Carla issue 39

Issue 39

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 under-­ resourced 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 under-­ resourced 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.

W T F, Ho ri zo n t a l fo u r- s i d e d L E D s i g n : RGB d i o d e s, 1 4 x 35 8 . 1 x 1 4 c m / 5 1 / 2 x 1 4 1 x 5 1 /2 i n © Je nny Ho lze r, A R S . P h oto : F i li p Wo l ak

Spring 2025

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

Issue 39

$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/.

Contents

8

PST ART Art & War Collide in Cai Guo-Qiang’s WE ARE Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu

18

Grief is a Filipino Boxing Match

42–57 Reviews

Ben Caldwell at Art + Practice —Allison Noelle Conner Jonathan Casella at Gross! Gallery —Tina Barouti

jonah valdez

Scientia Sexualis at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles —Ashton S. Phillips

Adaptive Theory

Demetri Broxton at Patricia Sweetow Gallery —Taylor Bythewood-Porter

26

On the Evolution of Ecofeminism Ashlyn Ashbaugh

34

Interview with Dashiell Manley Mateus Nunes

Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch —Zoey Greenwald Evan Apodaca at Grand Central Art Center —Aaron Katzeman

Support our work by becoming a Club Carla member today!

Thank you to our Club members!

Carla is free, grassroots, and artist-led. Club Carla members keep it that way. Club Carla is a joyful community of art-­ curious individuals who join us in taking conversations off the page and into artist studios, galleries, and beyond.

We have an exciting season of membership events, including studio visits with local artists, a Frieze-week launch party, and a gallery hop to alternative art spaces on the East Side.

Come explore the L.A. art world with us!

Join Club Carla now! join.contemporaryartreview.la

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.

Colophon

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.

Editor-in-Chief & Executive Director Lindsay Preston Zappas

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).

Contributing Editor Allison Noelle Conner

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.

Graphic Designer Satoru Nihei

Allison Noelle Conner is an arts and culture writer based in Los Angeles.

Copy Editor Rachel Paprocki

Satoru Nihei is a graphic designer.

Managing Editor Erin F. O’Leary

Administrative Assistant Aaron Boehmer Color Separations Echelon, Los Angeles Printer Solisco Printed in Canada Submissions For submission guidelines, please visit contemporaryartreview.la/submissions.

Inquiries For general inquiries, contact office@contemporaryartreview.la.

Advertising For ad inquiries and rates, contact ads@contemporaryartreview.la.

Copyright All content © the writers and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles.

Social Media Instagram: @contemporaryartreview.la Cover Image 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.

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.

Board of Directors Lindsay Preston Zappas, Executive Director Melissa Lo, Board Chair MJ Brown Trulee Hall Membership Carla is a free, grassroots, and artist-led publication. Club Carla members help us keep it that way. Become a member to support our work and gain access to special events and programming across Los Angeles.

Carla is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization; all donations are tax-deductible. To learn more, visit join.contemporaryartreview.la.

Thank you to all of our Club Carla members for supporting our work. A special thank you to our La Brea and Western members: Andrea Simmons, Anjelica Triola, Ann Weber, Anthony Cran, Bob Preston, Chad Alligood, Chad Karty, Heather Mingst, Ian Stanton, Jobert Poblete, Matthew Scheele, Melissa Lo, Michael Zappas, Raskin Foundation, Sarah Ippolito, Solid Art Services, Tiffiny Lendrum, and Tim Disney.

Los Angeles Distribution Central

East BOZOMAG Feminist Center for Creative Work Gattopardo GGLA Junior High la BEAST gallery Marta Nicodim Gallery OXY ARTS Parrasch Heijnen Gallery Philip Martin Gallery Rusha & Co. Sea View South Gate Museum and Art Gallery The Armory Center for the Arts Umico Printing and Framing Vielmetter Los Angeles Vincent Price Art Museum Wilding Cran Gallery North albertz benda ArtCenter College of Design ArtCenter College of Design, Graduate Art Complex STARS The Aster LA The Pit Los Angeles

Space Ten The Den Torrance Art Museum West 18th Steet Arts Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Dorado 806 Projects Five Car Garage L.A. Louver Laband Art Gallery at LMU Marshall Gallery ROSEGALLERY Von Lintel Zodiac Pictures

Outside L.A. Bread & Salt (San Diego, CA) Bortolami Gallery (New York, NY) Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY) Chess Club (Portland, OR) DOCUMENT (Chicago, IL) Et al. (San Francisco, CA) Fresno City College (Fresno, CA) High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree, CA) Left Field (Los Osos, CA) Level of Service Not Required (La Jolla, CA) Los Angeles Valley College (Valley Glen, CA) Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego (San Diego, CA) Mrs. (Queens, NY) Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla, CA) OCHI (Ketchum, ID) Oolong Gallery (Encinitas, CA) Pitzer College Art Galleries (Claremont, CA) Libraries/Collections Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD) Bard College, CCS Library (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY) Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO) Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI) Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA) Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (Los Angeles, CA) Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD) Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN) Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA) NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University (Alfred, NY) Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA) School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY) University of California Irvine, Langston IMCA (Irvine, CA) University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) University of South Florida St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg, FL) University of Washington (Seattle, WA) Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY) Yale University Library (New Haven, CT)

South Angels Gate Cultural Center Long Beach City College

Scan to access a map of Carla’s L.A. distribution locations.

Distribution

1301 PE 7811 Gallery Anat Ebgi (La Cienega) Anat Ebgi (Wilshire) Arcana Books Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth as-is.la Babst Gallery Baert Gallery Bel Ami Billis Williams Gallery BLUM Canary Test Central Server Works Press Charlie James Gallery Château Shatto Chris Sharp Gallery Cirrus Gallery Clay ca Commonwealth and Council Craft Contemporary D2 Art (Inglewood) D2 Art (Westwood) David Kordansky Gallery David Zwirner Diane Rosenstein dublab FOYER–LA François Ghebaly Gana Art Los Angeles Giovanni’s Room Hannah Hoffman Gallery Harkawik Harper’s Gallery Hashimoto Contemporary Heavy Manners Library Helen J Gallery Human Resources ICA LA JOAN KARMA LACA Lisson Gallery Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Louis Stern Fine Arts Lowell Ryan Projects Luis De Jesus Los Angeles M+B MAK Center for Art and Architecture Make Room Matter Studio Gallery Matthew Brown Los Angeles Michael Werner Gallery MOCA Grand Avenue Monte Vista Projects Morán Morán Moskowitz Bayse Murmurs Nazarian / Curcio Night Gallery Nonaka-Hill NOON Projects O-Town House OCHI One Trick Pony Pace Paradise Framing Park View / Paul Soto

Patricia Sweetow Gallery REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) Regen Projects Reparations Club Roberts Projects Royale Projects Sean Kelly Sebastian Gladstone Shoshana Wayne Gallery SHRINE Smart Objects SOLDES Sprüth Magers Steve Turner Stroll Garden Tanya Bonakdar Gallery The Box The Fulcrum The Hole The Landing The Poetic Research Bureau The Wende Museum Thinkspace Projects Tierra del Sol Gallery Tiger Strikes Asteroid Tomorrow Today TORUS Track 16 Tyler Park Presents USC Fisher Museum of Art Various Small Fires Village Well Books & Coffee Webber Wönzimer

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

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

Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu

Feature

Art & War Collide in Cai Guo-Qiang’s WE ARE

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

9

10

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-meets-­ science 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

11

Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1967–71).

Images courtesy of LACMA Archives.

12

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 the emptiness of WE ARE’s espoused atrocities enacted with those very tech- “we,” an inherently exclusionary project. nologies in the Global South. As artists Which “we” is served by the artwashing project utopian futures, genocides are of AI and drone technology? Cai’s live-streamed in real time. As with A&T, charged reference to terrorism also which participating artist James Turrell propagated the Islamophobic rhetoric described as “vastly overshadowed of the West, demonizing oppressed by the thrust of things going on indegroups while absolving state-sanctioned pendently”15 (i.e., the Vietnam War), terrorism. The artist further shared, it is impossible and unconscionable “Since September 11, I saw the impact to separate the optimistic aims of Art & of daytime explosions,” tracing his Science Collide from its geopolitical interest in daytime fireworks to the context, as the same technologies attack on the Twin Towers. Cai extracted feeding new artistic practices enable aesthetic value without acknowledging human rights abuses worldwide. the human costs of the tragedy—costs This notion is further complicated multiplied exponentially as the attack by the fact that Art & Science Collide was used to justify the decades-long was funded by at least one major “War on Terror,” a war fought with drones. sponsor complicit in genocide, Bank Presented just days after the anniversary of America, which has ongoing business of 9/11, WE ARE was not only literally relations with the Israeli arms manufacdeafening to experience but tone-deaf turer Elbit Systems.16 Further, many in its uncritical use of weaponized of the participating institutions are technology and rhetoric alike. universities investing in weapons The exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang: manufacturers, including USC.17 A Material Odyssey further attests Four days after USC hosted WE ARE’s to Cai’s indiscriminating aesthetic artistic deployment of drones at interest in all forms of explosive violence, The Coliseum, University of California humanmade or otherwise, through regents voted to equip campus police a selection of paintings created with at the nearby University of California, gunpowder. In Shadow: Pray for Los Angeles (UCLA) with military-­style Protection (1985–86), the artist renders weapons, including drones and victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb projectile launchers, to further the in gunpowder and melted wax, accomrepression of student-led pro-­ panied, strangely, by a photorealistic Palestinian protests.18 (UCLA was self-portrait. Camorra Test (2018–19), the most-granted institution, an arrangement of faux-archaeological receiving $2 million from PST.)19 artifacts smattered with gunpowder, While artists may attempt resistance replicated the effect of the eruption from within institutions, financial in Pompeii. cAI™ also figured as complicities undermine the forms a collaborator on two gunpowder of imaginative play and experimentation paintings on glass and mirror, The they enact, even when envisioned Annunciation of cAI™ and Canvas as survivance and resistance. From on the Moon: Project for Extraterrestrials drones to AI, who gets to play with No. 38 (both 2023), by generating bombs? With whose blood money, imagery and executing it with a mechanand on top of whose bodies? In one ical arm. Presented with the barest world, a bird of paradise blooms; historical context and eerily reminiscent in another, a bomb falls on a refugee of contemporary scenes of destruction, camp and a drone descends to pick these works appeared flatly universal. off the survivors one by one.20 Just as he viewed terrorism as singular During WE ARE, Cai asserted: explosions detached from systemic “If gunpowder is used in violence violence, in these works Cai minimizes and terrorism but an artist uses gunpow- the circumstances of each particular der in the creation of art and beauty, scene of violence, highlighting instead that brings a sliver of hope to humanity.”21 its aesthetic qualities and expression Such self-aggrandizement reveals through experimental technologies.

13

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.

16

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.

17

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 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

jonah valdez

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.

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

19

20

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. ⁂ 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.

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.

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.

21

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.

22

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).

⁂

the floor to sway with it, appearing to cede control to its inertia, or the At the start of the October perforweight of colonialism. The opera was mance, Carlon entered with the pomp replaced by Tobin’s voice. She rewrote and swagger of a prizefighter. He wore this section of Madama Butterfly a maximalist costume designed by with a different arrival in mind: VINTA Gallery that drew from both the landing of Ferdinand Magellan, Catholic and precolonial Indigenous a settler colonialist who came to the art styles, a nod to the colonial tension Philippines in 1521, starting a 400-year inherent in Filipino symbology.5 makuriSpanish colonial era. Tobin’s rewrite ye’nte pumped up the crowd with channeled Lapu-lapu, the Filipino rousing calls to “cunts and bussies,” leader who defeated Magellan “baklas,” and “heterosexuals,” drawing in battle.7 Rather than the hopeful roaring applause. bride of Madama, Tobin subverted From the DJ booth, Tobin spun a narrative of Asian subservience “Pump Up the Jam.” As Tobin distorted to colonial forces into that of a prideful the club music and cut it to silence, warrior. She sang: “When he arrives / Carlon was left to face the punching I will strike him down / At the knees / bag alone, mirroring the isolation I will not wait / To be saved / I am not of his grief. He weaved as the bag afraid / Of the white ship.” swung toward him, taunting it before Once Carlon lowered himself striking it again. He performed to the ground, he stabbed the bag with hypermasculinity, a response to the a blade, scattering rice along the dance emasculating horrors of empire. floor. He allowed it to rain down onto He embodied a particular rage that his body, crawling into a fetal position I found familiar—rage that began as he was consumed by whiteness. when I first learned about a history “My body like rice, devour me,” Tobin left out of most American education: sang, now in the tender voice of a lola’s the U.S. government’s violent extraction lullaby. It’s unclear whether Carlon of the Philippines, our land, and our surrendered to colonialism, sacrificed bodies, reducing us to an expendable himself to its gaze, or was resting commodity. The audience also reacted after victory. But it’s less about whether to this palpable rage, shouting affirmaCarlon won or lost, and more about tions like “Get ready,” “Shake it out,” ceasing to fight. Indeed, there is and “Let’s go now.” We carry a colonial a material battle against colonialism past and face a neocolonial present that is worth fighting. But here, that tears us from each other and our Carlon per­formed the pointlessness histories. This makes the act of showing of battling and suppressing grief, up for each other’s fight and grief— instead softening and processing community, kapwa—a radical act it with others. of resistance.

Toward the end of the perforEventually, Carlon stopped mance, Carlon playfully lip-synced punching as he allowed the bag to sway to Eartha Kitt’s rendition of “Warayaround him. Tobin then played an aria Waray” (c. 1965), a Filipino folk song from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama about the stereotypical physical Butterfly (1904). The opera’s protagonist and mental strength of Waray women is a Japanese woman awaiting the of the Visayas.8 While Carlon, with return of her lover, a white American a euphoric smile, mouthed Kitt’s words, navy officer. She kills herself upon he bathed in the rice, rubbing handfuls realizing he’s abandoned her for another of grains to his face and chest like woman. The aria, which often features soapy water. When the rice became a white performer in yellowface, is from jammed in the makeshift punching a scene in the opera where she sees bag and the flow stopped, Carlon her lover’s “white ship” and celebrates.6 improvised by fingering the hole At this point, Carlon embraced and in the bag while shooting a devilish danced with the bag, lifting himself off grin at the crowd.

23

24

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.

25

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

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 The poet and activist Adrienne Rich once described the relationship between others, date from the last few years.

The show’s range of artworks, though theory and practice by comparing it by no means a comprehensive survey to the water cycle. “Theory—the of ecofeminist art, evoked Rich’s seeing of patterns, showing the forest theory-practice cycle: ecofeminist as well as the trees—theory can be theory being reconsidered again, a dew that rises from the earth and altered by and for today’s realities. collects in the rain cloud and returns Some contemporary artists to earth over and over,” she states in the exhibition adapt ecofeminist in “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” theories to fit twenty-first-century a lecture she gave in 1984.1 A theory, conditions, making work that reflects Rich argues, arises from particular today’s more fluid conceptions of material and bodily circumstances gender and digital hyperconnectivity.

—and can then, in practice, influence These works are conscious of climate those circumstances. “But if it doesn’t change as a human-driven phenomenon smell of the earth,” she adds, “it isn’t good for the earth.”2 As material realities with origins in extractive colonialism and dire implications for all life. shift, theory must adapt, and making By adapting ecofeminist ideas to the good on our ideas for a better world concerns of the present, these artworks means making sure our theories fit renew and revise those ideas. Extending the actual conditions on the ground. ecofeminism’s ethos of interconnection, Rich’s figuration strikes me as useful for thinking about the relationship they unsettle distinctions between human and nonhuman, people and between theory and artistic practice, place. If we attend, with care, to the too. When we gather a group of artists particular and interlocking material or artworks together under the banner realities on Earth, these works suggest, of a movement or an ideology, we we might find alternative models also consider how each adapts the for inhabiting—and repairing—our theory in question to specific materials precarious planet. and forms, in a particular time and The term “ecofeminism” first place. Last fall, an exhibition at The appeared in Le Féminisme ou la Mort Brick’s new Larchmont space collected (Feminism or Death), a 1974 book artworks by 18 artists and collectives by the French radical feminist Françoise in Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism. d’Eaubonne.3 D’Eaubonne identified The show tied a heterogeneous group the subjugation of women and nature of sculptures, videos, photographs, as twin consequences of “phallocracy” performances, and installations and asserted that “a planet placed to the loose theoretical framework in the feminine will flourish for all.”4 of ecofeminism, which in the United Around the same time in the United States arose from the confluence States, thinkers like Susan Griffin of the women’s liberation and environand Carolyn Merchant were exploring mentalist movements of the 1970s similar ideas.5 In their scholarly work, and ’80s. Ecofeminists connected

On the Evolution of Ecofeminism

Ashlyn Ashbaugh

27

28

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

29

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.

30

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

31

32

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.

3. Trish Glazebrook, “Karen Warren’s Ecofeminism,” Ethics & the Environment 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2002), 12–26, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/37440.

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.

33

Interview with Dashiell Manley

34

—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 In retaliation to the attack on Pearl influenced by American conceptual Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States government imprisoned and post-conceptual art, he began working in video and installation, some 120,000 people of Japanese though for over ten years, Manley heritage (more than 70,000 of whom has turned to painting to critically were U.S. citizens) in ten internment question language and information. camps mostly built in the Western United States.1 Photographic archives In his series The New York Times and Elegy (both 2014–present), of the concentration camps—which the artist addresses late capitalism’s were euphemistically called “War barrage of information. Appropriating Relocation Centers”—are stored the text of the newspaper’s front in the Records of the War Relocation pages into vibrant watercolor Authority of the U.S. National abstractions, The New York Times Archives in Washington, D.C., undertakes the unsurmountable an archive that Los Angeles-based retention of a daily attention span artist Dashiell Manley began and a consumerist convention of diving into 15 years ago. Manley encapsulating information published was principally seeking images in circadian doses. Elegy, by contrast, of his grandmother, great-uncle, bids farewell to this overwhelming and great-grandparent, who influx—the abstract paintings were imprisoned in Tule Lake in are made by employing ceaseless, Northern California, the segregation meditative gestures with vivid oil center situated closest to the West paints across the canvas as if coast, straddling the Californiain an effort to clear away the clutter Oregon border. of excessive information.

In spending time with the Manley utilized desynchronized archive, Manley was struck by the archival images of the Tule Lake propagandistic reach of the archival concentration camp alongside his images, some of which were taken own photographs of cherry blossom by renowned photographers such trees and monochromatic blocks as Ansel Adams and Dorothea in the two-channel slide-​projection Lange, artists who were responsible work pleasant countries (Tule Lake) for idyllic signifiers of the American (2024), included in his latest solo West: caricatured wide-open show, Tule Lake, on view last landscapes, profitable boomtowns, summer at Jessica Silverman in and rugged miners. Manley leans San Francisco. pleasant countries into dynamics of sociopolitical highlights the staged aspect of the control in historiographical and archive through intentional pairings media structures. Present within —in the projection, the smiling this particular archive is a false idea children in kimonos appear alongside of life in the concentration camps.

One photograph features unsettlingly a photograph that depicts forced labor in a barren desert landscape.2 cheerful smiles of children dressed The photographs of cherry blossoms in festive kimonos, for instance

Mateus Nunes

Interview

Image courtesy of the artist.

36

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.

subject—not necessarily taboo, but not (which incorporate traditional something that was openly discussed.

Japanese symbols, such as ikebana I returned to the archive a few and Sakura branches, that resonate with themes of resilience and beauty) years ago, kind of in tandem with personal explorations I was doing serve as meditative respites from at the time in therapy, and I started this devastation. Meanwhile, the to wonder if I might find some images monochromatic fields, derived from of my grandmother or other family color samples of the flower photos, represent a sense of close, introspec- members in the background of some of these pictures. I haven’t, but projects tive observation. Displayed on have sprouted through this process. a white wall, these images emitted from two analog slide projectors placed side by side on the same plinth. MN: And on the personal level?

Despite their pairing, the projectors DM: On a personal level, the exploration were independent—although they of this archive has been exhausting played simultaneously, the images and uncomfortable. I think one of were always slightly out of step with the most impactful moments came each other. This tottering cadence, when I stopped looking at these images oscillating between information as historical artifacts—at least in terms overload and respite, mirrors the of the objects themselves being a kind tensions between violence and of document of something, a document resistance, histories that overlap of Japanese American internment and yet can be retold through wildly —and instead started looking at them disparate lenses. as documents…not so much of everyday Months after meeting—first life inside the camps [but as] documents in São Paulo and then in New York— of this kind of propaganda machine Manley and I spoke several times that was swirling around America via video call about his practice. at the time.

In this conversation, we focused I haven’t found photographs on pleasant countries and discussed of my family there, for instance, even the intersections between archival though they were in the Tule Lake violence and the fictionalization camp. [I wanted] to reflect on how 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

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

37

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.”

38

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

39

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.

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.

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.

40

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.”

41

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.

42

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.

on chaos theory. Later, and community members Caldwell’s wife Pam, who through KAOS Network, also attended the talk, showed a multimedia arts hub and him the Sanskrit meaning of cultural center that Caldwell has been operating in the heart chaos: “where brilliant dreams October 12, 2024– are born.”5 of Leimert Park for nearly 40 One of the dreams that years. In crafting a retrospecMarch 8, 2025 Caldwell helped cultivate tive of Caldwell, the exhibition at KAOS was Project Blowed, doubles as a cacophonous During an interview with the influential open-mic AfroLA, Ben Caldwell sketched media archive of the imaginative energies pulsing within this and workshop event series out a few scenes from his geared towards underground historic neighborhood, and childhood in Deming, a border hip-hop artists drawn to of Caldwell’s role in creating town in rural New Mexico. the weird and the experimental. community within it.

Describing nighttime in that The project was founded While the exhibition uses flat landscape, he explained, by rappers Aceyalone and archival photographs, films, “if you’re in the desert, it’s Abstract Rude; Caldwell gave and video footage to illustrate almost like you’re going the collective a space to hone Caldwell’s formative years through space because you their skills and host events. in New Mexico and beyond, can feel the movement, Ephemera from the ‘90s and including his draft into the you can feel space and space early 2000s dot the walls Vietnam War and his decision is there. There’s nothing and appear within display between you and the universe.”1 to study film at the University cases at A+P, including of California, Los Angeles This notion of collapsing a partially ripped sign that in the ’70s, the bulk of KAOS space—a place where Theory highlights the numerous lists the house rules of Project the division between you Blowed’s events.6 One reads: projects that have been and I and earth and air ceases “This is a Hip Hop Educational incubated at KAOS Network to exist—stood out to me Seminar, where styles are since it opened in 1984. while visiting the exhibition, shown so many can learn and Caldwell wanted the space KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic grow.” This ephemera is joined (originally known as Video Media Arts of Ben Caldwell 3333) to be a multigenerational in the exhibition by music presented at Art + Practice videos like “Mic Check” from hub where young folks could (A+P) in collaboration with 1995, which played on a small build relationships with their California African American monitor in a small room dedielders and by extension Museum (CAAM). themselves and their histories.3 cated to the musicians of Curated by Jheanelle Project Blowed. In this video, Brown and Robeson Taj Frazier This desire for intergenerawhich recreates a KAOS open tional dialogue was joined (and inspired by a 2023 monomic night, Aceyalone coolly

by Caldwell’s interest in techgraph written by Frazier and raps over scenes of the crowd nology: The space provided Caldwell),2 the exhibition and shots of a glitching televineighborhood kids the tools translates Caldwell’s artistic and time to learn video produc- sion. Caldwell also directed journey, spanning from his the film Hip Hop Habana tion and animation as a means adolescence in the 1960s up (2006), a documentary that to the present day, into a tactile of self-expression. During follows a group of Project the late ’80s and ’90s, the archive. Divided into four Blowed artists in Havana center embraced emerging rooms, the exhibition bursts as they meet up with Cuban technologies like the internet with photographs, films, rappers. In these portraits, through workshops on web videos, books, ephemera, the neighborhood cackles development and digital poems, music, and media with bravado and innovation, experiments (such as a musical graphic design, which as Caldwell records one way Caldwell presented as new bench and an interactive pay media tools that students could that KAOS artists forged phone). While built around their creative language. hack to broadcast their own Caldwell’s personal and Another KAOS project, visions.4 In 1990, he decided creative history, the exhibition Sankofa Red (2013), repurto change the center’s name also circles out and away poses a payphone into an after attending a lecture from him, marking his collabointeractive audio installation. at the American Film Institute rations with a variety of artists

Ben Caldwell at Art + Practice

Reviews

Allison Noelle Conner

43

44

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.

Jonathan Casella at Gross! Gallery 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, 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.

46

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

of specific shapes they may that are screen-printed and have encountered in some painted onto the canvases other connection.6 in This Palace.

Casella does not imitate While Casella leaned the work of his hard-edge into hard-edge abstraction predecessors, nor is he loyal in The Shapes, his referential to all their rules. In The Shapes, titles appear to convolute he is clearly interested in hard-edge’s insistence the shaped canvases of the on form over meaning (or, as 1960s and ’70s that served Frank Stella famously said: as an offshoot to minimalism “What you see is what you and post-abstract expressionsee”).4 Titles like Royal Gulp, ist painting (for instance, Beacon, and Gentle in Sun Stella’s Protractor series, (all works 2024) narrate Casella’s pieces, complicating 1967–70, which was inspired by the architecture and his insistence that the work design the late artist saw is devoid of meaning. In Royal throughout West Asia.)

Gulp, a royal blue circle rests Mary Heilmann’s casual on a landscape composed of a square of black-and-white geometric vocabulary is also referenced, as is Kenneth static and a rectangle of Noland’s shaped canvases brown cross-hatching. While from the ’70s, Sven Lukin’s the press release pointed of the ’60s, and the work to René Magritte’s pipe of Imi Knoebel. In The Shapes, (La Trahison des images [ceci Casella places himself within n’est pas une pipe], 1929),5 this lineage, using canvases Casella’s title leaves viewers as vessels for his very own to connect the dots. Perhaps geometry. the titling can be interpreted While the hard-edge as a layer of completion to the work, rather than a direct abstractionists focused on sharp and clean forms, Casella association—still, in many opted for intentional, obvious of them, visual associations can be made, however oblique, imperfections. In Driving as fast as I can, the red circles to their attendant titles. are far from smooth, prompting Driving as fast as I can up the one exhibition visitor to ask, Arroyo Seco Parkway is “Was that done on purpose?” a gridded isosceles trapezoid These imperfect circles reapsandwiched between two pear several times in Royal red circles and a band of Gulp and Beacon, while the white marquee-like dots, painted circles in Angel which call to mind car headNumber are unevenly spaced. lights or traffic stop signs.

The hard-edge abstractionists Here, Casella fails to banish were preoccupied with the the possibility of symbolic illusion of perfection, while content, choosing to flirt Casella chooses instead with association with strictly to reveal his hand. While privinonobjective artworks that leging structure, shape, and suggest a potential myriad color like his predecessors, of meanings. This departs Casella challenges Langsner’s from the hard-edge ethos idea that hard-edge forms are articulated by critic Jules autonomous shapes, sufficient Langsner: The artworks are unto themselves as shapes not intended to evoke in the and nothing more. In this series, spectator any recollections

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 kink-​ fueled, imperfect liberation.

Pulling its title from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), a canonical text that critically examines the development

Ashton S. Phillips

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 “xeno-­ euphoria”—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

47

48

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.

colonial “progress.” It can and understood. We want that were given to him by hold the growling rumbles to touch it because we are his grandmother.1 The photoof artists sublimating that curious, and we want to feel graphs found their way into pain into cathartic rage and know the unknown. a series of five large-scale and defiant disobedience.

Other works center textile works included in It can hold the xeno-euphoria the horror of bodies cut up Broxton’s recent exhibition without consent. KING COBRA that comes when we let Ancestral Echoes at Patricia ourselves get lost in the churn(documented as Doreen Sweetow Gallery. Alongside ing tangle of growling, dancing, the archival photographs, Lynette Garner)’s gruesome grieving, laughing, dripping Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016) which had been passed bodies on the wrestling mat. literalizes the history of J. down through generations, Not mine or yours, but ours.

Marion Sims’ forced medical the textiles are adorned As a form of speech, the howl experiments on enslaved with materials like sequins, defies the cis-heteronormative, antique silk, glass beads, and Black women, confronting colonial logics of control the viewer with a sutured-up cowrie shells. Investigating that demand legibility and silicone relic of butchered personal genealogy and transparency. But it is not mere empowerment through brown, pink, and yellow pelvic noise. The howl is a chorus flesh inside a mirrored case. material, Broxton weaves for the howlers and those who Candice Lin’s Night Moon Afrofuturist narratives that may join them, like a battle (2024) requires viewers tune into African cosmology cry or a Bacchanalian incitato kneel in front of a violently while building new stories tion for the long night ahead. truncated ceramic pelvis of agency and freedom. modeled on an eighteenth-­ Broxton integrated century anatomist’s illustration. 1. In 2013, the DSM-V replaced “gender the photographs of his family identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria” From this position, viewers members—sepia-toned to refocus clinicians on dysphoria as the can peer through a vaginal images of men posing condition that requires treatment, not trans identity itself. See: Jack Drescher, hole to watch a tiny stop-​ in uniform, couples posing “Queer Diagnoses Revisited: The Past action video of flying genitals together, and other portraits and Future of Homosexuality and Gender and cannibalism. When Diagnoses in DSM and ICD,” International —as an act of ancestor Review of Psychiatry 27, no. 5 (2015): the gallery is quiet, viewers worship.2 Broxton prints 386–95, https://doi.org/10.3109/095402 can hear a series of howls, the images on fabric before 61.2015.1053847. like a call to the moon or embellishing them with 2. McKenzie Wark, Raving (Durham: a feral, primal scream. These glass beads, crystals, Duke University Press, 2023). howls are a fitting soundtrack chainette, brass elements, 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism to the whole exhibition and or 24-karat gold. His labor-​ and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. the rising anti-trans-neo-​ intensive practice venerates Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg fascist-MAGA-2.0 moment the photographs: The slow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Luce deLire, “Can the in American history. If, embellishment process acts Transsexual Speak?” philoSOPHIA 13 as philosophers Gayatri as a sacred ritual performance (2023): 50–83, https://muse.jhu.edu/ Chakravorty Spivak and that honors the ancestors. article/919597.

Luce deLire have argued, Keepers of the Altar (all works subaltern postcolonial 2024) acknowledges the and transsexual subjects important role of ancestors cannot really “speak” in the in maintaining harmony language of our oppression,3 and balance. A quartz and then perhaps the howl could gold veil covers the faces be our shared language. of two figures, who stand September 14– The howl can hold the beside a table with their hands October 19, 2024 multi-vocal complexity placed upon a box. Cowrie of the past and present, just shells are sewn over the box, Following the passing of his like this exhibition. It can and web-like lace covers father, artist Demetri Broxton hold the pain and grief of the table. The inclusion sought to reconnect with his generations of queer, trans, of the shells harkens back Creole and Filipino heritage Black, and Indigenous people to the transatlantic slave trade, through meditation and who have suffered abuse reflection, revisiting twentieth-​ in which cowrie shells were in the name of science and used as currency on the century family photographs

Demetri Broxton at Patricia Sweetow Gallery

Taylor Bythewood-Porter

49

50

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 metaphys­ ical 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

52

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

Zoey Greenwald

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.

53

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.

Bottom: Post Human (installation view) 2024–25).

Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2024–25. Image courtesy of the artists and Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Joshua White.

54

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 forward-­ looking 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 wide-​ ranging—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.

4. Robert Rosenblum, “Post Human,” Artforum 43, no. 2 (October 2004), https://www.artforum.com/columns/ post-human-169745/.

5. Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 12–3.

6. Emily McDermott, “Anna Uddenberg’s Perverted Performative Sculpture,” Vulture, December 12, 2018, https://www. vulture.com/2018/12/anna-uddenbergsperverted-performative-sculpture.html.

Evan Apodaca at Grand Central Art Center September 7, 2024– January 12, 2025 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

55

56

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 self-​ defense 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

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.

Review Contributors 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.

57

Photo: © Lacy Lennon

Karma

Woody De Othello Turning the Dial

February 19–April 5, 2025 7351 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles

Wu Chi-Tsung

Fading Origin

January 18 – March 8, 2025

LOS ANGELES

New York Simphiwe Mbunyuza UMTHONYAMA On view through February 22

Ivan Morley

March 6 – April 26, 2025

Los Angeles Sam McKinniss

The Perfect Tense On view through February 23

Lesley Vance

Paintings, Watercolors On view through February 23

Maia Cruz Palileo March 13 – April 26, 2025

Chico da Silva March 13 – April 26, 2025

davidkordanskygallery.com

Mr., りさ-パインジュースの午後- | Lisa—A Pineapple Juice Afternoon, 2023. Iron, FRP, urethane paint, acrylic paint, and plywood base with MDF surface finish. 150 × 70 × 70 cm 140 × 50 × 50 cm 10 cm Ø 70 cm | 59 1/16 × 27 9/16 × 31 1/8 in 55 1/8 × 19 11/16 × 19 11/16 in 0 3/8 in, Ø 2 3/4 in. ©2023 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

Mr.

FEBRUARY 18 – MARCH 22, 2025

Santa Monica Airport Buy Tickets Now

Discover the best contemporary art from around the world

FRIEZE LOS ANGELES FEBRUARY 2O–23, 2O25

Night Gallery North

CLAIRE TABOURET February 15 - March 29 Night Gallery East

ANNE LIBBY February 22 - March 29

Night Gallery South

JANE SWAVELY February 22 - March 29

North & East, 2050 Imperial Street South, 2276 East 16th Street Los Angeles, CA 90021

MARK ACETELLI, BLUE VEIN, 60 X 48”

BENDIX ART NIGHT

FEBRUARY 22ND 7-10 PM

VISIT LA’S MOST PASSIONATE CREATORS, GALLERIES, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PERFORMERS FOR A ONE NIGHT ONLY OPEN HOUSE AND RECEPTION

THE BENDIX BUILDING

1206 MAPLE AVE, LOS ANGELES, CA

BENDIXBUILDING.COM @BENDIXBUILDING

EMBRACING DIASPORIC ART PORTRAITS

OF JOAN AGAJANIAN QUINN

MARCH 22 - MAY 23 2025 Opening Reception Saturday, March 22 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM Curated by Erin Katgely, Ara & Anahid Oshagan

ReflectSpace |Glendale Central Library |222 E. Harvard St., Glendale CA 91205 | ReflectSpace.org

Re-ImagIne DIsabIlIty anD mobIlIty In CollaboRatIon wIth the stUDents of glenDale UnIfIeD sChool DIstRICt

aPRIl 26, 2025 – JUne 21, 2025 oPenIng ReCePtIon

satURDay, aPRIl 26, 2025 6:00 Pm - 9:00 Pm

BRAND LIBRARY & ART CENTER | 1601 W. MOUNTAIN ST., GLENDALE, CA 91201 BRANDLIBRARY.ORG

Images: Huguette Caland (Beirut, Lebanon, 1931-2019), Untitled (detail), Oil on canvas, 1991; Larissa Nickel, Human Limb Object /Architech Me, Still, 2014

Ahree Lee: Home Maker Space Jan 26 — May 4, 2025

5814 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90036 www.craftcontemporary.org

Kelly Akashi LOS ANGELES

Through May 4 Getty Center

Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Brooklyn Museum

FREE ADMISSION Plan your visit Image: The Calling (detail), 2003, María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Diptych of Polaroid Polacolor Pro photographs. Collection of Jonathan and Barbara Lee. Courtesy of and © María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Text and design © 2025 J. Paul Getty Trust