In the wake of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, cornerstones were often all that was left unburned. Also left standing were adaptable community members, who have continued to show up for each other, filling in systemic gaps through nimble response.
LA AYUDA Art Benefit will feature hundreds of stones—symbols of the resilience and strength of community—each authored by an individual artist. Together, they demonstrate the foundation of mutual aid and collective care that undergirds and supports LA County. Each stone is sold on a sliding scale with the proceeds distributed by the LA AYUDA Network directly to the underresourced communities structurally excluded from existing recovery aid, such as undocumented, BIPoC, essential workers, children, and youth.
No two stones are the same. Artists selected stones from their ecosystems and altered them in countless ways, created them from diverse materials, or manifested them digitally. Each stone sustains a broader narrative: We are an empowered community, committed to collective re-building.
To make a donation or see where the stones are located across LA, visit: @laayudanetwork and www.laayudanetwork.com
LA AYUDA Network (Los Angeles Artists Yield: Union for Distributing Aid) is an artist-led volunteer group committed to providing vetted health communications and resources (PPE, tenants’ rights information) to Angelenos most impacted by the fires.
Core Principles:
We believe that cataclysmic fires are the result of climate change; the fossil fuel industry’s extractive practices; and systemic failures of local, state, and federal governments.
We also believe that mutual aid networks —resilient, restorative, and responsive— best protect people and ecosystems doubly besieged within carceral, surveillant systems.
We are committed to distributing vital, vetted, and hard-found health resources and housing information to underresourced communities. Investing in networks of social justice and mutual aid is—and will continue to be—critical to the longevity and health of our communities in Los Angeles County.
Red LA AYUDA (Artistas de Los Ángeles Producen: Unión para Distribuir Ayuda) es un grupo voluntario liderado por artistas comprometidos con proveer información verificada de salud y recursos (equipo personal de protección, información de derechos de inquilinos) para los Angelinos más afectados por los incendios.
Principios Básicos:
Creemos que los incendios catastróficos son el resultado del cambio climático, prácticas extractivas de la industria de combustibles fósiles, y de las fallas sistémicas de gobiernos locales, estatales y federales que eligen financiar sistemas carcelarios y vigilancia sobre la protección de la gente y ecosistemas.
Creemos que frente a la ausencia de liderazgo cívico o ético, participar en redes de justicia social y ayuda mutua es crítico para la longevidad y salud de comunidades.
Creemos en la distribución de cruciales y verificados recursos de salud e información de vivienda para comunidades de escasos recursos dada la ausencia de fuentes cívicas confiables.
Letter from the Editor
As I write this, Los Angeles is still burning. The devastation we have seen in the last week has been unfathomable. Friends and community members have lost homes, art spaces, studios, businesses, schools, and whole neighborhoods. Our city will not be the same.
This profound loss has been quickly met with an outpouring of mutual aid and care. People are donating money, clothes, baby supplies, legal advice, childcare, health consultations, and more. Recalling the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, neighbors are gathering in protective gear to disperse supplies and aid in clean-up efforts. It has been beautiful to witness and contribute to these efforts, as so many of us try to do what we can to uplift those most impacted by this catastrophe, one undoubtedly ushered in by climate change.
Our recovery in L.A. will be prolonged. It will continue long after the national news coverage and Instagram algorithms move on. Immense uncertainty about what our city will look like on the other side remains, but recovery will undoubtedly require top-down initiatives and grassroots organizing in equal measure. We are thrilled to see the swift organizing by artists, arts workers, museums, galleries, and other institutions in support of affected individuals and families. At the time of this writing, the L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, a coalition led by the J. Paul Getty Trust, has already committed
$12 million in emergency grants for the art community.1 There are already profound displays of grassroots mutual aid led by artists and art workers. At the time of this writing, Grief and Hope has raised more than $400,000 to support artists and arts workers impacted by the fires. Other Places Art Fair (OPaF) has already dispersed $5,000 in microgrants to twenty-three individuals. The LA AYUDA Network, a group committed to providing aid to under-resourced communities, has begun to mobilize.2 Carla will continue to collaborate with its peer organizations to amplify these and other mutual aid efforts.
In this issue of Carla, jonah valdez writes about Jay Carlon, an artist who has channeled immense grief into performance. valdez writes that Carlon’s practice invites us “to process our grief and joy in community, urging us toward the realization that showing up for each other’s grief is a radical act in the face of our dominant Western capitalist society that seeks to individualize. In contrast, being together is urgent and essential for survival and healing.” We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but we will continue to show up for each other, working towards communal healing one day at a time. We love you L.A.
Lindsay Preston Zappas Founder & Editor-in-Chief
January 15, 2025
1. Getty, “Foundations and Arts Organizations Create $12M LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund,” January 15, 2025, https://www.getty.edu/news/foundations-andarts-organizations-create-emergency-relief-fund-forla-arts-community-fire-relief-fund/.
2. Grief and Hope, “Help LA’s Artists and Art Workers Start Over,” GoFundMe, accessed January 15, 2025, https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-rebuild-the-livesof-las-artists-and-art-workers; Other Places Art Fair (@otherplacesartfair), “Hi family! Just a quick update on the Emergency Micro Grants,” Instagram, January 10, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DEqGxR6y3Xf/ ?hl=en; Los Angeles Artists Yield: Union for Distributing Aid (@laayudanetwork), “LA AYUDA Network is an artist-led volunteer group,” Instagram, January 15, 2025, https://www.instagram.com/p/DE3BZjITc1w/.
8
PST ART
Art & War Collide in Cai Guo-Qiang’s WE ARE
Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu
18
Grief is a Filipino Boxing Match
jonah valdez
26
Adaptive Theory On the Evolution of Ecofeminism
Ashlyn Ashbaugh
34 Interview with Dashiell Manley
Mateus Nunes
Reviews
Ben Caldwell at Art + Practice
—Allison Noelle Conner
Jonathan Casella at Gross! Gallery
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Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
—Ashton S. Phillips
Demetri Broxton at Patricia Sweetow Gallery
—Taylor Bythewood-Porter
Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch
—Zoey Greenwald
Evan Apodaca at Grand Central Art Center
—Aaron Katzeman
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Carla is free, grassroots, and artist-led. Club Carla members keep it that way. Club Carla is a joyful community of artcurious individuals who join us in taking conversations off the page and into artist studios, galleries, and beyond.
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From top left to bottom right: Studio visits with Elliott Hundley, Rosha Yaghmai, and Simphiwe Ndzube; West Side gallery hop; Frieze-week launch party at The Ace Hotel; and walkthrough at ICA LA with curator Amanda Sroka.
Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles is a quarterly magazine, online art journal, and podcast committed to being an active source of critical dialogue in and around Los Angeles’ art community. Carla acts as a centralized space for art writing that is bold, honest, approachable, and focused on the here and now.
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Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists.
Photo: Argel Rojo.
Contributors
Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder of Carla. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include those at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), OCHI (Los Angeles), and City Limits (Oakland).
Erin F. O’Leary is a writer, editor, and photographer from the Midwest and raised in Maine. A graduate of Bard College, she has lived in Los Angeles since 2018, where she writes about photography and image culture. Her work has appeared in Carla and Photograph, among other publications.
Allison Noelle Conner is an arts and culture writer based in Los Angeles.
Satoru Nihei is a graphic designer.
Rachel Paprocki is a writer, editor, and student of library science who lives and bikes in Los Angeles.
Aaron Boehmer is a writer and photographer from Texas. He is interested in writing and research related to the intersection between politics and art and has written for publications such as The Nation, The Drift, and Texas Monthly
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Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART, Act I: “Dimensionality Reduction” (performance view) (2024). Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 2024. Image courtesy of Cai Studio. Photo: Kenryou Gu.
PST ART
Art & War Collide in Cai Guo-Qiang’s WE ARE
On September 15, 2024, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang launched an array of fireworks titled WE ARE: Explosion Event at University of Southern California’s (USC) Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Delivered via dystopian fleets of drones and positioned panoptically around the stadium, Cai’s daytime fireworks included exquisite “birds of paradise” crafted from prismatic smoke, serpentine arcs of light, and pyrotechnics shaped like zodiac signs. Explosives encircled some 4,500 viewers deliberately placed by the artist in the Coliseum’s field instead of the stadium seating in a reversal of spectator and spectacle. Presiding over the display was Cai himself, a cerebral figure much celebrated for his provocative work with gunpowder and fireworks. Over a half-hour of five sequential acts, Cai delivered a bombastic commentary on humanity’s ambivalent relationship with new technologies in Mandarin, which was broadcast over loudspeakers as a live translation into English by cAI™, his proprietary artificial intelligence program. cAI™, trained on Cai’s past artworks, archives, and personal interests, helped generate both imagery for the explosions and made-up compound words projected on two screens at the front of the stadium.1 In his voiceover, Cai drew allusions from Prometheus and Eve to a Chinese parable about a vengeful god of thunder, cautioning the audience about the sacrifices that progress exacts, all while downplaying his own engagement with weapons of destruction.
Cai, who considers cAI™ a close collaborator, began his oration by daring the AI to emerge from the computer out into the world: “Let’s play!”2 Yet the event entirely disregarded
the material realities of AI, from its severe environmental toll and dependence on exploited workers in the Global South to its use in ongoing genocides internationally.3 As explosions shook the stadium with sonic force, across the world, AI tools like Lavender and Project Nimbus were used to target and transform Gazan refugee camps into 40-foot-deep craters, vanishing entire human bodies under the force of 100-pound bombs.4 WE ARE also traumatized spectators and residents of surrounding neighborhoods: Some spectators were reportedly injured by falling debris from the pyrotechnics, while residents unaware of the event thought that actual bombs were being dropped.5
Such neglect made WE ARE a curious choice for the opening event of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a network of exhibitions across more than 70 Southern California art institutions. Embracing Southern California’s history of scientific innovation, the program aims to foster exploration of the intersections of art and science. Many PST exhibitions have staged interventions to the often exclusionary and exploitative institution of science, foregrounding themes such as community science, environmental justice, and Indigenous futurisms. Cai’s WE ARE and his connected exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey at the USC Pacific Asia Museum similarly align with the PST ethos to reclaim and realize utopian possibilities in science, yet ultimately reveal the limits of attempts to rehabilitate science through art. From intensifying state surveillance and spreading disinformation via deepfakes to automating genocide in Palestine and enabling mineral extraction powered by modern-day slavery in the Congo,6 today’s technology seems inexorably at the service of empire and capital. In aestheticizing technologies of war and overinvesting art with the ability to counteract or mitigate the harms of science, art only provides cover for its abuses.
Art & Science Collide is not the first major art and science program in
Southern California to be eclipsed by war. From 1967 to 1971, the blockbuster Art and Technology (A&T) initiative at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) devised an ill-fated experiment that coincided with the Vietnam War.7 LACMA had proposed a series of artist collaborations with corporate giants, pairing heavyweights like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Serra with General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NASA, and others, culminating in the 1971 exhibition.8 With access to emerging technologies like cybernetics, holographs, and lasers, artists were intended to realize their visionary potential as hybrid artist-technologists and engineers of the future. But as atrocities in Vietnam came to light, the abstracted play of artists with technology was overshadowed by the devastatingly real impact of weapons of war manufactured by A&T sponsors like RAND and Lockheed.9 Already frustrated by the clash between artists and corporate culture, the exhibition opened with only sixteen collaborations that had successfully produced any work, much of which was critical of the project. Critics and even participating artists eviscerated A&T for embracing techno-fascism.10 Though intended as the first iteration of an ongoing project, the A&T initiative was discontinued. In Anne Collins Goodyear’s analysis, the technophobia generated by the Vietnam War triggered a major decline in technologically oriented artwork featured at U.S. institutions from the 1970s to the 1980s.11
Fifty years later, these same complicities now undermine Art & Science Collide’s resurgence of critical optimism about science. The program centers the artist-scientist as a vaunted, influential actor whose fusion of the two disciplines produces novel solutions to today’s problems. If art and science empower each other to effect greater social good, Art & Science Collide seeks to enhance public understanding of this potential by dispelling the skepticism and charges of elitism increasingly levied against both.12 As art is activated
to produce tangible contributions to causes like environmental justice, science is rendered more accessible, stimulating, and intimately relevant through art. Despite this hopeful spirit of social concern, however, art’s overinflated sense of its own abilities is put into brutal perspective by the real-world applications of science and technology.
To be sure, Art & Science Collide has evolved from A&T’s unabashedly technophilic approach. PST has exchanged “technology”—loaded with negativity in today’s world of hypervisible, digitally-powered atrocities—for a field inclusive of more natural, biological systems under the broad banner of “science.” Many exhibitions, for instance, address climate change, while avoiding controversial “digital-age issues.”13 The only AI-themed exhibition is REDCAT’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace; a handful of other exhibitions interrogate technologies like remote sensing and surveillance tools (among them Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency at the Wende Museum and Remote Sensing: Explorations Into the Art of Detection at the Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Art & Science Collide is also much more progressive, accessible, and diverse than A&T. Exhibitions under the PST umbrella uncover diverse figures in the history of science, subvert institutional definitions of sex and gender, and elevate issues of social justice from global warming to disability activism. All Watched Over, for instance, envisions AI futurities that are “rooted in indigenous belief systems, and feminist, queer, and decolonial imaginaries,”14 showing how tools like algorithmic prediction models, augmented reality, and interactive AI can be used in decolonial practices of divination, sacred dreaming, and speculative research. Yet PST’s iteration of the art-meetsscience experiment remains complicit in artwashing corporate and militaristic interests. While artistic visions of next-generation AI and reparative science are entertained in the Global North, animated through identity
Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1967–71).
Images courtesy of LACMA Archives.
Top: Cai Guo-Qiang, Shadow: Pray for Protection (1985–86). Gunpowder, ink, candle wax, and oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 61 × 118 inches. Image courtesy of Cai Studio.
Bottom: Cai Guo-Qiang, Camorra Test (installation view) (2018–19). Gunpowder on plaster, marble, glass, ceramics, terracotta, brick, concrete, wire, and canvas, dimensions variable. USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Image courtesy of Cai Studio. Photo: Mengjia Zhao.
politics, they gloss over simultaneous atrocities enacted with those very technologies in the Global South. As artists project utopian futures, genocides are live-streamed in real time. As with A&T, which participating artist James Turrell described as “vastly overshadowed by the thrust of things going on independently”15 (i.e., the Vietnam War), it is impossible and unconscionable to separate the optimistic aims of Art & Science Collide from its geopolitical context, as the same technologies feeding new artistic practices enable human rights abuses worldwide.
This notion is further complicated by the fact that Art & Science Collide was funded by at least one major sponsor complicit in genocide, Bank of America, which has ongoing business relations with the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems.16 Further, many of the participating institutions are universities investing in weapons manufacturers, including USC.17
Four days after USC hosted WE ARE’s artistic deployment of drones at The Coliseum, University of California regents voted to equip campus police at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with military-style weapons, including drones and projectile launchers, to further the repression of student-led proPalestinian protests.18 (UCLA was the most-granted institution, receiving $2 million from PST.)19
While artists may attempt resistance from within institutions, financial complicities undermine the forms of imaginative play and experimentation they enact, even when envisioned as survivance and resistance. From drones to AI, who gets to play with bombs? With whose blood money, and on top of whose bodies? In one world, a bird of paradise blooms; in another, a bomb falls on a refugee camp and a drone descends to pick off the survivors one by one.20
During WE ARE, Cai asserted: “If gunpowder is used in violence and terrorism but an artist uses gunpowder in the creation of art and beauty, that brings a sliver of hope to humanity.”21 Such self-aggrandizement reveals
the emptiness of WE ARE’s espoused “we,” an inherently exclusionary project. Which “we” is served by the artwashing of AI and drone technology? Cai’s charged reference to terrorism also propagated the Islamophobic rhetoric of the West, demonizing oppressed groups while absolving state-sanctioned terrorism. The artist further shared, “Since September 11, I saw the impact of daytime explosions,” tracing his interest in daytime fireworks to the attack on the Twin Towers. Cai extracted aesthetic value without acknowledging the human costs of the tragedy—costs multiplied exponentially as the attack was used to justify the decades-long “War on Terror,” a war fought with drones. Presented just days after the anniversary of 9/11, WE ARE was not only literally deafening to experience but tone-deaf in its uncritical use of weaponized technology and rhetoric alike.
The exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey further attests to Cai’s indiscriminating aesthetic interest in all forms of explosive violence, humanmade or otherwise, through a selection of paintings created with gunpowder. In Shadow: Pray for Protection (1985–86), the artist renders victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb in gunpowder and melted wax, accompanied, strangely, by a photorealistic self-portrait. Camorra Test (2018–19), an arrangement of faux-archaeological artifacts smattered with gunpowder, replicated the effect of the eruption in Pompeii. cAI™ also figured as a collaborator on two gunpowder paintings on glass and mirror, The Annunciation of cAI™ and Canvas on the Moon: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 38 (both 2023), by generating imagery and executing it with a mechanical arm. Presented with the barest historical context and eerily reminiscent of contemporary scenes of destruction, these works appeared flatly universal. Just as he viewed terrorism as singular explosions detached from systemic violence, in these works Cai minimizes the circumstances of each particular scene of violence, highlighting instead its aesthetic qualities and expression through experimental technologies.
Cai Guo-Qiang, WE ARE: Explosion Event for PST ART, Act II: “WE ARE” (performance view) (2024). Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 2024. Image courtesy of Cai Studio. Photo: Kenryou Gu.
Nor was much curatorial commentary provided, as exhibition texts primarily discussed a study of Cai’s materials and techniques used in his gunpowder experiments, conducted by the Getty Conservation Institute and Getty Research Institute. While the exhibition had a deep technical focus on the work’s chemical and physical composition, it avoided engaging in a more profound analysis of art, science, and their shared capacity for violence.
An incisive critique of such politically dispassionate practice may be found in Amy Goldin’s 1972 essay “Art and Technology in a Social Vacuum,” written in response to A&T. Goldin wrote, “Once subject matter and the artist’s ‘feelings’ were removed from the center of the stage, what was left? Materials are real. Methods are real. Places are real.”22 In attempting to fuse art with science, we must consider the materiality of artwork. Artists should be aware of how they confer legitimacy and sympathy upon destructive technologies via the methods and materials they utilize. After all, materials and methods are not disembodied tools for the artist to wield, but tangible formulations that emerge from specific networks of power, labor, and capital. In the case of many technologies, these materials are developed, funded, and used by corporations to further global campaigns of death. Art may sear, lacerate, move, and wound metaphorically, but science can be weaponized to enact material change on a massive scale and literally incinerate people alive.23
Years in the making, Art & Science Collide could not have anticipated coinciding with the War on Gaza. Yet, war is never far, so long as U.S. imperialism continues to wrack the world from Palestine to Sudan. Against the permanent backdrop of global devastation flickering in and out of visibility, waves of both technophilia and technophobia surge across Southern California, ignited and dampened in turn by the appearance of major conflicts.
By the twenty-first century, A&T was “unproblematically reclaimed,”
remembered as a pioneering initiative in hybridizing art and technology.24 In 2014, it was resurrected as the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA, complete with morally dubious sponsors like Google, NVIDIA, and SpaceX.25 Art & Science Collide originates from this same fascination with the technopolis of Southern California, from the aerospace industry to Silicon Valley and Hollywood—all industries linked to genocide, environmental destruction, and global exploitation. To honor the program’s attempts to critically engage and contest these sites of scientific power requires turning the lens on itself and examining the difference between reclamation and complicity. While individual exhibitions may form limited if still significant sites of resistance, they are integrated into a broader PST project that cannot resolve its internal contradictions around its volatile union of art and science—two institutions fixed in a global framework of corporate and imperial domination.
In the final act of WE ARE, entitled “Divine Wrath,” cAI™ relayed a Chinese parable about a thunder god, just before rings of thunderous explosions and blinding light began to lash around the audience. In the story, a group of children hide in a temple on a mountain during a storm. When the storm fails to relent, they realize that the thunder god is angry and demands a sacrifice. Yet when the bullies of the group push the most kind, selfless child out into the storm as a sacrifice, the god instead destroys the temple as punishment.26 As fragments of debris fell from the sky at the end of the show, a pale imitation of the aftermath of a bombardment, this message felt more visceral than any other part of WE ARE. Perhaps WE ARE should heed its own final act, and refuse to submit a sacrifice to the altar of science and progress, lest the temple be destroyed and all within it.
Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu is an archivist, cultural worker, and writer based in Los Angeles.
1. Cai Guo-Qiang, “Recent Projects,” accessed December 5, 2024, https://caiguoqiang.com/projects/.
2. Min Chen, “A.I. Meets Pyrotechnics at Cai Guo-Qiang’s Explosive Fireworks Spectacle in L.A.,” Artnet News, September 16, 2024, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ cai-guo-qiang-pst-art-fireworks-ai-2537066.
3. See, for instance: Shaolei Ren and Adam Wierman, “The Uneven Distribution of AI’s Environmental Impacts,” Harvard Business Review, July 15, 2024, https://hbr. org/2024/07/the-uneven-distribution-of-aisenvironmental-impacts; Patricia Gestoso, “How artificial intelligence is recolonising the Global South,” The Mint, September 24, 2022, https://www.themintmagazine. com/how-artificial-intelligence-is-recolonising-theglobal-south.
4. Sarmad Ishfaq, “Israel’s AI-powered genocide of the Palestinians,” Middle East Monitor, June 3, 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240603israels-ai-powered-genocide-of-the-palestinians.
5. Jessica Gelt, “Getty PST Art fireworks show caused injuries, so what went wrong? Artist Cai Guo-Qiang answers,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2024, https:// www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-10-03/ getty-pst-art-fireworks-cai-guo-qiang.
6. Terry Gross, “How ‘modern-day slavery’ in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy,” NPR, February 1, 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/ goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobaltcongo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara.
7. Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,”’ Leonardo 41, no. 2 (April 2008): 169–73, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20206559.
8. A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–1971 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971), https://eastofborneo.org/ wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AT-Program-LACMA.pdf.
9. Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia.”
10. John Beck and Ryan Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab,” Cultural Politics 14, no. 2 (July 2018): 225–43, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-6609102.
11. Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.”
12. Chadd Scott, “Third Edition Of Getty’s PST ART Moves Beyond Los Angeles, And Beyond Art,” Forbes, September 11, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chaddscott/ 2024/09/11/third-edition-of-gettys-pst-art-movesbeyond-los-angeles-and-beyond-art/.
13. Jori Finkel, “Where is the big museum blockbuster on AI?” The Art Newspaper, July 15, 2024, https://www. theartnewspaper.com/2024/07/15/where-is-the-bigmuseum-blockbuster-on-ai.
14. REDCAT, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” press release, September 2024, https://www. redcat.org/events/2024/all-watched-over.
15. Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia.”
16. Emma Paling, “Revealed: BMO bankrolled Israeli weapons maker with a $90M loan,” The Breach, January 27, 2023, https://breachmedia.ca/revealed-bmobankrolled-israeli-weapons-maker-with-a-90m-loan/.
17. USC Divest from Death Coalition, “After a year of genocide, what will it take for USC to divest?” Daily Trojan, October 7, 2024, https://dailytrojan.com/2024/10/07/ a-year-of-genocide/; Sophie Austin, “University of California official says system has $32 billion in holdings targeted by protesters,” AP News, May 15, 2024, https:// apnews.com/article/california-regents-university-
divestment-israel-a10e121cfa68badab77efc65d8ea1925; Caltech Students for Justice in Palestine, “We are the engine of research at Caltech. But who is providing the fuel, and who is driving?” The California Tech, June 4, 2024, https://tech.caltech.edu/2024/06/04/sjp-whoprovides-the-fuel/; Jiya Kathuria, “‘It seems like they don’t care’: Chapman University Investment committee of the board of trustees denies SJP’s divestment proposal,” The Panther, September 12, 2024, https://www. thepanthernewspaper.org/news/it-seems-like-theydont-care-chapman-university-investment-committeeof-the-board-of-trustees-denies-sjps-divestmentproposal.
18. Michael Burke, “UC regents approve campus police requests for more military-style weapons, ammunition,” EdSource, September 20, 2024, https://edsource.org/ updates/uc-regents-approve-campus-police-requestsfor-more-weapons-ammunition.
19. Jessica Wolf, “UCLA plays a pivotal role in Getty PST ART, the nation’s largest art event,” UCLA Newsroom, May 22, 2024, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ ucla-plays-pivotal-role-getty-pst-art-nations-largestart-event.
20. Marcus White, “Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting children,” BBC, November 13, 2024, https:// www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo.
21. This quote was transcribed during the live event and differs slightly from the official transcript published on Cai’s website. The artist’s studio noted that Cai’s actual oration was slightly off-script, but emphasized that “the core message and sentiment remain consistent across these versions.”
22. Amy Goldin, “Art and Technology in a Social Vacuum,” Art in America 60, no. 2 (March–April 1972), 50.
23. “Israel attacked Rafah at night, ‘all the people burned,’” Al Jazeera, May 27, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/ features/2024/5/27/israel-attacked-rafah-at-night-allthe-people-burned.
24. Beck and Bishop, “The Return of the Art and Technology Lab.”
25. Samantha Culp, “LACMA Art + Technology Lab: Then, Now, and Next,” Hyundai Artlab, July 7, 2022, https:// artlab.hyundai.com/editorial/lacma-art-technology-labthen-now-and-next; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “LACMA Introduces Art + Technology Lab,” press release, December 10, 2013, https://www.lacma.org/sites/ default/files/A%2BT-Release-FINAL-12.11.13.pdf.
26. Cai Studio, “Cai Guo-Qiang joined hands with cAI™ to illuminate the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum,” accessed December 5, 2024, https://mailchi.mp/ caiguoqiang/cai-guo-qiang-illuminates-la-memorialcoliseum.
Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024.
Image courtesy of the artists.
Photo: Argel Rojo.
Grief is a Filipino Boxing Match
punching bag could also symbolize postcolonial grief—for Carlon, grief of losses from the Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines from which his parents immigrated. When Carlon punched the rice-filled bag during the performance, he was in a battle with not only himself, but his colonizer. During the seventh round, he escalated the resistance, stabbing the bag with a blade, tearing it open as its innards of calrose rice spilled over the artist and onto the dance floor.
In 2021, the Los Angeles-based dance artist Jay Carlon suffered a litany of losses: his brother was found dead on a Little Tokyo sidewalk; his grandmother died in the Philippines shortly after (limited by Covid travel restrictions, he and his family mourned over Facebook Live); and he broke up with his partner of 15 years. Years earlier, in 2008, his father had also died. From the grief of these losses came a series of three performances that took place over three years. The first performance, WAKE, was staged in November 2021 as part of the Flower of the Season performance series at Venice’s Electric Lodge, and the second, Novena, was performed over several nights in 2022 at REDCAT. The final version, also named WAKE, created with composer Micaela Tobin and produced in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Center for the Art of the Performance, was performed last October on the expansive dance floor at Don Quixote, a Boyle Heights quinceañera hall and nightclub.
The one-night event last autumn was structured as a nine-round boxing match in which Carlon faced off with a punching bag filled with rice —hung suspended center stage, it doubled as the physical manifestation of his grief. Performance artist láwû makuriye’nte played the part of a ring announcer and coach, while Tobin operated a DJ booth on an elevated stage. The billing for the show invited “communities born in the wake of the U.S. empire an opportunity to grieve, heal and find solace in the collective.”1 With this framework in mind, the
But by the end, you got the sense that Carlon no longer had fight left in him. We saw Carlon collapse on the floor as rice from the bag poured over his body. From this vulnerable place, Carlon spoke for the first time in the hour-long performance, directly to the audience through a microphone: He asked why he felt like his survival depended on his fighting, and wondered what would happen if he stopped, whether his grief would disappear, and with it, the memory of his lost loved ones. The performance was intimate, as much of the audience, which skewed largely Asian American, Latinx, and queer, huddled around Carlon, eye-level with him. The audience, which included his mother and brother, remained engaged throughout Carlon’s dynamic performance. But it was Carlon opening himself to the crowd, spilling rice, and with it, his grief, onto the dance floor, that seemed to resonate most strongly. While showing us the limits of trying to fight grief away in isolation, the performance tapped into what happens to grief after shedding sharpness for softness and the individual for the collective.
Our current era is defined by grief, both on individual and mass scales: A global pandemic is ongoing; the state continues to murder Black and Brown people (in the streets and in prisons); the U.S. is funding genocide in Palestine; and in November, our country reelected a former president who promises to inflict harm on our immigrant and queer communities. Even while this grief is broadcast to us every day through our phones, there is an expectation of normalization that propels America’s
capitalist agenda. We must return to work. Buy things. Have social lives. Fall in love. And we are instructed to cope with our losses in private, by individualized means. Writer and artist Camille Sapara Barton writes on the lack of “state-initiated” moments to grieve those who died during Covid: “To do so in public space would jeopardize the needs of the market, so hungry for us all to become productive workers and consumers again.” She asks, “How can we live in a way that serves the web of life?”2
The iterations of WAKE push against the isolation of grief. Carlon and his collaborator Tobin began to work together in 2021 after connecting over their feelings of cultural loss and estrangement in being Filipino American and their shared fight against colonialism. Carlon and Tobin are guided by Black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde who speak to the interwoven struggles of collective liberation and the Filipino concept of kapwa, or the coming together of people—another notion of radical interconnectedness. Kapwa invites you inside its home, gives you a place to sit, to tsismis (gossip) with others and share laughter. Kapwa asks, “Did you eat?” and then packs the leftovers in Ziploc bags for you to bring home. Kapwa says, “my loss is yours, and my joy is yours.” WAKE invited us inside to process our grief and joy in community, urging us toward the realization that showing up for each other’s grief is a radical act in the face of our dominant Western capitalist society that seeks to individualize. In contrast, being together is urgent and essential for survival and healing.
He revealed to us his compounding familial and collective losses. We helped him build an altar of grief.
I walked into that performance space with my own loss. One week earlier, my family and I had buried my grandfather. Over a meal of sinigang or pinakbet, my grandfather, a talented storyteller, would spin illustrious stories of home in northern Luzon, Philippines. With his death, I lost a bridge to a place I had never known, a Filipino culture I still fight to cling to, and a language I don’t understand. I would later learn Carlon and I share this loss. My mother tongues of Ilocano and Tagalog are foreign to me, and Carlon cannot speak his mother tongue of Visayan. At the graveside, my family and I carried out a similar flower ritual, each setting a stem atop my grandfather’s casket. The ritual embodies kapwa—the mass of flowers is the mass of community members who hold each other up. Though my loss was recent, I had already begun to bury my grief amid a new job and new relationship. Carlon’s invitation to partake in the onstage ritual also embodied this same collective grief, and it allowed me to access my own as I cried from my theater seat.
Carlon often externalizes his grief with physical objects, as if he needs to witness it outside of himself.
The first time I saw Carlon perform was in October 2021, when he debuted the first iteration of WAKE. He began by inviting the audience onstage. We each plucked a flower stem from a white plastic bucket before setting it down to form a circle in the center of the stage.
In Moving Through: BAGGAGE, a 2021 dance film produced with Metro Art, Carlon tugs on a dozen articles of luggage fastened with string, dragging them across Los Angeles’ Union Station.3 In This Ocean is a Bridge, another dance film released in 2021, Carlon uses nature to physicalize his grief: He stands on the Santa Monica shoreline, staring out across the Pacific Ocean, calling out to his grandmother who died that year.4 Because Carlon chooses such public objects to embody his grief, each performance is an invitation to project and process our own. Within Carlon’s display of vulnerability, we also get to watch our grief play out in front of us.
Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance views) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024.
Images courtesy of the artists. Photos: Argel Rojo.
Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance views) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024. Images courtesy of the artists.
Photo: Jonathan Potter (top); Argel Rojo (bottom).
At the start of the October performance, Carlon entered with the pomp and swagger of a prizefighter. He wore a maximalist costume designed by VINTA Gallery that drew from both Catholic and precolonial Indigenous art styles, a nod to the colonial tension inherent in Filipino symbology.5 makuriye’nte pumped up the crowd with rousing calls to “cunts and bussies,” “baklas,” and “heterosexuals,” drawing roaring applause.
From the DJ booth, Tobin spun “Pump Up the Jam.” As Tobin distorted the club music and cut it to silence, Carlon was left to face the punching bag alone, mirroring the isolation of his grief. He weaved as the bag swung toward him, taunting it before striking it again. He performed hypermasculinity, a response to the emasculating horrors of empire. He embodied a particular rage that I found familiar—rage that began when I first learned about a history left out of most American education: the U.S. government’s violent extraction of the Philippines, our land, and our bodies, reducing us to an expendable commodity. The audience also reacted to this palpable rage, shouting affirmations like “Get ready,” “Shake it out,” and “Let’s go now.” We carry a colonial past and face a neocolonial present that tears us from each other and our histories. This makes the act of showing up for each other’s fight and grief— community, kapwa—a radical act of resistance.
Eventually, Carlon stopped punching as he allowed the bag to sway around him. Tobin then played an aria from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly (1904). The opera’s protagonist is a Japanese woman awaiting the return of her lover, a white American navy officer. She kills herself upon realizing he’s abandoned her for another woman. The aria, which often features a white performer in yellowface, is from a scene in the opera where she sees her lover’s “white ship” and celebrates.6 At this point, Carlon embraced and danced with the bag, lifting himself off
the floor to sway with it, appearing to cede control to its inertia, or the weight of colonialism. The opera was replaced by Tobin’s voice. She rewrote this section of Madama Butterfly with a different arrival in mind: the landing of Ferdinand Magellan, a settler colonialist who came to the Philippines in 1521, starting a 400-year Spanish colonial era. Tobin’s rewrite channeled Lapu-lapu, the Filipino leader who defeated Magellan in battle.7 Rather than the hopeful bride of Madama, Tobin subverted a narrative of Asian subservience to colonial forces into that of a prideful warrior. She sang: “When he arrives / I will strike him down / At the knees / I will not wait / To be saved / I am not afraid / Of the white ship.”
Once Carlon lowered himself to the ground, he stabbed the bag with a blade, scattering rice along the dance floor. He allowed it to rain down onto his body, crawling into a fetal position as he was consumed by whiteness. “My body like rice, devour me,” Tobin sang, now in the tender voice of a lola’s lullaby. It’s unclear whether Carlon surrendered to colonialism, sacrificed himself to its gaze, or was resting after victory. But it’s less about whether Carlon won or lost, and more about ceasing to fight. Indeed, there is a material battle against colonialism that is worth fighting. But here, Carlon performed the pointlessness of battling and suppressing grief, instead softening and processing it with others.
Toward the end of the performance, Carlon playfully lip-synced to Eartha Kitt’s rendition of “WarayWaray” (c. 1965), a Filipino folk song about the stereotypical physical and mental strength of Waray women of the Visayas.8 While Carlon, with a euphoric smile, mouthed Kitt’s words, he bathed in the rice, rubbing handfuls of grains to his face and chest like soapy water. When the rice became jammed in the makeshift punching bag and the flow stopped, Carlon improvised by fingering the hole in the bag while shooting a devilish grin at the crowd.
The piece’s humor and levity were a throughline for the audience, inviting us into the performance. While humor can mask grief, within Filipino culture, it can also be a vehicle for connection. At one point during the show, Carlon was seated on a stool, as if in the corner of a boxing ring, as makuriye’nte tended to him. The pair joked and poked fun at each other—makuriye’nte spilled water on Carlon’s face, causing him to gasp, and held poppers up to his nose to sniff (community picks you up after a hard fight). At another point, makuriye’nte smelled Carlon’s shoes after removing them, reacting in disgust, shaking their head (community keeps you honest). Each joke seemed to aim at making connections with the audience. The laughter allowed us to participate in the ritual: We were showing up for Carlon and for each other. In a moment where nothing seemed right, we told each other, “It won’t always be this way.” Each smiling face is a mirror to a self that has found happiness, even if just for this moment.
Before his final October performance, Carlon told me that when he gave his father’s eulogy, he wanted to make his grieving family laugh. Tobin also recalled that after her grandfather’s funeral, her family played music, danced, and ate. I was reminded of my family’s gathering after my own grandfather’s funeral, where we let our stoicism dissolve into partying hard— we drank heavily and laughed fully, as if attempting to match the largeness of our loss.
“In Filipino culture when you talk about grief, the other side of grief,” Tobin said, “there’s always laughter.”
jonah valdez is a Filipino American writer, journalist, and poet living on unceded Tongva Land (Los Angeles) He is currently a staff writer with The Intercept and previously wrote for The Los Angeles Times. He is interested in writing about decolonial struggles and movements toward liberation.
1. Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, “WAKE (world premiere): Created by Jay Carlon with Micaela Tobin,” 2024, 4, https://cap.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/2024-10/ wakeprogram2.pdf.
2. Camille Sapara Barton, Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2024), 19–20.
3. Metro Los Angeles, “Moving Through: BAGGAGE, a dance film by Jay Carlon,” YouTube, April 22, 2021, https://youtu.be/9zqZtjWpojo?si=CIOm_e1az0tjoKuK.
4. CARLON (@carlondance), “/ a prayer for my nanay // ‘This Ocean is a Bridge’ — a dance film by former Beach House Resident Choreographer Jay Carlon,” Instagram, October 29, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/ CVnuOqePgm_/?hl=en.
5. VINTA Gallery (@vintagallery) and Jay Carlon (@ jaycarlon), “VINTA Gallery for WAKE, created by Jay Carlon with Micaela Tobin,” Instagram, October 26, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DBld3yugWp/?hl=en&img_index=1.
6. Royal Ballet and Opera, “Madama Butterfly – ‘Un bel dí vedremo’ (Puccini, Ermonela Jaho, The Royal Opera),” YouTube, October 10, 2018, https://youtu.be/ CTT5FlTvz4A?si=b5kC4Gf7FXyODaOw.
7. Thirteenth Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, S.B. no. 973, June 30, 2004, https://legacy.senate.gov.ph/ lisdata/21771704!.pdf.
8. Lucy Burns, “Eartha Kitt’s ‘Waray Waray’: The Filipina in Black Feminist Performance Imaginary,” in Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora, eds. Martin F. Manalansan and Augusto F. Espiritu (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 313–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctt18040v1.18.
Jay Carlon, WAKE (performance view) (2024). Performance featuring Micaela Tobin and láwû makuriye’nte. Don Quixote, Los Angeles, 2024.
Image courtesy of the artists.
Photo: Argel Rojo.
yétundé olagbagu, protolith: heat, pressure (installation view) (2019). Two color photographs, 40 × 30 inches each. The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024.
Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick.
Photo: Ruben Diaz.
Adaptive Theory
On the Evolution of Ecofeminism
The poet and activist Adrienne Rich once described the relationship between theory and practice by comparing it to the water cycle. “Theory—the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees—theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over,” she states in “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” a lecture she gave in 1984.1 A theory, Rich argues, arises from particular material and bodily circumstances —and can then, in practice, influence those circumstances. “But if it doesn’t smell of the earth,” she adds, “it isn’t good for the earth.”2 As material realities shift, theory must adapt, and making good on our ideas for a better world means making sure our theories fit the actual conditions on the ground. Rich’s figuration strikes me as useful for thinking about the relationship between theory and artistic practice, too. When we gather a group of artists or artworks together under the banner of a movement or an ideology, we also consider how each adapts the theory in question to specific materials and forms, in a particular time and place. Last fall, an exhibition at The Brick’s new Larchmont space collected artworks by 18 artists and collectives in Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism. The show tied a heterogeneous group of sculptures, videos, photographs, performances, and installations to the loose theoretical framework of ecofeminism, which in the United States arose from the confluence of the women’s liberation and environmentalist movements of the 1970s and ’80s. Ecofeminists connected
gendered oppression and environmental destruction, and they called for a relationship to nature and society founded on interdependence, not dominance —ideas that energized artistic practices, then and since. Some of the artworks on view at The Brick, like documentation of Aviva Rahmani’s 1972 performance Physical Education, were created decades ago, when ecofeminism was still inchoate; many, including videos by the Institute of Queer Ecology and A.L. Steiner and sculptures by Alicia Piller and Maria Maea, among others, date from the last few years. The show’s range of artworks, though by no means a comprehensive survey of ecofeminist art, evoked Rich’s theory-practice cycle: ecofeminist theory being reconsidered again, altered by and for today’s realities.
Some contemporary artists in the exhibition adapt ecofeminist theories to fit twenty-first-century conditions, making work that reflects today’s more fluid conceptions of gender and digital hyperconnectivity. These works are conscious of climate change as a human-driven phenomenon with origins in extractive colonialism and dire implications for all life. By adapting ecofeminist ideas to the concerns of the present, these artworks renew and revise those ideas. Extending ecofeminism’s ethos of interconnection, they unsettle distinctions between human and nonhuman, people and place. If we attend, with care, to the particular and interlocking material realities on Earth, these works suggest, we might find alternative models for inhabiting—and repairing—our precarious planet.
The term “ecofeminism” first appeared in Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death), a 1974 book by the French radical feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne.3 D’Eaubonne identified the subjugation of women and nature as twin consequences of “phallocracy” and asserted that “a planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.”4 Around the same time in the United States, thinkers like Susan Griffin and Carolyn Merchant were exploring similar ideas.5 In their scholarly work,
Ashlyn Ashbaugh
they recast the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution—usually regarded as periods of progress in the West—as movements that had stripped the natural world of spiritual value, reduced landscapes to extractable resources, and divided the world into harsh dualities (male/female, culture/ nature, human/animal, self/other) that, in turn, justified the patriarchal, capitalist subjugation of marginalized people and the natural world.6 Repairing the environment and ending social hierarchy, ecofeminists argued, would require a paradigm shift. Simply put, humans needed to recognize that they were inextricably intertwined with each other and with all living things —and act accordingly.
As the art historian and critic Eleanor Heartney notes, many artists who became associated with ecofeminism were already committed feminists.7 Many were also frustrated with the male-dominated art market and drawn to the nascent field of conceptual art.8 Ecofeminism led them away from institutions and into the living environment. Unlike monumental land art (think Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty), many iconic ecofeminist artworks were ephemeral and ecologically conscious; some affected actual environmental and community repair, like Bonnie Ora Sherk’s Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974–87), an eco-garden and meeting space built beneath a San Francisco freeway overpass.
In Life on Earth, the artist Rahmani was one of few envoys from the beginnings of the movement. Rahmani, a dedicated feminist who had made performances about sexual violence in the late ’60s, began incorporating ecological themes into her work in the early 1970s.9 At The Brick, softcover journals stacked on a bench contained documentation of Ghost Nets (1990–91), Rahmani’s restoration of a former dump site near Vinylhaven, Maine to its original wetland habitat. In the documentation (titled Ghost Net Journals), the artist inscribed dreams, sensations, and colored-pencil sketches beside task lists and supply inventories, creating journal entries
that meld internal experience and external facts. It’s as if the habitat restoration is also a process of co-creation, where regenerated land reshapes its caretaker, and vice versa.
Still, while artists like Rahmani continued to draw on ecofeminism in their work over decades, the movement itself had to evolve. Like other second-wave movements, ecofeminism centered white, middle-class women who took their environmentalism to be universal, ignoring ongoing eco-activism by women in the Southern U.S., South America, and South Asia.10 Some ecofeminists argued that women had a special connection to nature, a stance critics identified as a mere reiteration of oppressive essentialisms that pitted female/nature against male/culture.11 An association with the appropriative “Goddess movement,” which distorted the spiritual practices and aesthetics of non-Western and Indigenous cultures, further tainted ecofeminism.12 Yet despite these failings, ecofeminism’s “philosophy of interconnectivity,”13 in Heartney’s words, feels, in many ways, as relevant as ever. Last September, Southern California withered over days of 105º+ heat. In November, New York City saw temperatures in the 70s rather than early winter snows. Drastic climate change demands a drastic change in us—the monocultural, anthropocentric solutions of 50 years ago won’t work. Many of the contemporary artworks in Life on Earth not only affirm, in the tradition of twentieth-century ecofeminist projects, the interconnection of humans and their environments, but challenge the very boundaries that separate them. Metamorphosis (2020), a four-part video by The Institute of Queer Ecology, locates blueprints for human transformation in the nonhuman world. In the video, footage of moths and butterflies is spliced with images of weaponry and urban infrastructure, juxtaposing, for example, the mosaic scales of a butterfly wing with the dense patterning of a city seemingly captured by drone. Eerie echoes between the forms suggest an underlying continuity between the
Top: Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism (installation view) (2024). The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists and The Brick.
Photo: Ruben Diaz.
Bottom: Alliance of the Southern Triangle, Executive Order 27–1100100: Phase Change towards the Deluge (installation view) (2024). The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists and The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.
Top: Institute of Queer Ecology, Metamorphosis (video still) (2020). Image courtesy of the artists.
Bottom: Otobong Nkanga, Tsumeb Fragments (installation view) (2015). Tate St Ives, Cornwall, England, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick.
Photo Oliver Cowling.
micro world of insects and the macro of geopolitics. A voiceover suggests that humans might emulate these species, citing the metamorphosis and gynandromorphism (the presence of male and female characteristics in a single organism) of creatures like the Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly. The work inverts typical human-insect hierarchies: Instead of destroying them, we might become more like the insects around us, and we might begin by recognizing that, in a fundamental sense, we already are them. As a caterpillar liquifies within its cocoon, so might we dissolve psychic barriers that divide us from the natural world. protolith: heat, pressure (2022), a diptych of photographs documenting a performance by the artist yétúndé olagbaju in Point Reyes, California, plays with figure and ground to suggest a renegotiated relationship between human and landscape. The photographs show olagbaju, dressed in white with a white headscarf, standing in a rocky outcropping. Facing away from the camera, olagbaju raises both hands to a massive rock; in the left photograph, their hands hover above its surface, while in the right their palms meet stone. This is no typical portrait of a foregrounded figure, with nature reduced to a scenic backdrop. Reading the photographs left to right, right to left, a pulse forms—touch, release, forward, back—as if the rock were rising to the artist’s hands, or the pressure of their touch was moving the rock, or both, their bodies synchronized in a rhythm that recalls Rich’s water cycle. If early ecofeminist artworks sometimes placed bodies in the land to suggest a “oneness” with nature, olagbaju’s work locates that unity not in any human category, or even necessarily in the category “human,” but instead in an active orientation toward and within the land.
While olagbaju and the Institute of Queer Ecology destabilize easy human/nonhuman essentialisms, other artists in Life on Earth reach into the past, where they unearth ancient practices with potentially radical applications in the present day. Carolina Caycedo’s
Nanay Ñañay Kculli ~ S’oam Bawi Wenag ~ Kiik K’úum (2024) magnifies the “Three Sisters” seeds of beans, corn, and squash—a trio planted together for thousands of years because they nurture each other in the ground as they grow14—to iconic proportions. Carved from polished wood and suspended in rope nets, the seeds hang down from the ceiling. The hovering triangle they formed seemed like an invitation to step inside, stand among them—and I did, feeling like I was joining a trinity of sisters, convened for a millennia-long chat. In their mutually nourishing relationship, and in the ancient agricultural practices that have connected these resources for ages, Caycedo finds a timely model of balance and symbiosis, a template for sustainable cooperation that humans might follow in arenas far beyond their crop fields. Caycedo’s sculpture also stands as a corrective: Some early U.S. ecofeminists invoked (often with factual errors) pre-Enlightenment Indigenous perspectives, even as they used them, in the words of scholar Grace Y. Kao, “as inspirational symbols for the environmental movement” while “fail[ing] to develop real relationships with Native communities or struggle in solidarity with them for post-colonial justice and the survival of Native spiritual practices.”15 In Caycedo’s work, balance between Earth and humanity isn’t merely symbolic, nor is it a pat lesson from a distant past—balance means accountability in the present, and it points a way forward toward a more just and sustainable future.
⁂
The ecofeminists of the 1970s couldn’t have anticipated the role of the digital realm in our lives today —or the ways the internet simultaneously interlinks and alienates us from one another and the world beyond our screens. On a giant, freestanding screen, curved at the bottom like a wave, the three-channel video Executive Order 27 - 1100100: Phase Change toward the Deluge (2024) filled a corner of
The Brick with flashing text and images. Collectively composed by the Alliance of the Southern Triangle, the piece forms a visual deluge, intercutting TikTok videos of floods in Miami-Dade County, Florida; scrolling text cut from theory and news; flashing red triangles; and glitching maps of watersheds. It was a familiar experience: Anyone with a social media account has been inundated with photo documentation of weather extremes, decontextualized quotes from fictional and nonfictional sources, et cetera. The torrent might inspire action; it might induce paralysis. What struck me was that the digital landscape presents a new reality that ecofeminism must now adapt to. The digital sphere gives and stores valuable information about climate disasters, but the infrastructure that sustains it—the server farms, for instance— contributes to those very crises. Maybe the division between virtual and physical realms is another dualism to undo; maybe the interconnection the internet facilitates between humans comes at the expense of the rest of Earth. Executive Order 27 raises these possibilities but ultimately offers little resolution. I was left wondering to what extent ecofeminist practice requires us to touch grass.
To me, the most arresting works in Life on Earth were those that brought me back to my senses. Yo-E Ryou’s sound installation, 숨 오케스트라 (Breath Orchestra), Act 1 (2024), formed strange and beautiful rhythms out of layered recordings of human breath. Ryou, who is based on Jeju Island, South Korea, made the piece in tribute to the Hanyeo shellfish divers, young women who were training in the generations-old tradition of freediving for shellfish off the Island’s coast. The artist recorded a group of young women as they learned Haenyeo traditions for the first time. The sounds —which seemed only partly or potentially human—surrounded me as I stepped inside a circle of speakers. There, as my own breath joined the chorus, I felt suspended at the center of a lung, a shell, and a wave. Breath might be our most basic form of mutual
exchange with our environment. In Ryou’s piece, breath is not a solitary function, but a shared rhythm, one that binds human to air to ocean to animal to everything else.
Rain can transform the place where it falls. A doused landscape shines; later, it blooms. In the same way, a theory can reveal latent truths in the material conditions that inform it. It can transfigure those conditions, too. Ecofeminist ideas have precipitated artworks for decades, and the works in Life on Earth suggest that contemporary artists are continuing to update and adapt ecofeminist ideas. It feels important to note that Life on Earth left out works by major figures associated with ecofeminism—the omission of artists like Agnes Martin, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Wangechi Mutu, Faith Wilding, or Ana Mendieta, plus the absence of a catalog (not due out until late 2025),16 seemed like perplexing and ironic oversights in a show centered on a philosophy of connection. While the curation neglected to make substantive links between the works on view and the movement’s legacy, the artworks themselves made and extended those connections, drawing ecofeminist insights into the present and suggesting paths forward. A theory of connection, the show proposed, is also a theory of transformation: To transform means first, and always, to connect.
Ashlyn Ashbaugh (she/her) is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
1. Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 213.
2. Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” 214.
4. Françoise d’Eaubonne, Feminism or Death: How the Women’s Movement Can Save the Planet, trans. Ruth Hottell and Emma Ramadan (London: Verso, 2022), 92.
5. See, for instance: Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
6. Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, “Ecofeminism: Toward global justice and planetary health,” Society and Nature vol. 2 (1993), 1–35, https://lgruen.faculty.wesleyan.edu/ files/2011/05/Gaard.pdf.
7. Eleanor Heartney, “How the Ecological Art Practices of Today Were Born in 1970s Feminism,” Art in America, May 22, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/ features/ecofeminism-women-in-environmentalart-1202688298/.
8. Catriona Reid, “ecofeminism(s): A Closer Look at Ana Mendieta’s Bacayu (Light of Day),” Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas 14, no. 1 (2022), https:// digitalrepository.unm.edu/hemisphere/vol14/iss1/7.
9. “Feminist Art: Conversations between Aviva Rahmani and Felicity Stone, Art Thinker,” Aviva Rahimani, accessed December 12, 2024, https://www.avivarahmani.com/ feminist-art.
10. Eleanor Cummins, “Is Ecofeminism Due for a Comeback?” The New Republic, March 10, 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/165926/ecofeminismclimate-crisis.
11. Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (Summer, 2011), 26–53, https://www.proquest.com/ scholarly-journals/ecofeminism-revisited-rejectingessentialism-re/docview/902917617/se-2.
12. Cummins, “Is Ecofeminism Due for a Comeback?”
13. Eleanor Heartney, cited in Nancy R. Howell, “Ecofeminism: What One Needs to Know,” Zygon 32, no. 2 (1997), 231–41, https://philpapers.org/rec/HOWEWO.
14. Leela Viswanathan, “The Three Sisters as Indigenous Sustainable Agricultural Practice,” Indigenous Climate Hub, June 15, 2023, https://indigenousclimatehub. ca/2023/06/the-three-sisters-as-indigenoussustainable-agricultural-practice/.
15. Grace Y Kao, “The Universal Versus the Particular in Ecofeminist Ethics,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 38, no. 4 (December 2010), 616–37.
16. The Brick, “Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism,” press release, accessed November 20, 2024, https://the-brick. org/life-on-earth2024.
Interview with Dashiell Manley
In retaliation to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States government imprisoned some 120,000 people of Japanese heritage (more than 70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens) in ten internment camps mostly built in the Western United States.1 Photographic archives of the concentration camps—which were euphemistically called “War Relocation Centers”—are stored in the Records of the War Relocation Authority of the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., an archive that Los Angeles-based artist Dashiell Manley began diving into 15 years ago. Manley was principally seeking images of his grandmother, great-uncle, and great-grandparent, who were imprisoned in Tule Lake in Northern California, the segregation center situated closest to the West coast, straddling the CaliforniaOregon border.
In spending time with the archive, Manley was struck by the propagandistic reach of the archival images, some of which were taken by renowned photographers such as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, artists who were responsible for idyllic signifiers of the American West: caricatured wide-open landscapes, profitable boomtowns, and rugged miners. Manley leans into dynamics of sociopolitical control in historiographical and media structures. Present within this particular archive is a false idea of life in the concentration camps. One photograph features unsettlingly cheerful smiles of children dressed in festive kimonos, for instance
Mateus Nunes
—a contrived, violent, and unjust visual retelling of the history of the Asian diaspora during a period marked by racial prejudice and wartime hysteria. The impact of such images continues to echo through history as a form of racist propaganda.
The confrontation of preestablished epistemological systems has been central to Manley’s work since the beginning of his career. With a deep theoretical foundation influenced by American conceptual and post-conceptual art, he began working in video and installation, though for over ten years, Manley has turned to painting to critically question language and information. In his series The New York Times and Elegy (both 2014–present), the artist addresses late capitalism’s barrage of information. Appropriating the text of the newspaper’s front pages into vibrant watercolor abstractions, The New York Times undertakes the unsurmountable retention of a daily attention span and a consumerist convention of encapsulating information published in circadian doses. Elegy, by contrast, bids farewell to this overwhelming influx—the abstract paintings are made by employing ceaseless, meditative gestures with vivid oil paints across the canvas as if in an effort to clear away the clutter of excessive information.
Manley utilized desynchronized archival images of the Tule Lake concentration camp alongside his own photographs of cherry blossom trees and monochromatic blocks in the two-channel slide-projection work pleasant countries (Tule Lake) (2024), included in his latest solo show, Tule Lake, on view last summer at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. pleasant countries highlights the staged aspect of the archive through intentional pairings —in the projection, the smiling children in kimonos appear alongside a photograph that depicts forced labor in a barren desert landscape.2 The photographs of cherry blossoms
Image courtesy of the artist.
Dashiell Manley, some efforts up close (2023–24). Oil on linen, 48 × 36 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
Photo: Francis Baker.
(which incorporate traditional Japanese symbols, such as ikebana and Sakura branches, that resonate with themes of resilience and beauty) serve as meditative respites from this devastation. Meanwhile, the monochromatic fields, derived from color samples of the flower photos, represent a sense of close, introspective observation. Displayed on a white wall, these images emitted from two analog slide projectors placed side by side on the same plinth. Despite their pairing, the projectors were independent—although they played simultaneously, the images were always slightly out of step with each other. This tottering cadence, oscillating between information overload and respite, mirrors the tensions between violence and resistance, histories that overlap and yet can be retold through wildly disparate lenses.
Months after meeting—first in São Paulo and then in New York— Manley and I spoke several times via video call about his practice. In this conversation, we focused on pleasant countries and discussed the intersections between archival violence and the fictionalization of images.
Mateus Nunes: pleasant countries was inspired by your archival research, which was a genealogical investigation into your family’s experience during internment. You sought records of your relatives at Tule Lake. How were you impacted by these archives?
Dashiell Manley: I’ve always been interested in [the history] for several different reasons, but it wasn’t until recently that it became personal, or maybe I let it become personal. I initially approached it with a kind of suspicious amount of emotional distance, instead focusing on details of specific photographs relevant to my work at the time. I think it was probably a way of distancing myself from having to sit with the idea that my grandmother and other family spent time in these camps in their youth. It was always a kind of gray
subject—not necessarily taboo, but not something that was openly discussed.
I returned to the archive a few years ago, kind of in tandem with personal explorations I was doing at the time in therapy, and I started to wonder if I might find some images of my grandmother or other family members in the background of some of these pictures. I haven’t, but projects have sprouted through this process.
MN: And on the personal level?
DM: On a personal level, the exploration of this archive has been exhausting and uncomfortable. I think one of the most impactful moments came when I stopped looking at these images as historical artifacts—at least in terms of the objects themselves being a kind of document of something, a document of Japanese American internment —and instead started looking at them as documents…not so much of everyday life inside the camps [but as] documents of this kind of propaganda machine that was swirling around America at the time.
I haven’t found photographs of my family there, for instance, even though they were in the Tule Lake camp. [I wanted] to reflect on how these temporary spaces of detention are a gray area: this ideological, social, philosophical, and moral area that allows us as individuals, and certainly as a society, to excuse certain acts, which can also be a historiographical, memorial blank space. It’s temporary, it’s transitional, so, therefore, we don’t need to take stock of or audit the significance of it. Much like a refugee camp or a temporary prison, right?
And artistically speaking, the archive has been really generative. I’m kind of at a point where I have more ideas for projects than I will ever have time to produce. And that’s a really comfortable space for me in contrast to the discomfort [the archive] produced early on.
MN: In pleasant countries, you combine the images of the archival photos with images of flora—you’ve mentioned
that your grandmother was fond of ikebana. But you also pair them with monochromatic blocks. For you, how are these different elements in dialogue with each other?
DM: I feel like I need to go back a little to answer this question. With The New York Times paintings, I found myself in a state of overwhelm, overloaded by ingesting that much textual information so closely for such a short and dense period of time. The solution to this feeling was the Elegy paintings, which I came to as a kind of a joke, or by accident, but it was essentially like…“I’m not a painter, I’ve never been a painter, I have this oil paint, I have these canvases…I’m going to make a really stupid painting.”
MN: It’s curious that you mentioned that you thought that you were not a painter. I always saw your work as that of a conceptual artist, and when you painted, it was clear to me that it held a robust conceptual background that would stand behind the pictorial image, and that the medium—be it painting, installation, or video—was just a means of communicating this conceptual argument. But let’s go back to the different nature of the images.
DM: I agree with you, it’s nice that you see the work this way because I also believe in this. But okay, going back to the images…I started making these repetitive marks. And what came from that was these meditations, right? This period of repetitive meditation presented an opportunity to get rid of that information and those feelings of overwhelm with information.
MN: As a reprieve?
DM: Yes. I’ve often looked to use a similar strategy in other works that I make. With these works, in dealing with these images [from Tule Lake], I wanted them to be, particularly in the projection work, a reprieve from the weight of history. And so I started taking these walks.
As I was working in the studio, I would work for hours. It was too physically and mentally exhausting, [so] I would go take a walk, and at some point, I started taking pictures of flowers. I’ve made a massive folder of pictures of blossoms.
When I was thinking about the projection work and thinking about the painting and thinking about my practice as a whole, again, this idea of beauty came up. I thought that I could point to that or hint at that by allowing these images of flowers into the narrative of the projection work so that you would be confronted with the image and then you’d be confronted with this non sequitur in a way, this idea of beauty. And then the color…it’s essentially just a color sample from the image of the flower. It’s like a color that’s contained within. I saw that as this kind of zoom-in, while the historical image is almost like a zoom-out. The image of the flowers is bringing it back to present day and the image of the color is this extreme, almost impossible, zooming in.
MN: This question may be a little psychoanalytic, but you always mentioned that your grandmother, when she was talking about her memories from the camp, always fled from them, as if avoiding them to protect herself. Do you think that going into the images of flora is a similar strategy of “maybe if I don’t remember it, I can move on?”
DM: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. I think that this is a complicated question because I believe that to answer “yes” would be to acknowledge that the images from the archive [are] something other than propaganda. It became very clear to me that the images in this archive are not in fact historical documents. They’re completely staged and coerced. I don’t want to get too into theoretical questions about photography and what its limits are, but yeah, I feel like to acknowledge a move away from the images of the camps would be to
Bottom: Dashiell Manley, Tule Lake (installation view) (2024). Digital file projected by two Kodak 5600 projectors, 6 minutes and 22 seconds. Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
Photo: Phillip Maisel.
Top: Dashiell Manley, once removed from celebration and an instance of happiness (installation view) (2024). Oil on linen, 60 × 48 inches each. Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
Photo: Phillip Maisel.
give those images a power that I actually don’t think they have because they’re propaganda images: coerced, staged.
MN: Like the flora photographs?
DM: Yes! I think the flora photographs point to this…very basic idea of our need to question what we’re looking at to begin with. Because it offers…a seemingly unrelated image, but it’s kind of a more true image, right?
MN: Sure—and the projection subtly superimposes these layers of archival truth and documentary with fictional narratives full of fallacies, right? It’s as if you’re attesting that these historical narratives are an amalgamation of many things.
DM: This is a bit of a tangent, but one of my favorite things in the world is when I’m driving my car and I’m at a stoplight turning and I have to put my turn signal on [and] I’m playing music. There’s this moment where the rhythm of the clicking of the turn signal matches up with the rhythm of the music.
I derive such a deep sense of satisfaction out of these. The dual projections [playing] out of sync…they provide a very similar thing. There’s a sensory experience you can have with the rhythm of these projectors falling out of sync and then back into sync. I think it can be read conceptually in the sense of like, this can be [multiple] dimensions that coexist.
Mateus Nunes, PhD is a São Paulo-based writer, curator, and postdoctoral researcher from the Brazilian Amazon.
Dashiell Manley (b. 1983, Fontana, CA) is a Japanese-American artist who employs a labor-intensive and meditative practice to create impasto abstract oil paintings. Informed by an abiding interest in film and photography, Manley works with conceptual frameworks to examine language, memory, and history. His colorful, highly textured abstractions operate as psychological landscapes.
1. These actions were materializations of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorizing the Secretary of War and the Military Commanders to exclude, remove, and incarcerate individuals seen as a threat to homeland security in prescribed military areas. See: Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestonedocuments/executive-order-9066.
2. Manley believes that “any actions undertaken at the camp—even [the Japanese American detainees’] presence there—are a kind of forced labor,” reckoning that his position is “not necessarily accurate to the dominant historical record of the events.”
Dashiell Manley, The New York Times, Sunday April 17 2016, national edition Southern California (front page) (2016). Watercolor pencil on canvas, 96 × 72 inches. image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: Jeff McLane.
Ben Caldwell, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (installation views) (2024–25). Art + Practice, Los Angeles, 2024–25.
Images courtesy of the artist, Art + Practice, and the California African American Museum.
Photos: Joshua White.
Ben Caldwell at Art + Practice
October 12, 2024–
March 8, 2025
During an interview with AfroLA, Ben Caldwell sketched out a few scenes from his childhood in Deming, a border town in rural New Mexico. Describing nighttime in that flat landscape, he explained, “if you’re in the desert, it’s almost like you’re going through space because you can feel the movement, you can feel space and space is there. There’s nothing between you and the universe.”1
This notion of collapsing space—a place where the division between you and I and earth and air ceases to exist—stood out to me while visiting the exhibition, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell presented at Art + Practice (A+P) in collaboration with California African American Museum (CAAM).
Curated by Jheanelle Brown and Robeson Taj Frazier (and inspired by a 2023 monograph written by Frazier and Caldwell),2 the exhibition translates Caldwell’s artistic journey, spanning from his adolescence in the 1960s up to the present day, into a tactile archive. Divided into four rooms, the exhibition bursts with photographs, films, videos, books, ephemera, poems, music, and media experiments (such as a musical bench and an interactive pay phone). While built around Caldwell’s personal and creative history, the exhibition also circles out and away from him, marking his collaborations with a variety of artists
and community members through KAOS Network, a multimedia arts hub and cultural center that Caldwell has been operating in the heart of Leimert Park for nearly 40 years. In crafting a retrospective of Caldwell, the exhibition doubles as a cacophonous media archive of the imaginative energies pulsing within this historic neighborhood, and of Caldwell’s role in creating community within it.
While the exhibition uses archival photographs, films, and video footage to illustrate Caldwell’s formative years in New Mexico and beyond, including his draft into the Vietnam War and his decision to study film at the University of California, Los Angeles in the ’70s, the bulk of KAOS Theory highlights the numerous projects that have been incubated at KAOS Network since it opened in 1984. Caldwell wanted the space (originally known as Video 3333) to be a multigenerational hub where young folks could build relationships with their elders and by extension themselves and their histories.3 This desire for intergenerational dialogue was joined by Caldwell’s interest in technology: The space provided neighborhood kids the tools and time to learn video production and animation as a means of self-expression. During the late ’80s and ’90s, the center embraced emerging technologies like the internet through workshops on web development and digital graphic design, which Caldwell presented as new media tools that students could hack to broadcast their own visions.4 In 1990, he decided to change the center’s name after attending a lecture at the American Film Institute
on chaos theory. Later, Caldwell’s wife Pam, who also attended the talk, showed him the Sanskrit meaning of chaos: “where brilliant dreams are born.”5
One of the dreams that Caldwell helped cultivate at KAOS was Project Blowed, the influential open-mic and workshop event series geared towards underground hip-hop artists drawn to the weird and the experimental. The project was founded by rappers Aceyalone and Abstract Rude; Caldwell gave the collective a space to hone their skills and host events. Ephemera from the ‘90s and early 2000s dot the walls and appear within display cases at A+P, including a partially ripped sign that lists the house rules of Project Blowed’s events.6 One reads: “This is a Hip Hop Educational Seminar, where styles are shown so many can learn and grow.” This ephemera is joined in the exhibition by music videos like “Mic Check” from 1995, which played on a small monitor in a small room dedicated to the musicians of Project Blowed. In this video, which recreates a KAOS open mic night, Aceyalone coolly raps over scenes of the crowd and shots of a glitching television. Caldwell also directed the film Hip Hop Habana (2006), a documentary that follows a group of Project Blowed artists in Havana as they meet up with Cuban rappers. In these portraits, the neighborhood cackles with bravado and innovation, as Caldwell records one way that KAOS artists forged their creative language.
Another KAOS project, Sankofa Red (2013), repurposes a payphone into an interactive audio installation.
Set up in the corner of a room labeled “Kaos Laboratories,” the project was created by the Leimert Park Phone Company, a design collective composed of University of Southern California professors and students, game designers, hackers, and residents of Leimert Park.7 Initially conceived by Caldwell, the phone allows visitors to listen to personal testimonials about the neighborhood’s history alongside voice prompts that encourage people to add their own stories. Cupping the receiver to my ear, I pressed five on the keypad and was greeted by a woman who shared a story about her cousin Mo and their efforts to keep in touch over the phone during his incarceration. They would connect about their love of mindfulness and her anger towards law enforcement. Other testimonials included a musician recalling his experience playing the World Stage, the legendary performance arts center, followed by an anecdote about how its co-founder Kamau Daáood would call folks on the phone to invite them to shows. In remixing a public object, Caldwell honors the history of Leimert Park while allowing residents to share stories of connection.
Alongside KAOS and its array of projects, Caldwell’s films offer another reflection of his expansive artistic voice. Driven by a desire to “emancipat[e] the image,”8 his early film work rejected the traditions of commercial Hollywood cinema and instead pulled inspiration from jazz, blues, literature, painting, performance, and history. His first film project, Medea (1973), screened on A + P’s
main gallery wall, made to look like it was emitting from a 16mm projector. Beginning with trembling shots of roving clouds, the film collapses the histories of the African diaspora into six minutes. Pre-colonial photographs dance next to portraits from Jim Crow-era America. Intercut between these still images is footage of a pregnant woman resting beneath a canopy of trees. Without dialogue, the film’s narrative is guided by the rhythms of a gong, which evokes the sounds of a beating heart.
Free from cinematic conventions, Caldwell crafts a new film grammar, emphasizing the virtuosity of image and sound to collapse the space between past and present. Caldwell’s creative life within and beyond KAOS Network enacts a similar language, where the space between us all ceases to exist. In bringing together then and now, Caldwell’s films demonstrate his role in the Leimert Park community. Across the many community-designed projects launched at KAOS, what stands out is Caldwell’s ability to nurture this ecstatic form of collectivity in ways that challenge our fixed sense of time and space.
1. Marilyn Berlin Snell, “Artist Ben Caldwell on the power of race, place and culture in his beloved Leimert Park,” AfroLA, June 10, 2024, www.afrolanews. org/2024/06/artist-ben-caldwell-onthe-power-of-race-place-and-culturein-his-beloved-leimert.
2. Robeson Taj Frazier and Ben Caldwell, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2023).
3. Alyssah O. Hall, “Frazier and Caldwell Discuss New Book on Leimert Park and KAOS Network,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 2, 2023, www.lasentinel.net/ frazier-and-caldwell-discuss-new-bookon-leimert-park-and-kaos-network.html.
4. Matt Stromberg, “Ben Caldwell, an LA Renaissance Man, Gets His Due,”
Hyperallergic, November 7, 2023, https://hyperallergic.com/855235/ ben-caldwell-an-la-renaissance-mangets-his-due/.
5. Hall, “Frazier and Caldwell Discuss New Book.”
6. Aaron Carnes, “Leanin’ on Slick: L.A. rapper Aceyalone Continues in the Spirit of Project Blowed,” Metro Silicon Valley, June 10, 2014, https://www. metrosiliconvalley.com/leanin-on-slick-la-rapper-aceyalone-continues-in-thespirit-of-project-blowed/; Sam Ribakoff, “Enter The Kaos: How Ben Caldwell Built An Afrokosmic Ark in Leimert Park,” Passion of the Weis, October 24, 2023, https://www.passionweiss.com/2023/ 10/24/robeson-taj-frazier-ben-caldwellbook-project-blowed/.
7. Leila Dee Dougan, “The Future is Calling in Leimert Park, by Payphone,” PBS SoCal, November 26, 2013. www. pbssocal.org/shows/departures/ the-future-is-calling-in-leimert-parkby-payphone.
8. Ben Caldwell, quoted in “Introduction,” L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, eds. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 1.
October 11–November 1, 2024
The eight acrylic on canvas artworks in Jonathan Casella’s The Shapes were intended to be a playful and experimental project.1 At Gross! Gallery, a 240-square foot project space tangential to Los Angeles’ commercial gallery circuit, Casella presented a risk-taking body of work that departs from what he is known for.2 Even more provocatively, the exhibition was Casella’s way of refusing to cater to the commercial art world, which (at the moment) undoubtedly values easily digestible figurative and illustrative paintings, and return to creating artwork for the sake of it, much like his hard-edge predecessors did. These works are arguably challenging to categorize as
Tina Barouti
Jonathan Casella at Gross! Gallery
Jonathan Casella, Driving as fast as I can up the Arroyo Seco Parkway (2024).
Acrylic on canvas, 53.5 × 45.5 × 1.5 inches.
Image courtesy of the artist and Gross! Gallery.
either sculpture or painting, becoming more so zygotes of painting and object, akin to Donald Judd’s early red reliefs of the 1960s and ’90s. The Shapes displayed Casella’s reverence for the hard-edge movement that emerged in the 1950s, yet deviated from its conventions. His playful titles challenge the idea that, in the artist’s words, there is “no motive or story behind the work,” and the presence of Casella’s hand and deliberate imperfections move away from hard-edge’s illusion of perfection.
As the exhibition’s title suggests, the mid-sized artworks are an amalgamation of shapes, including circles, rectangles, hexagons, and triangles, amongst others —each work disavowing a traditional canvas in favor of a collection of combined forms. Casella made the shapes by cutting wood into a desired form before wrapping each piece with canvas and combining the panels with mounting hardware to create various configurations. Using acrylic paints and tape for clean, precise lines, Casella painted a series of motifs, defined as his “vernacular,”3 such as a band of consecutive circles, stripes, crosshatching lines, or panels of paint that mimic television static. These patterns can also be found in previous bodies of work, such as Doublestar (2021–present) and in the exhibition This Palace (2024). Yet here, Casella transforms the actual canvases into shapes rather than depicting them 2-dimensionally with paint, as in Doublestar. He also attempted to rid himself of narrative, departing from the use of the collage-like images
that are screen-printed and painted onto the canvases in This Palace. While Casella leaned into hard-edge abstraction in The Shapes, his referential titles appear to convolute hard-edge’s insistence on form over meaning (or, as Frank Stella famously said: “What you see is what you see”).4 Titles like Royal Gulp, Beacon, and Gentle in Sun (all works 2024) narrate Casella’s pieces, complicating his insistence that the work is devoid of meaning. In Royal Gulp, a royal blue circle rests on a landscape composed of a square of black-and-white static and a rectangle of brown cross-hatching. While the press release pointed to René Magritte’s pipe (La Trahison des images [ceci n’est pas une pipe], 1929),5 Casella’s title leaves viewers to connect the dots. Perhaps the titling can be interpreted as a layer of completion to the work, rather than a direct association—still, in many of them, visual associations can be made, however oblique, to their attendant titles. Driving as fast as I can up the Arroyo Seco Parkway is a gridded isosceles trapezoid sandwiched between two red circles and a band of white marquee-like dots, which call to mind car headlights or traffic stop signs. Here, Casella fails to banish the possibility of symbolic content, choosing to flirt with association with strictly nonobjective artworks that suggest a potential myriad of meanings. This departs from the hard-edge ethos articulated by critic Jules Langsner: The artworks are not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollections
of specific shapes they may have encountered in some other connection.6
Casella does not imitate the work of his hard-edge predecessors, nor is he loyal to all their rules. In The Shapes, he is clearly interested in the shaped canvases of the 1960s and ’70s that served as an offshoot to minimalism and post-abstract expressionist painting (for instance, Stella’s Protractor series, 1967–70, which was inspired by the architecture and design the late artist saw throughout West Asia.)
Mary Heilmann’s casual geometric vocabulary is also referenced, as is Kenneth Noland’s shaped canvases from the ’70s, Sven Lukin’s of the ’60s, and the work of Imi Knoebel. In The Shapes, Casella places himself within this lineage, using canvases as vessels for his very own geometry.
While the hard-edge abstractionists focused on sharp and clean forms, Casella opted for intentional, obvious imperfections. In Driving as fast as I can, the red circles are far from smooth, prompting one exhibition visitor to ask, “Was that done on purpose?” These imperfect circles reappear several times in Royal Gulp and Beacon, while the painted circles in Angel Number are unevenly spaced. The hard-edge abstractionists were preoccupied with the illusion of perfection, while Casella chooses instead to reveal his hand. While privileging structure, shape, and color like his predecessors, Casella challenges Langsner’s idea that hard-edge forms are autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves as shapes and nothing more. In this series,
viewers have the option to pull from their own visual lexicon of shapes in order to create narrative, meaning, and visual connections.
1. Interview with the artist, October 13, 2024.
2. Casella has previously exhibited at more commercial galleries such as Harper’s Gallery, M+B, The Pit, and WOAW Gallery.
3. Gross! Gallery, “The Shapes: Jonathan Casella,” press release, accessed December 12, 2024.
4. “Frank Stella, Black Series I, 1967,” The National Gallery of Art, accessed December 12, 2024, https://www.nga. gov/features/the-serial-impulse/ frank-stella.html.
5. Gross! Gallery, “The Shapes: Jonathan Casella.”
6. Jules Langsner, California Hard-Edge Painting (Balboa: The Pavilion Gallery, 1967).
Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles
October 5, 2024–March 2, 2025
In a world of raging anti-trans animus, where so many are working so feverishly to cement a flat stereotype of us as fearsome predators and tragic victims, the intersectional breadth, multiplicity, and specificity of trans voices, aesthetics, and thought brought together in the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ (ICA LA) Scientia Sexualis hit like medicine. Yowling trans rage sits beside howls of trans humor and pleasure. Wails of trans grief slip into yips of kinkfueled, imperfect liberation. Pulling its title from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), a canonical text that critically examines the development
of Western conceptions of sex and sexuality, Scientia Sexualis brings together work from 28 multidisciplinary artists refusing simplistic, colonial, and cis-heteronormative ways of thinking and feeling about art, science, and sex. These works play off of each other, longing for each other’s complications—like wrestlers on a sticky floor that struggle and groan together but come up bloody and smiling at the end of the match. Joseph Liatela’s funny and defiant On Being an Idea (the right to live without permission) (2020) presents a stack of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV (1994) books—the last edition to list gender identity “disorder” as a mental illness.1 The books are tied up in shibari knots like a bound submissive longing for release in restraint and liberation in surrender. P. Staff’s performative Depollute (2018) also plays with the power dynamics of doctor/ patient and artist/viewer, requiring visitors to ask museum staff to turn on the work, only to be greeted with a strobing video describing the precise steps to carry out self-castration. Nicki Green’s ritual bath/urinal triptych/trans fountain installation Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain (2024) explores related themes of (de)pollution and transformation. But Green’s dripping vessels, inscribed with delicate drawings of her mythic Androgynes bathing, offer absolution and transformation through water and reworked purity ritual. Instead of familiar tropes rooted in personal vulnerability, the works in Scientia Sexualis offer
some bondage rope, a mirror, a vibrator, a basin of water, a knife, and an invitation onto the wrestling mat.
Demian DinéYazhi’s mural POZ since 1492 (2016/2024) welcomes visitors to the exhibition with a body slam of poetic confrontation. The mural depicts a painting of the “First Thanksgiving,” colorized in blue and green like a film negative, behind the work’s title emblazoned in floor-to-ceiling graphic text. Installed across an entire wall of the museum’s courtyard entrance, the mural forces visitors to think of coloniality as virus, as infection, as disease. This confrontation sets the stage for all of Scientia Sexualis by reminding us, before we set foot inside the galleries, that colonialism and its cis-heteronormativity continue to infect us all.
Jes Fan’s large, looping video projection Xenophoria (2018–20) joins DinéYazhi’s Indigenous defiance of cisheteronormativity with more-than-human autonomy. Fan’s video of writhing, crumbling, and twirling bodies and body parts offers viewers a taste of what trans theorist McKenzie Wark calls “xenoeuphoria”—the ecstatic experience of dissolution and multiplicity that happens when moving inside a swarm of entangled, “pretty,” yet “strange” bodies and body parts.2 We do not want to touch the ambiguous tentacle flesh and cover ourselves in its inky melanin because it belongs to us or originated in our bodies—we want it because it is strange and wet and writhing. We do not desire the black powder scraped from the amorphous fleshy fungus because it is familiar
Ashton S. Phillips
Top: Joseph Liatela, On Being an Idea (the right to live without permission) (installation view) (2020). 126 pounds of DSM-IV-TR books formerly used by students, shibari hemp rope, LED lights, and MDF, 74 × 37 × 34 inches. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artist and ICA LA. Photo: Jeff McLane.
Bottom: Nicki Green, Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain (installation view) (2024). Site-specific installation with glazed ceramic, hardware, and water, dimensions variable. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artist and ICA LA. Photo: Jeff McLane.
and understood. We want to touch it because we are curious, and we want to feel and know the unknown.
Other works center the horror of bodies cut up without consent. KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner)’s gruesome Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016) literalizes the history of J. Marion Sims’ forced medical experiments on enslaved Black women, confronting the viewer with a sutured-up silicone relic of butchered brown, pink, and yellow pelvic flesh inside a mirrored case. Candice Lin’s Night Moon (2024) requires viewers to kneel in front of a violently truncated ceramic pelvis modeled on an eighteenthcentury anatomist’s illustration. From this position, viewers can peer through a vaginal hole to watch a tiny stopaction video of flying genitals and cannibalism. When the gallery is quiet, viewers can hear a series of howls, like a call to the moon or a feral, primal scream. These howls are a fitting soundtrack to the whole exhibition and the rising anti-trans-neofascist-MAGA-2.0 moment in American history. If, as philosophers Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Luce deLire have argued, subaltern postcolonial and transsexual subjects cannot really “speak” in the language of our oppression,3 then perhaps the howl could be our shared language. The howl can hold the multi-vocal complexity of the past and present, just like this exhibition. It can hold the pain and grief of generations of queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous people who have suffered abuse in the name of science and
colonial “progress.” It can hold the growling rumbles of artists sublimating that pain into cathartic rage and defiant disobedience. It can hold the xeno-euphoria that comes when we let ourselves get lost in the churning tangle of growling, dancing, grieving, laughing, dripping bodies on the wrestling mat. Not mine or yours, but ours. As a form of speech, the howl defies the cis-heteronormative, colonial logics of control that demand legibility and transparency. But it is not mere noise. The howl is a chorus for the howlers and those who may join them, like a battle cry or a Bacchanalian incitation for the long night ahead.
1. In 2013, the DSM-V replaced “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria” to refocus clinicians on dysphoria as the condition that requires treatment, not trans identity itself. See: Jack Drescher, “Queer Diagnoses Revisited: The Past and Future of Homosexuality and Gender Diagnoses in DSM and ICD,” International Review of Psychiatry 27, no. 5 (2015): 386–95, https://doi.org/10.3109/095402 61.2015.1053847.
2. McKenzie Wark, Raving (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Luce deLire, “Can the Transsexual Speak?” philoSOPHIA 13 (2023): 50–83, https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/919597.
Demetri Broxton at Patricia Sweetow Gallery
September 14–October 19, 2024
Following the passing of his father, artist Demetri Broxton sought to reconnect with his Creole and Filipino heritage through meditation and reflection, revisiting twentiethcentury family photographs
that were given to him by his grandmother.1 The photographs found their way into a series of five large-scale textile works included in Broxton’s recent exhibition Ancestral Echoes at Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Alongside the archival photographs, which had been passed down through generations, the textiles are adorned with materials like sequins, antique silk, glass beads, and cowrie shells. Investigating personal genealogy and empowerment through material, Broxton weaves Afrofuturist narratives that tune into African cosmology while building new stories of agency and freedom. Broxton integrated the photographs of his family members—sepia-toned images of men posing in uniform, couples posing together, and other portraits —as an act of ancestor worship.2 Broxton prints the images on fabric before embellishing them with glass beads, crystals, chainette, brass elements, or 24-karat gold. His laborintensive practice venerates the photographs: The slow embellishment process acts as a sacred ritual performance that honors the ancestors. Keepers of the Altar (all works 2024) acknowledges the important role of ancestors in maintaining harmony and balance. A quartz and gold veil covers the faces of two figures, who stand beside a table with their hands placed upon a box. Cowrie shells are sewn over the box, and web-like lace covers the table. The inclusion of the shells harkens back to the transatlantic slave trade, in which cowrie shells were used as currency on the
Taylor Bythewood-Porter
Western coast of Africa and were exchanged for enslaved people until the twentieth century.3 Simultaneously, Broxton’s inclusion of the twentieth-century lace gestures to British imperialism, as the slave trade was a key factor in growing and enforcing European empires. These materials serve as a form of subversion and divination, underscoring that African spirituality is not a closed theological system. Broxton thus creates a portrait of his relatives as stewards of ancestral knowledge: They are, as anthropologist David Colón-Cabrera would say, the protagonists in this narrative—reimagining a future rooted in African traditions and knowledge and illustrating how the past is a continuing influence on the present.4
In some African cosmologies, the human world lies between the sky and the earth. He Who Stands at the Crossroads is a rounded tapestry that includes an image of a soldier in a uniform that has been embellished with small keys and red beads. His face is veiled with clear quartz crystals, red beads line the brim of his hat, and he stands at a halt. Bravely appearing within this portallike shape, the spirit serves as an intermediary between the human and ancestral plane, an ancestral soldier influencing the living through generational ripples. His figure is framed against a red, white, and blue beaded pattern. Gold-plated orbs are scattered throughout the background, a subtle nod to the American flag, while 24-karat gold-plated brass, cowrie shells, wooden beads, and black and red rayon
chainette dangle from the bottom of the tapestry. Broxton reimagines a future where spirits occupy a higher level of existence between sky and Earth to bestow blessings from beyond and guide the living. Broxton’s textured tapestries decolonize the way we utilize anthropological knowledge.
Guardians: Private Foster Lillard and Private Felix Green (the only work whose title names Broxton’s relatives) emphasizes that ancestral lineage is cosmic. Taking the African diasporic worldview that challenges linear timelines, ancestry is more than a biological inheritance but a spiritual and metaphysical interconnectedness with the universe that creates a loop of guidance and resilience. Through the lens of Afrofuturism and African cosmology, the ancestors are thought to provide guidance and protection.5 Guardians presents two veiled soldiers in uniform. One wears a light blue turban-style beaded headpiece with a single cowrie shell as a plum veiled in crystal, while the other is dressed in a green beaded brimmed hat with three stitched golden feathers. Evoking a galactic sky, the beaded background incorporates wave patterns and abstract lines in shades of blue, purple, and black. The act of creating a celestial ceremonial shrine is a way to both honor and access power. Invoking ancestral power in this way emphasizes Afrofuturism’s core tenets by reclaiming lost histories and spiritual connections to resist oppression and envision futures of liberation. By centering traditional African materials and spiritualities alongside his family history, Broxton
offers a holistic mode of engagement with ancestral knowledge. Through material and historical images, he employs coded iconography rooted in African diasporic tradition, transforming these symbols into a language that resists dominant epistemologies and reframes cultural memory. In engaging with the past, we shift our understanding of the present, expanding binary thinking to a cosmic wholeness that speaks across spiritual, social, economic, and artistic expressions. Broxton’s textiles operate as portals, where the threads of ancestral wisdom weave visions of futures defined by liberation. Through this lens, the past is not a static archive but an active guide, transforming how we navigate the present and shape what is to come.
1. Demetri Broxton (@dbroxtonstudio), “Shout out to my cousin, @ecincali for capturing this emotional moment of my artist talk this past Saturday, October 5,” October 7, 2024, https:// www.instagram.com/reel/ DA2cxEvp8yo/.
2. Demetri Broxton (@dbroxtonstudio), “Shout out to my cousin.”
3. “Cowrie Shells and Trade Power,” National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian, accessed January 7, 2025.
4. David Colón-Cabrera, “Looking for Humanity in Science Fiction through Afrofuturism,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, December 18, 2018.
5. Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures, eds. Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill (Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2023); Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu, “The Dimensions of African Cosmology,” Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religion 2, no. 2 (2013).
Demetri Broxton, Guardians: Private Foster Lillard and Private Felix Green (2024). Japanese and Czech glass beads, sequins, cowrie shells, quartz, brass elements, sterling silver and 24K gold plated brass, rayon chainette, wool, and serigraph printed on Japanese sateen cotton and mounted on birch board, 37 × 20.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Patricia Sweetow Gallery.
Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch
September 12, 2024–
January 18, 2025
Those familiar with haute topics in academia may think of the “posthuman” —defined by N. Katherine Hayles as a “view” that seamlessly integrates human and mechanic bodies1—as a broad category of creative and intellectual inquiry. Following a poststructuralist turn in critical theory ushered in by Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” and popularized by its 2016 republication,2 in recent years the posthuman has been the subject of more discourse than ever before. In 2020, musician Arca tweeted: “Is the concept of posthumanism intellectual before it is visceral?”3 While critical theorists like Haraway and Hayles were more interested in the posthuman as a philosophical framework, Arca’s question about viscerality reflects a shift three decades removed from the cyber-fetishism that spilled into ’90s pop culture and academia. In our digital age, the cyborg exists beyond a speculative mode of inquiry, pressing into our daily realities.
On the heels of Haraway’s essay and at the nexus of the posthuman moment, Jeffrey Deitch’s 1992 show Post Human was pivotal in framing the term for the art world. The show brought together thirty-six artists, including Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Barney, crowning
what critic Robert Rosenblum described as a “new dynasty.”4 The show was popular and toured broadly, essentially distributing the concept of posthumanism to the world. Thirty-three years later, Post Human returned to Jeffrey Deitch—a bigger and broader revival of the 1992 exhibition in Deitch’s huge Hollywood gallery space, mixing some pieces from the original show with new works by an expanded group of artists. The effect was something of a perverted world’s fair, reflections on futurity from now and decades past.
Theorist Rosi Braidotti recently credited Deitch’s original 1992 show with “show[ing] also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization, and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial.”5 However, in 2025, this “flair for the artificial” is well-felt and no longer nascent within culture; “computerization” is an anachronism. As the integration of AI into everyday life and artmaking processes becomes a reality, the strain on our collective imagination to envision the future intensifies. As innovations in cosmetic surgery proliferate, the previously speculative becomes plainly possible. As the internet begins to shape culture instead of the other way around, new social, political, and economic dynamics emerge and are encoded without delay, without any space for speculation. Compared to its predecessor, this Post Human was less of a meditation on what might come after the human, and more of a postmortem. While
its newer pieces reflected our contemporary, technologized bodies in fascinating ways, these were not exactly in conversation with the older pieces, not exactly their successors. Presented together in a hodgepodge were new mechanic humanoids alongside older ones that gazed at these new bodies from a nebulous moment in the past. The effect was an uncanniness on top of an intended uncanniness.
The gallery’s funhouse layout made it difficult to discern which pieces existed in what time—now, the ’90s, between, or before. This timeless feeling, like a room without windows, could be felt in the presentation of Damien Hirst’s Nothing is a Problem for Me (1992), a wall of shelves displaying pharmaceuticals. The work did less to amplify the ubiquity of tech in our present moment and more to perhaps unwittingly display its acceleration since the ’90s (as well as unwittingly mirror the unimpressive pickand-choose nature of the 2024 show). Another work from the 1992 show, Paul McCarthy’s sprawling, animatronic installation The Garden (1991–92) dominated the gallery, taking up more space than any of the more than 50 other works in the show. Its dense forest landscape contains two very basic animatronic bodies, pants around their ankles, thrusting into the trunk of an oak and a mossy knoll respectively. The figures are adult white men—in other words, culturally unmarked subjects. In this way, The Garden doesn’t actually trouble the human. Perhaps a commentary on perversion, it does not subvert.
Zoey Greenwald
Bottom: Post Human (installation view) 2024–25). Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artists and Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Joshua White.
Top: Cajsa von Zeipel, Pep Talk (installation view) (2024). Silicone and mixed media, approximately 80 × 48 × 84 inches. Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery. Photo: Charles White.
Top: Evan Apodaca, Oceanside ’69 (video still) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center.
Bottom: Evan Apodaca, Movement for a Democratic Military (Reruns Series) (installation view) (2024). Cyanotype, paper, and plaster. Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center.
The piece read as anachronistic compared to much of the work that surrounded it, work whose humanoids were, in their beings, different. On the other side of a wall in the huge gallery space, almost as if from a different show, and certainly from a different time, stood Anna Uddenberg’s T-Top Tummy Tuck (2022), an unsettling body-focused utility contraption that fuses medical apparatuses and auto upholstery materials to suggest a thing on which the viewer might be made to sit. It offers a far more incisive critique of the body’s technologized future: Rather than presenting a human figure, it calls the viewer’s own body into question, the ambiguous nature of the seat daring the viewer to wonder what will happen to their body once inside. Where McCarthy’s The Garden, with its dusty colors and abject persons, positions the viewer as voyeur, the challenge of Uddenberg’s contraption lies in its immense eroticism, inviting the viewer to sit in as posthuman figure; to surrender their body—your body—to the future in a visceral way. This body can be any body. Uddenberg has said that her work is largely inspired by control.6 Gender stands out as a theme in other nearby works, like Ivana Bašić’s pearlescent clitoral figure I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #2 (2017), which recalls and disrupts the female form. Confusingly sharing the space with McCarthy’s take on sexuality, these works felt especially nuanced. These fluid and forwardlooking pieces did well to engage in rather than merely comment on futurity. However,
many works in the show were content to simply imagine a modified body. Throughout the show, the human or humanoid form was filled with plastic; plaster; smooth metal; foam; and uncanny, bulbous wax, from Cajsa von Zeipel’s surreal feminine figure Pep Talk (2024) to Mariko Mori’s famous Technogel aliens (Oneness, 2003). Here, our anorexic cultural moment finds itself mirrored by iterations on Botox. These pieces squish and slide their old forms into an image meant to signify futurity, wholly ignoring that time has produced a popular, Facetuned, futurist—yes, but ever-depreciating— aesthetic. As the internet has accelerated culture, these aesthetic paradoxes have proliferated, and our ideas about the future and how to imagine it have sputtered, failed.
As a member of the so-called “internet generation,” born after the dawn of the internet, I’ve often argued that our relationship to tech is not about so-called “digital citizenship,” but about being born into a new and differentlystructured time. Post-1992, the internet has accelerated everything. There simply isn’t any way the revival of a past exhibition—no matter how star-studded or wideranging—can truly capture what the posthuman means to us now. In this sense, we are, forgive me, post-posthuman, the concept played to its end in light of new ideas around subjectivity and embodiment. If Post Human were to present itself as a retrospective on futurity, that would be one thing. But in its sprawl, this show
buried reflections about the present and future in a strange nostalgia for a long-gone past.
1. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
2. Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto” in Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
3. Arca (@arca1000000), “is the concept of posthumanism intellectual before it is visceral? will we look at this idea with the same self awareness we project onto postmodernism?,” Twitter, November 14, 2020, https://x.com/arca1000000/ status/1327649651114332167?lang=en.
Even with its camouflage vinyl backdrop, Los Angelesbased artist Evan Apodaca’s video work Monumental Interventions (2023) too effectively disclosed aspects of San Diego’s military presence that some would have preferred to keep secret.
Featuring digital animations of toppled military monuments, the work was installed at San Diego International Airport for less than a month before controversially being censored and removed for its subversive content.1 Similar themes of resistance to U.S. militarism in Southern California (and the attendant backlash) were present
Aaron Katzeman
in Apodaca’s exhibition Insurgent Smokescreen, which was recently on view at Grand Central Art Center. Emulating an aesthetics of covert operations to investigate lesser-known accounts of anti-Vietnam War organizations in San Diego County during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Insurgent Smokescreen aptly constructed a people’s history of demilitarization movements, in turn uncovering the incessant counterinsurgency tactics deployed against them.
The exhibition revolved around three documentary videos, part of a series titled Retracings (2020–present), in which Apodaca follows activists from the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM) and the San Diego Convention Coalition as they recall stories of armed vigilante attacks, state violence, and presumed Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) projects. MDM—formed in 1969 by active-duty G.I.s at Naval Base San Diego and Camp Pendleton—particularly represented a serious risk to U.S. imperialism, with its foot soldiers joining a growing multiethnic, multiracial, and gender-diverse civilian population protesting the country’s involvement in Southeast Asia.2
Apodaca’s videos, installed on upright poles in the center of the gallery, highlight the ensuing attempts to squash such efforts. In Oceanside ’69 (2021) (the title referring to the place and date of events discussed), activists take Apodaca to the Bandshell, an outdoor amphitheater where a fake
bomb threat was called in to preemptively end MDM’s People’s Armed Forces Day rally, which included speakers like Angela Davis. In another scene, two members performatively reenact the events of a shooting at the house that once served as MDM headquarters, ducking under windows, crawling to safety, and continuing to ponder who might have been the culprits (the police are suspected).
Moving south in Del Mar ’72 (2020), activists lead Apodaca on a walk along the railroad tracks that were once obstructed during a direct action to prevent the transportation of munitions, resulting in severe police retaliation and fabricated charges. In Ocean Beach ’72 (2021), members of the Convention Coalition show Apodaca the house where, following undercover infiltration into the group, another shooting occurred, this one believed to have been perpetrated by the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing paramilitary unit with reported ties to the FBI. Returning to the unassuming places where such remarkable events happened, these Retracings reveal how evidence of this rich antiwar history, although not publicly commemorated, remains embedded in the built environment, only made visible when shared by those who took part.
Despite being presented in a rather straightforward documentary style—interspersed with archival footage, photographs, and newspaper clippings for added veracity— moments of forgetting and slight misremembering arise in the activists’ recorded testimonies, due in part to
changes in the urban settings that have since occurred. Apodaca’s work dwells within these gaps of collective memory, using drawing, language, and sculpture to incite new means of historical understanding. Seven chalk pastel drawings titled with geotagged street intersections creatively interpret and reimagine scenes described in the videos that could not have been properly documented in the present. Freeman & Minnesota (2023–24), for example, depicts a foreboding shotgun appearing in selfdefense from an attic window at MDM’s headquarters, dramatizing the palpable danger faced by those who might otherwise be unsympathetically derided for their radical political orientation. Each drawing in the series is framed alongside related clandestine-esque typewriter communiques. Written by Apodaca in the third person, these texts narrate his experience interviewing activists in a bureaucratic tone that mimics an informant debriefing their handler, complete with transcribed quotations. Apodaca flips the typical audience addressed in these types of official reports, disseminating his findings to the general public rather than a government agency. Further concerned with the agitational distribution of ideas, two squat, rectangular plaster sculptures spotlighting material from MDM’s self-published newspaper Attitude Check dotted the gallery floor. Atop the undulating surface of the sculptures are cyanotype printed images: digital scans of articles from Attitude Check superimposed on
crumpled paper and floating against a dark background. While referencing a stack of newspapers awaiting distribution, the intentionally hard-to-decipher content —covering the MDM shooting and the organization’s political program—accentuates the ephemerality of most activist print media, reasserting the precarity by which movement history is ultimately preserved.
Art about the Vietnam War, particularly in the U.S., has never been in short supply, nor has the relevance of such work dissipated.3 Scholarship within the last twenty years has detailed the various responses of artists in realtime opposition to the War, including Julia Bryan-Wilson’s contention that the era’s heightened political awareness helped usher in the identification of artists as workers, linking class consciousness in the imperial core to anti-imperialist struggle in the periphery.4 Half a century removed, Apodaca’s place-based
Review Contributors
approach remains that of a worker, although of a specific vocation that combines the role of artist-as-historian with the commitment of a public intellectual à la Marxist geographer Mike Davis.5 Differing from the art made in immediate protest against—or, later, memorializing—the U.S. military’s atrocities in Vietnam, Apodaca’s multimedia practice functions as an operating manual, striving to bridge the generational knowledge gap between disparate demilitarization movements in Southern California then and today. Beyond merely affirming the ideology of the activists with whom he has interfaced over many years, Apodaca’s prolonged interpersonal process—of establishing connections, building trust, and ensuring safekeeping— more precisely speaks to the foundational cultural work that is a necessary component of organizing any anti-imperialist popular front, especially in the heart of empire.
Allison Noelle Conner is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Art in America, Broccoli Magazine, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.
Tina Barouti, PhD is an art historian and curator from Los Angeles. She lectures in SAIC’s Art History, Theory, and Criticism department.
Ashton S. Phillips is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a JD from the George Washington University Law School. His writing has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and Cambridge University Press.
Taylor Bythewood-Porter is a curator and writer. She received the American Association for State and Local History Award of Excellence for her exhibition Rights and Rituals: The Making of African American Debutante Culture. Her work has appeared in Frieze Week and Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday we said tomorrow. She is the current Curator of History at the Museum of Riverside.
1. Evan Apodaca, “My airport installation criticizing San Diego’s hypermilitarization was wrongly censored,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, April 19, 2023, https://www.sandiegouniontribune. com/2023/04/18/my-airportinstallation-criticizing-san-diegos-hypermilitarization-was-wrongly-censored/.
2. Richard R. Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 88.
3. Major retrospective exhibitions include A Different War: Vietnam in Art curated by Lucy Lippard at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art (1989) and Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 curated by Melissa Ho at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2019). Regarding the lasting impact of the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War on artists, see Carolina Miranda, “A ‘Catalytic Moment’ for Art and Culture,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/projects/ chicano-moratorium/chicanomoratorium-catalytic-moment-la-art/.
4. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). See also Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).
5. See Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 140–72; and, among others, Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (New York: The New Press, 2003).
Zoey Greenwald is a writer and editor based between Los Angeles and New York. She is an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts and the Nightlife Editor of On the Rag
Aaron Katzeman is an art historian, curator, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. His research examines contemporary art and visual culture concerning the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, specializing in the intersection of nationalism, class, and environmental politics. His writing has appeared in Radical History Review, Third Text, caa.reviews, Pacific Arts, and Antipode
