Rotations on Conceptual Practice by Brent Holmes

Spin (after Sol LeWitt) installation photograph. Photo: Lonnie Timmons III/UNLV Creative Services.

Roth’s first forays into Spin (after Sol LeWitt) began in her home of Colorado in 2017. As a wandering temporary performance, Spin (after Sol LeWitt) has been staged throughout the West Coast but spent its longest duration at the Marjorie Barrick.

How to describe Spin? The actions are simple. Passages from Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, one of the founding documents of the conceptual art movement, are excerpted and arranged with a rigorous mind

by Roth, then formatted into directional signage. The sign is six feet long, a bright red arrow (riddled with all the subtext a bright red arrow can contain) pointing you in a direction, that direction a rumination on the creative process.

The signs, eighteen in total, are then mounted on a museum wall.

Were this work to have been declared finished in its gallery presentation it would have been engaging and complete in its own right. Thankfully this presentation of objects is a mechanism for conversion. When the sign spinner selects their LeWitt quote and begins to dance, toss, and of course spin it … that is when it has found its intended purpose. An inperson dialogue with the spinners in the museum transforms the space and develops the conversation around the work. Then in a final evolutionary step, the museum is removed, the spinner and sign placed on the street, providing another contour to the shape of the piece. Spin, as a practice in concept making and performativity, depicts an intricately-shaped understanding of what can be designed in art making, and how we discover and define space, and self.

Often it is context that lends definition to art. A violin solo performed in a concert hall instead of a subway platform marks the difference between a

professional and a busker. Where we place our actions becomes definitive of the estimation our culture is willing to ascribe any act.

Spinning and advertising on a street corner may not be an act we hold in high esteem but it engages every practice that we in the arts claim to hold dear. Taken out of a marketing frame we see dance, motion, design, a petite urban ballet geared towards car culture cities. Sign spinning, when witnessed on a street corner, may be seen as a blight. Crass advertising done for any number of products. Taken out of capitalistic trappings, disengaged from its service to spectacle, sign spinning is shown for the performance that it has always been.

To my mind, Roth engages in a radical act that recontextualizes the viewer’s perspective, but also the self-perception of the spinners. Their work in Spin is transformed into a performance since they are freed from the need to sell.

“Because if it’s not about selling anything it’s about you” - Roth One of the great problems of conceptual art lies within its trappings.

Contained in a gallery or museum the concept and performance can become an object. Cradled by notions of artistic import.

Watching a sign spinner enter a space held apart by so many artists is fascinating. It pulls apart myriad social stigma with greater ease than any fraught and staged ideologue or lace-draped and biofluid-coated performance art piece. Sign spinning viewed in isolation ushers us into a greater understanding of its movement, martial nature, and participatory engagement, these physical actualizations massive and resonant in a clean hemmed-in space.

With Spin, we are asked several questions, about where art can belong, how its presentation functions, what are the delineations that we as audience and the institutions that cultivate art, feel driven to engage. Where does the line between artistic expression and advertising get drawn? Who gets to inhabit spaces both public and private? Whom do we allow to be called artists? How do we create meaningful statements in a public sphere?

In Spin, we find a successful dialogue around class solidarity that more prominent artists espouse the importance of, but remain short of holistically incorporating. By incorporating sign spinners into a deconstructed perceptual dialogue Roth brings inquisition to the very nature of artmaking in spectacular ways. Individuals without the insulation of privilege and accolades from educational institutions become our directors. They give necessary attention to the acts of artmaking within the everyday, that art can be labor and built upon the pragmatic, even exploitative. Spin dispels stratification and the segmentation that tends to isolate most thought experiments. The string of pearls that conceptual art provides its champions

is transformed here into hook and ladder rescuing conceptuality from its ostentatious inferno.

When spinners activate the museum, their experiences become the primary voice in a space that does not typically privilege the voices and identities of people in their position. When LeWitt is placed in the street it shifts the cerebral into the material. These interpolations have staggering ramifications in the realm of social practice.

When asked about the quotes they handle most spinners reply kindly, “I don’t know, it’s Sol LeWitt.” Right here we lose LeWitt as a recognized author, transferring ownership of his writings to the sign spinner; putting the onus on the work they do. This transition of authorship from official source to layman gives us a more democratic view of conceptuality as a whole. Something LeWitt was interested in was the deposition of ideas and actions which typically get attributed to the “artists.” LeWitt created several novel methodologies to remove ownership of an artwork. Through Spin, Roth proposes a continuation and expansion of these methodologies.

Not only does Spin affect our perception of the art maker, it also alters notions of art space.

In this larger discussion of space, the Barrick Museum must be observed in its function as receptacle for Roth’s work, and for its direct engagement of Spin as performative work. The process has in its time at the Barrick shifted from conceptual to familial, personal. The Barrick allowed access to the sign spinners, the public, and room for chitchat and the handling of the art. The open-ended policy led to a deepening exploration of what is possible when you do “All of the things you don’t want people to do when they are in a museum,” said Roth.

The museum staff working with the spinners so intimately and at such a long duration had incredible effects on how the work developed. “Usually it’s a tight few-day period,” Roth says of previous Spin iterations. “The show at the Barrick was really the chance to have them be a part of it for three months.”

The progressive human element of the spinners is key to the strength of this work. Enthusiastic followers of its duration bore witness to several stages of awakening in the spinners themselves. “The ability to reflect on the content of the work, and create repeat performances is unique to the Barrick exhibition.

The longer duration has created an intimacy with the spinners and the work.”

Most of the sign spinners are polymaths, each philosophically grounded, full of diverse interests, imbued with a dancer’s infatuation with movement.

Sign spinners are inherently displaced. People that have walked many paths and found acceptance in a profession that has little social validation, not much different than artists, have found an activity that can hold them, their interests, and desires outside of socio-normative depictions of success. The sign spinning community is smaller and more marginal even than that of the

(Left to right, back to front) Rayen Jones, Evan James, Christopher Sicuso, Laramie Rosenfeld, and Alex Lewis.

Photo: Yumi Janairo Roth.

arts. Resonant with many artforms, the act of sign spinning as described by venerable spinner Larry Fuller occurs in a “Flow state, a transcendental space.”

The spinners working at the Barrick are not dabblers. Most have been working from five to ten years. At this point, I would be bereft of any authenticity if I could not provide the reader with the words of at least a few spinners who participated in this process.

The first spinner I spoke with was Rayen Jones; he is the General Manager of AArrow Sign Spinners in Las Vegas. He, like many sign spinners, got into it pretty young.

“I started when I was fifteen. A guy named Justin Brown was like, Hey, you want a job? And I was like, Yeah. Absolutely, let’s do this. And ever since then, I just kind of fell in love with it. My mom always told me I was rude to point, my mom’s Italian. And then I found this job and I found out that I can make people happy if you smile and wave and point give out that energy.”

He speaks about spinning the way most artists speak of their practice.

“It is my passion. It’s what makes me keep going every day. Words can’t describe how I feel whenever I’m out there and around pointing at somebody, doing my job, because it is something that I fell in love with and

something that I really do love, it’s amazing. There’s nothing on this planet that I love more than doing this. I’m one of the lucky individuals that have actually found their true passion in life because a lot of people don’t have that experience or even get close to that experience to enjoy what they’re doing.”

I asked him about his perception of spinning as artform.

“Everybody has their own style. Everybody has their own way of spinning, and that is art in itself. There’s a certain rhythm that everybody learns like there’s certain levels of sign spinning that people learn if they stick around long enough to understand. The Rayen Jones. Photo: Miranda Alam. fluidity of it, the actual movements with the sign, how to spin with it instead of against it. That’s when you can understand how good somebody really is, if they’re paying attention to the sign. And it’s kind of cheesy, but you gotta be one with the sign. Like, if you’re not understanding how it moves and how you’re moving at the same time, that’s the difference between becoming one with the sign and just being a sign spinner. Because anybody can kind of sign spin. It’s hard for people to be one with the sign and actually have a clean flow with it. That’s when it will definitely become a piece of art.”

Here Jones expresses, for all intents and purposes, the same ideas existing in almost all forms of art and human creativity and achievement.

Jones assures me that “anyone can learn how to spin,” and some of the most enjoyable moments of the exhibition were when the Museum hosted sign spinning classes. The Barrick’s spin classes were led by Las Vegas Arrow instructor Chris Sicuso who told me, “they call it a spin “Spinstructor”. I asked Sicuso to talk about their experience of teaching in the museum.

“I felt special; it just felt special. Man, if that could be my weekly job to actually teach a random group of strangers like that. That was so fun. It was definitely unique. A lot of the time, I’m doing one on one with the spinners. I love teaching people stuff. I think you would never guess how much there actually is to sign spinning and stuff. That’s why teachers exist in general, just because we need to find details to things. And yeah, I really, really enjoyed it.”

Sicuso told me that in the museum, “You’re teaching professionals and more well-off people. They’re never going to touch a sign like this in their daily lives.

They struggle with it. I think most people think it’s a super light sign. You see them realize that something they thought they could do any time is way more difficult. I just love handing them the sign. It’s heavier than what they thought.

I love watching humility happen real quick. You know what I mean? Especially, when they think about being out there on a windy day with a three-pound sign to do a five-hour shift. They’ll have a different perspective on what the sign spinner does.

I love seeing qualified people do stuff like that.”

Sicuso told me that teaching in a gallery “Versus training in the park; it felt elevated. It just made it so special. I mean, while I’m teaching the whole time, I’m like, Wow, this is really happening. Like, this is amazing. I would have never expected to be teaching in a gallery.

Chris Sicuso. Photo: Yumi Janairo Roth.

Never. Yeah, that’s true.

That was a trip.” When asked what his previous experiences in museums had been he said “To be honest, I am not a big, was not a big museum guy, but I will tell you this. It gave me a whole new found respect for museums.”

Sicuso was introduced to Roth and Roth’s work by sign spinner Evan James who got into spinning through dance. Evan tells me initially he was just looking for a job. “I think I wanted something that didn’t seem like it had so much pressure. Low intensity, you know? But I didn’t know how high intensity it was at the time. I just saw something that wasn’t conventional and looked easy enough for me to do. I mean, I’m a dancer. You know, I’ve done a lot of, you know, physical things in my body before. And you know, I saw it. It looked really cool. The guy threw a helicopter spin flying overhead and then caught it in some sort of tripod catch, and I thought it was interesting.”

Evan grew up in L.A. and was introduced to Roth through an earlier iteration of Spin. I find Evan compelling amongst the spinners because other than being a brilliant dancer and spinner, he is a direct representation of what museum spaces so often lack: Young, Black, Male, from a difficult upbringing.

Evan exemplifies what art institutions claim they want to incorporate more of. Yet rarely do you see someone like Evan engaging a museum let alone being spotlit by it. Evan says he recognized spinning as an art form from the beginning. “Yeah. When you don’t get desensitized by the work, It’s still an art, and if you do your best to continue to look at it as an art and not a job, it’s more fun. I can keep the spirit alive that way because it’s still an art. You’re

Evan James. Photo: Josh Hawkins/UNLV Creative Services.

just being hired to present that art in a different way, shape, and fashion, you know, something that works as a form of marketing and advertising.

So, you know, some days I get stuck in the art aspect of it and just spin and forget to stop smile and wave at a wave of cars, and then I’ll miss my targets and they won’t know what I’m advertising because I’m tied up in the art of it, which is, you know, 90 percent of, the story of my shift. But yeah, I consider myself an artist.”

Evan made a point to state how hard it is for sign spinning to get any recognition as an art form.

“I recall somebody saying that, quote, ‘it’s the equivalent of competitive milk-drinking.’ It was one of the judges on America’s Got Talent. I can’t recall which.”

He gave me insight into his relationship with museums as self-directed learning spaces. “I still consider museums’ art, even if it’s like the Natural History Museum, the Aquarium of the Pacific, you know, stuff like that. I enjoy places like that and just getting out of school and not doing something conventional. I have a student-teacher type of relationship with museums because there’s always something you can learn. I got diagnosed with ADHD. You know, I always preferred trips to museums because I liked advocating for myself and my normal school was hard for me.” Evan told me his experience with the Barrick was a reversal of that relationship. “I got to teach people

things about sign spinning. People learned about sign spinning through me.

That’s really tight, like I’m immortalized as an exhibit now. I felt appreciated.

You know, I felt like a piece of art. I guess you could say, it sounds silly but, like I really did. I felt the love. I look at museums differently now. I can now see and understand what the artist goes through to try to infer a message across to the audience or the people. The, you know, the art is being exhibited too, I guess. And I feel so good about being a piece of art and about spinning in general. I guess I feel like, any other time, I feel like somebody is going to look at me and either be interested in a positive way or in a negative way. And I finally understood what it was like to be objectified as a piece of art to be looked at objectively, you know, with opinions and questions thrown at me about who I am as an artist, what I do as an artist, and in my art, I guess, is different being the exhibiting piece, you know? I guess that’s really how I feel about it. I never really looked at it in a way that was. And what’s the word? You know, I never really looked at it the way I looked at a museum because I was on the other side and you sort of flipped on his head, you know?“ If Conceptual art is about anything it is about the development of internal understandings. Through Evan’s experience we can perceive Spin as a striking masterpiece in that aspect.

But what of Sol LeWitt? When asked, Evan told me “What’s the best way to put this? The relationship between me and Sol LeWitt can be best described as a test, you know, like of self or like just a hundred synthesizers in a way that sounds different. And I feel as though the quotes are there too. Not questioning, but have me question myself. As a method of introspection, as a tool for introspection.”

Still, I wanted a more expert opinion so I asked Gary Garrels, former director of SFMOMA, and organizer of LeWitt’s 2000 touring retrospective and catalog.

Gary spent four years working “hand in glove” with LeWitt on his retrospective.

Of Roth’s work he told me, “Sol was exceptionally open. He was very generous toward other artists all the time and extremely supportive of young artists. He made a long history of buying artists early, of creating work, of just helping. He was one of the most generous artists I have ever known. But he also could be very decisively opinionated. And I don’t know. I don’t think he would have opposed it, but I’m not sure that he would have sanctioned it. I mean, his work is full of paradoxes and contradictions. And it is full of humor.”

In that statement, I think with or without any posthumous approval we see kindred spirits between Roth and LeWitt. A desire for humor, exploration, and openness pervades the work of both. With openness, we find the exceptional.

For myself, museum attendees, the staff of the Barrick, the occasional attentive motorist, and most importantly the sign spinners themselves, Spin (after Sol LeWitt) continues a progression to more inclusive, fantastic ways to create and experience art.

ABOUT YUMI JANAIRO ROTH Yumi Janairo Roth was born in Eugene, Oregon and grew up in Chicago, Metro Manila, the Philippines and suburban Washington DC. She received a BA in anthropology from Tufts University, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine ArtsBoston and an MFA from the State University of New York-New Paltz. She currently lives and works in Boulder, Colorado where she is a professor of sculpture and post studio practice at the University of Colorado. Roth has created a diverse body of work that explores ideas of immigration, hybridity, and displacement through discrete objects and site-responsive installations, solo project as well as collaborations. In her projects, her objects function as both natives and interlopers to their environments, simultaneously recognizable and unfamiliar to their users.

Roth has exhibited and participated in artist-in-residencies nationally and internationally, including Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, CA; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Smack Mellon, and Cuchifritos in New York City; Diverse Works and Lawndale Art Center in Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Consolidated Works, Seattle; Vargas Museum, Metro Manila, Philippines, Ayala Museum, Metro Manila, Philippines; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; Galerie Klatovy Klenová, Czech Republic; and Institute of Art and Design-Pilsen, Czech Republic.

ABOUT BRENT HOLMES Brent Holmes is an artist, activist, and cultural animator whose work investigates contemporary social structures through a historical lens. Much of his work examines epistemological warfare, the body, food, play, and cultural discourse. He has exhibited at the Torrance Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and is part of the permanent collection of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. He is the co-organizer of local performance art event RADAR, an arts writer, and curator.

MARJORIE BARRICK MUSEUM OF ART The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art believes everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that holds space for us all.

Located on the campus of one of the most racially diverse universities in the United States, we strive to create a nourishing environment for those who continue to be neglected by contemporary art museums, including BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ groups. As the only art museum in the city of Las Vegas, we commit ourselves to leveling barriers that limit access to the arts, especially for first-time visitors. To facilitate access for low-income guests we provide free entry to all our exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and community activities. Our collection of artworks offers an opportunity for researchers and scholars to develop a more extensive knowledge of contemporary art in Southern Nevada. The Barrick Museum is part of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV).

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art University of Nevada, Las Vegas 4505 S. Maryland Pkwy.

Box 454012 Las Vegas, NV 89154 702-895-3381 barrick.museum@unlv.edu www.unlv.edu/barrickmuseum

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