Graem Whyte: Resystemize

GRAEM WHYTE 1

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GRAEM WHYTE RESYSTEMIZE CUE ART FOUNDATION MARCH 15 - APRIL 19, 2014

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS Gregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Brian D. Starer

CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff William Corbett Lynn Crawford Paddy Johnson Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Sharon Lockhart Andrea Zittel

CUE FELLOWS STAFF Polly Apfelbaum Theodore S.Berger, Chair Ian Cooper William Corbett Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Deborah Kass Corina Larkin Jonathan Lethem Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers Lilly Wei

Beatrice Wolert-Weese Interim Director Jessica Gildea Associate Director of Programs Hannah Malyn Development Coordinator

Each year, CUE invites ten individuals from across the country to anonymously nominate up to three artists for the solo exhibition program.

Artists are invited to apply, and the final selection is made by an independent jury each fall. Jurors for the 2013-14 season were Michelle Grabner, artist and founder of The Suburban, Chicago, IL; Paddy Johnson, founder, Art F City; and Gregory Amenoff, artist and Chair, Visual Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts.

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CUE ART FOUNDATION IS A DYNAMIC VISUAL ARTS CENTER DEDICATED TO CREATING ESSENTIAL CAREER AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMERGING ARTISTS OF ALL AGES. THROUGH EXHIBITIONS, ARTS EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS, CUE PROVIDES ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES WITH SUSTAINING AND MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES AND RESOURCES.

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GRAEM WHYTE

Graem Whyte is a sculptor born and raised in metro Detroit, currently based in Hamtramck, MI. His career started in the field of architecture, later shifted to fine art, and now hybridizes both disciplines. In 2004, Whyte created the one night only weekly art showcase This Week In Art at Motor City Brewing Works, which continues to the present. In 2007 Whyte and his wife, Faina Lerman, founded the experimental art venue Popps Packing in Hamtramck. Currently, Whyte is working on Squash House, the conversion of an abandoned house in Detroit into a squash court and community squash garden, and is in the development stages of Popps Emporium, an experimental storefront, community gallery, and social club utilizing barter and time-based exchange. His work utilizes a wide array of materials and often fuses architecture, mythology, and patterns of mathematics and nature with a wry sense of humor.

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STATEMENT

RESYSTEMIZE Popps Packing is our home, studios, gallery and residency program. In 2011 we added two adjunct houses across the street (including Poppa Joe’s Guest House and Popps Emporium), and in the last few years several friends have purchased homes within close proximity. Popps and these other properties are located in the northwest corner of Hamtramck and expand northwest into Detroit, and so we refer to these collective spaces as The Northwest Territories.

Resystemize presents experiments based on the reimagining of infrastructural, recreational, instrumental, and mythological systems of the Northwest Territories. Through the improvement and embellishment of these spaces, loci for social interaction and engagement are created. These works and spaces are increasingly collaborative, and aim to convey notions of sustainability from both a material and social viewpoint. They will often have a master plan from the onset, but are left open-ended to allow for flexibility and improvisation based on mood or material availability.

These spaces are augmented with sculptural components that reconfigure found objects or fuse fragmentary elements from disparate sources into cohesive wholes. These investigations of personal memory and public history are simultaneously astral and deeply grounded, inviting the viewer to wonder and dream while opening a dialogue about how we relate to a demystified world.

Hopefully, they serve as examples of how we can rebuild our personal and communal environments into something greater than the sum of their parts, using what we already have available.

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IMAGES 8

Venue for Advanced Conflict Resolution, 2011 Modified ping pong table, cast bronze, paint 7

In Search of Water (top to bottom) Trying to Paddle Upcourt, 2013 Racquetball racquets, cedar, grip tape Morphology of Flow, 2013 Vinyl downspout The Divining Tongue, 2013 Maple, cast bronze 10

Of a Proper Lineage (top to bottom) They Came From Planet X, 2013 Cast bronze The Family Conduit, 2013 Paint on steel electrical conduit It Takes a Village To Raise a Wookie, 2013 Cast bronze 11

The Divining Tongue (detail), 2013 Maple, cast bronze 12

It Takes a Village to Raise a Wookie (detail), 2013 Cast bronze 13

New Systemic Components The Family Conduit Morphology of Flow They Came From Planet X Zig Zag Wanderer, 2013 Aluminum 14

They Came From Planet X (detail) 2013 Cast bronze 15

Laying It All Out, 2013 Aluminum, steel, wheel, can of spray paint 16

Wishing For Mountains, 2013 Urethane resin, pine, found horn parts, wheels 17

Inherent Questions (top to bottom) Expanding or Contracting, 2013 Cast bronze Time As Matter, 2013 Collaboration with Kevin Beasley Luan, Plexiglass, brass screws 18

We Have Ze Power, 2013 Cast iron, renshape 19

Popps Mobile Sauna, 2013 (ongoing) Collaboration with Benny Henningsen Modified Mitsubishi van, cedar, steel rocket stove, Plexiglass

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Popps Mobile Sauna, 2013 (ongoing) Collaboration with Benny Henningsen Modified Mitsubishi van, cedar, steel rocket stove, Plexiglass

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Offering For The New Gods, 2010 Found chair parts, modified aluminum bat, ironwood walking stick, rubber chicken, lacewood, urethane rubber 22

United Rambler v. 1, 2010 Golf bag cart, steel, urethane rubber, fluorescent light fixture, miscellaneous woods, copper 23

Debuitendouche, 2012 (ongoing) Collaboration with Erik Jutten Pine, cedar, water

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WRITING GRAEM WHYTE'S CARNAL OPTIMISM p.24 25

GRAEM WHYTE'S CARNAL OPTIMISM

By John Corso

1 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les presses du reel, 2002).

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Walking through one of Graem Whyte’s exhibitions is an adventure. On the walls might hang an assortment of curious objects that seem to resemble misshapen billiard sticks or wobbly tennis rackets. They may appear alongside of ping-pong tables that are so drastically reconfigured as to suggest entirely new gaming equipment. There might be musical instruments that seem to belong to Dr. Seuss’s world. Occasionally, Whyte even includes space-age pods into which you might climb for a few magical moments.

Whyte’s work may seem humorous, but at its core is a deeply social understanding of play. With his performative sculptures, Whyte establishes environments that bring together spectators as participants in a shared social field. He does this to forge new communities that seek not a better future, but a better present achieved through the careful cultivation of social relationships.

Take, for example, a group of divining rods entitled In Search of Water (2013).

Displayed on a wooden wall rack, three linear forms hang horizontally. They include a double blade paddle made of rackets from racketball; a twisted and burnt vinyl rain gutter that resembles a cast-off from a John Chamberlain sculpture; and a giant wishbone made of polished maple, the joint of which terminates in a larger-than-lifesized human tongue rendered in bronze. The works imitate divining rods, but their ridiculous forms seem to imply that they are unable to divine anything useful. Viewers might imagine a comical scenario in which wielders of these functionless sticks wander without purpose. (Whyte has even considered allowing visitors to handle these objects in the gallery, though so far, they have not been shown with this option.)

Whyte’s work confuses the object of the game. Here, the act of seeking water or other resources is thwarted by the absurdity of the objects. By removing clear strategic objects of a game, Whyte swerves away from the notion of winning or losing and instead emphasizes the interaction of players. In works like In Search of Water, Whyte 1 invokes what Nicolas Bourriaud and other critics refer to as “relational aesthetics.”

Whyte is heir to a generation of relational artists that includes Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gabriel Orozco, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres—artists whose work advances sociological relationships as its principal aesthetic concern. Devoted to the social, Whyte nevertheless admits the challenges and obstacles that befall relationships, as he incorporates these twists and kinks into the form of the work. For two works seemingly in conversation with Gabriel Orozco, Whyte constructs fantastic permutations of

ping-pong tables. In Venue for Advanced Conflict Resolution (2011), Whyte alters a ping-pong table by fracturing the flat plane into an irregular topography of contiguous facets. The asymmetrical structure renders a table tennis match—here, a stand-in for conflict—virtually impossible, since contact with any of the planes would send the ball whirling off in unpredictable, unmanageable directions. Conflict is prevented by changing the conditions on the field: both offensive and defensive moves are subverted by the field, and instead the competitors are united in a comically hopeless situation.

The battlefield is again altered in Make Love, Not War (2012), another table tennis construction. This time, Whyte encloses the area of play by wrapping the table around it. Whyte builds an octagonal channel through which agents may play. This work, too, relies on humor, as the pink tubular sculpture, which resembles the birth canal, transforms antagonistic competition into a sexually suggestive game of cooperation.

Constructing a real social sphere—a relational sphere in which live agents interact— constitutes a critical aspect of Whyte’s artistic practice. Each of these two sculptures enacts what Bourriaud identifies in relational art as a shift away from modernism’s tenets toward the desire to build “concrete spaces.” Among the effects, this shift instigates a return of disembodied vision (key for modernists like Clement Greenberg) to the body as a carnal site for sensation. The “preference for contact and tactility” that Bourriaud observes in relational art is manifested explicitly in these two works. Their materiality renders the spectator an embodied social agent who experiences concrete sociological exchange in a tangible environment. To develop these sociological environments, both Bourriaud and Whyte refer to the “field,” a concept developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, the field contains the area in which agents assume social positions in relation to one another.

Whyte occasionally investigates the concept of the field literally, as in his 2010 collaborative work Memory Field, created with his wife, artist Faina Lerman. Memory Field features three concentric ripples made in a grassy field, designed to channel rainwater to an underground cistern that feeds a local community garden. The piece delineates a literal field for sports and social interaction. But the ripple elliptically refers also to the community gathered around the garden. Whyte returns to the idea of the field in his 2013 work, Laying it All Out, a mechanical device capable of inscribing a spray paint circle of up to eighteen feet in radius. The device includes a 27

GRAEM WHYTE'S CARNAL OPTIMISM

2 Bourdieu’s protégé, Sociologist Loïc Wacquant, puts it this way: “the notion of the habitus proposes that human agents are historical animals who carry within their bodies acquired sensibilities and categories that are the sedimented products of their past social experiences…” See Loïc Wacquant, “Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter,” Qualitative Research in Psychology 8 (2011): 82.

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spike (the compass center) which, when driven into earth, allows the trammel arm to rotate, delineating literal spheres of relations. But relational aesthetics involves more than geography; it equally requires action by social agents. That action is always conditioned by an agent’s experience. The field, therefore, works in tandem with another crucial tenet of Bourdieu’s philosophy—the habitus.

Though Bourriaud never mentions it, the habitus haunts relational art. The habitus is a dynamic system that relies on established dispositions while simultaneously defining the conditions for potential response.2 Whyte brings attention to the habitus by requiring social reaction from his viewers. In some cases, Whyte tests the habitus by calling on his constituents and awaiting their reply. Wishing for Mountains (Supper’s Ready) (2013), for instance, is Whyte’s approximation of an alpine horn. He crafted the functioning instrument to be used to call to meetings residents of the Detroit artists community in which he lives. In other cases, Whyte cultivates an embodied response that more closely resembles the kinesthetic sociology practiced by Loïc Wacquant.

Wacquant studied prizefighting by joining, training, and competing in a black urban boxing gym in Chicago. He recognized that by embedding himself in the sporting community, he was able to achieve a “deep immersion in, and carnal entanglement with” his sociological object. In Squash House, to be completed in late 2014, Whyte will offer a similar experience to art goers.

Working with the non-profit organization known as Power House Productions, Whyte is in the process of converting a dilapidated Detroit house into a usable squash court. The house, bought at auction, has been gutted and will be outfitted with a squash court, an area for spectators, and a greenhouse. As a pun on the house’s name, Whyte intends to grow squash in the greenhouse and its outside gardens.

(Squash appears frequently as a crop in many backyards in the surrounding Bengali neighborhood.) Squash House invokes the habitus on multiple levels. Sport itself relies on skill developed by past practice. But this house will also function as a community hub and recreation center, so established social habit will routinely come into play.

Importantly, the social activities here—athletics and gardening—are highly physical activities. Whether participating in a game or working in the greenhouse, art goers necessarily interact with one another on a physical level. Visitors to Squash House thus experience what Wacquant calls the “potency of carnal knowledge” since these

artworks insist on real-time, embodied exchange, not only the representation of such.

Whyte’s use of play is powerful not only because it is engaging, but because it returns the viewer to an embodied sense of the sociological so often missing in contemporary discourse. His work offers us the chance to investigate “carnal knowledge” by sharing directly in corporeal sociological transaction. Whyte’s interactive sculpture offers a compelling venue in which social interactions are initiated, tested, and revised.

Moreover, his work is optimistic. By calling attention to our habituated responses while simultaneously returning our sensibilities to the body, Whyte insists on our inherent agency and ability to build better relationships through aesthetic means.

Writer John Corso is a Detroit-based art critic and an assistant professor of art history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He holds a PhD in the history of art and visual studies from Cornell University, master's degrees from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA in art from Williams College. Corso has written art criticism for Art Papers, The Huffington Post, and most recently, Art in America. He is currently drafting a manuscript on the American sculptor Sheila Pepe.

Mentor David Ebony is currently a Contributing Editor of Art in America and its former Managing Editor, part of an association with the magazine that spans over 21 years. He has written for A.i.A. more than 450 signed articles. He is also a senior editor-at-large for SNAP Editions, based in New York. He is the author of “David Ebony’s Top 10,” a long-running contemporary art column for Artnet.com, which is accessible on the Artnet web site. He was a Contributing Editor and writer for Lacanian Ink, (from 1998-2012), a journal of art and psychoanalysis. He served for two years (2002-2003) on the Board of Trustees of AICA, the Association internationale des critiques d’art, of which he is a long-standing member.

He lives and works in New York City and Clermont, New York. Among his books are Anselm Reyle: Mystic Silver (2012); Carlo Maria Mariani in the 21st Century (2011), Dale Chihuly; Garden Installations (2011); Emily Mason, (2006); Botero: Abu Ghraib (2006); and Craigie Horsfield: Relation (2005).

This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified.

No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org

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All artwork © Graem Whyte a