Together or Alone, We Find Our Way

Exhibition view of Sasha Zirulnik’s ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, 2020.

Sasha Zirunilk’s debut solo show, Young Hearts Run Free, at Nationale in Portland, Oregon (running from November 19 - December 27, 2020) is a quietly raw and powerful meditation on amorous love, the self, the natural world, and the vast, unknown space of the future. The show’s title, aptly drawn from Candi Staton’s 1975 disco release of the same name, evokes the powerful resiliency and inner growth born from the “trouble and strife” that comes along with young heartbreak. 

Running throughout Young Hearts Run Free is the sense of a strong narrative arc; however, piecing it together requires viewers to observe each and every work’s motifs and a consequent  rollercoaster of emotions -- from moments of joyous, utopian pleasure and love to intense, inescapable feelings of loss and dread. Split between sculptures -- variously made from a combination of plaster, cement, wood, glue, found objects (both industrial and natural, in the case of seashells), and human hair -- and oil paintings, the works in the show (all produced in 2020) demonstrate Zirulnik’s playful and tactile exploration of materiality as a means of evoking an emotional response. While explicitly working within self-portraiture, Zirulnik’s figures are ambiguous enough for viewers to place themselves in each scene, and experience the artists’ complex, and often simultaneous, emotions of hope, expectation, loss, introspection, and renewal. 

Nestled prominently on the wall behind the front desk, I encounter a pair of self-portraits graphically rendered in red and soft pink oil paint on canvas. This wall divides Nationale into two airy, light filled spaces: a book-object-record store in the front and the gallery in the back. Both paintings, Back of My Head and Long Ago, Far Away, feature soft, deep red foregrounds delineated from a lighter pink sky with cartoonish white clouds by a horizon line. A nondescript figure with thick black hair, holding a strong representational similarity to the artist’s own image, stares at the vast, open space ahead, simultaneously evoking an alternating sense of excited anticipation and dread for what lies ahead. Incidentally, the figures' gaze into the gallery space and lead me into the rest of the show. 

Exhibition view of ‘Young Hearts Run Free’ at Nationale in Portland, OR, 2020.

Entering the space, I’m confronted by a low, rectangular pedestal displaying a row of four small sculptures -- each of which employ found objects as their base, and given form using plaster and/or cement and dirt, and finally adorned with seashells. Growing up going to thrift stores with her father, Zirulnik says he passed along a love of and ability to “find beauty and worth in secondhand objects and random ass chachkis.” She has also found this passion in the natural world -- most recently, the Rockaway beaches along New York’s coast -- where the artist has been especially drawn in the summers. In the show’s press release, Zirulnik says, “I choose to work with seashells because they symbolize life, death, and the natural world in which our ties to nature have become increasingly frayed.” Perhaps most representative of this sense of pleasure in the odd castoffs of industrial culture can be found in For Dali, which takes for its base a white, plastic candle holder with three columns which Zirulnik has flipped upside down. In doing so, she has turned the columns (reminiscent of skinny chicken legs, in my eyes anyhow) into a support for a seashell covered plaster mound which, when viewed from above, a face -- made up of two closely-set brown eyes on a butterfly and soft pink lips on a seashell -- looks back. Its expression is hard to place (and also hard not to smile and giggle at, perhaps nervously), and feels as though it’s peering into your soul without judgement or expectations. In fact, the figures in every sculpture and painting in the show appears to look past and ignore the viewer, as a side effect of their total immersion and focus on their own world.

Sasha Zirulnik, ‘For Dali,’ 2020.

Sasha Zirulnik, overhead shot of ‘For Dali,’ 2020.

Sasha Zirulnik, ‘The Daydream,’ 2020.

The pedestal presents a fork in the road and invites (or forces, depending on your take…) a decision: to go left or right. Choosing the former, I come upon The Daydream, a large vertical painting depicting a solemn, brooding figure -- presumably Zirulnik -- who takes up the bottom right corner and emanates a dark, black cloud. In the upper left area, two swiftly illustrated figures, tucked into a voluptuous red bed, passionately kiss. Surrounding the figures are free floating orange Brugmansia (also known as Angel’s Trumpets due to their unusual shape), which are commonly understood to represent vitality and vibrancy. As part of the nightshade family however, they are known to have slightly toxic, poisonous, and hallucinogenic properties. In An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, the author Christina Pratt notes that “Brugmansia induces a powerful trance with violent and unpleasant effects, sickening after effects, and at times temporary insanity.” This admixture of intensity and passion with toxicity and deliriousness are not-infrequent side effects of amorous love, and the piece subtly foreshadows the arc of the Zirulnik’s young love. 

Positioned directly across from this powerful, layered depiction of blissful, yet foreboding love is I Have Angels Guiding Me, a fleshy-pink bust made from cardboard, chicken wire, plaster, and human hair. With her chin raised high and gaze directed slightly upward, the sculptural self-portrait features a prominent nose, seashells for ears, and Zirulnik’s own thick, curly brown-black, shoulder-length hair: an abject, physical representation of the figure repeated throughout the show. A metal, trumpet-holding angel, weathervane affixed atop the figure’s head points in the same direction as the figure’s gaze. This angel confidently and cheerily hovers above the figure as though it were protecting and celebrating her as they guide her forward. Without viewing this piece in the round, viewers might miss a quiet moment on the sculpture’s backside: a figure on the left flank gazes towards New York City’s  iconic, triumphant Statue of Liberty. Behind the bust, in The Path, one of the show’s smallest oil paintings, loose, quick brushstrokes portray a dark winding path leading over and through rolling yellow hills, bringing to mind the golden landscape of the artist’s native California. Growing up in San Francisco and later graduating from San Francisco Art Institute with a BFA in Sculpture, Zirulnik moved to New York City in 2017 for a fresh start -- perhaps, this piece would suggest, with the guidance of angels. 

left to right: Sasha Zirulnik, ‘The Path,’ 2020 and ‘I Have Angels Guiding Me,’ 2020.

Sasha Zirulnik, ‘I Have Angels Guiding Me,’ 2020.

Continuing to circumnavigate the space, I come to In the Studio, a large, moody and muddy brown-green painting depicting an intricately complex and disorienting space, and quite arguably the showstopper moment for Young Hearts Run Free. In the foreground, a three-quarters profile of the same thick, black-haired figure looking and touches yet another thick, black-haired, fleshy-pink bust on a pedestal depicted in profile, behind which a small black and blue painting -- a miniaturized copy of the piece, Lover (which hangs directly to the right) -- of two figures hangs on a wall. In the dark shadows of the small, black and blue painting, Lover, we can just make out two intertwined figures: a woman with arms raised above her head, while a man holds her tightly while affectionately kissing her. There’s an ominous overtone to this painting, as the bodies convey an uneasy power dynamic that is only quieted by the figures’ calm expressions and locked lips. Overlooking this ricochet of gazes and complicated power relations is the backside of an oversized large, black cat, which has turned its head to ominously peer back at this scene, and subsequently the viewer themselves. I can’t help but be reminded of Zirulnik’s protective, guardian angel and wonder whether they have assumed an animal form to continue to watch over her. Standing in front of the work, the viewer becomes yet another set of eyes in this chain of observation and introspection. 

Sasha Zirulnik, ‘In the Studio,’ 2020.

Sasha Zirulnik, ‘Lover,’ 2020.

Opposite the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling street-facing windows and hanging alone is the show’s largest painting: Profile. Painted in the same hues as the pairing at the show’s entrance, this work is another variation on a multiple-perspective portrait. This time, four overlapping and rotating figures -- with the furthest left standing in profile and each progressively turning away from the viewer -- until all we see of the last figure is the back of her head. Above the bright red ground, blue skies and thin white clouds provide a brief moment of calm, tranquility, and uplift in between Lover and the final sculpture in the show, Hard Times in New York Town. The latter work pulls its title from Bob Dylan’s song released in 1994 that speaks to the toughness, grit, and hustle required to survive the cutthroat New York City. Atop a narrow pedestal, a gruesome decapitated head -- adorned with the hair of her ex-lover -- is rested upon its left cheek. The plaster and paint construction acts as a mask underneath which seashells have been placed in two negative spaces in the space of the figures' eyes. Positioned at a 45 degree angle, Hard Times in New York Town, looks out at the entirety of the gallery space and surveils viewers as they explore the show. Though perhaps not immediately recognized, the work produces an underlying eerie and foreboding energy that is difficult to shake. 

left to right: Sasha Zirulnik, 'Profile,’ ‘Hard Times In New York Town,’ ‘Left in the Dust,’ and ‘Left in the Dust (Part 2),’ all 2020.

The show’s final two pieces, Left in the Dust and Left in the Dust (Part 2), are a pairing of dark, black and blue atmospheric paintings with soft grey figures staring down seemingly endless roads which only disappear as they approach the horizon line. This imagery that returns again and again in Young Hearts Run Free speaks to Zirulnik’s interest in “figures that are going somewhere or doing something.” In the latter work, the road -- demarcated by a steady rhythm of bright yellow brush strokes -- begins from the bottom center until it fades off into the top right, where a light source beams through streaks of white light highlighting the desperately outstretched arms and face of the figure as it runs towards the light at the end of the tunnel. 

After several laps and ping-ponging across the works on view in the gallery, my head is spinning and my heart is racing as I attempt to sift through Zirulnik’s deeply personal and intimate experiences. Through landscape, gazes, and self-portraiture, Young Hearts Run Free reflects upon the future as a space of potential, and embraces its capacity to not only induce dreadful anxiety, but hope, excitement, and the joys of something new. Facing headlong into the unknown of a year marked by continuous change and unstable ground, I can only hope to face what comes next with the courage and resiliency depicted in Zirulnik’s works. Leaving the gallery, I recall the words of Candi Staton quoted in the press release:

 It's high time now,

 just one crack at life

Who wants to live in,

In trouble and strife

My mind must be free 

To learn all I can about me 

A History Made Present: The Power of Absence Through Reference & Address

A History Made Present: The Power of Absence Through Reference & Address

May 16, 2017

Alfredo Jaar, This is what happened, Miss Simone, 2015

During the summer of 2016, Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, the co-founders of the first artist-run super PAC, For Freedoms, curated an unabashedly political show of the same name at Jack Shainman Gallery. Amongst the many works in the show and displayed in a ten-foot by ten-foot room off the main exhibition space was Alfredo Jaar’s rather subtle and simple work, This is what happened, Miss Simone (2015). The work consists of two parts: on the wall is a black-framed, 30-inch by 30-inch, black poster divided vertically into five, 2-inch columns, each with four dozen repeating lines of white text hung against the white gallery wall. A few feet in front of it, on the black matte gallery floor, a 3-foot-tall stack of identical posters – only these are in the negative: black text on a white background. In its density the stack appears to be a solid white cube; however, the slight differences in alignment of the posters’ edges make the sides ridged and announces its true form. Jaar’s This is what happened, Miss Simone concatenates textual and formal, cultural and historical references in a configuration that muddles delineations between past and present, artist and viewer, to offer the absence of violent representation as an ethical mode of showing.

From afar, the repetition of form makes the content of the poster appear fuzzy, producing a disorienting and dizzying effect that obscures the text’s clarity. To the distant viewer, each of the five columns appear as rows of purely geometric form: a thin line followed by a thicker line, except for the first line in the top left corner which, instead, is just one long, thick line. However, this deviation from the otherwise rigidly followed grid structure rewards closer attention – the lines are not just shapes, but are in fact text in all caps. Stepping in to take a closer look, viewers enter into a space of tension: the distance between the stack of posters and the framed poster on the wall establishes a dialectical object relationship that highlights viewers’ own corporeality as their body prevents their ability to see both elements simultaneously. It is within this space that the text becomes clear; the first line reads: “MISSISSIPPI GODDAM,” while the rest of the several dozen line segments in each column repeats: “___________ GODDAM”. What had previously seemed to be an innocuous abstraction becomes ambiguously troubled under the force and urgency of the capital letters and soft profanity.

Offering little else to look at, the work relies upon viewer participation to decipher the accumulation of meaning generated through textual and formal reference. As such, the title (This is what happened, Miss Simone) and the textual content (Mississippi Goddam) become clues and entry points into the work. In 1964, at her concert in Carnegie Hall, for a largely white audience, the African-American singer and pianist, Nina Simone, performed “Mississippi Goddam.” The piece was a fierce response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that resulted in the death of four young black children. With this new cultural knowledge in mind, the work’s initial, purely formalist reading becomes imbued with the targeted and racialized violence committed against people of color during the Civil Rights Movement. The distant text in its fuzzy obscurity now reads as rows of piano keys; the blank underscore appears as the line between the white keys of a piano, while the bold, condensed font of “GODDAM” is thick and raised like the black keys. The stark contrast of the black text on white paper embodying Zora Neal Hurston’s oft-cited quote, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” [1]

The work’s title, This is what happened, Miss Simone, close resemblance to the Netflix documentary, “What Happened, Miss Simone?”, released just the year before in 2015, cannot be mistaken. The documentary’s title was, in turn, a direct appropriation of a quote from Maya Angelou’s 1970 article in the magazine, Redbook, in which she asked, “But what happened, Miss Simone? […] What happened to you?” [2] While Angelou and subsequently, the Netflix documentary pose a question to Nina Simone, hoping for her to answer from beyond the grave, Jaar reformulates this question into a declarative statement directed at rather than about her. The title exclaims, “This is what happened, Miss Simone” as though to gesture towards an answer, yet the this we are left with is almost literally, quite empty. “This” is column after column, row after row, of blanks followed by the solemn, frustrated, rage-filled “Goddam” on the framed poster, in addition to the endless (and endlessly reproducible) stack of posters just a few feet away. In reconfiguring the grammatical structure of Angelou’s query and presenting the viewer with blank spaces, This is what happened, Miss Simone situates the viewer in the position to address Simone and provide her with an answer.

Alfredo Jaar, This is what happened, Miss Simone, 2015

In sitting with the blank list and searching for an answer, it becomes more difficult to ignore the resonance between the poster and #BlackLivesMatter protest signs of the names of people of color killed by the police. The poster’s list is also reminiscent of Claudia Rankine’s in her book, Citizen, that begins each line with “In Memory of” proceeded by the names: Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sr., Myra Thompson, Sandra Bland. [3] Several more lines continue with the text, “In Memory,” followed by blank space while gradually fading as though trailing off into both infinitude and exhaustion at the anticipation of more to come. Each name memorializes a person of color who died at the hands of unjust, racialized police violence, and it is their names and their cities whose spectral presence are called to occupy the blank lines of This is what happened, Miss Simone. Just as Rankine fulfills James Baldwin’s call to “bring out your dead,” the blank lines beckon viewers to do the same. [4]

excerpt from Citizen by Claudia Rankine

As the text situates the work within an accumulation of meaning through cultural reference, the work’s formal qualities does so through (art)historical reference. Nancy Princenthal writes that Jaar’s work “is firmly grounded in the present, and its orientation is squarely face-forward. But it is also based, as it has been from the start, on the assumption that political attentiveness cannot be dissociated from historical awareness…” [5] Throughout the 1990s Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced a series of stacks of paper that were often simple in form – with either little to no text, color, or figurative representation. For example, Untitled (Passport) (1990), consists solely of a 4-inch stack of 2-foot by 2-foot white paper, placed directly on the ground and against a wall. Despite being visually minimalist, or perhaps precisely because of it, his paper stacks become complex in their ambiguous open-endedness. Their visual simplicity redirects attention to the interaction between the works’ title and its physical object quality, the work and other pieces in the space, and the work and viewer participation. Gonzalez-Torres’ paper stacks reference in turn, the stark, geometric form that characterized 1960s Minimalism. However, by emphasizing viewer participation and imbuing his works with a politically charged rather than neutral, universalized content, Gonzalez-Torres reinvigorated the radical potential proffered by the contingency of perception. This compounding of art historical references proves to be profound when considering the coetaneous reality of the life-threatening urgency of Simone’s lyrics in contrast to Minimalism’s cold, apolitical and supposedly content neutral work.

Another work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which in its explicit content is somewhat of an outlier for him, is the paper stack Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990). Organized within a gridded matrix, each paper poster provides the name, age, and face of 464 individuals killed by bullet wounds in the span of a week in the United States alone. Though This is what happened, Miss Simone and Untitled (Death by Gun) share an obvious formal relationship as paper stacks, considering these two works as they converge and depart from one another surfaces a generative analysis. While neither are rigidly didactic, the title and visual, photographic representations make explicit the subject matter in (Death by Gun), while This is what happened, Miss Simone purely vague textual content is ambiguous. In the case of Untitled (Death by Gun), viewers are encouraged to learn about gun violence and perhaps even become advocates of gun control. This is what happened, Miss Simone, on the other hand, asks that the viewer contribute to its message.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Passport), 1990

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990

While This is what happened, Miss Simone utilizes the same on distribution strategy, it expands the viewers’ participatory role in creating meaning. Through its form, it operates as what Umberto Eco calls an ‘open work’ in his essay “The Poetics of Open Work.” [6] The posters are ‘unfinished’ until the viewer interacts with them – whether physically altering the surface of the poster, or even mentally filling them in. Rather than being a transparent transfer and dissemination of information like in Untitled (Death by Gun), the list of blanks is intentionally absent of information as an invitation, or perhaps a challenge, for the viewer to actively unravel its references and then to contribute to the creation of the work. While no writing instrument is provided, the blank line preceding each “GODDAM” compels viewers to fill it in by recalling a site of racialized violence against people of color from the expansive reservoir provided by America’s history. In fact, in speaking about his practice, Jaar said, “if the media and their images fill us with an illusion of presence, which later leaves us with a sense of absence, why not try the opposite? That is, offer an absence that could perhaps provoke a presence.” [7]

In her song, “Mississippi Goddam,” Simone sings, “You keep on saying ‘Go slow!’//But that’s just the trouble//’Do it slow’//Desegregation//’Do it slow’//Mass participation//’Do it slow’.” [8] Challenging white America’s insistence on a slow, progressive narrative of change Simone pointed to the racialized violence in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama as evidence of the failure and myth of gradual change. Rather than presenting a completed list, This is what happened, Miss Simone relies upon the viewer’s own knowledge of racialized violence to fill in the blanks. Through this process, rather than recalling historical events from the 60s or 70s, the cities; Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Beavercreek, Baltimore, Houston, Santa Rosa, Washington, D.C., and their associations with police violence against people of color rush to mind. As a result, the temporal gap between the 60s and the present collapses under the present-day reality of racialized violence, echoing Simone’s message that little has changed.

During the 1960s and 1970s, in the hopes of democratizing access to viewing, making, and owning art, artists (and the work they made) explored and developed alternative distribution strategies. In his seminal 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin anticipated that technological advancements in photography had the potential to catalyze such a radically democratic movement within the artworld. Benjamin believed the reproducibility of images made possible by photography troubled notions of originality and uniqueness liberating “the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.”[9] Because a reproduction could be made, the cult value of an artwork diminished and its exhibition value increased, as viewers no longer had to travel great distances in order to experience the work.

By attempting to eliminate the art object itself and instead provide instructions or mass-produced and disseminated work Conceptual Art of the 1970s continued to decenter the authorial artist and deemphasize art’s cult value. Such strategies of mass dissemination informed Gonzalez-Torres’ paper stacks, and consequently, This is what happened, Miss Simone, as it is fundamental to the form that the work and its message can reach an audience beyond those who visit the gallery. While the dissemination of Gonzalez-Torres’ work is often read as the spread of a virus in the context of HIV/AIDS, the dissemination of This is what happened, Miss Simone brings to mind the viral sharing of photographs and video – particularly that of racialized police violence – by media outlets and social media. Yet, unlike mass media’s uninhibited sharing of spectacular violence (often upon minoritized bodies), this work does not subject viewers to the spectacle of violent imagery.

In the mid-1960s, forty years after Benjamin published “The Work of Art…” the Land Art artist, Robert Smithson, produced a body of work based on his theorization of Site/Non-Site works of art. The former being “the actual site” from which the natural materials came and a place that could be traveled to while the latter is a container, a representation of the original site. By exhibiting photographs and maps of the original site Smithson produced a dialectic tension between Sites and Non-Sites, both linking the two and placing them in contrast to one another. Through this body of work – the sculptural abstraction of the Non-Sites, the photographic and geographical representation, and the Site – Smithson incorporated the natural landscape into the space of the gallery. Reading these works alongside Benjamin’s essay highlights the ways in which Smithson negotiates and upholds the aura of the Site as original, as something different from its reproduction as a Non-Site, while simultaneously applying a unique status to Non-Sites as well. In doing so, the work becomes diffused across its many elements and an experience of any one element is not elevated above others as more or less “authentic.” This is what happened, Miss Simone operates similarly if we are to read its installation at Jack Shainman Gallery as the work’s Site, and the distribution, displacement, and relocation of the white posters from the stack as its Non-Site. In this way, the white posters become the excavated material standing as a representation, map, guide to the Site – not the piece itself, but an element of the work. Those who take a poster from the stack do not own the work itself, but an element of it.

Robert Smithson, Oberhausen (Ruhr, Germany) Non-Site, 1968

A cynical reading of this work might understand the black framed poster to simply be a product of the art market’s demand for scarcity through the editioning of unique works of art. While this market-driven reading may also be true, a formal consideration of the black framed poster remains generative in its own right. The framed poster and the stack of posters share identical textual content and layout; however, they differ as visual inverses and in viewer accessibility. The monochromatic use of black and white in both posters and the distance and quantitative difference between them alludes to asymmetrical racial division. The glass frame of the black poster physically demarcates it as a work of high art and prevents the viewer from affecting its surface while the white poster is available for the taking. While the black poster is unique in its singularity, the white posters are seemingly endless – an infinitely reproducible list of blanks waiting to be filled in with another city, another name, another act of violence, by a dark pen against the sleek, glossy white background.

While the work is not so much engaged in the lineage of antagonistic, or even relational, aesthetics – that is, prompting relations of conviviality or antagonism amongst viewers in a shared space – it does create an informal, nebulous, anonymous collectivity through shared “ownership” of the work. By taking a poster from the stack, viewers do not violate the work but rather participate in its dissemination – hanging it in their homes or relocating it to the street – and become intertwined with one another through collective ownership. Moreover, by providing the blank space, the form of the work invites viewers to become not just an owner of the piece, but a collaborator and participant in the work’s meaning, and to share a degree of authorial status with Jaar. Admittedly, though an ‘open work’ in its prompting of viewer participation, the degree to which one can alter the work’s meaning is rather limited – in fact, any addition to the blank space could be understood to be a fulfillment of Jaar’s meaning for it rather than the viewer/participant/creator’s own, altogether different meaning. Nevertheless, these uncertainties and confusions are indicative of the work’s disruption of any clear distinctions between artist and viewer, instead highlighting the fault lines that run along them.

While technological advancements brought about the proliferation and democratization of photography and mechanical reproductions, the ethics of figurative representation were troubled during the 20th century. In the wake of photojournalism’s documentation of wars and its atrocities, Susie Linfield writes, “photographs have robbed us of the alibi of ignorance… [However,] the belief in the saving power of exposure qua exposure can no longer be sustained.” [10] The knowledge and representation of international horrors was and is not enough to catalyze change in and of itself. In fact, the representation of the brutalized or traumatized Other is often complicit in the production of the Other as a victim or otherwise inferior, becoming a re-enactment of violence against them. In “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” Rey Chow also denounces re-presentations of the Other that infuses them with subjectivity, because “defilement and sanctification belong to the same symbolic order.” [11] That is, the order of representation, which leads to a second order of violence. Jaar experienced his own crisis of representation on his trip to Rwanda in 1994 during the country’s genocide against its own people. After returning home to create work about his time there, any attempt to represent the experiences of those he met and what he saw felt inadequate and a failure.

Given both the ethical dilemmas and sheer inadequacy of figurative representation to translate experience and catalyze social change, Jaar has developed an aesthetic practice of “not the production of images, but the creation and choreographing of the viewer’s encounter with and reflection upon the encounter with images…” [12] Rather than enacting a second order of violence upon black bodies through figurative representation, This is what happened, Miss Simone uses the amalgamation of textual and formal, cultural and art historical references to call for an end to police violence. It is through absence rather than presence that This is what happened… provides entry points into the work and necessitates viewers to become active. Jaar does not depict violated black bodies, but instead provides oblique references and absence to compel viewers to become enraged by their own repository of imagery. It might be argued This is what happened… is simply displacing the violence of representation from the work on to the viewer, as the imagery and memory is recalled in the viewer’s mind. However, as Linfield writes, artists are “responsible for the ethics of showing, but we are responsible for the ethics of seeing.”[13] This is what happened, Miss Simone demonstrates an ethical mode of showing violence that leaves the viewer to decipher its very absence by gesturing towards it through textual, formal and cultural, (art) historical reference. While in 1965 Nina Simone sang, “…everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam,” today Beyonce’s “Formation,” J.Cole’s “Be Free,” and The Game’s “Don’t Shoot,” suggest that we now say “…everybody knows about Ferguson Goddam.”

Footnotes

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” The World Tomorrow, May 11, 1928, 215-216.

[2] Maya Angelou, “Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul,” Redhook, November, 1970.

[3] Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press, 2014), 134.

[4] James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York City: Henry Holt & Co, 1985:1995), 39.

[5] Nancy Princenthal, Alfredo Jaar: The Fire This Time: Public Interventions 1979-2005, ed. Emily Ligniti (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2005), 25.

[6] Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 22.

[7] Rubén Gallo et al., “Representation of Violence. Violence of Representation” in Trans (New York, 1997), 59.

[8] Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddam, MP3, Philips Records, 1964.

[9] Walter Benjamin, “The work of Art…,” ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24.

[10] Susie Linfield, “Photojournalism and Human Rights,” in The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 46-47.

[11] Rey Chow, “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 146.

[12] Griselda Pollock, “Not-Forgetting Africa,” in Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images, ed. Nicole Schweizer, trans. Gauthier Herrmann (Lausanne, CH: JRP|Ringier, 2007), 132.

[13] Susie Linfield, “Photojournalism and Human Rights,” in The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 60.

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Nyberg, Patrik, and Jari-Pekka Vanhala, ed. Silja Kudel, Eva Malkki, Jyrki Lappi-Seppälä,

Patrik Nyerg, and Jari-Pekka Vanhala trans. Alfredo Jaar: Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. Porvoo, FI: Bookwell Oy, 2014

Disruption, Permeability, & Radical, Queer Togetherness

Disruption, Permeability, & Radical, Queer Togetherness

May 11, 2016

Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

As I opened the heavy steel doors to Andrea Rosen Gallery’s exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, I was anticipating the artist’s works of distinctive excess – overflowing mounds of candy, piles of strung lights, copious stacks of papers – while silently hoping for the sweaty bodies of hunky go-go dancers. Contrary to these expectations and desires, I encountered a space that was in large part empty, save for the faint presence of a frieze running along the top edge of the gallery’s white walls. I had to tilt my gaze upward and squint in order to see the subtle silver text overlaid on a baby blue banding atop the nearly thirty-foot walls. A stream of text unfurled in what can only be called jumbled chronological disorder; along the gallery walls above me is an assortment of names, locations, and events, each followed by a year. The series reads as follows:

Red Canoe 1987; Watercolors 1964; Paris 1965; Supreme Court; Blue Lake 1986; Our Own Apartment 1976; Rosa 1977; Guámaro 1957; New York City 1979; Pebbles and Biko 1985; Ross 1983; Civil Rights Act 1964; Mariel Boatlift 1980; White Shirt 1984; Julie 1987; An Easy Death 1991; Berlin Wall 1989; Great Society 1964; Venice 1985; Wawanaisa Lake 1987; U.N. 1945; Mother 1986; Myriam 1990; VCR 1978; Dad 1991; Bay of Pigs 1961; D-Day 1944; Interferon 1989; Jeff 1978;  Silver Ocean 1990; H-Bomb 1954; The World I Knew Is Gone 1991; Bruno and Mary 1991; Madrid 1971; MTV 1981; Rafael 1992; May 1968; Andrea 1990; Twenty-fourth Street 1993; L.A. 1990; Placebo 1991; George Nelson Clock 1993; A view to remember 1995

Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (1989) testifies to the complexity of meaning that can be produced within an economy of form. A reimagining of the genre of self-portraiture, this work exclusively consists of a linear index of text and numbers, which art critic and critical theorist Adaire Rounthwaite notes “[create] a body as an accumulation of events.” [1] In this essay, I aim to illustrate the means by which Untitled queers binary distinctions between artist and curator, past and present, the personal and the political, and the individual and the collective to disrupt the notion of distinct, fixed categories and operates as a queer framework for radical togetherness.

Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

In his postmodern essay, The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes writes, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” [2] Gonzalez-Torres performs a gesture much like Barthes’ obituary to the textual Author in Untitled; in an apparent effort to disrupt the fixity of his work’s meaning and to open up the scope of the work’s historical relevance, Gonzalez-Torres instructs future handlers, himself included, to continually modify the piece, insisting that curators are to add to or subtract events from Untitled’s series as they deem fit. This explains the appearance of events in Untitled’s list that had not yet happened by the time of the piece’s production (e.g.,“The World I Knew Is Gone 1991,” which references the death of Gonzalez-Torres’ lover, his world, Ross Laycock; “Placebo 1991,” a work he would later make; and “Andrea 1990,” the year of his first exhibition at Andrea Rosen). The creation of this work through a collaborative exchange between the artist and Untitled’s subsequent owners/curators diffuses and displaces authorship into a liminal space which complicates any clear delineation between the artist and the owner/curator. This relinquishment of authorship consequently poses a critique of originality and authenticity: if the owner modifies the work, should their name be included alongside Gonzalez-Torres’? Or, as a self portrait, does its modification fuse the owner within Gonzalez-Torres’ subjectivity and thereby combine them as a collective entity? Does the proper date of the work change? In response to these questions specifically, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation seems to think not, as it lists Felix Gonzalez-Torres as the sole artist and retains the date of its original creation; however, the questions that the work conjures loom more generally and beg for sustained reflection upon these fundamental notions of authorship, identity, and meaning. [3]

Time, as it is figured in Untitled, folds over and back on itself, and the piece therefore seems to suggest that the notion of a linear delineation of time is fallacious. The work is a continuous stream of text that wraps around the top of four walls and offers no definitive start or end point. Thus, the viewer finds themselves choosing a seemingly arbitrary “beginning” point, imitating the way in which we find ourselves arbitrarily placed within the infinitude of time. Moreover, the events and their accompanying dates, are not in chronological order – at one point, they jump from 1985 to 1987 to 1945, alluding to the way that circumstances of the past continuously reverberate in the present moment. The ability for events to be added and subtracted from Untitled grants the piece--and, transitively, the life of Gonzalez-Torres himself –a quality of continuous renewal and infinite regeneration of life beyond finite death. The inclusion of events that happen after 1989 stands in tension with the work’s date of production. Muddling the distinctions between the past, present, and future in these ways, Untitled suggests these temporal states are in constant flux and interpenetrate one another without rigid borders.

The inclusion of names, locations, and events of varying personal/particular and cultural/general relevance in the text of Untitled constitutes the piece as a self-portrait that embeds an individualized account of Gonzalez-Torres’ life within a larger socio-historical context. For many, the ‘events’ may appear as an arbitrary listing of words followed by a date; however, for those knowledgeable about his life, the significance of each historical ‘event’ is readily read in relation to Gonzalez-Torres’ own personal history. Some events are a listing of personal milestones: “Guámaro 1957,” “Ross 1983,” and “Our Own Apartment 1976,” which respectively refer to the town in Cuba and year he was born in, the first name of his longtime lover and year they met, and the year he and his sister, Gloria, moved in together.[4] These senses of individuality and intimacy are further conjured through the use of first-person in “Our Own Apartment” and “The World I Knew Is Gone.” Every event in the work correlates with a significant event in his life and as such, these events comprise a unique portrait of his life. These personal events do not, however, stand alone; they are interspersed amongst events of broader political-historical import: “Bay of Pigs 1961,” “Civil Rights Act 1964,” and “Supreme Court 1986.” Yet, Untitled does not privilege one type of event over another. The capitalization of the first letter of every word elevates every event to the status of a proper noun such that no one event is distinguished over and above another, thereby suggesting that they are all integral components in Gonzalez-Torres’ identity. Unlike the more immediately personal events laid out above, these events entail significant and widespread consequences for millions of people, events which are included in the timelines of history books. Historical accounts of the Bay of Pigs, the failed military invasion of Cuba by a CIA-sponsored militancy in 1961, necessarily consider it from macroscopic lens; however, in doing so, the voices of individuals are lost in abstraction. On the other hand, autobiographies are overwhelmingly self-involved, and so fail to consider the dramatic impact of broad historical events in their personal lives.

Installation view: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Photo by Pierre Le Hors.

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

Untitled complicates the categorical division between the personal and the political by including both forms of historical events as constitutive elements of Gonzalez-Torres’ textual self-portrait. In doing so, this piece illuminates the ways in which the public, political (in)action spills into individual, personal histories. His desire to subvert this opposition is unsurprising given the repeated ways in which decisions made within the political sphere invaded his personal life. Though born in Guámaro, Cuba in 1957, he had been sent to an orphanage in Madrid the same year, and so was spared of the immediate experience of the Bay of Pigs. However, as a Cuban-American, the Bay of Pigs was necessarily more than a political and historical event for him; it meant the invasion of his home country, violence against his people, and his own tenuousness affective relation to citizenship in the United States. Similarly, the 1986 Supreme Court case, Bowers v. Hardwick, which made sex between two consenting adults of the same sex illegal, was in itself a rupture of the division between the personal and the political. On the one hand, as a gay man, this political and legal ruling infringed upon his personal life, and on the other, his private and personal act of having sex with another man was made to be a political action with legal ramifications. Speaking to this case, Gonzalez-Torres notes, “what we regard as the ‘private’ sphere has never been private. It has always been public.” [5] As a Cuban-American and a gay man, the personal and the political were constantly and overtly overlapping realms for Gonzalez-Torres and the ways in which this reality is reflected in his Unitled self-portrait allow us to imagine how large socio-economic histories directly shape our own personal histories.  

Gonzalez-Torres’ intimate and intertwined relation to the AIDS Crisis constitutes another such convergence of the personal/particular with the political/general. The failure to situate and critically analyze Untitled in the context of the AIDS Crisis would be, in the words of Craig Owens, “an act of gross critical negligence.” [7] While HIV/AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981 in just a few gay men, by 1989, due in large part to the United State government’s silence and inaction, the reported number of AIDS cases in the United States had reached 100,000. The fear of contracting HIV/AIDS haunted the entire nation; however, HIV/AIDS immediately threatened the existence of the gay community, which had been asymmetrically impacted by the epidemic, including both Gonzalez-Torres and his lover, Ross Laycock, who were among the thousands who died from AIDS.[8] Through the ‘events’: “Inferon 1989” (a reference to the proteins which cause cells to heighten their anti-viral defense); “An Easy Death 1991” and “The World I Knew Is Gone 1991” (which refer to the death of Ross due to AIDS), Untitled establishes the impact of AIDS as immediately situated in Gonzalez-Torres’ life.

The component textual elements of Untitled converge as the self-portrait of an individual, of Gonzalez-Torres; however, the distinctly individual and collective socio-historical events, operate as entry-points through which the viewer’s contingent relationship to each event becomes embedded within Gonzalez-Torres. In other words, while events like, “Watercolors 1964” – which refers to the year his dad gave him his first watercolor set – are immediately meaningful only to Gonzalez-Torres, many others, like “Berlin Wall 1989” are variously meaningful to many. Thus, while the fall of the Berlin Wall had a particular impact on Gonzalez-Torres’ life individually, the inclusion of the event retains the potential for different relations to each viewer, which these viewers subsequently utilize in order to interpret and engage with the work. Untitled thus invites viewers to produce meaning contingent upon their own socio-historical relation to each event. This produces a fusing of viewer’s particular histories in relation to the collective histories embedded within Gonzalez-Torres’ self-portrait. Given how meaning and collectivity are contingently produced, this work couches itself in a postmodernist “[attempt] to upset the reassuring stability of [a singular] master position.” [6] Rather than positing a single, fixed, correct meaning to be arrived at in an encounter with this work, its meaning changes according to each viewer and to collective relations to the work.

Utilizing Nicolas Bourriaud’s criteria for relational aesthetics, we might understand Untitled as a framework for radical togetherness. As such, it is a realization of relational aesthetics par excellence. Bourriaud posits the criteria for relational aesthetics as:

(1) “seeking to establish intersubjective encounters in which meaning is elaborated collectively,”

(2) “beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience,”

(3) addresses viewers not just “as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be.” [9]

Though Untitled does not generate explicitly interactive relations amongst viewers, it has meaning only in and through viewers’ interchange with the individual and collective events therein represented as constitutive of Gonzalez-Torres’ life; meaning in the case of this work is decidedly “elaborated collectively.” As the work’s owner is instructed to add and remove events listed in Untitled to maintain socio-cultural-historical relevancy, this work is intrinsically “beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience.” Preserving individuality through listing distinctly personal ‘events’ within its timeline and sustaining viewer’s autonomous relation to each ‘event’; while simultaneously forming a collective by means of folding individual identifications within a shared socio-political history, Untitled is a framework for generating a sense of community.

In unsettling fixed divisions -- between artist, curator, and viewer, past and present, personal and political, individual and collective -- and articulating boundaries and meaning as contingent, overlapping, intermingling, and interconnected, Untitled posits a distinctly queer framework for radical togetherness. As a virus which attacks the immune system, AIDS fundamentally renders urgently intelligible the reality that the human body is as an utterly permeable entity, exposing it as sensitively susceptible to its surrounding environment. Though I may risk setting back the work identity politics has done to separate HIV/AIDS from the LGBTQ community, I find this framework for togetherness as radically queer precisely because it utilizes the very strategy by which the virus which sought to kill – to bring us together. And what is queerer than that?

[1] Adaire Rounthwaite, “Split Witness: Metaphorical Extensions of Life in the Art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,”Representations 109 (2010): 45.

[2] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen (1967): 147.

[3] “Biography,” Félix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, http://felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/?page_id=64.

[4] “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” Queer Cultural Center, http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixBio.html.

[5] Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Body (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2007), 158.

[6] Craig Owens, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 168.

[7] Owens, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, 170.

[8] “History of HIV and AIDS Overview,” AVERT, http://www.avert.org/professionals/history-hiv-aids/overview.  

[9] Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (Massachussets: MIT Press, 2004), 54.

A Familiar Tale Told Out of Order

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Images courtesy of the artist.

A Familiar Tale Told Out of Order

February 20, 2017

In our contemporary world, technological reproduction is increasingly becoming the dominant mode by which viewers first – and, more often than not, exclusively ever – encounter works of art. Walter Benjamin wrote of this shift in his seminal 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in which he suggests this “change testifies to the special conflict in which painting has become enmeshed by the technological reproducibility of the image” (36). In what follows, I endeavor to explicate the ways in which Freeman Schlesinger’s series, Free Lunch (2016), responds to the particular transformations in technological reproducibility between then and now. I suggest that in attempting to maintain control over the conditions of its reception, Free Lunch confounds discrete notions of authenticity, originality, and reproduction.

This past summer I reconnected with Schlesinger, a friend from high school, in the air-conditioned reprieve of a café off the Morgan Avenue L train stop in Bushwick, New York. An artist enrolled in his final year at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and University of Pennsylvania dual-degree program, he had recently spent time in Buenos Aires where he produced Free Lunch, a series of fifteen acrylic paintings on cotton rag paper. He surprised me when he pulled a stack of the works out of his bag, and let me flip through them.

As I held one of the works in my hand, I felt awash in the undeniable preciousness of their presence, in the affective experience of the “here and now,” or what Benjamin coins the “aura” of the work of art. They were extremely lightweight and delicate which was reflected by some flecks of paint that, like scabs, had already chipped off – tracing the works’ travels and marking “the history to which the work [had] been subject” (21). These physical changes to the work reaffirm the status of the works as authentic, as unique works that traveled through space and time. However, this sensation of the works unique existence and originality was also because, despite being small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, each work possessed a great deal of gesture and movement. These gestural strokes and dynamic color relationships traffic in the – by now exhausted and thoroughly critiqued – genre of Abstract Expressionist painting, which is infamous in its claim to be synonymous with authenticity and the pure, unmediated expression of the artist’s hand.

It’s important to note here that as I reflect on the series’ formal qualities I am modulating between two forms of viewing: the physical and the digital, and thereby muddling the distinction that Benjamin belabors between exhibition and cult value. However, it is precisely this “tension between [the] two polarities” of physical, in-person experience and that of the virtual that this series brings to the fore (25). The scale of the works, which are in perfect life-size proportion to how they are viewed the screen of an iPhone 6/7 (2.375 x 3.125 inches), highlights and throws into question any clear delineation between these modes of reception. What are the conditions of reception under which this series intended to be viewed?

The scalar limitation on the conditions of the works’ production suggests an awareness that the artist’s intentions are irrelevant – whether Schlesinger likes it or not, in the age of technological reproducibility, his works will inevitably be encountered within the space of the virtual. Whether this is the viewer’s first encounter with them or a subsequent one, the ability to reproduce images allows for the “copy of the original [to be] in situations which the original itself cannot attain” (21). While Benjamin hails this transitory quality as the work of art’s emancipation from the bonds of ritual, for the controlling artist this also evokes a reasonable anxiety. If the copy of an original can be placed in situations unattainable by the original, then is the work any longer the same work? Is it the artist’s anymore? In fact, is it even a copy?

In delimiting the scale of these works, Schlesinger attempts to maintain consistencies, to narrow the gap between and across its physical and virtual modes of reception – the former being what we might consider the original, and the latter the reproduction. However, this consideration demonstrates an anticipation of its inevitable, eventual technological reproduction. Yet, not just any reproduction of Free Lunch will do – if one were to just take a picture of it, they might capture imagery beyond the borders of the work. Instead, Schlesinger produces a virtual, ‘copy’ image scaled precisely to match the screen of an iPhone that becomes its only digitally accessible form. The intentional limitations on the size of the works anticipates its virtual life, and even suggest the work is not complete until it has been reproduced and encountered on the screen of an iPhone 6/7. Thus, Free Lunch necessarily entails this preliminary act of technological reproduction in order to be achieve its intended form, in order to become an original.

For Benjamin, reproducibility brings about the liberation of works of art from cult value, yet Free Lunch challenges this notion by creating a formal relationship between the physical ‘copy’ and the digital ‘original’ that compels a desire to view the two simultaneously. Even though we might locate the ‘original,’ resting within the digital realm of the iPhone screen, to be easily disseminated and accessible, the desire to compare and verify the two generates a cult value in the copy. As a result, Free Lunch displaces the authority of the original and complicates discrete allocations of originality, reproduction, and uniqueness.