monumental Impulse Review: Andra Ursuta: Alps New Museum, New York

Patrick Staff 5 to those who deserve it

cover interiors and insert

Travis Diehl The Drop Shadow of Doubt Review: Laura Owens: Ten Paintings CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco Lutz Bacher: Magic Mountain 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles

Bedros Yeretzian Seething the Kid in His Mother’s Milk Review: John Knight: A work in situ (2016) REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles

Sophie Hoyle On and Off Our Backs Review: Sidsel Meineche Hansen: Second Sex War Gasworks, London

Maya Kóvskaya Art in Dark Times: Waswo X. Waswo’s Chaos in the Palace

Aria Dean Written and Bitten: Ulysses Jenkins and the Non-Ontology of Blackness

Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black… —Frantz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness For all of the vibrancy of the community described by black artists who lived and worked in Los Angeles in the 1970s—including the exhibitions at the Brockman Gallery, gatherings at Studio Z and Othervisions Studio, and collaboration throughout the city—mainstream critical writing’s treatment of these artists and the scene that incubated them merely skims the surface. Certainly a number of these artists have, after the fact, gone down in history as important figures. Among them are Senga Nengudi, Barbara McCullough, Fred Eversley, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Charles White, and David Hammons. But many of these artists’ careers skew in the direction of being “hometown heroes” in Los Angeles; they are ghettoized to consideration primarily when the art world wants to think local—a consistent trend when it comes to considering art that comes out of Los Angeles—or to think along racial lines. Video and performance artist Ulysses Jenkins is but one of these underrecognized artists, despite his large and potent body of work and his involvement in collaborations with many artists throughout California through the collective of Othervisions Studio, Electronic Cafe International, and other initiatives. Jenkins, now a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been included in retrospective exhibitions such as Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (Hammer Museum) and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston). But when his work is discussed, it is almost always in passing—garnering no more than a few paragraphs of interest, the bulk of which considers it a commentary on positive and negative representations and stereotypes of black life1 —a fate that befalls many a black artist.

1. In the catalog for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Jenkins’s work is described as a “critique [of] the cultural stereotyping of black people in American popular culture.” In Roberto Tejada’s essay in Now Dig This! Jenkins is similarly described

as “critiqu[ing] the physical and discursive violence of mainstream representation.” See Yona Backer, “Performance Trace: Staged Actions, Live Art, and Performance Made for the Camera,” in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Valerie

Cassel Oliver, ed. (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2013), 88; and Roberto Tejada, “Los Angeles Snapshots,” in Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Kellie Jones, ed. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2011), 20.

Ulysses Jenkins, Mass of Images, 1978. Still from video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound, 4:15 min. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ulysses Jenkins.

These readings of Jenkins’s work lean heavily on his 1978 video Mass of Images, a recorded performance that does indeed engage black stereotypes perpetuated by the American media. In the work, Jenkins appears on a set accompanied by a stack of televisions, his face obscured by a plastic mask and sunglasses, neck wrapped in American-flag-print scarf, and sporting an Adidas t-shirt underneath a bathrobe, arranged such that only the “ID” of Adidas is visible. The video cuts between this scene and examples of blackface and racist stereotyping from American films and TV. Jenkins repeats a mantra as he settles into a wheelchair and wheels himself toward center stage: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know / from years and years of TV shows. / The hurting thing; the hidden pain / was written and bitten into your veins / I don’t and I won’t relate / and I think for some it’s too late!” 2 Continuing the refrain, he gathers his strength and rears to smash the TVs but falters. He gasps and laughs, rather manically, and says, “Oh, I’d love to do this, but they won’t let me.” He turns toward the camera, repeats the mantra one more time, and then the screen goes dark. The few published texts on the work that are in circulation—and they are minimal—focus on the inserted panels featuring images of Hattie McDaniel in her all too familiar mammy guise, Bert Williams in blackface, Allen Hoskins playing “Farina” in The Little Rascals, and other instances of blackface and racist imagery. The authors argue that Jenkins aims to illustrate the possibility of overcoming the power of these representations. In the catalog for Now Dig This!, for example, Roberto Tejada focuses on Jenkins’s regaining of his composure following his outburst as signaling the “possibility of…self-possession within the mass of images that work to contain black bodies in representation.” 3 However, I would argue against Tejada’s claim, because this possibility is unrealized in the work. At the video’s closing, we leave Jenkins exactly where we found him, repeating the same refrain. Other readings of the video find Jenkins generally critiquing cultural stereotypes, again performing the work that has come to be expected of the black artist of his time.4 Across all readings of Mass of Images, the lack of interest in Jenkins’s failure to destroy the television sets is surprising. If the conceptual thrust of the work is meant to be the black-artist-as-subject’s triumph over his flattened, essentialized, racist image—as readings so far have claimed it to be—then we must ask the question: Why doesn’t Jenkins smash them? He tells us why. It is because “they won’t let” him. The line “they won’t let me” betrays a wholehearted desire to commit the act. Jenkins wants to smash the televisions but someone is stopping him. This moment, this break in the otherwise meditative pacing and relative calm of the video, becomes a focal point and in turn positions desire as the unseen force propelling the 2. It should be noted that the video’s audio is transcribed sometimes as “written and bitten into your veins” and at other times as “written and bitten into your brains.” “Veins” appears more often, so I’ve

used it here. Ulysses Jenkins, Mass of Images, video, 1978. 3. Tejada, “Los Angeles Snapshots,” 69–89. 4. For example, see Yona Backer, “Performance Trace,” 20.

work. Jenkins noted, in a 2008 interview, that he very carefully positioned the bathrobe over his Adidas t-shirt such that only the “ID” is visible to the viewer, as a sly nod to Freud, signaling that he is concerned primarily with the libidinal economy of the work.5 Here, we are not quite within the domain of ethics or politics—the domains that the Black Nationalist agenda and Jenkins’s Black Arts Movement contemporaries would have had him occupy. The only politics here is a desire to be himself.6 Focusing on this break and viewing Mass of Images as an exercise in failure, rather than a victory over representation, we follow Jenkins into a rather unusual realm of inquiry, one that makes sense to have downplayed when it comes to historicizing black art of the period. Jenkins and his Los Angeles contemporaries, such as Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Barbara McCullough, and (for a brief period) David Hammons, were often accused of making art that was not political enough or “black enough” due to their interest in new media and abstraction and their willingness to draw on sources from outside of the black tradition.7 Following Jenkins down this rabbit hole unravels much of the twentieth century’s work toward a black politic of representation and provides a counter-argument against attempts by Black Arts Movement leaders, such as Larry Neal and Ron Karenga, toward a black aesthetic and a black art that articulates a self-determined blackness through images that “speak to and inspire black people.” 8 Jenkins departs from this concern over what Frank Wilderson III calls the “hegemonic value” and pedagogical power of visual representations of blackness and black people, which ruled black art criticism and black cinematic theory of the time. Instead, Jenkins is interested in questioning the very nature of blackness itself. During the period from the creation of Mass of Images through the performance Adams Be Doggereal (1982), one finds Jenkins asking a specific set of questions. These works should be viewed as a marked period in Jenkins’s oeuvre, one that goes beyond “cultural critique,” reaching into a zone of inquiry less acceptable to the mainstream. During this period, which includes the video/performance Two Zone Transfer as well as the performance Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem (both, 1979), we witness a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins’s massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed on him and ends with an abandonment of this pursuit. By the end of this period, Jenkins—in a semi-linear progression— has moved away from grappling with the slippage between the black subject and its representation and toward a non-ontological blackness, or what he deems a new black universalism. 5. “Modern Art in Los Angeles: African American Avant-Gardes, 1965–1990,” panel discussion with Ulysses Jenkins, Maren Hassinger, Barbara McCullough, and Senga Nengudi, moderated by Kellie Jones and Judith Wilson, Getty Research Institute, January 16, 2008. For more information, see http://www.

getty.edu/visit/events/avantgardes.html. 6. Rebecca Peabody, “African American Avant-Gardes, 1965–1990,” Getty Research Journal no. 1 (The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2009), 214. 7. Their work was in apparent opposition to the criteria of black art set out by Maulana

Ron Karenga and others. In “Black Cultural Nationalism”: “black art must be functional, that is “useful… Black art must expose the enemy, praise the people and support the revolution.” (Valerie Cassel Oliver, “Through the Conceptual Lens: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Blackness,” in Double Consciousness: Black

Conceptual Art Since 1970, Terry Adkins, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and Franklin Sirmans, eds. (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2005), 19. 8. Maulana Ron Karenga, “On Black Art,” Black Theater 3 (1969), 9–10.

Ulysses Jenkins, Mass of Images, 1978. Still from video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound, 4:15 min. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ulysses Jenkins.

Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer, 1979. Still of video transferred to DVD, color, sound, 23:52 min. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ilene Segalove.

Let us begin again, from here. Jenkins started where many young black artists find themselves. Studying at Santa Monica College (SMC) and later at Otis College of Art and Design, “in the shadow of Hollywood,” 9 Jenkins was aware of the conflicting interests of the entertainment industry and the African-American community. The works he developed following shortly after his enrollment at SMC take to task the media’s role in perpetuating these stereotypes, exploring the resultant exacerbation of a black “doubleconsciousness,” to borrow W. E. B. Du Bois’s terminology.10 Mass of Images is chronologically the first of these critiques, followed by Two Zone Transfer and Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem (1979). Two Zone Transfer follows closely in the footsteps of Mass of Images, with Jenkins zeroing in on blackface and minstrelsy’s effects on black Americans. The video, also staged as a performance at Otis College, opens with Jenkins boarding a city bus, where we witness white riders’ suspicion of him as a black man. Jenkins drifts off to sleep, and a figure in a dream says, “You know why you can’t sleep; it’s the same old problem that every black person in this country has had.” Jenkins replies: “You mean the misunderstandings I encounter, or the same old, basic image problem?” 11 The “image problem” spoken of is the career-defining conundrum of black representation. However, Two Zone Transfer marks a shift in Jenkins’s approach to the image problem, away from the traditional inquiries of first wave black filmmaking and film theory—described by Frank Wilderson as an intense preoccupation with “identifying and critiquing the recurrence of stereotyped representation in Hollywood films,” 12 and exemplified in the writings of such critics as Don Bogle, Thomas Cripps, and Gladstone L. Yearwood. Instead, Jenkins looks to the source of the problem, interrogating the history of early twentieth century vaudeville. On screen, Jenkins is joined by three actors—Kerry James Marshall, Greg Pitts, and Ronnie Nichols—who wear masks in the likeness of presidents Nixon and Ford. In a strange layering of whiteface and blackface, the masks are smeared unevenly with black paint. The men brag about the history of minstrelsy in the United States and how they have, for years, manipulated and misused African-Americans’ images and culture in order to distort society’s understanding of black life. Here, Jenkins recognizes blackness itself as an image rather than focusing on its inaccuracy when contrasted with what might be posed as an authentic black life, once again departing from the efforts of black art and cinematic theory of the time. “The image problem” is not that the image fails to correspond to reality, but that the image has partly crafted reality, inextricably linking Jenkins’s own experience—as exemplified by his earlier interaction on the bus—to popular images of blackness and black people. The developing line of thought here resonates with Frantz Fanon’s |realization of

9. Tejada, “Los Angeles Snapshots,” 79. 10. “Double Consciousness” is explained by Du Bois as “a peculiar sensation…this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, introduction by

David Levering Lewis (1903; New York: Modern Library Edition/Random House, 2003), 5. Quoted in Cassel Oliver, “Through the Conceptual Lens,” 17. 11. Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer, video, 1979. 12. Frank Wilderson III, Red,

White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7.

blackness as some “impure product.” 13 As Fred Moten reads Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” (in Black Skin, White Masks), blackness has always been and always will be “a function of a making that is not its own, an intentionality that could never have been its own.” 14 Traces of this position are also visible in the earlier Mass of Images. In Jenkins’s refrain, he repeats: “The hurting thing / the hidden pain was written and bitten into your veins.” If we take “the hurting thing / the hidden pain” as a reference to suffering as a constitutive element of black lived experience, then Mass of Images shares Two Zone Transfer ’s emphasis on the origin of blackness as external to itself. Here, his use of “written” could be read as a gesture toward a biologically determined blackness, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek shout out to out-of-fashion scientific racism. Jenkins is a black person, an individual of African descent. Blackness is “written” into his DNA. In contrast, “bitten into your veins” points to blackness as a virus or contagion—a theme that we find throughout rhetoric around blackness and black cultural production, from racist associations between blackness and actual disease to the tendency to laud black music as “contagious” and black joy as “infectious.” Whether “written” or “bitten,” blackness appears caught in an apparent contradiction. Jenkins, in effect, admits the seemingly paradoxical distinction between written black and bitten blackness. Jenkins himself is black in all his appearances and in his biographical experience, but his blackness is, again, an “impure product.” It is an external contagion, circulating independent of Jenkins’s own embodiment, “bitten into his veins” by mass media, engineered by white America long before his birth. Two Zone Transfer has, in essence, a dramatic “to be continued” ending. After the history lesson in Two Zone Transfer, the video cuts to Jenkins, dressed as a preacher, delivering a sermon about the biblical figure Noah; in the following scene, he performs a rendition of a James Brown song with the actors, now unmasked, singing back-up. The video ends with Jenkins waking up from the dream and saying, invigorated, “After a dream like that, I know I’ve got direction. I know what I’m up against.” 15 Imagine a commercial break, and the next episode begins. — Later in 1979, Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem opened at Otis College in a gallery that was empty except for a small table upon which sits a television set. Ulysses Jenkins, dressed as a janitor, tidies the small set while a confused audience waits for his performance to begin. Jenkins surprises them by sitting down at the table and opening a book; through his reading he discovers that “the African-American male is perceived as a sex object in the Blacksploitation [era] of the 1970s.” 16 13. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, vol. 50, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 177–218. 14. Ibid. 15. Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer.

16. Othervisions Studio, “Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem,” http:// www.ulyssesjenkins.com/ justanother.html.

Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer, 1979. Still of video transferred to DVD, color, sound, 23:52 min. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ilene Segalove.

Ulysses Jenkins, Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem, 1979. Performance. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nancy Buchanan.

Jenkins pulls a cigar box from under the table, from which he procures a vibrating dildo. Importantly, it is a “white” dildo, with the glans, or head, painted black—a form of “blackface.” Jenkins then disrobes, “revealing pasties with Superman’s “S,” a rhinestone in his bellybutton, and silver boxer shorts,” 17 suddenly embodying the sexualized black male that he’s read about. Jenkins reacts by pulling out a fake pistol and shooting the dildo. The dildo falls into the view of a closed-circuit video camera, which in turn magnifies it on the monitor’s screen. It visibly gyrates from the impact of the shots. As recounted on Jenkins’s website, “the artist realizes [that this is] the perception he confronts in contemporary society and continues [to] shoot the dildo. This stereotype won’t die…so he realize[s] he has to manually turn off [the television] and walk away.” 18 The entire scene echoes “The Fact of Blackness,” in which Fanon writes: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” 19 In “The Case of Blackness,” Moten argues that “The Fact of Blackness” is a mistranslation; it should read: “The Lived-Experience of the Black,” which would more openly signal Fanon’s phenomenological interests. Moten narrates Fanon’s realization of the ontological impossibility of a black subjectivity within civil society.20 Fanon argues, “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” 21 Ontology—by way of Hegel—is attainable only when a consciousness confronts an “equally independent and self-contained” other. “Moreover, this other must have ‘nothing in it which is not itself the origin.’” 22 For the black (non)subject, this is an impossibility from the outset, as blackness itself is a condition whose very existence is contingent upon and derived from whiteness, making “the black” an always already impure other. In Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem, Jenkins thus parallels Fanon; the artist realizes that he himself exists at the limit—and beyond the limit—of ontology, unable to overtake his own representation, in this instance, as a sexual object. Caught in a literal closed circuit of representation between the dildo, its image, his own body, and the text that describes the processes acting upon him, he is left with no ability to contest his own objectification. Exhausted by his ongoing battle with the black image—which is exemplified in this work and others, as well as in his day-to-day life—Jenkins withdraws fully. Jenkins moves on to a much larger question, an inquiry that entirely exceeds cultural critique. Now freed from the stalemate between black life and the white gaze through his own withdrawal, he asks: If blackness cannot be in the eyes of civil—white—society, if black people cannot articulate themselves as a black individuals, untethered to blackness, then what is it, in fact, to be black? What is the character of blackness?

17. Paul Von Blum, “Ulysses Jenkins: A Griot for an Electronic Age,” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (2009), 135. 18. Othervisions Studio,

“Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem.” 19. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London:

Picador, 1970), 82. 20. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 179. 21. Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” 83. 22. Kara Keeling, “In the

Interval: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation,” Qui Parle, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003) (University of Nebraska Press), 91–117.

As Jenkins approaches Adams Be Doggereal in 1981, he has already parsed out the difference between blackness and the black individual, and understands the ontological impossibility of the latter. He has renounced his desire to just be himself, understanding now that he, as a black man, is always already “All Blacks,” as Fanon would say. Or, as Cedric Robinson wrote, Jenkins has renounced actual being for an acceptance of the historical being, the “ontological totality.” 23 He has always already “consent[ed] not to be a single being.” 24 As Kara Keeling writes, “The Black therefore exists as a collective subject whose governing fiction is not personal but social.” 25 With this distinction in mind, it is difficult to find the exact language to speak of where Jenkins finds himself at this juncture, for his concern appears at once as neither for “the Black” nor for blackness, as well as for both the black and for blackness. This is to say, Jenkins is thinking the gap between the two, or as Fred Moten so eloquently phrased it in “The Case of Blackness”: “[T]he wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaning—or, perhaps too ‘trans-literally,’ the (plain[-sung]) sense— of things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects.” 26 Moten, too, lingers in the gap, in the mistranslation of Fanon’s “lived-experience” as “fact,” of the phenomenologically black and the ontologically-voided blackness. Thinking this gap, Jenkins builds upon Fanon and anticipates Moten’s similar negotiations, resonances that situate him within some sort of Afro-pessimist/Black Optimist tradition 27 (if we can even claim there is such a tradition). In this continuum, Afro-pessimism is something like a “[theory] of black positionality” that spreads outward from Fanon’s (non) ontology rather than a school of thought.28 Moten writes that one of the great beauties of Afro-pessimist thought is that it “allows and compels one to move past that contradictory impulse to affirm the interest of negation and to begin to consider what nothing is.” 29 This is where we find Jenkins in Adams Be Doggereal. In the performance, Jenkins’s nothing, his approximated black nothingness, takes the form of the glass prism, collectively discovered by the artist and his collaborators in a pile of dirt in his studio. Jenkins recalls the object as symbolizing a “new self.” 30 The prism is materially present yet curiously empty, its primary function being to act as a filter for light. A prism can be used, as Sir Isaac Newton discovered long ago, to reflect and

23. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171. 24. Moten often references this phrase of Édouard Glissant. See “One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 28: 4–19, doi:10.1215

/10757163-1266639. 25. Keeling, “In the Interval,” 100. 26. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 179. 27. While often in dialogue and agreement with those considered afro-pessimists, Moten prefers to label his work as “Black Optimism.” However, he notes that afro-pessimism and black optimism “are not but nothing other than one

another.” Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” 742. 28. Wilderson III, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism, 6. 29. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:4 (Fall 2013) (Duke University Press), 741. Italics in the original. 30. “Modern Art in Los

Angeles: African American Avant-Gardes, 1965–1990,” panel discussion with Jenkins, Maren Hassinger, Barbara McCullough, and Senga Nengudi, moderated by Kellie Jones and Judith Wilson, Getty Research Institute, January 16, 2008. For more information, see http://www.getty.edu/visit/ events/avantgardes.html.

Ulysses Jenkins, Just Another Rendering of the Same Old Problem, 1979. Performance. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nancy Buchanan.

Ulysses Jenkins, Adams Be Doggereal, 1981. Performance. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Bruce W. Talamon.

refract light—that is to disperse white light into beams of different colors. Prior to Newton, it was believed that white light was colorless; his experimentation with prisms proved that it was quite opposite, that it is comprised of all of the colors of the rainbow. Jenkins’s use of the prism can be theorized in a number of ways, all of which might be said to negotiate the simultaneous plentitude and void that blackness presents. First, we might read the prism as a filter of sorts, where blackness might be a lens through which to view the world. We see a similar position in William Pope.L’s Black Factory. On the occasion of that work’s first instantiation, Pope.L declared that “blackness is a lever to talk about otherness, …just a funnel.” 31 A prism is a starting point from which to think a multitude of positions—a rather humanist, multiculturalist conclusion. Second, Jenkins might be proposing a radicalized departure from Pope.L’s stance, one where the prism—considering its role in proving that white light is not colorless—might speak to the notion that all other positions have been and must be articulated through and against “the Black.” This, again, follows in the Afro-pessimist line of thinking, where blackness is the non-communicable body against which white civil society constitutes itself. Third, the prism rests between emptiness and fullness. It is, as noted above, at once materially present and transparent; it also contains the potential for the apparent emptiness of white light and fullness of the rainbow. In this case, it embodies the paradoxical emptiness and fullness, plenitude and nothingness of a black (non)ontology. Looking back upon his own work from this period, Jenkins says that his goal was always to illustrate the possibility of a new black universalism.32 It is impossible to say whether this was fully realized—or what that would even look like in practice. However, we can say that, in Adams Be Doggereal, Jenkins does realize some sort of expansion of blackness that begins to repair or move beyond its originary ontological failure. The prism effectively positions blackness as a stance from which all else must be thought, much like François Laruelle’s uchromia, wherein we might “think from the point of view of Black as what determines color in the last instance rather than what limits it.” 33 From here, blackness, in all of its para-ontological glory, destabilizes not only its own existence but also all other racial ontologies that it exists to constitute. And from here, thinking “blackness as what determines color,” blackness as the starting point and not the limit, we might throw into question other artistic and philosophical interests in the color itself—and therefore reassess the position of all those whom it marks as well. Thinking of blackness, “the Black,” in this way activates its darkness and allows a consideration of its depth, its ability to reflect and absorb. As Laruelle writes, “a phenomenal blackness entirely fills the essence of man.” 34

31. Joshua Feist, “William Pope.L interview excerpt,” posted March 2010, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7KNlNpA6w. 32. “Modern Art in Los Angeles: African American

Avant-Gardes, 1965–1990,” panel discussion. 33. François Laruelle, “On the Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color,” trans. Miguel Abreu, Hyun Soo Choi: Seven Large-Scale

Paintings (New York: Thread Waxing Space, 1991), 2–4, http://www.recessart.org/ wp-content/uploads/LaruelleBlack-Universe1.pdf accessed 6/4/2016. 34. Ibid.

Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer, 1979. Still of video transferred to DVD, color, sound, 23:52 min. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ilene Segalove.

This brief period in the long and still-ongoing career of Ulysses Jenkins solves nothing once and for all. Jenkins’s later work finds him migrating away from this inquiry toward more multicultural concerns, less fixated on blackness in its singularity. But 1978 through 1981 should remain in our minds as a period of Jenkins’s career well worth further exploration. There is certainly more in this work than a plea for positive representation. Jenkins’s mid-career videos and performances look toward a black future “free [of ] ontological expectation” while, as Moten notes, still deftly examining this refusal as “the labor…which blackness serially commits.” 3 5 Aria Dean is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA.

35. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” 773.

Kate Wolf

Review: Aura Rosenberg: Head Shots (1991–1996)

Picturing La Petite Mort

JOAN, Los Angeles April 30–June 12, 2016

In 2015, a novel called A Little Life, by the author Hanya Yanagihara, became a surprise bestseller. Its 720 pages feature excruciatingly detailed accounts of sexual abuse, mutilation, and other forms of physical violence amidst the story of a friendship between four men over the course of multiple decades. In addition to commenting on Yanagihara’s devastating prose, many reviewers also noted the aptness of the book’s cover, a 1969 black-and-white photograph by Peter Hujar titled Orgasmic Man. Yanagihara told the Wall Street Journal that she was set on using the photograph: “I really hung on for the cover,” she said. “I love the intimacy, the emotion, what looks like anguish. There’s something so visceral about it.” 1 Without the telling title, it would be easy to mistake the expression in Hujar’s photograph for intense distress, as opposed to pleasure. The tight close-up shows a man with his eyes crushed closed, a pathetic whimper passing across his mouth, and his right hand jammed up against the side of his cheek, as if to keep his head up. More substantially than other photographs Hujar produced with similar conceits, the picture reinforces a deeply held connection between agony and ecstasy, between orgasm and death. Here the viewer seems to be witnessing a true la petite mort—the expression that is not just an synonym for climax but also an acknowledgement of death and orgasm’s shared state of ego dissolution—a moment of absolute transcendence of oneself, from which only in the second case are we able to return. Beyond its eroticism, Hujar’s image also evinces something fundamental about photography: the supremacy of the frame. Apart from sheer affect, it’s the exclusion of a larger context that gives Orgasmic Man its powerful ambiguity and, ultimately, its resonance. Hujar constructs a perspective that would occur in everyday life only in the most intimate of circumstances, but the meaning of his image would likely be altered if a viewer began to focus on actualities. (Did Hujar play a role in his subject’s orgasmic state? Was this state indeed orgasmic or was it feigned?) Actuality easily becomes the enemy of metaphor. In describing photographs, we use words 1. Jennifer Maloney, “How ‘A Little Life’ Became a Sleeper Hit,” The Wall Street Journal.com, September 3, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/ articles/a-little-life-racks-upreaders-1441312965.

Aura Rosenberg, Untitled, from Head Shots (1991–1996). Gelatin silver print, 16 × 12 inches. Image courtesy the artist.

like “pictured” to account for the distance between these two poles. In the post-mortem photography of the late 1800s, for example, deceased children are often “pictured” sleeping, lying in bed with their eyes closed. This manner of framing was not intended to mislead family members or conceal the sad reality, but instead to represent a gentler view of death, not as fiery paroxysm but as a long and peaceful slumber. In a series of photographs entitled Head Shots (1991–96), Aura Rosenberg pictures men in orgasm. The suite of 61 black-and-white, vertical images were exhibited in their entirety, at JOAN, a nonprofit space in Los Angeles’s West Adams neighborhood, for the first time in two decades. The photographs were hung in their original order, in a straight line at eye level across the gallery walls. Like Hujar, in Orgasmic Man, and Andy Warhol, in the film Blow Job (1964, a touchstone for Head Shots), Rosenberg trains her camera exclusively on the faces and upper bodies of her subjects, leaving everything else to conjecture. At times the stray body part of another person—toes, hands, a shadowy profile—tips the scale of inference directly toward sexual encounter, but mostly the men are shown alone. Orgiastic signifiers, the most common of which is the gaping mouth, à la Saint Theresa, also include torrents of sweat, closed or rolled back eyes, darting tongues, and private little smiles. Sometimes the men’s expressions verge on or arrive at abandon; others exhibit deep concentration that almost comes across as rumination. None of the subjects produces a countenance quite as indelible as the man in Hujar’s photograph, and a few even shirk the task completely, posing with cartoonishly bulging eyes in static faces that seem to announce artifice. Indeed, one way of looking at Head Shots is as a compendium of performances, the documentation of a group of men all interpreting and enacting the same directive. The title of the work seems to refer as much to the pictures actors use for representation (and the prints are only a few inches larger than the standard 8 × 10) as it does to pornography. Rosenberg has never divulged all the details about how the photographs were made, but her comments indicate that they were mostly staged. “I asked them to act out what they thought they looked like coming,” she told her partner, the artist John Miller, about the process in a 2013 interview.2 The photographs’ kinetic, informal style—many of them have soft focus or are blurred by motion—gives the impression that these were extended sessions of simulation. And the inferred proximity of photographer to subject implies intense communion. In some shots, Rosenberg (who also credits twelve other photographers in the making of Head Shots) seems to hover directly above her subject, or kneel below him, or come within an inch of his breath. This produces extreme, sometimes unflattering, angles that reveal nose hair, double chins, wrinkles, scars, strains of saliva, and crooked teeth. The candid, snapshot quality of the grainy images, which project disinhibition, complicates and destabilizes the knowledge that as viewers we are seeing something that is most likely pretend. Whatever is taking place, though,

2. John Miller, “Aura Rosenberg,” Bomb.com, http://bombmagazine.org/ article/7034/, March 4, 2013.

Aura Rosenberg, Head Shots (1991–1996), installation view, JOAN, Los Angeles, April 30–June 12, 2016. Image courtesy JOAN. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

the mode of posing alone suggests a base level of intimacy. “Shooting those pictures brought up a range of emotions for me and my models,” Rosenberg told Miller. “I realized that sexual exchanges can happen through the lens of a camera.” 3 The seeming disparity between what the photographs portray and what they document was noted when selections from Head Shots first began to surface in the early 1990s and when Rosenberg published a book of the same name in 1995. In the loft above the main gallery space at JOAN, artifacts from the project’s lifespan, such as contact sheets, exhibition posters, publications, and a few testimonies from Rosenberg’s subjects, were on view. Several contemporaneous reviews were also displayed, and they attest that the response from some critics at the time focused primarily on this aspect of the work. David Pagel, in a brief roundup of a group show Rosenberg appeared in at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, wrote: “The images are supposedly exposing a moment of naked intimacy, but they actually mask their subjects behind a list of clichéd conventions.”4 “Rosenberg’s images reek of insincerity and fraudulence—of men acting out stereotypical responses of ecstasy and release,” offered a reviewer in Art issues.5 Another, though noting the series’ inspired subversion of the male gaze and its reversal of pictorial depictions of female sexuality, still seems to have found the pictures distasteful: “interesting as these mechanisms are [they] take a backseat to the basic visual challenge, the ugly impact of the images…produced.” 6 But we could ask, do the photographs try to conceal their pretense, or do they instead brandish it as another element of their mingling of fiction and nonfiction? While pornography, though equally contrived, confirms what has taken place in the form of the obligatory climax shot, in Head Shots Rosenberg responds with uncertainty, allusion, even farce. The isolation of the men’s faces requires the viewer to fill in what’s left unseen. Roland Barthes writes: “The erotic photograph…does not make the sexual organs into the central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame and it is there that I animate this photograph and it animates me.” 7 By insinuating a strong level of doubt in the series, Rosenberg expands past the most obvious corollary, in some ways severing male ecstasy (or at least the gesture towards it) from material emission alone, attempting to make the realm outside the frame not just an afterimage cast by pornography, but possibly something more subjective or even profound. “Not only toward ‘the rest’ of the nakedness,” as Barthes writes, “but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together.” 8 On their surface, Head Shots form a loose portrait of an artistic community. In contrast to David Robbins’s Talent (1986)—a collection of 18 professional head shots that cast well-known artists, mostly of the Pictures Generation, as entertainers, with their names printed bottom right—Rosenberg’s choice of participants seems less a comment on art world affairs than a matter 3. Ibid. 4. David Pagel, “‘Go Down Stairs Diagonally’ Offers an OffBalanced View,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1993, F2, 3. 5. Alisa Tager, Art issues

(January–February 1994). 6. Marina Rosenfeld, “Johnny Came Lately,” LA Weekly (May 24–30, 1996), 32. 7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1981), 59. 8. Ibid. Here, Barthes is writing specifically on the punctum of a 1975 self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Aura Rosenberg, Untitled, from Head Shots (1991–1996). Gelatin silver print, 16 × 12 inches. Image courtesy the artist.

of friendship or propinquity. At JOAN, the men depicted were not identified, and the individual photos were exhibited without titles.9 Nevertheless, some of the artists in the series are recognizable, such as John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and the elastic-faced Mike Smith, who appears a few times, once in a demonically makeshift Santa Claus suit. The close focus limits our access to the settings, which might tell us more about these men as individuals, but Rosenberg still captures small details: a painting here, a pet there, bookshelves, a phallic prong of cacti, the Empire State building in the distance, and a glass display case housing a collection of animal skulls, as well as blankets and sheets, as many of the men are shown in bed. A bed, of course, conjures sex, fantasy, creativity, and the unleashing of the unconscious in dreams, but also illness. Rosenberg was photographing members of a community living through and likely touched by the devastation of AIDS, which, by 1995, had reached peak death rates in the United States.10 (That fact conspicuously went unmentioned when the work first appeared, but was highlighted by JOAN in their press release.) Looking at Head Shots in light of the AIDS epidemic reveals different layers of reference. Indeed, the work was created at a moment when the oppressive symbol of sex equaling death had jumped genders, from the syphilitic femme fatale of the nineteenth century to the promiscuous gay man of the twentieth; and when the image of a man lying in bed with a wrenched face, sweating profusely, may have had a slightly different resonance than it immediately would today. (One recalls another photograph: the shattering image of Hujar, with his mouth agape, on his deathbed, taken by David Wojnarowicz in 1989.) It seems fair to say it wasn’t Rosenberg’s aim to illustrate any of this, but the disease is present in a number of the photographs. In one, for instance, a seated man barely motioning toward climax holds a framed picture of Liberace. At first, it seems like a gag, until one remembers that the singer died of AIDS in 1987. Hunter Reynolds, the artist and AIDS activist, is photographed in the drag face of his persona, Patina Du Prey. And an image of the poet and performance artist Bob Flanagan (who had cystic fibrosis), with oxygen tubes up his nose, being asphyxiated by his partner Sheree Rose, demonstrates that the sick needn’t forgo desire or agency in the face of disease. The many representations of men experiencing an ambiguous moment of release—a vaporous photograph of Mike Kelley with his eyes closed, leaning his head to one side in a transported pose against a sea of black, is a particularly resonant example—enable the series to hint at some of the darker edges of sex during the decade, while also advocating for pleasure, and treating it with humor and play. (In fact, some of Rosenberg’s Head Shots photographs ended up being used in a Swedish campaign for safe sex, in 2002.)

9. According to JOAN’s press release, the individual photographs are all titled Head Shots followed by the subject’s initials in parentheses. But these titles were not included in the gallery’s exhibition or in the publication from 1995.

10. See Dennis H. Osmond, “Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS in the United States,” HIV InSite, University of California San Francisco, March 2013, http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/ InSite?page=kb-01-03.

Aura Rosenberg, Untitled (Neu Palais, Potsdam), 1992. C-print, 20 Ă&#x2014; 16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Meliksetian/Briggs, Los Angeles.

Rosenberg, who trained as a painter, began adapting pornographic images for a group of sculptures called The Dialectal Porn Rock (1989–2012), in which she pasted magazine cutouts onto rocks and encased them in resin, sometimes placing them back in natural settings. More recently, she has made paintings over images of vintage pornography culled from the Internet. Particularly with The Dialectal Porn Rock and Head Shots, she plays with notions of obscenity and objectification. In these works, Rosenberg ruptures a circuit of imagery that, while unbelievably vast and varied, can also be rigidly constrained. If Head Shots had been comprised of photographs of women or of less elliptically captured and perfectly statuesque men, perhaps it wouldn’t hold our interest as much today. Instead, amidst the contemporary refrain of a phrase like “toxic masculinity,” the photographs seem newly, even urgently, relevant. What would a culture look like, Rosenberg’s pictures seem to ask, where men were not only sexualized to the same degree as women, but also depicted as porous and open, as equal in vulnerability and in capacity for feeling? “There are endless things we can do with our faces because we have endless motives,” the affect theorist Silvan Tompkins has said. “But nonetheless, a critical part of what we do with our faces, even when we pretend, is based on what we know to be innate.” 11 As Rosenberg suggests in Head Shots, perhaps the first step to answering the question about what such a culture could look like is simply suspending disbelief and assuming the position. Kate Wolf is a writer and an editor-at-large for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

11. The Tomkins Institute, “What Tomkins Said,” http:// www.tomkins.org/whattomkins-said/introduction/ the-face-is-the-primary-organof-the-affect-system/.

Josephine Graf and Dana Kopel

Review: Andra Ursuta: Alps New Museum, New York

Andra Ursuta’s (Anti-) Monumental Impulse

April 27–June 19, 2016

Andra Ursuta has never been one for subtlety. Past works include, to give a brief sampling: a group of ass-shaped stools; a prostrate female figure, seemingly just flung from a nearby catapult; and a monumental inflatable fist made of patchwork fabric and held precariously erect by fans. She has consistently taken on, with sardonic and often masochistic wit, such grandiose themes as nationalism—informed particularly by her upbringing in communist Romania—desire, violence, and mortality. Yet her work doesn’t so much aim for discomfort (though this is often its initial impact) as it demands a good hard look at failure, genitalia, death—all those things that, like car crashes, we feel obliged to avert our eyes from but can’t help staring at. Alternately, Ursuta forces into plain sight those power structures so inescapable and symbolisms so ham-fisted as to have been normalized into invisibility. In either case, hers is not the oblique view. This inclination toward the confrontational continued in Andra Ursuta: Alps, the artist’s solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York, which presented selected past works within a new installation. Part retrospective and part Gesamtkunstwerk, this hybrid exhibition format managed to be simultaneously more and less modest than a straightforward presentation of new or old work. Straightaway, the viewer was met with the stares of two nearly identical stone statues of women defiantly facing the elevator doors. Their blank eyes were directed toward the viewer, but seemed to scan an unknown horizon, calling to mind the art historical (and nationalist) trope of the heroic explorer. In this installation, however, the figures looked squarely at an unremarkable elevator bank. The reverse of a large wall—propped up by metal scaffolding and still bearing the spray-painted notes of its assembly—loomed just behind this pair of statues, shielding the rest of the exhibition from immediate view. Walking around this partition revealed a rock-climbing wall constructed from a patchwork of cast Aqua-resin panels tinted the tone of pale pink flesh and dotted with colorful phalluses doubling as handholds. Puffy skeletons in bas-relief—like raised scar tissue—and ambiguous bodily orifices intermittently embellished these structures. Rising in a craggy geometry from floor to ceiling and largely blocking the gallery walls, these sexualized rock-climbing structures comprised the installation Alps. Within this claustrophobic second architectural skin, Ursuta exhibited a grouping of past works: a series of seated obelisks, several overtly exoticized female busts, a large backboard bearing an eagle in place of its basketball hoop, mops with immense lolling tongues as heads, and a limp cast of the artist’s body. 34

Andra Ursuta, Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental, 2012. Marble, nylon jacket, gaffer tape, coins; 70 Ă&#x2014; 18 Ă&#x2014; 24 inches each. Image courtesy the artist and Ramiken Crucible.

Together, these works operate most instantaneously on the gut level of the easy joke: the penis as handle, the tongue that literally licks the floor. But Ursuta’s work is far more generous and insidious than the initial joke—and her jokes, admittedly, are often not that funny. Or rather, these witticisms offer entry into Ursuta’s deadly serious underlying concerns. Foremost amongst these are monuments: those death-defying, nation-building, and masculinity-affirming exercises intended to seduce and dominate vision, banishing absence by filling the frame and focusing the view. Ursuta’s works not only assume the form and confrontational posture of the monument, they simultaneously gesture toward the myriad ways in which monuments—and all they represent—can fail or be forcibly deflated, exhausted, and punctured. The stone statues that greet the viewer introduce this concern. The catalog essay explains that the statues, jointly titled Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental and originally presented at Ramiken Crucible, in 2012, depict Roma women who, at the time of the work’s fabrication, had recently been deported from France. Curator Natalie Bell recounts that their creation was prompted by the Romanian government’s announcement that witchcraft—a major source of income for many of that country’s Roma women—would be considered a legitimate profession, and thus subject to taxation. Building from this narrative, Bell draws attention to the illicit forms of labor through which the two women depicted—and the countless others they represent— have managed to survive.1 Indeed, the two statues wear brightly colored vests embroidered with copper Euro coins and US pennies; their amounts correspond to exchange rates between the two currencies and reference the relationships of value that underpin both the lives of migrants and the status of the artwork itself.2 Positioned at the gallery’s entrance, the work introduces the uneven mobility of capital, objects, and people as a thematic undercurrent in the exhibition. Along with their forthright placement and gazes, the two stone women that constitute Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental strike the viewer for the simple fact that it is rare to see statues, as opposed to sculptures, in a museum of contemporary art. The distinction is pertinent to Ursuta’s practice: statues, unlike sculptures, have a specific function whose operative principle is to point beyond themselves; they commemorate a historical figure or event of importance, often denoting absence or death (though also victory). Ursuta’s use of traditional materials and her somber, even heavy-handed, portrayal of the two women emphasize the work’s memorializing role. Yet unlike most statues, Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental commemorates those typically forgotten, rather than those whose historical significance demands that we remember them. The work is a monument to the disenfranchised and unnoticed people—specifically women—who are most often subjects, rather than emblems, of state power.

1. Natalie Bell, “Absurdity Aside,” in Andra Ursuta: Alps, ed. Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell (New York: New Museum, 2016), 13.

2. Massimiliano Gioni, “Interview with Andra Ursuta,” in Andra Ursuta: Alps, 24.

Above: Andra Ursuta, Whites, installation view, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, September 4–November 1, 2015. Image courtesy the artist, Massimo de Carlo, Milan/London and Ramiken Crucible, New York. Photo: Philipp Hänger.

Previous spread: Andra Ursuta: Alps, installation view, New Museum, New York, April 27–June 19, 2016. Image courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio.

Ursuta has disavowed biographical readings premised upon her Eastern European heritage, but the work’s glorification of capitalism’s anonymous undesirables makes clear reference to Socialist Realism.3 She resuscitates this aesthetic vocabulary and promptly sets it adrift amongst a multiplicity of meanings that vacillate between parody and solemnity. The work’s title, for instance, pejoratively references its own sentimentality, and the statues’ vests further frustrate their monumentalizing role. In an interview with curator Massimiliano Gioni, Ursuta claims that the figures “could be viewed as monuments, but also as mere mannequins,” intended primarily to display the coin vests they wear.4 More equivocal and less politically virtuous than its initial appearance or supporting narrative might suggest, the work is instead radically contingent upon viewers’ interactions and interpretations. This is a precarious position that traditional monuments, with their demand for clear historical consensus, tend to shun.5 Ursuta thus complicates a reading of the work as a reclamation of the monument toward new political ends, leaving her viewer unsure whether hers is a tactic of critique from within or a more generalized nihilism that seeks to disrupt any sociopolitical virtue or moral certainty. This semiotic swerve, though discursively rich, can admittedly leave the viewer feeling slightly uneasy in light of the very real stakes of the situation so many migrants currently face, which explains, perhaps, some of the apprehension around the exhibition’s reception.6 The sense of ambivalent or deflated monumentality that Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental suggests emerges even more starkly in a series known as the Whites (2014–15). Anthropomorphized, mostly four-sided obelisks with pointed tops—phallic, like the Washington Monument—the Whites bend to “sit” dejectedly in brightly colored wooden chairs. Their pale surfaces have been sanded down to a smooth marble sheen, interrupted by the negative space of a human (or occasionally animal) orifice: a toothy mouth, nostrils, eye sockets. Sometimes the surfaces are punctuated by human leg bones in relief, where the “legs” of the monument might be. Like the climbing walls that surround them, the Whites are made from Aqua-resin, which Ursuta casts in facets and fits together to form obelisks before incising orifices into their surface. In fact, the climbing walls might be understood as an expansion of these obelisks, unfolded and flattened out in space. Their construction involves parallel processes of addition and subtraction—adding material while asserting negative space, so that the material process itself marks an absence, much as a monument is designed to do. Ursuta has been working with the Whites for several years. They first appeared in 2014, in Scytheseeing, at Kölnischer Kunstverein; the following year, she developed the series in a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel. Also titled Whites, that exhibition was composed almost entirely of the seated, beleaguered monuments. Congregating in one of the Kunsthalle’s galleries,

3. Ibid., 19. 4. Ibid., 24. 5. See, for example, Ken Johnson’s rather vitriolic—and ultimately off the mark—review, “Sex, Death, and Little Subtlety,”

The New York Times, April 28, 2016. 6. Jonathan F. Vance, “Documents in Bronze and Stone: Memorials and Monuments as Historical

Sources,” Building New Bridges: Sources, Methods and Interdisciplinarity, ed. Jeff Keshen and Sylvie Perrier (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005), 194.

the Whites were described in the exhibition text as inhabiting “a geriatric clinic for Western Modernism,” and indeed the weariness of these humanlike monuments suggests the exhaustion of Western modernity (and the hegemonic position of whiteness), though its formal structures and modes of power still cling, desperately, to life.7 As in much of Ursuta’s work, a base-level fatalism is here tempered by the undeniable and deeply relatable humor of these lazy monuments, at once imposing and depleted, half-assing their jobs. If Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental and the Whites series ape the monument’s form—the latter presenting it as distilled, cartoon-like gestalt— the surrounding works in the New Museum exhibition unfurl it outwards into subtler territory, mining its connections to nationalism, sport, and desire. In Scarecrow (2015), for instance, a thick black steel base supports a grey concrete basketball backboard that features, instead of a hoop, a stylized inflatable eagle cast in concrete, its wings outstretched. The eagle instantly evokes nationalist imagery—most pertinently, the eagle that decorates the Romanian coat of arms—yet upon closer inspection appears slightly wilted, its concrete form evincing a loss of air and therefore body. In its entirety, the sculpture is imposing; its dark palette stands in marked contrast to the pale flesh tones and brightly colored accents of the rest of the exhibition. Yet Ursuta has titled the work Scarecrow, designating it a harmless if frightening object, and thus deflating its ostensible gravitas. Both a useless piece of sports equipment (there is quite literally nowhere to score) and an impotent symbol, the sculpture is all bravado and little real power. Alps, the climbing wall installation that dominates the New Museum exhibition, extends this sense of derailed athleticism and impotent monumentality. Like much fascist, religious, or propagandistic architecture similarly daunting in scale, Alps solicits an unsettling combination of subservience, empowerment, and awe—while simultaneously parodying this solicitation. The work’s title obviously references the European mountain range of the same name. This linguistic play merits attention, as the Alps mark the intersection of two pertinent historical phenomena: the rise of the sublime as an aesthetic category of anxious but pleasurable submission to nature—at the moment when the Alps became an object of contemplation— and the fraught history of borders and nationalist sentiment, insofar as the mountains act as a natural barrier between Eastern and Western Europe.8 In a sense, the installation serves as an ambivalent monument to that which divides, while suggesting an intention to ascend and overcome the limits of nature and one’s own body. One might also understand Ursuta’s work itself as a monumental barrier, but it doesn’t function like this within the exhibition. Instead, the viewer can experience the space of Alps fully, moving freely around it, rather than strenuously over it—a stark contrast to the regimented and restricted movements of vulnerable bodies confronted with geological barriers or the imposed boundaries of nation-states. 7. “Andra Ursuta: Whites,” exhibition room sheet, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. 8. It should be noted that this crossing of nationalism and the sublime—with the Alps as one

of its main points of intersection—took hold in the United Kingdom and Europe during the Romantic period of the mid to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Andra Ursuta: Alps, installation view, New Museum, New York, April 27â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 19, 2016. Image courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio.

Though this disjuncture marks another moment of Ursuta’s appropriation of the monumental as a means of its negation, it also takes on particular weight considering the current migrant crisis—a convergence the exhibition text notes, but that gets somewhat lost. If in Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental the body of the migrant is forcibly imaged, in Alps it is noticeably absent. Yet, the body does present itself in Alps, though it does so in fragments: penises in various shapes, sizes, and bright colors, and diverse stages of flaccidity and erection, serve as grips for the imaginary rock climber. Given their colorful urethane construction, we might also interpret these as dildos, yet somehow—perhaps because of their particularity; their lack of functionality, fastened to the walls; or their subservience to the larger representational schema of Ursuta’s Alpine landscape9 —they resist a reading as objects of self-directed pleasure. Nevertheless, a form of desire is at play here in the idea of the grip: each penis is made specifically to be held or handled—and the installation entices on this material level, almost asking to be grasped, though in practice museum policy forbids this interaction. In these cock-climbing walls, desire can never be satisfied; it is constantly détourned, derailed, intensified by the impossibility of its fulfillment. Human anatomy is collapsed into a series of relatively flat and almost pictorial planes that imply interaction—cooperation, competition, touch—between bodies without depicting or allowing it. In Alps, the penis is a means to climb upwards—implying, perhaps, that any ascent to power through the privileges of (an assumed) masculinity is inherently self-congratulatory, even masturbatory. This may seem overly literal, but for Ursuta, that’s part of the joke. The oversimplified punch line of the work—that dicks = masculinity = power without real value, going nowhere fast—is repeated over and over with each neon penis-grip, becoming so obvious that it intentionally falls flat. It’s not a new claim, but one worth reiterating almost to death, which Ursuta does with massive scale and gallows humor. Of course, the presumption that the penis corresponds to male-ness or masculinity has undergone crucial challenges in recent years through the efforts of theorists in queer and trans studies. Yet Ursuta’s work takes as its subject the more commonplace position of phallic masculinity; instead of questioning this position through an obviously critical approach, she uses techniques of the joke—seriality, repetition, absurd juxtaposition—to poke holes in its logic. For her, the penis remains the most obvious, and culturally legible, representation of masculinity, and thus the dick joke serves as an effective tool in her work, precisely because it’s so simplistic. She notes: “It’s true, though, that the male presence in most of my works is evoked through an isolated part, almost like an amputation. I have made more complete female bodies, but the male presence is always a synecdoche— I don’t know if this is a sign of internalized reverence for the patriarchy, like when you pledge allegiance to the flag that stands for the country, or if it is

9. Ursuta explains that Alps "draws on a number of stylized representations of natural landscapes." Gioni, “Interview with Andra Ursuta,” 23–24.

an act of violence. Probably both.” 10 In its enforced fragmentation and isolation—one might say its castration—the penis gathers symbolic force, even as it finds itself subject to manipulation (resurrected as a climbing grip, to take Ursuta’s example). This is, oddly, the same operation at work in the phallic quality of so many monuments. Ursuta seems to point to the absurdity of this ironic turn by which a symbolic castration becomes a means of desperately demanding both visibility and reverence. In fact, images of penises are deployed to represent themes of nationalism and aesthetics—and by extension masculinity, that realm to which penises are culturally understood to correspond—regularly in Ursuta’s work. In her 2015 exhibition Ο Νότος θα εγερθεί ξανα at Ramiken Crucible in New York, Ursuta debuted her Olympdicks series, photograms on velvet depicting oversized anthropomorphic penises performing athletic feats (handstands, crunches) and suicidal ones (one hangs itself, while another holds a pickaxe and is split across the middle). With these works, Ursuta displays the trials and tribulations of violent masculinity, as embodied by the figure of the dick—not just any, but the best dicks, elite competitors in a global display of male dominance. And yet even these elite penises don’t have much going for them: they’re limp dicks, as Ursuta suggests with the titular pun, unable to adequately perform, isolated from the bodies that give them context and allow them to function. (Perhaps that’s why some of them are suicidal.) The exhibition’s title, Greek for “The south will rise again,” oddly appropriates the racist motto of the Confederacy, perhaps to signal historical confluences of power, violence, and hegemonic masculinity beyond the context of the United States. These anachronistic and anatopic allusions characterize Ursuta’s practice: from the reference to Iron Age bog bodies (the skeletons embedded in the surface of Alps) to the medieval catapult, from a US Civil War slogan offered in Greek to the Romanian folk tradition of making coin necklaces, enacted with contemporary currency. Dismissing attempts to read these allusions as solemnly resonant, Ursuta herself says, “In reality, the faux-primitivism of my work makes a mockery of modernism and of the expectations of a cultivated audience; there is nothing authentic about it.” 11 Her concern is not with historical or critical integrity but rather with the material and formal associations of the work itself and how these play around with—and sometimes bully—the conventions of contemporary art. By contrast, Crush (2011) presents a more personal approach to themes of violence, desire, and death. Installed off in one corner of the gallery, Crush is a striking sculpture: a full cast, to scale, of the artist’s naked body in urethane resin the color of aged bronze. In this it seems to reference memorial statuary, while providing—in contrast to Alps ’ large-scale brazenness and Commerce Exterieur Mondial Sentimental ’s unwavering solidity—a sense of the monument without monumentality, a body memorialized but left wholly unarmored. Indeed, in Crush the body is hollowed out, deflated; it sprawls limply on the museum floor, bony legs bent and crossed at the knees in a useless gesture towards modesty. Beyond its greasy wig and sneakers, the figure is completely exposed; it is covered in splatters of white wax that look

10. Ibid., 26. 11. Ibid., 19.

Above: Andra Ursuta, Olympdicks, 2015. Dye on velvet, 77½ × 58 inches. Ο Νότος θα εγερθεί ξανα, installation view, Ramekin Crucible, New York, June 7–July 12, 2015. Image courtesy the artist and Ramiken Crucible, New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

Following spread: Andra Ursuta, Crush, 2011. Cast urethane, wax, sneakers, wig, silicone, 60 × 40 × 9 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Ramiken Crucible.

like semen, intensifying its violent, vulnerable corporeality. The viewer is left to imagine a scene of rape and murder enacted upon the artist’s body even as she depicts it. The sculpture, the oldest of Ursuta’s works in the New Museum show, is by far the most emotionally intense. Read in the context of this exhibition, the work’s title, Crush, suggests that the woman’s body has been physically flattened under the weight of ideological forces of nationalist and patriarchal domination. Yet, the title also implies the one-sided desire of a romantic crush, with all the embarrassing vulnerability and masochism that can entail. The work’s protagonist (who doubles as the artist) is crushed by the things she does not desire, as well as by the things she does—and parsing the two can at times prove difficult. Ursuta’s work often muddies the line between the “good” and “bad,” the seductive and harmful, and it is her refusal to disentangle these threads— without resorting to a simplistic position of shocking immorality—that sets her apart. Her work does not reveal, from beneath a series of veiled gestures, a palliative to soothe intellectual or moral trepidation, as so much contemporary art does. Of all Ursuta’s defeated monuments, Crush most viscerally articulates this position. Throughout the exhibition, the monument surfaces as both target and tactic; this doubled stance allows Ursuta to trace the messy elision of death, violence, sex, and desire, and to picture them without resolving their contradictions. The resulting ambiguity of intention can be unnerving, with the monument marshaled toward vague political ends. But hers is an operation of radical leveling that offers its own form of politics, however nihilistic—a chipping away at any and all certainty through bombastic visual means. Like a suffocating embrace, she pushes the monument so far that its structure deflates: the drama of the monument is revealed as dramaturgy; its underlying supports buckle under their own ideological pressure. Josephine Graf and Dana Kopel are curators and writers based in New York. They received their MAs from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where they began a practice of collaborative writing. Their collective writing has previously appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, and they have published individually in Mousse, Modern Painters, and Pelican Bomb.

R. and I were in the Circus of Books on Santa Monica a few months back, a while before learning that the Silver Lake store would be shutting down. We were killing time, though I don't remember why; killing time, I think, despite a shared pleasure for subterfuge in gay cis male spaces, and horny anthropological interests. At a certain time, in another version of Los Angeles, I’m told, Circus of Books was a landmark, a cruising spot, a crossroads, an active feature of the city. When I look up the address now, Google lists the names of adjacent businesses each still trading in desire: joyful nails, smoke for less, tasty donuts. I bought two things at Circus of Books that night: a pair of photographs that had been jettisoned in the discount bin and a photocopied booklet of Bob Flanagan's poetry. The photographs are of a man: in one image he is seated, looking straight into the camera, wearing a leather cap and a harness on his bare chest. In the other, he is standing, staring into the camera again, wearing only tight black (plastic?) underwear and a perfect, snatched back tuck. His arms are up, as if to say: “I surrender.” I realise, a little while later, that my reading of this gesture is implicitly tied to current events, to the violence of this city and America now. I wonder if, in fact, his pose is as to say: “Here I am.” There is a stillness to his expression in both photographs: calm, blank. There is nothing to indicate the identity of the photographer, and I don’t remember the clerk charging me for the prints. The second item is a booklet of poems by Bob Flanagan, edited by Sheree Rose. An image of Bob, young, is printed cheaply on the faded pink fluoro cover. A worn sticker for $1.98 indicates the price, though I was only charged a dollar. The back cover says “$5 to those who deserve it, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center.” LOVE IS STILL POSSIBLE IN THIS JUNKY WORLD LOVE IS STILL POSSIBLE. LOVE IS STILL POSSIBLE.

Like many of my peers under precarity, I am increasingly preoccupied by care. What is taken, and what is received. How we are held, and hold, and harm. I reach more and more for ways to describe how we are bound together, the positions bodies occupy, and the vacillations between immunity and infection. Constitution, relationships, and dosage. I came to these handles through the slow lessons of working with queer people who’re older than me; through a handful of deaths, and certain illnesses, and disabilities of friends and lovers in my community; through the ongoing grief and raggedness of my own queer identity and body—its marking and codification always in negotiation with you, whether you’re a stranger, friend, lover, family member, physician, government, cop, or pig. SUFFERING ENDS WITH A BEAUTIFUL, BLIND FOLDED, TIED SPREAD-EAGLED FUCK IN WHICH I AM BEATEN, BIT, CHOKED, AND PINCHED INTO A WONDERFUL COME BY MY MOST COMPETENT MISTRESS. NOW, BLISSFUL, SLEEP. MORE PUNISHMENT IS PROMISED AND I AM THRILLED AND TERRIFIED. HELP. —Bob Flanagan, Fuck Journal (Hanuman Books, 1987)

I work these terms through Bob and Sheree. Bob’s poems do not tread lightly; love is pinched, squeezed, and bitten. My attraction to pain and release as a practice is channeled through theirs. Their love. As I talk about intimacy, bitten and choked, it is not an intimacy that is soft and sweet, but one of an almost unbearable heat. One that challenges tolerance, and where resistance is calcified. You and I, the city, violence, these photographs, are intimate and on a knife’s edge. It is not clean, it cannot be fixed or inoculated; to try to flush it out and sterilise is a violent deception. It is not the space where vanilla fucking prevails. Instead, there is this unbearable heat, a weight and heat through which our togetherness is constituted. We do not cleanse one another, but I might be undone by you. Arms up as if to say, “I surrender” or perhaps “I am here.” $5 to those who deserve it.

Travis Diehl The Drop Shadow of Doubt

Review: Laura Owens: Ten Paintings CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA April 28– July 23, 2016

Lutz Bacher: Magic Mountain 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles, CA May 21– July 31, 2016

For once, if you wanted to know what the show was about, the show itself could tell you. “Come text a painting,” read the CCA Wattis Institute website in late May, soon after the opening of Laura Owens’s exhibition Ten Paintings. A good first question was: Where are the paintings? Aside from a few dauby abstractions in a back gallery, hung salon style with the artist’s grandmother’s needlepoints (a rocking chair, a schoolhouse, an autumnal mill), Owens’s show comprised a giant silkscreened mural on paper, seamlessly tiled and pasted flush to every inch of the main gallery wall. Tromp l’oeil prints of lumber columns coincided with the gallery’s extant supports. This was less painting than wallpaper, an artisanal digital paradox as much desktop as drawing room, a massive bitmap of gray-lavender texture, layers of more or less coarse grids shaped by hard-edged, god-sized Photoshop brushes and erasers. It looked like not “ten paintings” but a painting—big-screen gestures breaking down into little squares of ink, the whole thing impastoed here and there in toxic-looking neon pigments like a giant hand-touched giclée, the drop shadows on the digital swooshes somehow mocking the actual, plastic buildup. The intimation of kitsch and craft, like grandma’s proto-digital needlepoints, dipped into self-effacement, while the craftsmanship throughout was aggressively good. Scattered everywhere—like scraps on a studio wall, each silkscreened with impressive fidelity—were vintage classifieds from the underground Berkeley Barb, a cat, a Peanuts strip featuring Snoopy’s brother Spike, printouts of webpages, and handwritten notes that urge you to “text any question” or “text more questions” to a handful of 415 numbers. This, so far, is quintessential Owens—an attitudinal body of work well summarized in a gallery text by Wattis director Anthony Huberman, here paraphrased in the press release: “When it comes to painting, there are many battles to choose from: flatness versus depth, materiality versus illusion, abstraction versus representation, the epic versus the everyday, the grid versus the gesture. Laura Owens picks them all, and she plays both sides. …She makes paintings that look like paintings. She forces painting to perform tasks other than painting. She feeds painting its own tail so that it ties itself up in knots.” 1 1. Press release for Laura Owens: Ten Paintings, CCA Wattis Institute, http://www. wattis.org/view?id=332.

Laura Owens, Untitled, 2016. Acrylic, oil, Flashe, silkscreen inks, charcoal, pastel pencil, graphite, and sand on wallpaper. Ten Paintings, installation view, CCA Wattis Institute, April 28–June 23, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Sadie Coles HQ, London / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; © Laura Owens. Photo: Johnna Arnold.

Owens lobs a few more shells at the old battleground of “surface.” If pretty art is superficial, decorative, both “flat” and “stupid,” Ten Paintings fits the bill. But this knowing concern for the tail-chasing of Greenbergian Modernism also cues us to the show’s intellectual depth, overwhelming in not only its technical execution (involving seemingly hundreds of unique silkscreen applications) and illusionistic space, but also in the deftness of its art-historical index. The walls were also physically deep; the wallpaper images literally had something behind them: the titular ten paintings. Embedded in the walls, ostensibly awaiting extraction as discrete works of art, were ten aluminum panels. By the way, you could text the paintings. Sending a question to one of the posted numbers cued one of an unknown number of scripted audio responses, some general, others strikingly specific, which played from speakers embedded in the walls roughly where the paintings were hidden. Texting “Where are the paintings?” for example, triggered a scattershot chorus of “here, here here, here…” Like Siri’s programmers, Owens anticipated lots of the who, what, where, when, and why of her show—questions like, “How did you make the paintings?” and “Where should I go for lunch?” Yet, even when audible in the white cube’s sloppy acoustics, the replies (something like “I had a good teacher” and “Taco Bell”) were never the answers I wanted. Then again, they were always the quip I deserved for talking to a painting. The flat, mute image, long derided for precisely these qualities, now adds to its pretense of depth a scripted interactivity. The clues on the walls and the seemingly bottomless “game” of texting paintings hint at a hidden richness: the interior lives of paintings. A program, of course (here in 2016, short of true AI), can only simulate (and perhaps stimulate) conversation. But Owens’s show also models a kind of painterly discourse. As with (other) paintings, there’s a discursive barrier to entry. And what you learn, once there, is that there are no last words. An artist proceeds from an unanswerable question of a set form—the “painting problem,” for example, of which Owens plays all sides. A peevish answer can be just what we need to maintain motion across time—to overcome the fatigue that maybe we’d like to blame on all this superimposed media, the layered and merged historical styles, cell phones, classified ads, web psychics, and the Adobe Creative Suite. In this respect, Ten Paintings’s insidery attitude, its veneer of information and secrets and gimmicks, is both Owens’s latest innovation and the work’s least productive aspect. After all, how much info do you really want? How far will you go to “discover” the “secrets” of these “paintings”? Rather, it’s the open-ended anxiety of secrets left covered and questions left unasked that prompts a more fundamental and unsettling problem: What is 2. Charles Desmarais, “Laura Owens at CCA Wattis Institute a Pulse-Quickening Experience,” Chron.com, Updated May 20, 2016, http:// www.chron.com/news/article/ Laura-Owens-at-CCA-Wattis-

Institute-a-7757510.php; Charles Desmarais, “Wallpaper Exhibition Compels and Conceals,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 2016, http:// www.wattis.org/MEDIA/00979. pdf.

Laura Owens, installation view of embroidery and cross-stitch works by Owens's grandmother, Eileen Owens, made between 1971 and 1995. In Ten Paintings, CCA Wattis Institute, April 28–June 23, 2016. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Sadie Coles HQ, London / Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; © Laura Owens. Photo: Johnna Arnold.

it you want from art, anyway? 2 As if asking something of Art in the abstract is any less insane than asking paintings directly, or texting your question to a decorated wall is substantively different than standing there looking at it and wondering, what’s the point? “[T]ext more questions / 415 690 0299” reads a note seemingly handwritten on a computer printout, then rendered on one wall. Heading the page in a digital typeface is the phrase: “How will I proceed with my paintings.” It’s Owens’s own question to a tarot card website. The bot’s reply fills a further three pages, listing and describing the six cards from the William Blake tarot (the recommended deck for writers and artists) arranged in the cruciform layout of the Creativity Spread. The first, for instance, the center card, “partially obscured, represents the Creative Project. This card represents the essence of the reading.” Owens has drawn “V RELIGION”: “Need or desire for personal guidance. Hypocritical influences may be present (spiritual materialism). Question authority and be suspicious of leaders and gurus…” The answer, like those of the paintings, isn’t direct or specific— that’s how tarot works—but the general wisdom can be bent to anyone’s situation. The spread isn’t final, but procedural—another prompt. More than painterly considerations, however, what I most wanted to know is why, in a largely formalist and contemporary show, on a gallery desk otherwise scattered with little ceramic emoji faces and copies of the exhibition text, was there a yellowed copy of a January 17, 1991 Los Angeles Times, where the headline announces the start of Desert Storm? I’ll admit I asked the paintings. They were unhelpful. I’ll also say I called the 805 number printed on a postcard-scale version of a poster by Sister Corita Kent (a nod to another stunning graphic artist), that reads, in the sky-blue sky above an ochre path through brushy hills, “we can create a life without war.” On the first try I got a busy signal. (A landline? It’s like I called the 1990s.) Later, I tried again and reached an office answering machine. I couldn’t understand the man on the tape when he said his name. I was curious, but I wasn’t actually that curious—and I didn’t leave a message. Maybe that was my answer. FOR HELP DIAL “0” / Anyone who thinks he can manage alone, he’s an idiot. / The Sure One —Sister Corita Kent, the sure one, 1966 Fitted to the illusionistic wooden column in a back corner of the Wattis gallery is another overlay—a list of 29 handwritten names (plus the word “Puto’s” [sic] and an arrow); all but three names are crossed out, including the last entry: Laura. The list has been lifted from graffiti on a concrete column in the basement of 356 S. Mission Rd., the gallery in Los Angeles that Owens co-founded.3 One column cues another. In San Francisco, Owens’s ten paintings stood mutely or babbled or broke into Gregorian chant in the 3. Elsewhere in the Wattis installation is a sign that reads BASEMENT in red, another quote from 356 S. Mission Rd. 4. “SPOILER: I found that texting “thank you” to one

of them brought on a 10 minute serenade by Gregorian monks—a transcendent reward for me (living hell for the gallery attendants).” Sarah Thibault, “Laura Owens, Ten

Paintings: More Than Meets the Eye,” SFAQ, May 25, 2016, http://sfaq.us/2016/05/lauraowens-ten-paintings-morethan-meets-the-eye/.

Installation view of Lutz Bacher’s Magic Mountain, 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles, May 21–July 31, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Lutz Bacher, Godfathers, 2016. Inkjet print on paper, 180 × 461 inches, and Chairs, 2016. Paint on metal, 32 × 16 × 16 ½ inches each, 13 total. Magic Mountain, 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles, May 21–July 31, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

airy Wattis space.4 Back in Los Angeles, the denser, darker cacophony of Lutz Bacher’s four-channel video PLEASE (LC) (2013–15) clamored in the dim yellow basement of 356 S. Mission Rd. A clip of Leonard Cohen peering out from a blue curtain and singing a bar was repeated in semi-random sequence across four projectors. In the center of the room rose the show’s titular Magic Mountain (2015), a head-high pile of spikey blue modules of acoustic foam. Designed to muffle the walls of a recording studio, here they weren’t absorbing much. As you passed through a heavy-gauge plastic curtain and ascended the stairs to the main 356 S. Mission Rd. gallery (a larger and rougher version of Wattis’s refinished warehouse) the loud plucky scrap of Cohen crossfaded to the light dirge of a piano being tuned. In the middle of the space, like the basement works’ bright “doubles,” sat a trio of more heavenward pieces. Paradise (2016), a baby grand piano painted white and rigged with a speaker, played the sound of its own tuning.5 Aligned approximately one floor above the castoff Magic Mountain, The Alps, 2015, a billboard-scale mylar print, shiny and translucent, of sharp snowy peaks against a relentless blue sky, trailed down lengthwise from the rafters to the concrete. Glitter covered the floor and dusted the windowsills and electrical outlets—a work titled Divine Transportation (2016).6 Such cheap, readymade transcendence scraped away where visitors dragged their feet and hitched a ride on shoes and clothes, winding up transported to your face, your car, your apartment. Magic, then divinity, then paradise, Bacher’s gestures feel loose and grandiose, promising more than they deliver—a conceptualism both gnostic and punk. Earthly toil is never far away. Bacher, like Owens, “intervenes” in the gallery desk. Thirteen found chairs (Chairs, 2016), of a simple welded-boxtype design and painted in flaking copper, silver, and gold, have replaced the gallery’s usual office seating at a long table in the front room. Pasted to the wall behind it, in a Leonardesque tableau, is a roughly tiled blowup of a found photo of several turn-of-the-century gentlemen around a table. Bacher mirrored the old image horizontally, to make it a biblical thirteen chairs (six of the seven in the original photo appear twice), but 22 men. Over the years, the source print had been etched with graffiti; possibly the subjects had given themselves nicknames, or later owners had added insults. Both long tables—one extant, one photographic—evoke, maybe, the Last Supper, while at the same time leaving this an absurd coincidence. It’s a silly photo, after all—one man poises a gavel above his neighbor’s head, another points a banana like a gun. It’s a warehouse, not a church. Trying to find some greater meaning in Magic Mountain is like asking God for a lunch recommendation, and getting a reply: “Taco Bell.”

5. During the opening, a live tuner was present and came every Saturday to perform a tuning. 6. You can buy your own version in the store for $100 (edition of 60). See https:// shop.oogaboogastore.com/ products/lutz-bacher-randomdisco-flakes.

Above: Lutz Bacher, Sweet Jesus, 2016. Sound installation. Installation view, 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles, May 21–July 31, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Previous spread: Installation view of Lutz Bacher’s Magic Mountain, 356 S. Mission Rd., Los Angeles, May 21–July 31, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

In recent years, Bacher has organized panel discussions on her work as part of her exhibitions. At 356 S. Mission Rd., three panelists met behind this very table.7 Like God, the artist is present only indirectly. Instead, audience members may ask questions of her panelists, who are likely just as baffled as they. For a talk to complement her 2013 show at the ICA London, a participant began by quoting “expressions of dismay” from Bacher’s reviewers, including the essential: “How are we supposed to view the work of Lutz Bacher?” 8 Like God, the artist doesn’t give interviews (only the occasional oblique press release). Instead, she conducts interviews with friends and collaborators.9 She asks the questions. And if the artist herself is somehow an answer to her art, this too is withheld; Lutz Bacher, famously, is a pseudonym. “The exhibition continues downstairs and outside,” reads a sign. Like “text more questions,” it’s an admonition and a challenge. Four speakers are mounted in an asphalt side lot; over a tightly looped, New Age chord progression, the patented velvet voice of James Earl Jones, slightly slowed, intones the begats that introduce the Gospel of Matthew. (In the 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus, only four women are mentioned—in the form “begat X of Y.” The feminist invective, too, is nearly readymade.) The piece is titled Sweet Jesus (2016), after the star of both the begats and the New Testament, but among Bacher’s more rhythmic or stuttering edits is a marked hairpin turn in the lineage, right before the finale. In this version, Jacob begat Joseph, then Jacob begat Joseph again, then Matthan begat Jacob.10 Topped on two sides by barbed wire, the parking lot is less prison yard than a little slice of desert, complete with knee-high sunbaked weeds. Forty-two minus one is forty-one—a numerology for which, no matter how long we wait in this wilderness, Bacher offers no Messiah. Or at least we won’t live to see it. That’s the post-spiritual penance we can rightly expect of contemporary art—where all answers are trivia, all questions prayer. Travis Diehl lives in Los Angeles. He serves on the X-TRA editorial board.

7. The symposium “PLEASE,” with panelists Monica Majoli, Forrest Nash, and Sophie von Olfers, took place at 356 S. Mission Rd., on June 10, 2016. For video documentation, see http://356mission.tumblr.com/ post/146468771545/pleasea-symposium-in-conjunctionwith-lutz. 8. “Online Talk: Lutz Bacher,” chaired by Sam Thorne with Lia Gangitano and Miriam Katzeff, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, streamed live on November 7, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=8Q15sK7XiDc. 9. Her interviews of collaborators and peers are collected in Lutz Bacher, Do You Love Me? (New York: Primary Information, 2012). 10. Biblical trivia: these begats are from Matthew, and they follow the patriarchal lineage from Abraham, to whom God promised the savior would belong to his line, through David, through Solomon, and to Joseph. But the line doesn’t consummate, exactly, as Joseph is only nominally the father of Jesus.

Bedros Yeretzian

Review: John Knight: A work in situ (2016)

Seething the Kid in His Mother’s Milk

REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles April 9–June 12, 2016

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) sits immediately adjacent to the third level of the parking structure underneath the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. This parking lot provides one of two entrances to REDCAT and is central to John Knight’s recent exhibition there. As the wall text in the lobby outlines, REDCAT was an afterthought to the initial plans and construction of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, carved out of the already built parking structure. The REDCAT Gallery was an additional afterthought, a hardly deliberate extension of the lobby. Although the Frank Gehry team was called back to consult on its design, the gallery space is barely articulated as such.1 The entire affair—concert hall, parking lot, theater, café/bar, and gallery—reflects a crucial but unremarkable choreography of bureaucratic prioritizations and administrative crisscrossing, characteristic of such large-scale projects. More than a decade after the completion of Gehry’s “living room for the city” 2 and its coda, REDCAT, the “cultural corridor” now includes The Broad museum, another media-friendly architectural landmark and yet another attempt to “rehabilitate Downtown Los Angeles,” which has proved to be undeniably successful by their standards. It’s difficult to speculate on the forces that drive the “urbanization” of the city, producing the kind of desire that expresses itself in long lines around The Broad, or attendance at a DJ night at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. At the very least, these scenes illustrate a strategic and coercive reconstitution of the image of a public in Los Angeles and present a hierarchical schema that underlines a massive disparity in the distribution of attention-value—one where REDCAT’s quaint presence seems to be on the losing side (a fact proven by the walk past the perpetual line at The Broad into the always nearly deserted REDCAT gallery). Knight’s installation mimes the organizational forms of the parking lot, consisting of text painted on the walls, floor, and support columns of the gallery in the same—or at least similar enough not to be able to tell the difference—lavender-like paint that is used to distinguish the third-level parking from the rest. The font that appears in the parking lot, designed by Bruce Mau specifically for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Walt

1. It is notable that the REDCAT acronym (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) excludes the art gallery.

2. See the Walt Disney Concert Hall website: http:// wdch10.laphil.com/wdch10/ wdch/architecture.html.

John Knight, A work in situ (2016). Installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, April 9â&#x20AC;&#x201D;June 12, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Disney Concert Hall, is also used in the installation.3 Knight’s texts satirize the directional language and shapes that are typical in spaces where functionality serves as a primary quality, by employing figures of speech that share a similarly assertive tone but lack the operational logic necessary to get people on their way. For example, the text on the northeast wall reads “TAKE IT FROM THE TOP” —a declaration most commonly used in music, where a conductor instructs the band, or orchestra, to start from the beginning of the piece. The statement can also be considered in the language of economics as a practical solution to income inequality, a refrain that has recently entered dominant political rhetoric as per the bolstering of the “99%” by the presidential campaigns. (“OCCUPIED,” painted high up near the ceiling, seems to refer to the same historical circumstance alongside its territorial intimations.) An arrow points to the top-right corner of the wall, in the direction of the concert hall, as if to say “from there,” further narrativizing the already spatialized top-down relationship between the two institutions. “CURB APPEAL” is painted on the floor beneath one of the two columns, evocative of countless real estate “flipper” themed television shows, playing smoothly into the “development” content of the exhibition. It’s also the title of a previous work by Knight (Curb Appeal, 1966/2012), which was installed during the 2012 Whitney Biennial on what is now the former Whitney Museum building, designed by Marcel Breuer. According to the Whitney website, Curb Appeal was Knight’s attempt to “spruce-up the façade” before the Metropolitan Museum took over the space.4 The occurrence of double meanings or multiple references—again exemplified by the text “ADDITIONAL FOUNDATION SUPPORT,” which punningly collapses financial and structural support into a singular entity—stands in contrast to the streamlining signs in the parking lot—the crème de la crème of utility— which contract the field of possible identifications to a single position (the subject who needs to find a parking space or the car or the exit). Instead, the installation acts as a sardonic model of the identificatory effects of design, diversifying the sequence to pathologically point elsewhere and, as a result, causing the implied subject position to bloat. It is noteworthy that Knight achieves this without relegation to the familiar vapor of text-based work, opting to keep intact the cultural connotations of each sentiment alongside the proliferation of its signifying means (most of which still maintain some tie to the circumstance of the exhibition—à la in situ), rather than to procure their instability through a generalized mystification.

3. Mau’s website explains that the font needed to be “equally at home with Philharmonic formal and downtown funky” and was developed using an animation technique that allowed for the oscillation between two preexisting fonts to produce a

font “in-between,” befitting the “dynamism” of Gehry’s design. See: http://www.brucemaudesign.com/work/walt-disneyconcert-hall. 4. See the Whitney Museum website: http://whitney.org/ Exhibitions/2012Biennial/ JohnKnight.

In his review of the show for the Los Angeles Times, David Pagel suggests that the installation provides the viewer with a trans-historical experience, stating “To step into ‘A work in situ (2016)’ is to travel back in time—to that moment after the parking structure was constructed and before a section had been converted into REDCAT.” He goes on, “The first thought that enters your mind when you step into Knight’s installation is that you have lost your way—that, somehow, you have gone through the wrong door and ended up back in the parking structure.” 5 Pagel’s description of one’s initial encounter provides an inflationary account of the simulacral qualities of the installation and assumes the folding of the work into the simple fact of the gallery’s previous state, leaving the viewer immersed in its deceits. The implied effect is reduced to a pseudo-revelatory engagement with REDCAT’s not so unique history, in a city where, as Allan Sekula wrote, “Parking is king,” 6 and where most parcels of land are used as parking lots prior to further development, only to be at risk of being turned back into one after the fact, as testified by the status of the long-standing downtown DIY space, The Smell.7 As if, in Los Angeles, parking might be the constant condition against which all transformation is measured. Aside from the paint color and font, Knight’s installation could at best be described as a suggestive approximation rather than a direct appropriation of the parking lot, as is demonstrated by the obviously out-of-place language and key differences in the application of the signs. The support columns are the most obvious digression: the parking structure uses black adhesive vinyl against lavender paint, while Knight’s install uses only the purple paint and its inverse. This stylistic differentiation privileges the sign value of the generalized form of the parking lot and the capacity of the viewer to fill in the blanks, suitably anchoring the work to the particularities of the site without collapsing in onto itself (or us). Which is to say, the distinction between the two spaces (and the cultural value that enforces this difference) remains firmly intact and no one is made to think otherwise. This doesn’t mean that the work entirely sidesteps the pitfalls associated with a narrow site-specificity, that is, the kind of D.O.A. criticality that such superficial comparisons propose. If anything, this effect is 5. David Pagel, “Art Gallery or Parking Lot?” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/ entertainment/arts/la-et-cmjohn-knight-redcat-review20160512-snap-story.html. 6. Allan Sekula’s Facing the Music, an exhibition curated for REDCAT in 2005, is a key reference when addressing REDCAT and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The catalog includes two essays by Sekula. In one, Sekula conveys in a few lines the complicated nexus of social relations that are implicated in the development of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, REDCAT, and the parking lot foundational to Knight’s display: “Six years ago, only the slab, ‘level

zero,’ was visible. Beneath were layered ramp-linked floors of parking for jurors serving in the civil and criminal courts just across the street and down the hill. A grand escalator led upward to nothing but the glare of the California sun on horizontal concrete. The interrupted dream of a symphony hall, would, when realized, continue to offer its lower depths to the jury pool, dual-usage in a city where parking is king and where the venerable buses of the County Sheriff deliver an unending parade of the accused to the bench, some making the journey for the third and last time.” Allan Sekula, Facing the Music: Documenting Walt

Disney Concert Hall and the Redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles, A Project by Allan Sekula, Edward Dimendberg, ed. (Los Angeles: East of Borneo Books, 2015), 22, http://www.redcat.org/exhibition/facing-music. 7. The Smell is an all-ages DIY venue in downtown Los Angeles that was founded in 1998. It provides a central site for non-commercial creative pursuits and has been seminal in the development of some sub-cultural communities in the city. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the building it occupies was sold to a parking lot company and would be demolished. See http://www. thesmell.org.

John Knight, A work in situ (2016). Installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, April 9â&#x20AC;&#x201D;June 12, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Rafael Hernandez.

exaggerated, illustrating not only the exhibition’s function as a quasi-mirror to its context, but also its configuration as a culmination of forms that refer (and are subservient) to an art-historical milieu of which Knight is a part. This operation gives form to the exhibition as a whole, by highlighting the inseparability of the critical gestures and their historicization with a kind of dry self-reflexivity (remember “CURB APPEAL”). The work enacts a double bind, in which such forms are both undermined and inscribed, which provides the foundation for drawing connections outside of the framework of the installation. Such connections emerge through the deployment of a recurring trope of Knight’s work: the extension of the exhibition site into publications or—as demonstrated in this show—a postcard, thus engaging a reorientation of the notions of primary and supplemental sites of artistic activity. For A work in situ (2016), the photograph on the postcard presents a view looking down on La Rambla (captioned with the Catalonian plural “Les Rambles”), a tree-lined street in Barcelona that has become a central tourist trap (comparable to a smaller scale Hollywood Boulevard or Times Square) ending at a monument to Christopher Columbus overlooking the sea. What’s noteworthy about the image is that it’s the first one that appears in the (Google) search results for “Les Rambles” (at the time of writing 8 ), and it serves as the main image for the Wikipedia article for the street (albeit cropped to fit the dimensions of the postcard)—as if to nod to the now commonplace extension of the explicative experience of art viewership into online sources, while simultaneously indulging in its capabilities. It becomes apparent (after a once-over of the Wiki article) that the image is taken from the vantage point atop the Columbus monument, which was erected in honor of his discovery of the “new world.” The implication of the genocidal depredations of colonialism (and its celebration) is exacerbated by the positioning of our elevated gaze, overlooking a street that has only recently experienced a dramatic shift due to a tourism industry—analogizing the effects of colonial conquests with the corrosive movements of capital. In some ways the postcard image constructs a similar viewing experience to that of Knight’s work 87° (1997–99) at Storm King Art Center: a telescope overlooking the outdoor sculpture garden that, when looked through at its titular position, reveals a water tower outside the institution’s perimeter. The site of ideological culmination (the “artwork” / the Columbus monument) serves as the platform for viewing a site of production/consumption (the water tower / La Rambla); the symbolic synthesis of the two is actualized primarily by our field of vision. Likewise, this perceptual marriage is re-performed at the scale of the exhibition itself, correlating the content of the postcard with the allegorical parking lot.

8. See https://www.google. com/webhp?sourceid=chromeinstant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF8#q=la+rambla.

John Knight, postcard accompanying A work in situ (2016). REDCAT, Los Angeles, April 9â&#x20AC;&#x201C;June 12, 2016.

John Knight, A work in situ (2016). Installation view, REDCAT, Los Angeles, April 9â&#x20AC;&#x201D;June 12, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

The exhibition is configured as a representation of its relational capacities: i.e. the relationships between the exhibition/REDCAT and the parking lot, the parking lot and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the development of the “cultural corridor,” contemporary art and the development of the “cultural corridor,” contemporary art and the larger gentrification of downtown Los Angeles, etc. The pairing of these with the complex of relations presented by the image on the postcard constructs a formulation that could lead one to the end-all provocation that contemporary real estate development and the gentrification it fosters is somehow comparable to the colonial atrocities of Columbus and those who followed. Although this read is certainly fruitful, the figurative and actual distance of the constituent parts of the display (the postcard inconspicuously resides on the desk outside of the designated gallery) and the multivalent content of the text together place emphasis on the procedural operations (such as looking) that produce such correlations, as opposed to the absolute comparability of the two disparate histories. Primacy is placed, then, not on the delineated sites of reception (exhibition, postcard, wall text) and the content they comprise, but rather on the eyesight that enforces their connection, situating us, and our cognitive faculties, as collaborators. This operation differs from the melancholic admissions of complicity epitomized by some of art’s boosted careers, which amount to little more than crooning the inescapability of dominant organizing forces (the market, capitalism, power, etc.) through a not so arduous (“performative”) participation in their circular mechanisms. Knight instead offers a survey of the processes that solicit our entanglement, and by virtue of this articulation—and as testified by the text that points to an alternative exit to the street—suggests the possibility of “ANOTHER WAY OUT.” Bedros Yeretzian is an artist in Los Angeles. He is also a contributing member of the bands Behavior and Purity.

Sophie Hoyle

Review: Sidsel Meineche Hansen: Second Sex War

On and Off Our Backs

Gasworks, London March 17–May 29, 2016

Multiple visual perspectives span the drawings, animations, and gaming PC that are distributed across Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s solo exhibition, Second Sex War, at Gasworks, London.1 The works combine the point-ofview of the 3D avatar EVA v3.0 with pose sets (predesigned 3D animation poses based on human actors) in what the artist describes as “post-human porn production.” 2 Second Sex War explores the politics of female and non-binary sexuality and pleasure through Hansen’s newly commissioned works and collaborations with animator James B Stringer, designer Nikola Dechev, artist and producer Kepla, and Nkisi (Melika Ngombe Kolongo), a female artist, DJ, and producer. The exhibition’s title refers to Simone de Beauvoir’s pivotal feminist text of 1949, The Second Sex, which argues that women have historically been treated as secondary to men. Hansen extends this line of inquiry into the continuing objectification and commodification of embodied experience that finds new forms through digital technologies. In DICKGIRL 3D(X) (2016), EVA v3.0 brandishes a phallic sex toy, which she uses to penetrate a large clay-like form; the act is seen in different positions from different viewpoints. The 3D model protagonist cuts the abstract form with a scalpel, seeming to sculpt and mold it to reflect and fulfill her desires. This animation plays on a hanging monitor that is suspended by a structure that evokes a hybrid of exhibition display and BDSM hoist. On the soundtrack “Exotica,” by Nkisi, samples of breathing suggest EVA v3.0’s pleasure as it breaks into high-powered beats that insistently underline the forceful acts portrayed on screen. Nearby hangs Methylene Blue Diluted by Female Ejaculation (2015), which combines body fluids with a loose drawing style to offer a non-binary form of genitalia. The resulting drawing represents a body that exists outside of normative medical classifications of sex by anatomy, which is also reductively used to assign gender. The artist describes a related series of laser-cut drawings on plywood as “low-tech manual craft.” 3 These works share the freehand expression of bodily experience, as compared to the 1. Under the pseudonym Scarab, I published an earlier and shorter version of this review; see “Off Our Backs,” AQNB, April 4, 2016, http:// www.aqnb.com/2016/04/04/ sidsel-meineche-hansen-

gasworks-reviewed/. The exhibition Second Sex War traveled to the Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway, where it was on exhibit June 12– October 16, 2016. 2. See the exhibition press

release for Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Second Sex War, Gasworks, London, https:// www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/sidsel-meineche-hansensecond-sex-war-2016-03-03/. 3. Ibid.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, DICKGIRL 3D(X), 2016. Virtual reality production and CGI animation. Courtesy of the artist. Credit: Werkflow Ltd, London. Commissioned by Gasworks in partnership with Trondheim kunstmuseum.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, No right way 2 cum, 2015. Virtual reality production and CGI video. Courtesy of the artist. Credit: Werkflow Ltd.

outsourced skilled digital labor of Hansen’s other works, although they are mediated through laser-cut technology. The loosely drawn outlines of non-binary bodies contrast with the slickness of her CGI works, but in all of these projects, her characters float in a decontextualized void. The drawing iSlave (non-dualistic) (2016) asserts non-binary gender identity and submissive and slave positions in BDSM. Its title also alludes to the individualist consumer ethos of products with the “i” prefix and suggests how contemporary expressions of non-binary and BDSM sexuality are mediated or enabled by digital technologies; this includes online forums and apps such as KNKI and Whiplr used to communicate, share fantasies, and organize IRL meet-ups. In combination with the 3D avatar and virtual reality gaming set of DICKGIRL 3D(X) and SECOND SEX WAR ZONE (2016), the artist also alludes to avatar identities and the simulation of more extreme BDSM activities in the virtual realm, such as within Sims and Second Life.4 In another drawing, a figure penetrates a car petrol tank in an expression of commodity desire and fetishism, or mechanophilia. In No Baby (2015), we see a sleeping female-bodied figure. Above her head floats a dream bubble in which a fetus has been circled and crossed out, as if the protagonist dreams of sexual pleasure liberated from functionality and the consequences of procreation. The Gasworks press release calls No Right Way 2 Cum (2015), a CGI animation that Hansen made with James B Stringer, a “feminist ‘cum shot’ video.” Kepla’s grinding and pulsing soundtrack—“Selfplex”—suggests the body and its industrial complex and the ideology of individualism at the core of neoliberalism. Like the other digital works in the exhibition, this animation features Hansen’s 3D model protagonist EVA v3.0, which was created by designer Nikola Dechev as a stock avatar for the adult entertainment company TurboSquid. In No Right Way 2 Cum, EVA v3.0 appears at first to conform to the straight male gaze; her blank face allows for projections of stereotyped gender roles, such as the “passive” female. But Hansen empowers her protagonist with female-bodied actions that undermine this perception. She is depicted masturbating and experiencing female ejaculation as a proclamation of self-pleasure. Hansen’s representation of the act of female ejaculation should be viewed in the context of the recent attempts in the United Kingdom to censor and regulate representations of “nonnormative” female-bodied climax in pornography, as well the use of “slut shaming” in wider media as a form of regulating female desire.5 According to the artist, No Right Way 2 Cum was inspired by a series of female ejaculation workshops that pro-sex feminist Deborah Sundahl has been running for over 30 years.6 In 1984, Sundahl and Susie Bright founded what they described as the “first lesbian erotica magazine,” On Our Backs, and a poster for the publication can be seen in the background of

4. See Beth Coleman’s account of people undertaking acts such as killing and cannibalism through avatars in Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 5. Christopher Hooton, “A

Long List of Sex Acts Just Got Banned in UK Porn,” Independent, December 2, 2014, http://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/a-long-list-ofsex-acts-just-got-banned-inuk-porn-9897174.html. 6. Exhibition press release.

No Right Way 2 Cum’s CGI room. On Our Backs was founded amidst the collective feminist debates and “sex wars” of the 1980s, which questioned, among other things, whether representations of porn and BDSM in popular culture constituted forms of empowerment or subjugation for women. The magazine’s title was chosen in response to another journal, Off Our Backs, which included a number of articles by anti-pornography feminists who argued that pornography was violently exploitative of women who were already systematically oppressed.7 In contrast, On Our Backs forcefully debated sex-positive interpretations of porn, arguing that it was—or could be reclaimed as—a medium for feminist sexual expression.8 In her use of porn industry images and methods to create her own iconography, Hansen manifests the latter position. Toward the end of No Right Way 2 Cum, the CGI footage of EVA v3.0’s body begins to break up. Shots of the interior and exterior of her body merge, invert, and take on the appearance of stretched skin. As the camera breaches the surface of her skin, it suggests that she is merely a vessel. But her subjectivity and desire are forcefully re-asserted when spurts of her CGI cum hit and trickle down the screen, forming the letters that comprise the title of the work. In SECOND SEX WAR ZONE, which Hansen made with the digital arts studio Werkflow Ltd., gallery visitors engage with EVA v3.0 by wearing an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset while reclined on a cushion on the floor. Through tilting the headset at different angles and in different directions, we explore the terrain of EVA v3.0’s body in close-up, viewing her from above and below. We can see EVA v3.0’s face, but her eyes are obscured by or replaced with reflective discs. When we try to engage with her in virtual reality, “we” are not visible in the mirror reflection; instead we see only the same empty CGI studio as in No Right Way 2 Cum. The figure of EVA v3.0 suddenly backflips and stands upright at a further distance, evading our gaze and escaping the proximity that VR promises. At other times, the avatar’s cis-female body possesses a prosthetic phallus lit up by a swirling blue pattern; we are positioned as her submissive counterpart in an act of rolereversal. The “war zone” of the title suggests the ongoing renegotiation of the power dynamics of dominance and submission, with EVA v3.0 moving between being the subject and object of the work. The viewer’s full-body engagement in the VR animation of SECOND SEX WAR ZONE heightens the impact of its sudden switch of perspectives. The artist uses the sensory, immersive dimension of the work to create tension between the viewer’s potential sexual arousal, in response to its hypersexualised imagery, and the stymying effects of experiencing the works in a public exhibition space.

7. Off Our Backs ran from 1970 to 2008. It included anti-pornography articles, such as Bobbie Goldstone’s “The Politics of Pornography,” December 14, 1970, and Madeleine Janover’s “Deadly Snuff,” March 31, 1976. Archived issues can be found at: http://www.offourbacks.org.

8. The first issue of On Our Backs, in 1984 included Gladys Fewkes Knightly’s “April First, 1984,” a satire of anti-porn feminists; an editorial by Susie Bright; and reflections on a fundraiser event for the first issue that included lesbian strippers.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, SECOND SEX WAR, 2016. Installation view, SECOND SEX WAR ZONE, Gasworks, London. Gaming PC, Oculus Rift headset, beanbag, vegan leather beanbag. Credit: Werkflow Ltd. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Cite Werkflow Ltd., 2015. Face imprint in clay, terra sigillata, and wax. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

In DICKGIRL 3D(X) (also made with Werkflow Ltd. in 2016), EVA v3.0 molds and remolds a brown clay form; she penetrates it and aggressively cuts it until it appears to seep blood. Her actions present the female-appearing body not only as the site of violence and control but also of retaliation and resistance. This violence between EVA v3.0 and the clay object also relates to a broader structural violence. In both No Right Way 2 Cum and DICKGIRL 3D(X), the artist explores the processes of 3D modeling as a parallel to how human bodies are socially constructed and altered to conform. EVA v3.0 is created by scanning actual body parts separately, fragmenting and isolating them, and recombining them through software to reconstitute a “whole” and idealized form. Scans of “flesh tones” (as they are referred to in the cosmetics and prosthetics industries, and now also in CGI) are mixed together to generate a new skin, which is then mapped onto the outline of the template body. The skin has elements of photorealistic textures and color variations, and it appears glossy and reflective, perhaps with sweat. But it also bears traces of reconstruction that have not been completely smoothed out, appearing in parts like skin grafts. In SECOND SEX WAR ZONE, the camera zooms in close on EVA v3.0’s skin. It’s amalgamated appearance and mottled pink-brown color leads one to question not only the obvious idealization of the female body but also the inherent racial bias in 3D models, which are frequently designed to be “white” by default. Across the gallery, Cite Werkflow Ltd. (2015), a clay relief sculpture with a flattened impression of a face, has similarly blotchy skin tones; its physical, handmade imprints echo the digital scans required for EVA v3.0’s fabrication. In the animation, the grid-based design of the body seen under the avatar’s “skin” recalls the obsession with measuring and comparing inherent to the disciplines of anatomy and medicine. In Hansen’s 3D animations, EVA v3.0’s new skin appears to be continuing to grow in excess of the underlying structure, suggesting that it won’t be constrained, as well as suggesting artificial skins produced or grown in laboratories for grafting. The avatar’s skin then assumes the earthy tones of the clay form that she was manipulating, suggesting that both skin and clay are mutable.9 Hansen’s woodcut print series HIS CORPORATE CUNT ART, credit Nikola Dechev (2016) is based on an image from the user manual for the “morph control” function of EVA v3.0’s vagina. These tools allow the user to choose not only which 3D model to use but also the internal workings of her body for his or her own simulated sexual pleasure. Consumer demand for anatomical accuracy in the creation of sex dolls and avatars has been increasing, including detailed mimesis of the physical affects of sexual activity. Hansen’s print series brings to mind the manipulation of non-virtual female-bodied sexual organs (including increasingly popular cosmetic pro-

9. In another reference to skin, Hansen specifically notes in the press release that the cushion in SECOND SEX WAR ZONE (2016) is vegan, alluding to the wider ethics of the production and distribution

of BDSM accessories, which are often made of leather. See https://www.gasworks. org.uk/exhibitions/sidselmeineche-hansen-second-sexwar-2016-03-03/.

cedures, from waxing and piercing to surgical labia removal and vaginal “tightening”) and questions who is the audience for the production and ownership of representations of female genitalia. HIS CORPORATE CUNT ART, credit Nikola Dechev takes an image of Dechev’s EVA v3.0 out of the commercial context of 3D model design and translates it back into a physical form, then re-positions it as a commodity for sale through the gallery. Hansen appropriates from the socially and financially more accessible gaming sector to produce an art object that is rarified yet at the same critically evaluates the mode of its production.10 The title also acknowledges the wider infrastructures of contemporary art in which commercial and nonprofit art institutions are complicit with the corporations that fund their activities that support artists. This resonates specifically in relation to the funding of Gasworks’ recent £2.1 million redevelopment, which made possible the gallery’s commission (in partnership with Trondheim Kunstmuseum) of the newer work in Second Sex War.11 Hansen’s work brings to mind the male-dominated technology sector, in which the 3D model was made, and its often slick, corporate aesthetics, and it implies that the likely buyer of the prints will be male and work in the corporate sphere. In a talk called “Possible Objects of a New Feminist Art Practice,” which accompanied Hansen’s exhibition, Josephine Wikstrom claimed that, in questioning the notion of formal labor relations and inequalities between different sectors of art, technology and corporations, and given its sex-positive feminist content, Second Sex War also points to the “hidden labor” in women’s roles in biological and social reproduction.12 This includes affective and emotional labor in interpersonal relationships and unwaged domestic work and childrearing, which still are undertaken predominantly by women. Hansen produced the ceramic sculpture CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #1 (2016) in collaboration with artists Manuela Gernedel, Alan Michael, Georgie Nettell, Oliver Rees, Matthew Richardson, Gili Tal, and Lena Tutunjian; the artists collectively own the finished work. The surface of the large, rectangular, black-and-white wall-mounted relief is scored into imprecise grids that skew the tightness of those used in CGI animation.13 The work’s scraped clay surface mimics the processes of cutting the clay object in DICKGIRL 3D(X), and impressions left by shoes evoke the bodily imprints in Cite Werkflow Ltd. By including a collectively produced work in the context of a solo show, Hansen and her collaborators lead viewers to question the status of artists as “brands” in the contemporary art market. The project is representative of Hansen’s ongoing interest in exploring alternative strategies for artists to work in or around arts institutions. For example, she participated in a conversation with Nils Norman on the subject of the artist-led collaborative project Parasite (1997–98).14

10. Financial accessibility is relative in terms of the price of HIS CORPORATE CUNT ART, credit Nikola Dechev, which was offered by Gasworks, London, for £600 including VAT (plus shipping).

11. Exhibition press release. 12. Josephine Wikstrom, “Possible Objects of a New Feminist Art Practice,” lecture at Gasworks, London, on May 26, 2016. 13. The work is based on

Asger Jorn’s 1956 commissioned ceramic piece for the Statsgymnasium in Aarhus, Denmark. 14. This discussion took place on May 11, 2016, at Cell Projects, London.

Manuela Gernedel, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Alan Michael, Georgie Nettell, Oliver Rees, Matthew Richardson, Gili Tal and Lena Tutunjian, CULTURAL CAPITAL COOPERATIVE OBJECT #1, 2016. Ceramic relief, mixed clay. Commissioned by Gasworks in partnership with Trondheim kunstmuseum. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, HIS CORPORATE CUNT ART, credit Nikola Dechev, 2016. Woodcut on paper, 25¾ × 18¾ inches. Courtesy the artist.

Parasite, which was initiated by Norman and Andrea Fraser, used the infrastructures and facilities of the New York arts institutions PS1 Clock Tower and The Drawing Center’s Project Room in exchange for “cultural capital.” The project represented an attempt to reclaim autonomy over the distribution and value of artists’ work independently from commercial galleries. The inclusion of this collective work in Second Sex War also suggests parallels between the embodied pleasures of art making and sexual activity, and the vulnerability of these shared experiences to being co-opted and commodified by market structures. SECOND SEX WAR ZONE ’s floor cushion in the center of the gallery and the wire-suspended monitor and speakers of DICKGIRL 3D(X) explicitly reference the collaborative and sadomasochistic practice of artists Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan. Rose and Flanagan’s works questioned the “non-normative” sexual desires of and toward the less able-bodied Flanagan, who had the condition cystic fibrosis, within the power dynamics of BDSM. DICKGIRL 3D(X) mimics the wooden structure of Rose and Flanagan’s 1991 installation Bob Flanagan’s Sick. In 2014 and 2015, Hansen organized a series of interdisciplinary events, This Is Not a Symptom, at South London Gallery. The themes were biopolitics, disability theory, and anti-Psychiatry—the critique of mainstream psychiatric treatment. One of the events included a screening of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (dir. Kirby Dick, 1997, USA).15 The seminars reflected on the biomedical construction and regulation of the body, including micro-level chemical alterations through hormone therapy and psychiatric medication. Hansen’s related work, Seroquel® (2014) also features the figure of EVA v3.0 and mimics a pharmaceutical infomercial in displaying 3D animations of micro-level biochemical reactions of the medication in the body.16 In a talk called “Always Already Undead: Unbecoming Object,” which accompanied Hansen’s exhibition at Gasworks, Linda Stupart explored alternative strategies of embodied defiance, such as bio-hacking.17 Stupart interlinked different scales of the techno-mediation of the body, from consumer uses of biofeedback technology in fitness and exercise apps to how these were developed by and to serve the military-industrial complex. Stupart also discussed grassroots subcultural subversions, such as DIY Transhumanism, in which people alter and enhance their own bodies without the intervention of healthcare professionals and institutions. Second Sex War investigates how technologies and the images they produce affect the human body by creating and satisfying sexual arousal. Simultaneously, the artist aims to disrupt those technologies and their modes of representation. Hansen’s works span a range of desires toward and mediated by mechanical and digital technologies, through the machine as fetishized commodity, the architectural structures of BDSM, and the use of interactive Virtual Reality. Hansen explores the co-option of artistic 15. The film was screened as part of the talk “Robert McRuer: Crip Times: Disability, Globalisation, and Resistance,” at South London Gallery, February 25, 2015. 16. Seroquel is the marketing

name for the pharmaceutical antidepressant and antipsychotic Quetiapine. 17. Linda Stupart, “Always Already Undead: Unbecoming Object,” lecture at Gasworks, London, on May 26, 2016.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen, DICKGIRL 3D(X), 2016. CGI animation with sound, 3 min loop. 3D design and VR production: Werkflow Ltd. Soundtrack: Exotica by nkisi, 2016. Commissioned by Gasworks in partnership with Trondheim kunstmuseum. Image courtesy the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

labor and collaborative practice by capital in the art market and culture industry, and possible strategies to evade or critique this from within. She also appropriates 3D model designs to question visual representations made by and for male consumers that reproduce and fulfill conventional aesthetics of the female body, within a wider culture that body-shames those who do not comply. In contrast to the clean lines of the designed body template is the messy discharge of bodily functions, from cum used in the drawing Methylene Blue Diluted by Female Ejaculation to the body fluids on the screen in No Right Way 2 Cum, in which EVA v3.0â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desires are fulfilled rather than the audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. We see beyond the superficial veneer of pornographic simulation and fleetingly inhabit the position of EVA v3.0, but our attempts to engage with her directly are refused. The videos featuring EVA v3.0 manifest the tensions between opposing feminist perceptions of pornography as a means of subordination and its potential to embolden female subjects. Hansenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work engages with and represents the mechanisms of social (re) production and control, as mediated by labor and technology, and the possibility of claiming different perspectives and reformulating power relations. Sophie Hoyle is a London-based writer and artist whose research explores biotechnology, anxiety as a psychiatric and collective cultural condition, and intersectional analyses of sociopolitical issues.

Maya Kóvskaya Art in Dark Times: Waswo X. Waswo’s Chaos in the Palace

Chaos in the Palace (2015), a work by Waswo X. Waswo, is the latest from a series of contemporary miniatures created in long-standing collaboration with the miniaturist R. Vijay at Waswo’s Rajasthan studio. Waswo describes the work as such: “Beneath what initially strikes as lighthearted satire, even a comedy of errors, Chaos in the Palace contains a subtext of a world caught between high-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty; selfindulgent decadence and anti-intellectual destruction.” 1 Before the viewer’s eyes unfolds a panorama comprised of eighteen miniature paintings arrayed in two rows of nine. Each depicts an identical architectural interior, though the tremendous jostle of color combinations varies from frame to frame. Against these variations, many scenes are staged, and well-known artworks—both Indian and Western—play various roles in the patchwork of narratives that the viewer pieces together. Pallid bone frames offset intense, garish, and clashing color schemes that are atypical of the palette of hues used in traditional miniature painting, signaling that this suite of works intends to deploy contemporary devices and images to make a bold statement about the current world in which we live. How does this suite of works take on the challenge of engaging us in this complex set of issues? What themes emerge to provoke us to question the nature of the contemporary relationship between the artistic and the political, the art market and the polis, and cultural production as a form of speech? What of attempts to gain hegemonic power through the censorship, repression, and outright violence against certain forms of expression deemed offensive, unacceptable, “hurtful to the sentiments” of someone in a position of power, or even seditious and “anti-national”? A little background to the predicaments faced by contemporary artists in today’s India helps contextualize the weight of such accusations as being “anti-national.” Under the right-wing Hindutva regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the term “anti-national” has become a popular slur against anyone out of line with the regime’s brand of Brahminical Hindu nationalism. “Anti-national” is widely used to assert that dissent of any form is un-patriotic and an attack on the nation itself. Hence the term is used to forcefully silence oppositional discourse with the threat of sedition charges and beatings by self-designated “patriotic” defenders of the idea of India as a Hindu nation. The governing Brahminical hierarchy denies the full personhood and citizenship claims of Others, ranging from women 1. This and all Waswo X. Waswo quotes are from personal writings and conversations with the author, February 2016.

to homosexuals, from Dalits (once referred to with the pejorative term “Untouchables”) to Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, as well as so-called “Sickular” (i.e. secular or atheist) and “Libtards” (i.e. liberals and progressives), as defined by the regime and, in the case of the latter two epithets, by its supporters and trolls. In spite of myriad relevant differences, it is not hard to see a homologous ethos at work in the aggressive ideology of presidential hopeful Donald Trump and his henchmen and minions, who have a very particular notion of the kind of racial, ethnic and religious “cleansing” needed to “make America great again.” These patterns are not exclusive to India and the United States but rather bespeak a growing wave of ultraright wing invidious and exclusionary hate politics on the rise across the world. So the critiques implicit in this suite of artworks speak to a problem that is not exclusive to the Indian context, even as the imagery and some particular terms are derived from it. The epithet “anti-national” was mobilized to dire effect in India during state efforts to crush and silence the student movement across the country that arose following the January 2016 suicide of Rohith Vermula, a Dalit PhD student at University of Hyderabad. Vermula committed suicide after being hounded, beaten, deprived of his stipend, kicked out of the dormitory, and then suspended from the university on fabricated charges. Protests swept the country, and a similar situation emerged at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), in February 2016, when the JNU Student Union Leader, Kanhaiya Kumar, was arrested on charges of “criminal conspiracy” and “sedition” based on allegations of “anti-national” speech. He was then brutally beaten by a brazen mob of right-wing Hindu lawyers inside Delhi’s Patiala House court, and journalists attempting to document the beatings were threatened. Student activist Umar Khalid and others have met similar threats and slander. Intellectuals around the world roundly condemn the use of charges such as “anti-national” and “sedition” to silence free speech and dissenting public opinion. This is the context in which contemporary Indian artists make their work, and Waswo’s Chaos in the Palace speaks to that context. It is a perilous minefield and the stakes grow commensurately with the dangers they face for opposing the Hindutva line. This precarious situation has a long history dotted with periodic explosions of violence against, as well as censorship of, artists; both have been quite pronounced since the early 1990s. Waswo’s position in this history is complex. As an American, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1953, Waswo has lived in Rajasthan since 2001. He shed his former identity and replaced it with an X, which is bookended by repetitions of his surname. Art historian Kavita Singh proposes that, in making India his new home, the artist also remade himself, becoming both “Waswo ‘ex-Waswo’” (the Waswo who is no longer Waswo, or the artist formerly known as Waswo) and also Waswo redoubled—perhaps more fully becoming his immanent self.2 2. Kavita Singh, “Foreword,” Annapurna Garimella, Artful Life of R. Vijay (Chicago and Bangkok: Serindia Publications, 2016), 9.

Waswo X. Waswo and R. Vijay, Chaos in the Palace, 2015. Suite of 18 miniature paintings, gouache and gold on wasli. Courtesy of the artists.Â

Initially, with the publication of his first book, India Poems: The Photographs, Waswo was met by kneejerk criticisms equating a White Man making art in India with the evils of Orientalism and questioning his right to participate in the Indian contemporary art world.3 Using the usual charges of “appropriation,” critics challenged his right to use Indian visual languages. It is telling that their ire was directed primarily at Waswo’s photographs that depicted the working class poor and the poverty of rural India, which some Indians apparently deemed unsightly embarrassments. Yet lauded Indian photographers such as Gauri Gill and Ravi Agarwal have done extensive work with poor rural and laboring communities without facing similar criticisms. It is hard to deny that what was at stake in these criticisms was Waswo’s whiteness and foreignness as purported disqualifiers of the right to “speak” within an Indian visual vernacular. Some claimed his early photographs were attempts to smear India’s good image by using pictures of the poor and so-called “backward” to deliberately elide the splendor of India’s development, growing wealth, and urbanism.4 Yet, it was precisely in these places where Waswo found so much dignity, beauty, and reason to love his adopted home. Nevertheless, these criticisms led Waswo to great soul searching, sending him on the path of a deeply self-critical, self-reflexive art practice. He pushed himself to imagine a process of making art that confronts and questions the position of the White Man in contemporary India, without relinquishing his desire to belong and be a genuine member of the community. With self-mocking satire (sometimes as hyperbolic parody of what he perceives his critics project onto him) and tongue-in-cheek humor that hints he is indicting us all along with himself, Waswo explores questions of post-colonialism, Orientalism, White privilege, and the place of Others within adopted communities, whilst refusing to evacuate the position he has worked to create for himself in both the art world and his local community in Rajasthan. Many of his works, photos and miniatures alike, feature the Fedora Man, who is Waswo’s alter ego; at times he takes the guise of “Evil Orientalist,” bumbling tourist, and ordinary Everyman traveling though incredible India. The foundation of Waswo’s sustained engagement with the local community in his adopted home is a commitment to the sort of fair labor practices and ethical collaboration with local artists (who were completely outside of the contemporary art world and unknown beyond the local scene) that goes far beyond most artist-fabricator relationships in the contemporary art world. In spite of the fact that he alone conceptualizes and designs the works, he still pays his collaborators for their work outright, gives them additional bonuses from sales, and flies them at his own expense to openings across India and the world. It is noteworthy that he also insists on naming them explicitly as collaborative partners and even having them co-sign the works. This kind of labor practice is virtually unheard of in India and, indeed, in most parts of the global contemporary art world, where craftspeople and

3. Waswo X. Waswo, India Poems: The Photographs (Mumbai: Gallerie Publishers, 2006).

4. Maya Kóvskaya, “Local Discourse and Its Discontents: Waswo X. Waswo’s ‘Confessions of an Evil

Orientalist,’” Art India, vol. XVI, no. IV (2012): 94–97.

fabricators labor in poorly paid obscurity. In contrast, Waswo treats his collaborators with a professional dignity that has earned him respect and acceptance within the Indian contemporary art world. Flying in the face of preconceived notions of the White Man as necessarily and inevitably Orientalist, which are prevalent in the Indian media, Waswo’s sensitive practices and ethos of fair and credited collaborations have led many Indian scholars and art historians, such as Kavita Singh, to argue that Waswo should be acknowledged as an Indian contemporary artist in his own right, due to the intimate and conscientious nature of his long-term investment in and deep engagement with both India and its aesthetic traditions.5 Today, Waswo is well known as a conceptual and installation artist, as the conceptual force in his collaborations with traditional miniaturist R. Vijay and others, and as an accomplished photographer, working closely for over a decade with traditional photograph hand-tinter Rajesh Soni.6 He is a devoted print collector who has championed Indian printmaking for years, sharing his collection with museum-goers across India and abroad. Even still, the specter of nationalist politics continues to haunt him, as it does many other artists in India. While Chaos in the Palace is not heavy handed, the work raises the question of what happens when art and politics intersect, particularly with the latter’s attempt to stifle free expression again and again throughout. To explore these questions, some grounding in the project’s specific imagery is useful. The visual framing device repeated in all 18 frames of the Chaos in the Palace suite is derived from the depiction of a palace interior attributed to Shaykh Zada and painted to accompany a fifteenth-century manuscript illuminating the Persian poet Sa’di’s Bustan.7 One of the great literary works of the thirteenth century, Sa’di’s Bustan (The Orchard, 1257), chronicles the struggles of Muslim peoples through stories that exemplify their virtues and critique their failings.8 A man of great literary talent but limited economic means, Sa’di could not offer the customary opulent gifts, so instead he composed the Bustan—an epic poem that he described as a “Palace of Wealth,” with “ten doors of instruction.” 9 He offered this “palace” to the world as his gift: “I regretted that I should go from the garden of the world empty-handed to my friends, and reflected: ‘Travelers bring sugar-candy [dates] from Egypt as a present to their friends. Although I have no candy, yet have I words that are sweeter. The sugar that I bring is not that which is eaten, but what knowers of truth take away with respect…like dates encrusted with sugar—when opened, a stone [pit] is revealed inside.’” 10

5. Ibid. 6. Recent photography books include Waswo X. Waswo: Men of Rajasthan (Chicago: Serindia Contemporary, 2011) and the forthcoming Waswo X. Waswo: Photo Wallah (Bangalore:

Tasveer Arts, 2016). 7. Sa’di’s Visit to an Indian Temple (painting, recto), text (verso), folio 119, from a manuscript of the Bustan by Sa’di, written for Sultan ’Abd al-’Aziz (1540–50), over

painting attributed to Bishndas for the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (1605–27), in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/

object/213072. 8. The Bustan of Sadi, trans. A. Hart Edwards (1911); http:// www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bus/ bus04.htm. 9. Ibid., 29. 10. Ibid., 28–29.

The “stone” of the fruit is the kernel of truth that the stories are meant to reveal; hence the title “The Orchard” describes the treasure contained behind the doors of his palace of instructional words. The works in Chaos in the Palace are akin to such doors; beneath the bright, “sweet exteriors,” they offer hard, sharp stones of insight about our current condition. Many of the stories in the Bustan emphasize a cosmology of predestination and the uselessness of railing against Fate. One passage recounts the loss of fighting spirit by an old warrior who suffers defeat at the hands of the Mongols: “‘O tiger-seizer!’ I exclaimed, ‘what has made thee decrepit like an old fox?’” The newfound wisdom of the man is expressed in his realizations that Fortune is not in his favor, and “only a fool strives with Fate.” 11 Elsewhere, Sa’di tells a story to illustrate that even theft is preferable to slander and backbiting: “Thieves,” he explained, “live by virtue of their strength and daring. The slanderer sins and reaps nothing.” 12 We find echoes of these lessons, albeit transformed by the indexical context and historical specificity of the times, in Chaos in the Palace. Chaos in the Palace shows us the politics of art making, both within India and internationally, but while Sa’di’s offerings are allegorical stories of moral guidance in the format of an epic poem, Waswo’s are an intentionally chaotic juxtaposition of insights and critiques about the intersection of art and politics on a number of intertwined yet distinct levels. The work hints at flows of hegemonic art-world value systems from “Occident” to “Orient” that privilege particular kinds of art practices and encourage the production of easily recognizable and digestible artworks. This system rewards art production that manages to finesse a politics of appropriation. Such appropriation takes place either in the realm of visual language (new wine, old bottles) or in easily assimilable themes and subject matter rife with exoticized, essentialized references to “Indianness” (old wine, new bottles). This same international art market is inept at recognizing work that does not fit neatly into either of these two categories. Waswo pokes fun at this, throwing the colonial “palace” of the art market into chaos with visual and referential moves that span the gamut from parodic to paradoxical. In keeping with his characteristically self-reflexive, self-critical art practice, Waswo never offers faux “impartial” critiques from on high, nor does he pretend he can take a fully critical distance from his own position as an artist of Western origin who has struggled to make a genuine and legitimate space for his art practice within his adopted home of India. Indeed, throughout the suite, no one is spared, and everyone, including himself, is implicated at the nexus where national politics, cultural politics, art market politics, visual and poetic politics, and personal-as-political politics collide, conjoin, and confound attempts to be disentangled into neat, linear, separate threads. As such, Chaos in the Palace varies in important ways from Sa’di’s guide to the moral and ethical behavior of Muslims in the world. While the “ten doors of instruction” in Sa’di’s palace open into neat

11. “Chapter V: Concerning Resignation,” The Bustan of Sadi, http://www.sacred-texts. com/isl/bus/bus09.htm.

12. Ibid., 116.

“orchards” of teachings about proper conduct in various realms—ranging from those of justice, benevolence, love, humility, resignation, contentment, education, and gratitude to repentance and prayer—Waswo’s eighteen panels do not offer such unambiguous teachings. Instead of opening up into “orchards” of orthodox learning, they contain their lessons within the confines of the palace itself, forcing us to draw comparisons and connections between the scenes unfolding simultaneously across the tableaux he creates. There is no proper sequence or prescribed pairing between panels arrayed left to right and top to bottom. It is entirely up to the viewer to find herself and the world in which she is located and participates within across, betwixt, and between the scenes. Waswo forces us to become active makers of the critical meaning within the work, to make assessments and judgments, to take stances and stands, and thus to explicitly implicate ourselves in the chaos in the process. If you read the suite of images from left to right and top to bottom, narratives about the politics of art, the struggles about what art should be and for whom, and whether art should be controlled or free expression allowed in the public sphere emerge, raising questions that the viewer is left to ponder. In the first image, Waswo borrows the figure of a man mounted on a swan with sword raised from Surendran Nair’s Cuckoonebulopolis (2004) series. The “cuckoo” polis, where reason no longer seems to hold sway and the sword is mightier than the pen (or pencil or paintbrush), could easily be any number of contemporary places in the world in which we attempt, as creative people, as intellectuals—as artists and thinkers and citizens—to make our art and make our lives. It is a place where things no longer make rational sense, and the power of the once great forces of secular humanism has been dwarfed by fundamentalists, extremists, and other people for whom knowledge, education, literacy, logic, reason, and rational argumentation have been overshadowed (or overwhelmed) by the slings and arrows (tridents and machetes, guns and knives and lathis) of those for whom freedom of thought and expression are evils to be contained, suppressed, and crushed out of existence. This could be any place on this earth today where freedom is under grave threat by organized forces of intolerance, most often mobilized in the name of religion and/or nationalism. Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all appear in these panels and, while none is singled out, neither is any let off the hook. In the panel below, we see people toppling a bust of Voltaire in ways that mimic the decimation of statues in Palmyra and the intentional destruction by the Taliban of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. In the background of these acts of cultural violence appears a reference to Mahatma Gandhi’s once powerful and effective use of non-violent resistance. The iconic Nandalal Bose linocut print in black and white, entitled Mahatma Gandhi (Bapuji) on the Dandi March, 1930, depicts Gandhiji with his walking staff commemorating the Independence movement and the pivotal 1930 Salt March, which protested the Salt Tax of the British on India; after the march, he was arrested. Tellingly, in Waswo’s composition the picture hangs tilted and ignored in the background.

Waswo X. Waswo and R. Vijay, Chaos in the Palace, 2015. Suite of 18 miniature paintings, gouache and gold on wasli. Courtesy of the artists.Â

In this panel and in many throughout the suite, monkeys take up various stances alongside men, blurring the boundaries between the human and the animal. For Waswo, “we are all monkeys,” sometimes as trouble makers, sometimes as helpless “mute spectators,” “victims,” or “refugees,” and they should “remind us of our origins.” We are, in spite of all our sophistication and learning, still animals. For Waswo, perhaps it is primarily our learning—our literacy and capacity for abstraction and art—that differentiates us from our primate ancestors. Non-human animals who lack our vast historical accumulations of knowledge and culture do not engage in the kinds of vicious, calculated cruelty and destruction that our species does with alarming regularity. It is important to note that, for Waswo, the chaos explored in the suite of works does not arise from a simple secular vs. non-secular binary. He writes: “There are other threats to the ‘palace’ of contemporary society as well, and perhaps this palace ought to be under threat.” The same is implied for the international art market’s system of valuation. Indeed, we see this clearly in the next set of panels, which depict the copying of René Magritte’s famous The Listening Room (1952) in juxtaposition with a giant mango that takes up the entire palace in the panel above. This juxtaposition begs the question of what is lost. Having spent over a decade working with practitioners of traditional Indian art forms, such as miniaturist R. Vijay, Waswo has an intimate sense of this threat. What is lost includes “possibilities of an art based on and evolved from Indian experience, technique and history,” he explains, because of the overemphasis in India on “copying” art from the West, as encouraged by the international art market. Thus, the threats emanating from the politics of capitalism and its “mass marketed consumption” also throw the palace into chaos, albeit in ways different from what the competing fundamentalisms and extremists do. In the next panel, we know neither what the scribe perched atop a representation of Andy Warhol’s iconic 1962 Campbell’s Soup Can is writing nor what the Fedora Man is writing. And perhaps the content is not what matters but rather the significance of the acts of reading and writing, and what literacy means for the possibilities of having civil societies. What happens when the forces of the market invade the realms of scholarship and intellectual life? Is this not, in its own way, as much a threat to free, meaningful expression as fundamentalism? Meanwhile, a boy dusts the soup can with a vacant expression—neither the words nor the art mean much of anything to him. Without literacy and learning, whole worlds of meaning are simply closed off to us, and under such circumstances, it is little wonder that we do not value them. Appropriation and imitation reappear in the next panel, with a scene that replicates a famous Norman Rockwell painting, entitled The Connoisseur (1961), which itself features a work by Jackson Pollock and pokes fun at the elitist art world. Note that this same “Pollock” painting reappears in another panel, in the room where forgeries of Magritte’s apples are being made. Fedora Man’s hat is off (as in the Rockwell piece), but his shoes are on, showing a tension between typically Eastern and Western modes of showing respect indoors, and the object of respect is of questionable authenticity.

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In another panel, Waswo’s use of contemporary artist Alwar Balasubramaniam’s famous sculpture of arms, which are here used as a dividing line in the adjacent piece and also as a laundry line, evokes boundaries between high and low culture and art. Just as the boy mindlessly dusting Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can points to the decisive role of cultural literacy in the formation of our value systems and the ways that our mutual ignorance of each other’s ways of life and cultural forms enable us to also devalue each other and Others more generally, Waswo draws attention to the way that art can fail to engage with everyday life. Here something is lost as the “manual is subverted into [a] preciousness” that is illegible to the laborers working in the same scene. Balasubramaniam’s exquisite white sculptural arms, which are typically shown in a pristine, white-cube art space, here are used to hang out the wash, in a scene where actual manual labor is going on all around. This is neither to simply condemn the art world for its elitism nor to denigrate the laborers for their lack of cultivation, but rather to show the disconnect that happens across these spheres and to question what an art that is unintelligible to ordinary people actually means, and how much is lost on people who are excluded from the creative discourses of the “high arts.” Complicity of all parties in creating the chaotic mess we’re in is another critical theme that permeates the suite. Waswo does not exempt himself. The complicity of the Fedora Man in what Waswo describes as “the entire scenario of image-making, ego, marketing, and selfishness” is clearly evoked in another panel. Acting as a court photographer, with servants prostrating themselves below on the carpet, the Fedora Man both appropriates imagery from the local scene to serve his own interests while also serving the ego and power of the king being photographically memorialized. Meanwhile, the monkey observes from on high, mimicking the king. What are we doing here? How is each one of us implicated? Themes of self-indulgence and mental masturbation, metaphorical fiddling while Rome burns, appear with the invocation of another iconic Balasubramaniam sculpture. Waswo places the seated white Balasubramaniam figure out of context and into what he describes as an “ornate jali” (hand-carved wooden screen) in the palace. The figure appears to be slouched over in the onanistic act of self-pleasuring, while the writer in the foreground indulges in a similar kind of masturbatory action, producing words to please himself without reaching any actual audience. Here the rope and arms from the previous panel attempt to delimit a boundary between high and low, elitist “art” and popular culture, the spheres of cultured elites and the plebian Everyman. Yet against this backdrop, the natural world—as invoked by Waswo’s recurring monkeys and peacock— carries on without a care for what the men in the scene are doing. This self-indulgence continues in another panel, as the Fedora Man smokes a hookah pipe in a pose that references Waswo’s own well-known miniature work, Dream of the Mirrors (2012). He appears lost in his own naval gazing, on his own trip, much like so many foreigners who come to India seeking spiritual enlightenment, bringing their exoticizing, essentializing assumptions with them and only seeing India through their distorted lenses. While the man remains immersed in his self-contemplation, 115

the balloons in the panel drift aimlessly away, signaling that perhaps the “party is over” without us even realizing it yet. The party balloons are echoed in Waswo’s appropriation of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog sculpture (1994–2000), which appears in the preceding panel. This particularly expensive and (in)famous artwork has become an icon of the utterly frivolous consumptive excess of the blue chip Western art market. The more common, less glamorous balloons in its midst at least can float or fly, while the Koons balloon dog of mirror-polished stainless steel is grounded, stuck, and inanimate. It is contained in a zoo-like environment with the monkey, a domesticated commodity animal alongside a wild animal that is often imprisoned for human entertainment and exploitation. But while the art is easily containable in the “zoo,” the beautiful tree on which the monkeys and birds congregate cannot be contained, and it grows beyond the frame. The tree’s roots are anchored in the panel below, where Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe hangs, an icon of Western pop sexuality, fame, glamour, celebrity, and beauty—superficial things that we often seem to value more than knowledge, learning, literacy, and creativity. In this context, however, Marilyn hangs off-kilter, and monkeys play with it like a toy, suggesting that in the end it is nature that has more vitality than culture. Human vanity, self-obsession, and nature are addressed frequently in the suite, symbolized by mirrors and peacocks, which are emblematic of the crass, callous manner in which we humans appropriate nature’s splendor to adorn ourselves. But nature is not passive, and Waswo’s paintings imply that, as much as we would like to fantasize, we are not its keepers. Watch out for the snake, which, unlike the decapitated tiger, is still lurking and very much alive. The theme of devaluing nature or only being able to see its worth within a calculus of our own instrumentality repeats pointedly in a nearby panel that again features peacock feathers. But we can also see both literal and metaphorical consequences in the next panel, where the Fedora Man stands with his flimsy, useless umbrella, impotent against nature as rain clouds lay siege to the palace, occupying it from within. Water cascades across the floor, threatening to flood the building and hinting at the forces of nature expressed through freak weather and storms. The broader implications are that the excesses of capitalism, industrialized agriculture, and use of fossil fuel are forcing us to start reaping the seeds we have sown. If we have jointly, unwittingly, created a world in which forces of intolerance, anti-intellectualism, inequality, deprivation, ecological degradation, and natural disaster are now shaping the spheres in which we live, work, and attempt to create culture, what role can art play in addressing this new world we have brought into being? What kinds of art appear in these tableaux in the palace, and what is the status of art in relation to political and cultural life—elite cultural masturbatory self-indulgence or actual social significance? In the following panel, we see what might be Waswo’s approximation of a modest rejoinder to this massive, entangled mess of questions, as he contemplates “What now?” In this room of the palace, Subodh Gupta’s kalipeeli black-and-yellow taxi sculpture Everything Is Inside (2004) is the focus 116

of attention. Here Indian art has arrived on the international scene in a form that is neither exotically essentialized nor overtly pandering to a pop culture of faux luxury endemic to the Western art market; rather it trades on an everyday object that is part of ordinary urban Indian life, capturing the attention of viewers foreign and Indian alike. A socioeconomically mixed crowd comprised of a scantily clad white woman (perhaps a tourist or a collector) and both brown and white men are all observing Gupta’s partially submerged taxi. The monkey appears to be untying the ropes that lash the luggage to the roof carrier, and the peacock looks ready to join in. This work is in noticeable contrast to some of the other art-market-star works that appear in this suite, including Warhol’s Marilyn and Koons’s Balloon Dog—both icons of pop glamour and consumptive excess. Of Gupta’s taxi sculpture Waswo has said, “It is real and people relate to it.” But just as Indian art is beginning to find its own place in the international art world, it is coming under increasing attacks at home. In a later panel, a balloon reappears; this time it is overinflated and about to burst. Is it the art market in general that has grown too big for its proverbial britches and yet simultaneously too empty—a literal bubble waiting to burst? Or is this brief moment of Indian art itself in danger, not only from the international forces discussed earlier, but also from forces gathering momentum domestically? The arrow pointed at the balloon is also the symbol of the far-right Hindutva organization, the Shiv Sena, which has been instrumental in many attacks on cultural expression and on cultural Others in Mumbai and beyond. The work of modernist painter M. F. Husain depicted in this panel warns of the destruction that this other kind of gathering storm cloud—religious intolerance and fundamentalist extremism—can visit upon cultural expression. Husain’s importance as a leading figure in the development of Indian modern art is well known, and the threat to all artists and culture producers who run afoul of sectarian, communalist forces is well documented in his case. While Husain believed his secularist visual interpretations of the Hindu iconography to be part of the shared inheritance of Indians of all backgrounds, his works and person were attacked by the far right with such virulent ferocity and unbridled hatred that Husain was forced into exile. He lived out his final years unable to return to his homeland due to threats of grave bodily violence, against which the state offered little protection. So what is to be done in the face of so many threats to free expression and intellectual and cultural production? The Fedora Man does not have any answers. He is overwhelmed, just as most of us are, and part of him seems to want to give up. All around him is violence, books and paintings are on fire, and people are armed and ready to kill each other. His hands are in the air in a universal gesture of helplessness and acquiescence. Shilpa Gupta’s 2007 series There Is No Explosive in This—in which a microphone sings, “hands in the air, hands in the air” again and again—comes to mind. The painting on fire in this panel is An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus (2000), by Surendran Nair. Thus Waswo closes the brackets begun by his evocation of Nair’s work in the first panel of the suite. Nair’s An Actor Rehearsing depicts Icarus standing on the Lion Capital of Ashoka Pillar, a symbol of India. His painting was yet another well-known artwork that 117

was attacked by far-right extremists, who forced its removal from a public exhibition in 2000. “Like this painting,” Waswo narrates, “Chaos forebodes an impending doom, a fall from grace, though the environs are couched in the pretense of grandiose dreams.” In this fall we are all complicit. Waswo’s cultural collaborators and longtime local friends appear in the frame as well. The Fedora Man is joined in this final panel by a red-shirted Rajesh Soni, the artist who hand-tints Waswo’s photographs. The gray-haired man in the bottom left corner is R. Vijay, who has executed the painting of this very work. “We are complicit, and will meet our fate,” Waswo writes. “Secularism, the Enlightenment, Free Speech...all threatened from inside and without. The barbarians (I will call them that) are at the gates (on both sides of the suite) and they are only met by a painting of a silly man on a goose in this palace of Cuckoonebulopolis.” What are we doing to hold back the rising tide of hatred and intolerance, violence and oppression? And where have the monkey and peacock gone? They may be victims of human greed and stupidity, but this is not their fight, and they are not complicit the way we are. In this rich and turbulent suite of works, Waswo raises painful questions. He asks us to consider both the importance—and also the relative impotence—of art, ideas, creativity, humanism, and secularism in the face of rising anti-intellectualism, right-wing fundamentalism, and violent fascist extremism. In short, this work not only is about India today but also darkly parallels the United States, Europe, and much of the rest of the world, where similar processes are unfolding around us in spite of our feeble interventions. In our world today, chaos has indeed been unleashed in the palace. For Sa’di, the palace was a cultural construct made of words, with “doors of instruction” opening out into orchards filled with fruits that were sweet but contained a hard stone in the center—a kernel of truth, as it were. In Waswo’s palace of aesthetic and political visions, there are no doors; we are trapped inside, with no discernible way out. The orchard isn’t out there beyond its doors, and the teachings offered are not the clear moral and ethical instruction that comprised the pith of Sa’di’s Bustan. In Waswo’s palace, as in our contemporary world, chaos and violence have overtaken righteous conduct and ethical living, yet ironically, the book burners, the painting torchers, the art hawkers and gawkers all also believe in their own morally unambiguous slanted truths. While the suite explores the politics of art making and art consumption—by whom, for whom, for what purpose, and to what effect—it also examines the politics of imitation, appropriation, and hegemonic standards for evaluating what is desirable. These often-arbitrary standards frequently elide something more interesting, more locally colorful, with greater local significance and flavor (the mango instead of the apple, as it were) in the process. Indeed, these things can be a form of violence as well. How do we face the violence being unleashed in these dark times, and what good is our art, what use are our ideas, our pacifism, our non-violence, our tolerance, and our secular humanism in the face of such brute mob violence and hubristic demagoguery? Because Chaos in the Palace is about brutally enforced censorship and the dangers of self-indulgent complacency, 118

navel-gazing, partying, and fiddling while Rome burns, it challenges us to ask, out of this chaos, what? What is to be done? What can we—through our ideas and our art—do? Unlike the unambiguous guidance for right conduct, morality, and justice offered in Sa’di’s “palace of wealth,” these questions are left unanswered. Not out of moral laziness, shirking of duty, or lack of commitment, but perhaps out of the sheer overwhelming magnitude of what we are up against, the brute force of it, and our keen awareness that our best and brightest tools, our pens and paintbrushes, do not seem to be much of a match for their swords, slings, and arrows. Yet somehow we must find a way to face off against these menacing forces of intolerance, or we will surely find the whole palace—and everything we value in it—burned to the ground. It is in these matters where Chaos in the Palace makes me passionate, makes me angry, and where it makes me afraid for us. Maybe for all our civilization, our learning, our culture, our erudition, it is the monkeys, the birds, and the trees that live better than we do. But if those things—our learning, our criticality and questioning, our creativity, our tolerance of difference, and our will toward empathy for Others—that we thought were our greatest strengths cannot save us from the violent chaos now being unleashed upon the world, then who are we? Without those things we become the mute monkey in its victim/refugee incarnation. Indeed, we allow our culture, our civilization, and our learning and reason to be incinerated at all of our peril. As weak as they now seem to be in the face of so much unreasoning violence, these “weapons” (reason, words, art, creativity, humanism, secularism, tolerance) are still the best we have, and most importantly, they still remain the best of what we are when we are at our best. Maybe distractions, like the market, our vanity, appeasing social flattery, and fraternizing, have gotten the better of us and vitiated our best hopes in art, emptying out of it the vitality and power that could allow it to save us. The balloon dog is no match for ISIS rampaging through Syria and Iraq, or the RSS (the national paramilitary wing of the ruling BJP party) in India, or Donald Trump in America, and a glamorous pop-art Marilyn isn’t going to offer us a new vision for humanity. So what is left? What power does art still potentially have? We know that the Fedora Man admits to his complicity, but here he isn’t the Evil Orientalist anymore. Here he becomes a kind of Everyman. He is us. He gets caught up in the party, he navel gazes, he gets distracted by the glitz, he takes his own small role a bit too seriously, and in the end he is under a storm cloud that is following him everywhere, and no umbrella is going to be big enough to hold back all that rain. In the end, he feels desperate; nearly vanquished in the face of violence, he’s ready to give up and admit his impotence. Yet perhaps he does this for us. Perhaps he allows himself to be the fall guy who shows us where this kind of capitulation and quiescence can only lead. Maybe he shows us because he wants us to grow indignant at him for giving up so easily, get riled up, and be unwilling to do the same. Maybe, just maybe, he is staging another provocation and hoping we will respond with a call to arms. One that we can call our own, one that we are ready to take responsibility for—and who that “we” is will be determined 119

by how we respond to the crisis, to this chaos, and how determined we are to save our palace. How can we reclaim what is righteous and powerful in our letters and arts, in our tolerant humanities, in our fragmented left-behind-ness, in such a way that will allow us to fight without losing the very humanity we are fighting for in the process? This suite of paintings doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t offer an ideological answer or a quick fix to this question, but the chaos in our palace most certainly compels us to ask ourselves these questions nonetheless and to acknowledge their burning urgency. We must acknowledge that this crisis at hand takes place within an environment of xenophobic, nationalistic persecution and censorship that is growing worldwide. This is the actual terrain on which we must now wage a new kind of war, and we must hone our cultural weapons for the struggle, the only kind of weapons we have at our disposal that we are willing to use. Not swords, guns, and lathis, but rather ideas, images, culture, and critical thinking. How to make them no longer impotent in the face of violence is our challenge. To me, this is the most important kernel of truth in the fruits offered within this suite, and it is a truth that can crack your teeth when you bite down on it. Ecological political theorist, art critic, and curator Maya KĂłvskaya (PhD UC Berkeley, 2009) has authored, co-authored, edited, translated, and contributed to many books and articles on contemporary art as it intersects with the political, cultural, and ecological. She has curated many exhibitions in India, China, and abroad, and is art editor for positions: asia critique (Duke University Press). She is currently writing a book on art and the Anthropocene in India, and another on contemporary Indian photography. For more see www.mayakovskaya.com and www.mutualentanglements.com.

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conference.collegeart.org Julia Oldham The Loneliest Place, 2015 Art Journal Spring 2016

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ARTMARGINS IS DEVOTED TO ART PRACTICES AND VISUAL CULTURE IN EMERGING GLOBAL MARGINS. HIGHLIGHTS from the Special Issue: Art Periodicals Today, Historically Considered (Issue 5:3, October 2016) INTRODUCTION Art Periodicals Today, Historically Considered Octavian Eşanu and Angela Harutyunyan Critical Machines: Art Periodicals Today Octavian Eşanu ARTICLES Art Periodicals and Contemporary Art Worlds (Part I): An Historical Exploration Gwen Allen Surrealism Is a Thing: Rubrics and Objectivation in the Surrealist Periodical, 1924–2015 Catherine Hansen ARTIST PROJECT Lotus Notes Nida Ghouse DOCUMENT On Yugoslav Post-structuralism: Introduction to “Art, Society/Text” (1975) Nikola Dedić Art, Society/Text Anonymous (Authorized by the editors of Problemi-Razprave) EDITORS: Sven Spieker, Karen Benezra, Octavian Eşanu, Anthony Gardner, Angela Harutyunyan ISSN: 2162-2574 | e-ISSN: 2162-2582 | Triannual

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Goya’s War:

LOS DESASTRES DE LA GUERRA Project Series 51:

INCENDIARY TRACES Incendiary Traces is Hillary Mushkin’s art and research project focused on the politics of collective landscape imaging in international conflict.

Pomona College Museum of Art On View: January 17–May 14, 2017 Opening Reception: Saturday, January 21, 5–7 p.m.

330 North College Ave. Claremont, CA 91711 pomona.edu/museum (909) 621-8283 Tuesday to Sunday, 12–5 p.m. Closed Monday Art After Hours: Thursday, 5–11 p.m. (1/19–4/17) Image: Range 220, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, CA, 2016. Map data © Google. Photo Montage: Richard Wheeler

EMBODIED ENCOUNTERS Featuring: Rhona Byrne, George Khut, Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat, Alex May, Miriam Simun, and Sha Xin Wei Curated by David Familian and Simon Penny In Conjunction with Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts Conference at UC Irvine, December 8–10, 2016

On View: October 1, 2016!–!January 21, 2017

The mission of the Beall Center is to support research and exhibitions that explore new relationships between the arts, sciences, and engineering, and thus, promote new forms of creation and expression using digital technologies. The Beall Center aspires to redefine the museum/gallery experience—both in content and form—formulating answers to the questions of how technology can be used effectively, not only to create new forms of art, but also to connect artist to artist, and artist with audience.

Beall Center for Art+Technology

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712 Arts Plaza, UC Irvine Irvine, California 92697 (949) 824-6206

Tues–Sat, 12pm–6pm Closed Sunday & Monday

The Beall Center’s 2016-17 exhibitions are supported by The Beall Family Foundation, and donations from the public. The Beall Center received its initial support from the Rockwell Corporation in honor of retired chairman Don Beall and his wife, Joan, the core idea being to merge their lifelong passions — technology, business and the arts — in one place. Today major support is generously provided by the Beall Family Foundation.

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

Robert Rauschenberg, Coca Cola Plan, 1958, pencil on paper, oil on three Coca-Cola bottles, wood newel cap, and cast metal wings on wood structure, 26 3/4 × 25 1/4 × 5 1/2 in. (67.9 × 64.1 × 14 cm), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection

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