Sightlines 2016

2016

Sightlines is produced by the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

Visual and Critical Studies creates an interdisciplinary and culturally diverse framework within which to bring historical, social, and political analysis, as well as formal analysis, to bear on the interpretation of the visual world. VCS trains students to write professionally about the visual arts and visual culture. Students complete coursework followed by the production of a thesis project, leading to the Master of Arts degree.

For more information on the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at CCA, please contact us:

California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street

San Francisco, CA 94107-2247

Tirza True Latimer, Program Chair Mike Rothfeld, Program Manager

cca.edu/academics/graduate/visual-critical-studies viscrit.cca.edu

Acknowledgements Haptic Visuality:

Sienna Freeman Elena Gross Forrest McGarvey Systems,

Veronica Jackson Eden Redmond Tanya Gayer Mailee Hung

Jesus Barraza Ekin Balcioˇglu Bryndis Hafthorsdottir Bios

p. 01 p. 02 p. 03 p. 04 p. 05 p. 06 p. 07 p. 08 p. 09 p. 10 p. 11 p. 12 p. 13

and the

order and

through

“For years now,” New York Times critic Holland Cotter recently observed, “there have been laments about a ‘crisis in criticism.’”1 For some, that “crisis” relates to the art market’s ascendant role in the ascription of value. For others, it has more to do with the advent of the Internet—which has enabled exercises of critical thought more varied and decentralized than at any other time since criticism emerged as a professional vocation roughly two centuries ago. The proliferation of critical platforms and critical perspectives is not, in and of itself, a problem. On the contrary, as the flm critic A.O. Scott has argued, “Criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood…not an enemy form which art must be defended, but rather another name—the proper name—for the defense of art itself.”2

1 Holland Cotter, ‘The Contemporaries,’ ‘Painting Now’ and More,”

The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, 25 June 2015. http://www. nytimes.com/2015/06/28/books/review/the-contemporaries-paintingnow-and-more.html?_r=0 (accessed 4/1/16).

2 A.O. Scott, quoted by Daniel Mendelsohn, “A. O. Scott’s ‘Better Living Through Criticism,’” The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, 19 February 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/books/review/ao-scotts-better-living-through-criticism.html (accessed 4/1/16).

Many of our students have active critical careers. Some Visual & Critical Studies alumni work as editors for art publications, as museum educators, or as content developers for museum websites. They enter and complete PhD programs. They innovate new forms of pedagogy; administer nonprofts; publish reviews, essays and books; make flms; make magazines, make trouble. Together, they prove our institutional motto to be more than a mere slogan: in myriad ways, they “make art that matters.” They support each other and build cultural communities. They found online and analog magazines in which they write about socially signifcant forms that include art, performance, cinema, comics, historical representation, advertising, political propaganda, signage and sign systems, architecture, urbanism, public space, imaging technologies, migrant labor, mapping, DIY culture, traditional crafts, street

altars, GMOs, NGOs, and the for-proft prison system, to name a few representative areas of VCS alumni research over the past decade.

VCS graduates take part in the current crisis in criticism—a positive and necessary crisis. They have acquired the skills and earned the credibility to help shape cultural agendas as they pursue (and/or invent) careers beyond CCA.

The graduating students whose work appears in this year’s volume of Sightlines engage with artworks and artists who, like the authors themselves, think critically about culture and actively take part in projects of world-making. Jesus Barraza introduces Dylan Miner’s project Native Kids Ride Bikes to discuss the creative uses of indigenous traditions for building decolonized communities and value systems. Ekin Balcıoğlu argues that Duncan Campbell’s flm essay It for Others breaks down dichotomous structures (e.g., subject/ object, form/content, self/other) that subtend the colonial logic of museum collections and display. Sienna Freeman flls a critical lacuna in scholarship about the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning by devoting sustained consideration to the artist’s soft sculptures. An online video diary by Erica Scourti provides a point of departure for Tanya Gayer’s interrogation of the taxonomical systems and technologies that mediate our social identity and relations. Elena Gross analyzes the shift in Lorna Simpson’s practice from making photographs to producing serigraphs on felt, and the ensuing transformation of embodied and phenomenological content in Simpson’s art. Bryndis Hafthorsdottir focuses on the work of Ragnar Kjartansson to explore intersections of local tradition and global forces in Icelandic contemporary culture. Mailee Hung places discourses of materiality and disability aesthetics in conversation with Donna Haraway’s cyborg to explore what the prosthetic body has come to emblematize in recent popular culture. Focusing on turn-of-the-twentieth-century

vaudeville performer Aida Overton Walker, Veronica Jackson presents popular theater as a site of feminist contestation and “racial uplift.” Through an analysis of Ken Okiishi’s oeuvre, Forrest McGarvey considers how screen technology now sets the terms not only for virtual but material engagement with the world. Looking at Hobbes Ginsberg’s Tumblr-based compositions, Eden Redmond explores the relevance of the still-life genre in our contemporary consumerist era. These projects came to fruition within the rigorous intellectual community of the Visual & Critical Studies graduate program, itself embedded in CCA’s distinctive art-school environment. Faculty members from diverse programs and departments at CCA, as well as scholars and artists from other institutions and organizations, have contributed to our students’ evolution. The effectiveness of this teamwork attests to the disciplinary diversity and collaborative character of the Visual & Critical Studies enterprise. We are profoundly grateful for these alliances.

Tirza True Latimer, Chair Visual & Critical Studies

Acknowledgments

On behalf of the students and the VCS program, I would like to acknowledge a few of the individuals who helped bring this year’s thesis projects and the Sightlines journal to fruition. Jacqueline Francis and Makeda Best led the way as primary VCS thesis directors. Thesis co-directors Michele Carlson and Frances Richard prepared students for the VCS Symposium and assumed responsibility for the production of Sightlines 2016, respectively.

Markus Thor Andresson, Maria Elena Buszek, Rebekah Edwards, Kit Hammonds, Anne Harris, Peter Krapp, David Krasner, Patricia Lange, Elizabeth Mangini, Julian Myers-Szupinska, Dawn Nafus, Eric E. Olson, Laura Perez, Jordana Moore Saggese, Cherise Smith, Marquard Smith, Tina Takemoto, and Kathy Zarur provided invaluable guidance and critique as internal and external advisors.

This volume of Sightlines benefts from the expert copy-editing of Victoria Gannon and from the design prowess of Megan Lynch.

Finally, I would like to commend Mike Rothfeld, VCS Program Manager, whose professionalism, creativity, executive capacity, and dedication have maintained the vitality of the VCS program and assured the success of its students.

Haptic Visuality: Rethinking surface, physicality, and the visual

Sienna Freeman

In the frst years, I was painting on our side of the mirror—the mirror for me is a door— but I think that I have gone over, to a place where one no longer faces identities at all. 1 –Dorothea Tanning, 1974

If we take the word of American Surrealist painter, sculptor, and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) that early in her career she was painting on “our side of the mirror,” while in later works she created from a place where identity is unconstrained by specular representation, we can identify a clear division between her early and late approaches to confronting alterity. Her initial approach is contained within paradigms of the imaginary, linked to the symbolic law of language and Modernist ocularcentrism in painting. By contrast, her later method evokes an ambiguous sense of otherness that is fostered in the realm of the abject, beyond the restraints of the refected self-image. Tanning’s nearly thirty works of soft sculpture, created between 1965 and 1982, are emblematic of this pivotal change.2

Although sixteen pieces from this series can be found in museum collections worldwide, Tanning’s cloth objects are largely absent from critical discourse, overlooked or marginalized as avatars for her painted fgural elements. 3 While earlier themes of

1 From Tanning’s 1974 interview with Alain Jouffroy in: Dorothea Tanning (Sweden: Malmö Konsthall, 1993), 57.

2 “Tanning Sculpture List,” PDF provided by the Dorothea Tanning Foundation in an email to the author, October 4, 2015.

bodies, boundaries, self-portraiture, and the female muse persist in her soft sculptures, I argue that the latent meanings attached to their construction from textile—a medium generally associated with corporeality and functionality—activate transgressive possibilities that are otherwise limited in her paintings. I propose that Tanning’s soft sculptures break the metaphorical picture plane associated with the Lacanian imaginary, entering into the borderland territory of the abject as defined by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Deviating from the canoni cal ideology of André Breton’s founding version of Surrealism, Tanning’s soft sculptures become experiential forms of matter in bodily terrain, aligning instead with the alternate surrealist platform established by Georges Bataille.4 By focusing on these fundamental shifts, we can see that Tanning’s cloth works demand a revisionist reading, one that establishes them in material terms specific to the abject.

3 Tanning spoke of her soft sculptures as “avatars, threedimensional ones, of the figures in my two-dimensional universe.”

See: Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 282. For other sources that echo this sentiment see: Dorothea Tanning, JeanChristophe Bailly, and Robert C. Morgan, Dorothea Tanning (New York: G. Braziller, 1995), 302; and Anna Lundström, “Bodies and Spaces:

On Dorothea Tanning’s Sculptures,” Journal of Art History 78, no. 3 (2009): 121.

4 Julia Kristeva credits Georges Bataille with providing one of the foundations for her theories on abjection. See: Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 64.

Born from a cultural arena defined by the horrors of World Wars I and II and the profound effects of the industrial revolu tion, Surrealism aimed to disrupt social norms on a global level by tapping into the collective unconscious and unleashing repressed desire.5 Breton’s ideals for Surrealism are characterized as “crystalline and lyrical,” propelled by goals of collective transcendence and utopian hope for intellectual freedom.6 In contrast, Bataille’s path to liberation is charted not in transparency and light but through lowness, as it aims to expose an anti-dialectic experience of otherness beyond the symbolic realm.7 A conceptual split between the mind and body is evident in the relationship between these two ideologies, with Breton finding truth in the majestic, cerebral, or sublime and Bataille locating potency in baseness, physicality, or abjection. Hal Foster suggests that work by Tanning’s husband Max Ernst—the historically more celebrated artist of the couple—typifies Breton’s ide ology, which focuses on exploring the imaginary and unconscious as opposed to the material or corporeal.8 While Tanning’s early paint ings functioned similarly, her later soft sculptures no longer perform these ideals.

5 Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism (London: Phaidon, 1997), 6.

6 Michael Richardson, “Introduction,” in Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth, Writings on Surrealism, trans. and with an introduction by Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 2006), 5.

7 Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 125.

8 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 110.

In a 1976 interview, Tanning discusses her material moti vations in the soft sculpture series: “These sculptures represent for me two or three kinds of triumph: The triumph of cloth as a material for high purpose…the triumph of softness over hardness…and the triumph of the artist over his volatile material, in this case living cloth.”9 In her view, “living cloth”—i.e., the cloths or coverings we associate with corporeal experience—is “volatile,” subject to sudden change and unpredictable degradation, like the body itself. In using cloth as a material for a “high purpose,” Tanning recog nizes that, unlike her painted figural elements, her cloth works not only challenge preconceived notions about the rigidity of fine art, but also draw on associations generated by the Modernist positioning of textiles as a “low” art form, historically associated with craft or women’s work, rather than as fine art. We can see that Tanning’s strategic use of materiality in her soft sculptures stands in contrast to Modernist ocularcentrism, which regards the flatness of paint on canvas as the purest and highest form of art.10

9 Monique Levi-Strauss, “Dorothea Tanning: Soft Sculptures,” American Fabrics and Fashions 108 (Fall 1976): 69.

10 Contemporary craft theorist Glenn Adamson explores the binary opposition between the optical and the material with regard to substances and forms embraced or rejected by fine art. He posits that the application and exploitation of craft materials and techniques have been coded as low, other, or not even art, as a result of a Greenbergian privileging of the purely optical. See: Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 40–1.

A comparison between Tanning’s 1942 painting Children’s Games (fg. 1) and her multi-part soft sculpture installation Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (fg. 2), from 1970–73, illustrates the implica tions of Tanning’s late approach. Demure in size at less than a foot tall and half that in width, Children’s Games depicts two wild-haired young girls viciously ripping at the seams of periwinkle wallpaper. This activity takes place in a dimly lit and seemingly endless hall way where a third body lies on the floor, chopped at the waist by the bottom of the picture plane. Two rectangular wounds have been made in the wallpaper, their torn edges exposing strange, sinewy, sagging masses. The room’s papered interior seems to serve as a mask for some muscular entity, alive and writhing as its fragile boundary is compromised. Children’s Games depicts female figures interrupted in action within a fantastic domestic space. However, though the

fig. 1 Dorothea Tanning, Children’s Games, 1942; Oil on canvas, 11 x 7 1/16 in.; Private collection; image courtesy the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, NY.

fig. 2 Dorothea Tanning, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202), 1970–73; fabric, wool, synthetic fur, cardboard, and Ping-Pong balls; 133 7/8 x 122 1/8 x 185 in.; Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; image courtesy the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, NY.

3 Photograph of Dorothea Tanning in Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202), 1977; collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Unknown photographer; Image courtesy the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, NY.

scene is surreal in its representation of a dreamlike narrative, the manner in which it is illustrated allows for a sense of visual famil iarity. Overall, its execution is quite traditional in terms of symbolic realism or Bretonian Surrealism.11 The image is contained within the canvas’s mirrorlike picture plane. Interior structures take on exaggerated but identifiable forms; endless hallways, open doors, and architectural thresholds serve as visual metaphors for transitional spaces of consciousness. The figures are recognizable as young girls, and the structure is believable as a house, regardless of the bizarre transformation that occurs within its boundaries. In Tanning’s soft sculpture, however, this rational legibility falls apart.

In Tanning’s installation Hôtel du Pavot, a series of domestic objects lose control of their proper formal boundaries. Five life-size anthropomorphic forms sheathed in chocolate brown and bubble-gum pink fabric emerge from and meld into the walls and furniture of a Victorian-inspired interior, their skins stitched from textile panels and their bodies stuffed with carded wool. Dismembered parts resembling limbs, backbones, and bellies meld with utilitarian items such as chairs, tables, fireplaces, and wallpaper, their haptic materiality and humanesque forms evoking uncanny connections to our own corporeality. Unlike the figures in Children’s Games, these bodies fuse into the environment that contains them, seemingly leaking from and being absorbed into its furnishings.

Individual works from Tanning’s Hôtel du Pavot, alongside others from her soft sculpture series, have previously been exhibited both as singular objects and as multipart works alternately configured.12 In each setting, viewers have encountered the work in different phenomenological iterations, ranging from traditional pedestal arrangements within a white-walled gallery space to dimly lit and dramatically staged museum displays.13 Hôtel du Pavot, as curated and historicized by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977, presents a life-size tableau of objects in which viewers encounter the installation much as they would a diorama at a natural history museum. Yet despite these differences in exhibition style, when viewers encounter Hôtel du Pavot in each of its iterations over time, their individual bodies enter into phenomenological dialogue with Tanning’s uncertain bodies (fg. 3).

12 Works from Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, alongside other pieces from Tanning’s installations, were previously exhibited at Dorothea Tanning: Sculptures, Le Point Cardinal, Paris, May–June 1970, and Dorothea Tanning: Sculpture, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Milan, February 23–March 18, 1971.

13 Images of alternate iterations and arrangements of works form Hôtel du Pavot, as well as three pieces from Tanning’s soft sculpture series, were viewed during the author’s November 5, 2015 trip to the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, NY.

11 As exemplified by Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Hans Arp, and others.

The split between the imaginary-visual and the materialhaptic that separates Tanning’s early and late work can be further understood through the relationship between the psychological paradigms of Lacan’s mirror stage and Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Recapitulating the relative position of Bataille’s “low” approach to Surrealism, which embraces physical baseness, vis-à-vis Breton’s “high” goals of intellectual ascension, Kristeva’s notion of the abject—as a developmental stage, and as a trope that operates both psychoanalytically and aesthetically—can be understood as the underside of the Lacanian symbolic.14 Developmentally situated before the mirror stage, the abject offers a counterapproach to patriarchal psychoanalytic theory by considering a confrontation between self and other before a child takes up a permanent position in the symbolic order of language.15 Kristeva’s theory accounts for an experience of otherness that is rooted in the Lacanian real, a prelinguistic state in which a child experiences self and world as continuous and whole. Direct access to the real is lost upon entering into the symbolic through the mirror stage, after which a permanent separation between the inside and outside, or body and image, is established. 16 The image of the Ideal-I , located within the imag inary, is thus established, where “the order of surface appearances… are deceptive, observable phenomena which hide underlying structure.”17 However, in Kristeva’s narrative of the abject, a sense of ambiguous otherness persists in the material realm, as fusions and fissures between inside and outside of the body, or self and other, cyclically repeat.18

14 Elizabeth Gross, “The Body of Signification,” in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, eds. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1990), 89.

15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

16 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 114–16.

17 Ibid., 82.

18 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 64.

Tanning’s use of cloth in her soft sculptures exemplifies the polymorphousness of Kristeva’s theory of the abject. The medium of textile functions between polarities, as it formally and culturally folds together notions of birth and death and experiences of life in between. Cloth serves as cover and container for the mortal body, taking the form of clothing, upholstery, bed sheets, blankets, funeral shrouds, or wedding veils.19 Humans are born naked but wrapped in cloth upon entering the social world. Dead bodies are ritualistically wrapped in cloth during mourning ceremonies or preservation rites such as mummification. Cloth can be used to swaddle or suffocate,

constrain or comfort, celebrate or shame.20 The medium simultaneously joins and separates nature and culture, maintaining a distance and connection between the body or self and the outside world.21

19 Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 179.

20 Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockney, Death, Memory, and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 117.

21 Claire Pajaczkowska, “On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth,” in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 3 (May 2005): 233.

The individual elements that construct Tanning’s soft sculptures—each with its fabric skin stretched around a furniturearmature—can be considered broadly as craft forms, defined by contemporary craft theorist Howard Risatti as “containers, cover ings, and supports.”22 Through the lens of prevalent Western cultural ideologies, craft objects have typically been hierarchically catego rized as “feminine” and “low,” the dialectical “other” to fine art. 23 These objects, which include vessels, clothing, and furniture, serve physiological needs, mediating bodily interactions with the world at borderland sites of the body such as the skin and mouth—thresholds for the experience of the abject, per Kristeva.24 Craft objects can thus be read as coded interfaces, metonymic for the boundaries of the body. Because craft objects serve the physiological needs of the body, they are also reminders of our volatile corporeality: liminal and destined to degrade.

22 Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Appreciation (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 32–3.

23 Two sources expand upon this point: Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, 40 (see note 10); and Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: A Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 62–3.

24 Risatti, A Theory of Craft, 29.

Such considerations become particularly fruitful in light of Tanning’s assertion that her soft sculpture series is “fragile on purpose, bound to decay. Like the human body.” The pieces’ formal and material associations cultivate a disruptive power that is ampli fied by the works’ address to viewers’ bodies.25 Take, for example, Tanning’s Time and Place (fg. 4), one of the individually-titled works that comprise Hôtel du Pavot. The piece figures as a central hearth, like a fireplace with an attached interior chimney vent. The speckled milk-chocolate tweed of Time and Place reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be made up of tiny fibers in blood red, tan, cream, and dark brown. These are colors of both the inside and out-side of the body. From its obtuse midpoint, the base of the sculpture resolves into the shape of a standard hearth. Yet instead of a rectangular opening

fig. 4 Dorothea Tanning, Time and Place, from Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202), 1970–73; Wood, tweed, wool, metal, and synthetic fur; 66 1/8 x 47 1/4 x 51 1/4 in.; Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; image courtesy the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, NY.

fig. 5 Dorothea Tanning, Révélation ou la fin du mois (Revelation or the End of the Month), from Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (Poppy Hotel, Room 202), 1970–73; Upholstered chair, tweed, and wool; 31 1/2 x 47 1/4 x 33 1/2 in.; Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; image courtesy the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, New York, NY.

leading to its interior, a large tumorlike mass bulges from its façade. The extrusion appears trapped in mid-transmutation, stuck within the process of growth or expulsion. Time and Place calls to mind concurrent visions of birth, afterbirth, miscarriage, or pregnancy, states that, like Kristeva’s abject, mark a “borderline phenomenon…blurring yet producing one identity and another.”26 The hearthlike object appears at once active and passive, alive and dead, crawling and sprawling horizontally and vertically, frozen in concurrent states of degradation and transformation.

25 From Tanning’s 1974 interview with Alain Jouffroy, who asks: “Your sculptures—Ouvre-toi, for instance—are fragile on purpose, bound to decay. Like the human body. Are you detached from the notion of ‘duration,’ from the survival of your work?” Tanning’s response: “These sculptures do show such a detachment. They will, in effect, last about as long as a human life—the life of someone ‘delicate.’”

See: Dorothea Tanning (Sweden: Malmö Konsthall, 1993), 59.

26 Gross, “The Body of Signification,” 94.

At nearly six feet tall, Time and Place performs in still motion for the installation’s viewers, who seem to enact the role of the painted protagonists in Tanning’s Children’s Games. As viewers, we no longer peer into a tiny painted scene; we have become active participants in a physical borderland space. The stitched cloth surface of each piece reads as a skin, just as the viewer’s own skin is encased in cloth garments. Eliciting thoughts of our own abject corporeal fusions and divisions, the sculptures evoke the presence of a material “other” that is disturbingly like ourselves.

A close look at Tanning’s 1970–73 soft sculpture Révélation ou la Fin du Mois (Revelation or the End of the Month) (fg. 5), also from Hôtel du Pavot, expands upon these ideas. Révélation is a supple object, its exterior casing machine-sewn from fuzzy brown tweed. Wool batting and a modified parlor chair serve as the body’s internal skeleton, an amalgamation of folds, lumps, orifices, and extremities, like an exaggerated female body trapped within the seating that supports it. Blurring the line between functional furnishing and figure, the object appears at once active and passive, phallic and feminine, erotic and grotesque. Révélation looks as if it is being consumed, digested, and ejected by itself, reinforcing the knowledge that, like Tanning’s cloth bodies, our own bodies will eventually lose their definition and decay.

Even the wallpaper in Hôtel du Pavot serves as a threshold, a physical and metaphorical location for the cycle of fusion and division that constitutes abjection. Since the work’s original installation, the wallpaper has been updated more than once; as with the body or a textile, it is apt to fade, wear, and degrade.27 Various iterations of the wallpaper have ranged from cluttered floral blooms to gridlike filigree. Across these changes, a faded horizontal rectangle has

continually appeared upon the wallpaper’s surface, as if a painting had been removed from the room. Perhaps pointing to Tanning’s shift from painting to soft sculpture—or from the imaginary to the haptic— this faded rectangle lingers as a ghost of her earlier approach to confronting alterity, on our side of the mirror.28

27 Pamela Johnson, Director of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, in conversation with the author, Photographic Archives, New York, NY, November 5, 2015.

28 Tanning specified that the wallpaper was meant to be “vintage” in the installation. However, there are no records stating whether or not she made an effort to create this effect of a picture frame having been removed when she reinstalled the piece in various iterations. Pamela Johnson, Director of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, email correspondence with the author, March 22, 2016.

While Hôtel du Pavot and other works from the soft sculpture series can undoubtedly be seen as a continuation of Tanning’s investigations of borders, the figure, and the self, they are more than simply avatars for her painted figures. They are bodies that devour corporeal space, constructed using historically charged, functional materials that share material connections to the bodies of their viewers. As we encounter these objects, our own bodies pulse and move before the stationary scene. The installation stages frozen transitions between the biological and the social, illuminating unfixed positions of the self in a borderland of embodied contradictions. In her soft sculptures, Tanning offers a transgressive address to otherness and selfhood relevant in her historic surrealist context and still fruitful today. The material “other” serves to remind us that, like the world around us, we are made from liminal matter, destined to age, sag, and eventually decay. But in the meantime—while we all exist as subject and object, autonomous but dependent, on the verge of creation and destruction—the space in between is open for growth, revelation, and revolution.

Looking | Reading | Feeling Image | Text | Body

“We all know a classic Lorna Simpson photograph when we see one,” art historian Kellie Jones states at the opening of her 2011 essay on conceptual photographer Lorna Simpson’s nearly three-decade career.1 The statement, not as simple as it appears, leaves its meaning fairly open-ended. Jones follows up with an explication: “…those elegant black female fgures, their backs to us, rejecting any familiarity and yet communicating with us feverishly in accompanying messages located just beyond the borders of the image.” Jones’s casual, almost too casual, opening line is supported by hard descriptive detail. What makes that opening address, the collective “we all” of it, so seductive is also what makes the statement perplexing—and false when left to stand on its own. Jones has subtly invoked an unsettling truth: “we all” come to Simpson’s work with expectations about what we will see—black female bodies, photographed from behind, with strategically placed lines of text. But what if the formula changes? What if one of the variables is substituted for another? If what makes a “classic Lorna Simpson photograph” is its familiarized exchange with the viewer—both a familiarity with Simpson’s signature photographic styles and a presumed familiarity with cultural tropes of race and gender in visual culture—what happens when that weighty exchange dramatically changes form?

1 Kellie Jones, “(Un)Seen and Overheard: Pictures by Lorna Simpson,” in EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 82.

In 1994, Simpson began screen-printing photographs onto panels of industrial felt, in a cycle of production I am calling the Felt Period. In these experiments with a new materiality, Simpson also began to change the aesthetic content: her “elegant black female figures” suddenly vanished (fig. 1) . The discomfiting erasure of the figure from these photographs was commented upon at the time by critics and curators well acquainted with the artist’s previous work. In an interview with curator Thelma Golden, for example, Simpson is asked whether her transition away from the black female figure has been symptomatic of exhaustion with talking about identity—specifically race and gender—and its relationship to the body. To this query Simpson responds: “Not really… I am just trying to work through these issues without an image of a figure. My interest in the body remains.”2 In this short exchange, the terms “figure” and “body” are pulled apart from one another and considered separately: the “figure” is what is missing from Simpson’s felt work. The “body” is what remains.

The word “figure” has many meanings. However, within the context of photography, “figure” typically connotes both “an object noticeable only as a shape or form” and “[a] bodily shape or form, especially of a person.”3 Therefore, the “figure” can most usually be understood as a visual depiction of the “body”—a pictorial representation of the physical form of a human being. One necessitates the other, but only in one direction—for the figure to be present, the body has also had to be present at some point; however, the body does not require the figure’s presence to exist. The body can exist on its own, un-pictured. The figure holds significance solely in its flattened and hollow visual depiction. The body, on the other hand, has a phenomenological life—it extends beyond the picture plane and into the physical, experiential world. For Simpson, who until this point in her career had been so easily defined through her depictions of the black female figure, the choice to remove the figure, but simultaneously to insist upon the presence of the body, allows us to privilege who exists within and outside of these marked borders of identity.

Where, then, does the body exist within Simpson’s felt pho tographs when the

removed? The Felt Period shortly follows Simpson’s exchange with Golden, beginning with the 1994 series Wigs (

twenty-one individual black-and-white images of store-bought wigs printed onto white felt panels (fg. 2). The use of

2 Huey Copeland, “‘Bye Bye Black Girl’: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat,” Jeu de Paume Magazine, May 2013. First published by the College Art Association in Art Journal 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 62–77.

felt also signals a dualism: “felt” refers to the photographs’ material surface and, at the same time, invokes the memory of touch or strong emotion. Bodies feel and bodies are felt. Yet, there are no depicted bodies, no human figures, in Wigs (portfolio), only objects meant to stand in metonymically for those figures, meant to invoke the body. Wigs are devices that represent a lack—in this case, a lack of hair— and are being used by Simpson as a part to represent the whole. Next to skin, hair is the biggest signifier of racial difference. Together both hair and skin constitute an “epidermalization” of race.4 This terminology was originally put forth by Martiniquais psycho analyst Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks, in which Fanon recounts being held within the frightened and frightening gaze of a white child on a bus. The term was then redeployed by queer theorist Judith Butler, as a tool of analysis in the 1991 acquit tal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with the brutal public assault, caught on video, of black motorist Rodney King. Butler, using Fanon’s theory to develop the concept of a racial epidermal schema, argued that it was an inherently racist mode of percep tion that allowed for white jurors to read King’s prone and battered body as violent and threatening.5 It is this “epidermal” mode of perception, perpetuated by the visualization of race through the black body, that by the early 1990s had stultified the reception of Simpson’s work, and it is this history in which her black female figures remain caught, making her decision to remove them from the picture plane necessary. Critic Okwui Enwezor describes this predicament in Simpson’s work as “double displacement:”6

The first displacement connects to the question of what it is to be black and female. This frame represents the universal and the particular in her line of enquiry. The second displacement is on the narrower subject of what it means to be African American and American simultaneously.7

4 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008). Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952).

5 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15–22.

6 Okwui Enwezor, “Repetition and Differentiation: Iconography in Lorna Simpson’s Racial Sublime,” in Lorna Simpson (New York: Abrams and American Federation of Arts, 2006), 114.

7 Ibid.

The figure/body dichotomy established in the exchange with Golden thus exposes a dualism that runs throughout Simpson’s work. The simultaneity of presence and absence is both an affirmation and a negation of identity: black is and black ain’t.8 In Wigs

(portfolio), the store-bought wigs both invoke a cultural fascination with black hair and show us empty, body-less objects that highlight artifice and construction as much as the sublimation of a feminine ideal predicated on whiteness. A second felt series, 9 Props, uses vases blown in black glass as figures—that is, as literal props or stand-ins for unpictured bodies (fg. 3). 9

8 I am borrowing this phrase from late filmmaker Marlon Riggs’s 1994 documentary Black Is…Black Ain’t, which explores the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality and the inability to subsume these identities under one monolithic definition or mode of expression.

9 Limiting the scope of analysis, the Felt Period refers to the years between 1994 and 1998 when the production of works on felt was most significant: Wigs (portfolio) (1994), Wigs II (1994–2006), 9 Props (1995), Public Sex (1995–98), Still (1997).

Later in 1995, however, the Felt Period takes an even more unexpected turn. With the unveiling of the series Public Sex, the figure—the visual depiction of the body—has completely absconded. The individually subtitled photo-text works combine imagery of public and semi-public spaces with cryptic, mostly narrative text panels, all printed on felt and arranged in a grid, which as a whole is roughly life-size. The title heightens the mystery of the empty scenic locations and the subtle eroticism of the text, driving home the “felt” pun with a dark humor. Felt is a dense material made from “natural wool fibre [sic]…stimulated by friction and lubricated by moisture…”10 The process by which the material is created coyly parallels the act of sex.

10 “The History of Felt,” Torb & Reiner Online Shop, accessed December 2015, http://www.torbandreiner.com/felt-history-general.

Compared to Wigs (portfolio) and 9 Props, the absenting of the figure in Public Sex feels more totalizing and extreme. For instance, in The Park (1995), we are presented with a massive, God’seye view of Central Park at night, with the lights of the city framed behind it (fg. 4). Even if one wanted to make out individual figures moving in the dark, it becomes impossible—the vantage point is too high, the ink that renders the trees too dark, the proximity one is allowed to an artwork in a gallery too distant. In this tableau that Simpson has designed, our collective desire to see, and to see clearly, is used against us, as the work invites pondering but denies our gaze anything concrete to latch onto. Denying the figure increases our desire to see it again.11 These voyeuristic—and scopophilic—desires are then mirrored in the narrative of the disembodied subjects in The Park’s paired text panels:

Panel 1: Just unpacked a new shiny silver telescope. And we are up high enough for a really good view of all the buildings and the park. The living room window seems to be the best

fig. 3 Lorna Simpson, Just before the battle, from the series 9 Props, 1995; 3M heat-transferred felt panel in a linen clam-shell box; 14 ½ x 10 ½ in.

fig. 4 Lorna Simpson, The Park, from the series Public Sex, installation view, 1995; Six felt image panels, two felt text panels; Overall: 68 x 67 ½ in.

spot for it. On the sidewalk below a man watches figures from across the path (fg. 5).

Panel 2: It is early evening, the lone sociologist walks through the park, to observe private acts in the men’s public bathrooms. These facilities are men’s and women’s rooms back to back. He focuses on the layout of the men’s room— right to left: basin, urinal, urinal, urinal, stall, stall. He decides to adopt the role of voyeur and look out in order to go unnoticed and noticed at the same time. His research takes several years. He names his subjects A, B, C, X, Y, and O, records their activities for now, and their license plates when applicable for later (fg. 6).

11 Jones, “(Un)Seen and Overheard,” 86.

Though the actions of the subject in each panel—their shameless gazing—remain consistent, the tone and the gravity of their actions change dramatically. Acts that could be described as curious in the first panel would almost definitely be described as invasive and potentially predatory in the second. The invocation of science and research brings to mind how photography has a legacy not only in fine-art making but also in practices closely associated with racially biased modes of quantification, including eugenics and criminalization.

While The Park explores looking, The Bed (1995) considers the counter-perspective of those being looked at. In this diptych, Simpson presents two images of empty beds with white sheets (fg. 6). It is not immediately clear whether these are separate beds in separate rooms or whether they are before-and-after shots of the same bed, the same room. The text panel is equivocal:

Panel: It is late, decided to have a quick nightcap at the hotel having checked in earlier that morning. Hotel security is curious and knocks on the door to inquire as to what’s going on, given our surroundings we suspect that maybe we have broken the “too many dark people in the room” code. More privacy is attained depending on what floor you are on, if you are in the penthouse suite you could be pretty much assured of your privacy, if you were on the 6th or 10th floor there would be a knock on the door (fg. 7) .

The text shifts tonally, as in the panels for The Park, between the sensual and the ominous. Simpson suggests a relationship between surveillance and the missing figures in the image—but were they asked to leave, or were they forced to? The unidentified

fig. 5 Lorna Simpson, The Park, from the series Public Sex, detail of text panel.

fig. 6 Lorna Simpson, The Bed, from the series Public Sex, installation view, 1995; Four felt image panels, one faelt text panel; Overall: 36 x 22 ½ in.

fig. 7 Lorna Simpson, The Bed, from the series Public Sex detail of text panel.

subjects in this diptych are described as “dark people,” and it is this that has apparently prompted the hotel security’s response. The implication being that it is the darkness of the “dark people,” their visible skin color, that has caused the threat. Butler asserts in her essay that the racial epidermal schema “pervades white perception” and “interpret[s] in advance ‘visual evidence.’”12 In the text’s descrip tion, the visual evidence is the couple’s dark skin, suggesting that the black body cannot evade its skin color and, therefore, is forever caught in the racial epidermal paradigm. However, as viewers, we never see the couple, never see their skin, and are never afforded this visual evidence. The black figure—the visualized image of the black body—may be confined within a visual schema of difference, but from our vantage point, the black figure does not exist.

12 Butler, “Endangered/Endangering,” 16.

In Simpson’s felt works, the body is detached from its visual effigy, the figure. But what does this detachment allow Simpson to do? Jones’s essay cites a common misconception that Simpson’s work is specific to the experiences of black womanhood. Because Simpson chooses to work with the black female figure, Jones adds that these works—which implicitly explore the history of racialized violence, trauma, and the aftermath of American slavery—are also often believed to be reflective of the artist’s own experiences as a black woman. The black female figure in Simpson’s photographs has been uncomfortably coupled with Simpson’s black female body.

Art depicting black women can only possibly be about that actual experience; somehow there seems to be no room for wider or “universal” interpretations, no place for “others” to imagine themselves in that picture, in that skin…13

But this is ultimately what The Bed asks us to do—to imagine ourselves in that picture, in that skin. We are asked to feel the white heat of a phantasmic racial gaze as we experience the implied body through our own, suspending, for a moment, the culturally prescriptive contextual information the figure contains in its very outline.

Public Sex problematizes the notion that “we all know a classic Lorna Simpson photograph when we see one.” These works question who all constitutes “we all,” what “knowing” really means, and what marks Lorna Simpson as a photographer and an artist in the midst of this culturally defining moment of the 1990s, the end of twentieth-century art. Removing the figure from the picture plane opens the possibility of broadening the kinds of bodies, the kinds of lived experiences “we all” imagine when we engage with Simpson’s work.

13 Jones, “(Un)Seen and Overheard,” 104.

Forrest McGarvey

The Allegory of the Screen: Paradox of Representation in Ken Okiishi’s gesture/data (feedback)

Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than shadows of artifcial objects.

Quite inevitably, he said. –Plato, “Allegory of the Cave”

Being born and held captive in the bowels of a cave, the prisoners in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” know nothing of the world outside.1 Behind them, their captors project shadows of puppets by campfre onto the cave’s stone wall, defning the prisoners’ reality through the moving silhouettes (fg. 1). To the prisoners, the shadows in the cave are tangible forms—not representations that point toward other things that are physically absent. Perceived as actual objects, the shadows in Plato’s scenario present a philosophical question about representation—a system of forms that stand in for absent referents, symbolically or cognitively.2 The prisoners’ ability to constitute their reality is dependent on the distinction between physical object and visual image. Yet the conditions of the cave make it impossible for them to understand this very distinction. If a system of representation depends on reference to an absent object in an exterior reality, what happens when the methods of representation fuse the image and its object seamlessly together, collapsing absence and presence, interior and exterior?

1 Plato, Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Paul Shorey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 748, http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/ clowney/Aesthetics/scans/Plato/PlatoCave.pdf.

1 Jan Pietersz Saenraedam, after Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Plato’s Cave, 1604; Engraving on laid paper, 10 ½ x 17 ½ in.; National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Ken Okiishi, gesture/data (feedback), 2015; Oil paint on

.mp4

(color, sound); (left)

in.;

of the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery.

The convincing power of the “shadows of artificial objects” described by Socrates finds a contemporary parallel in the perceptual assumptions that surround our engagement with screen-based representations. Unlike commercial screen technologies that prioritize user experience, contemporary art practices engage screens beyond their utilitarian functions through material, experiential, and conceptual investigations. In 2015, American artist Ken Okiishi constructed a series of multimedia, screen-based works collectively titled gesture/data (feedback). Okiishi paints on the surface of digital flat-screens that are simultaneously playing a pre-recorded digital video; using the screen as a site of perceptual experimen tation, Okiishi paints in response to the video image that has become the support for his mark-making. The replication of images and mediums displayed on Okiishi’s screens thus instantiates the vast representational possibilities generated through screen-based engagements. Contrasting the gestural painting with the moving video even as they are combined on a stationary digital screen, Okiishi’s work performs technology’s ability to replicate almost anything. This multivalent capability leads us in turn to understand what we view on-screen as undifferentiated from the object it represents, the indexical handmade mark reduced to its virtual corollary. This fusion problematizes Plato’s traditional model of representation, which posits the necessity of an object or concept as existing prior to, and separate from, its depiction. Replicating the visual conflation of object and image found in the cave, the tech nological screen can be positioned as a new site of self-referential representation. Okiishi’s gesture/data (feedback) produces on-screen images that collapse the role of the shadow into its referent; they appear as one and the same, the shadow extended by its representation and reiteration of itself. In doing so, (feedback) reveals a paradox of screen-based imagery in our increasingly electronic and digital visual landscape that calls attention to how it can potentially reshape our conception of visuality.

In one diptych from Okiishi’s gesture/data (feedback) series, two flat-screens have been turned vertically and installed side by side—a small screen on the left and a slightly larger screen on the right (fg. 2). Each screen is physically marked on its glass surface by an accumulation of expressive strokes of paint, spiking horizontally outward from the right of the screen in cadmium red, mint green, and an array of murky grays. On the left screen, the marks’ sense of energy contrasts the digital gradient of a powder-blue background playing beneath it. Re-rendered in video on the right screen, the

2 Anne Freadman, “Representation,” in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society , eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 306–09.

entire combination of video and paint from the smaller screen is reproduced, scaled to fit the second screen’s larger size. The same explosive marks that appear as a video background have also been recreated a second time in paint on this screen’s glass surface, mul tiplying the number of marks in the screen’s frame.

This mediated repetition of image and surface conflates the two video-plus-paint compositions in a way that forces us to consider the screen as a specific model of representation that accounts for its own mediation. The two screens mirror one another, constructing a complicated layering of self-referential representations. From left-to-right, the flow of production reads; digital video, paint on screen, digital video of paint, and painted reproduction of digital video, which then folds back into (feedback)’s total diegetic image as a small painted screen with video, then a larger painted screen with video, and finally a diptych. The back-and-forth between these layers and semiotic references centralizes the screen as a key ele ment in the production and reproduction of images.

The commonplace presence of the technological screen is largely responsible for contemporary culture’s widespread privileging of visual representations over somatic experience. The awesome ability that smart devices possess to reproduce images, text, video, real-time feeds, interactive exchanges, sound, and haptic stimulation leaves no question as to why screen-based technology has become the primary format for engaging with such an array of media.3 To media scholar Lev Manovich, the cultural demand to display new forms of media in turn drives the development of screens. He argues that new technologies have been constructed in order for each kind of media to come into being; the canvas served as a surface on which to create images with paint; the computer screen evolved from the technology of radar, and so on, each invention formally connected to those that came before it through their consistent rectilinear shapes.4 Manovich states that technologically produced images are “synthetic,” meaning that their representations of reality exist outside human visual potentiality, due to the capacities of the computerized platform (fg. 3). 5 His approach assumes that screens serve a singular purpose: to define what they depict as a product of the screen, intrinsic to it, rather than as a re-creation of something exterior to the technological device. If the screen exclusively produces synthetic realities, then screen-based represen tations are conflated to the devices themselves, implying a refusal of anything external to their projections.

3 “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior,” Google, last modified August 2012, accessed February 6, 2016, http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ multiscreenworld_final.pdf.

4 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 99.

3 In another unit from the gesture/data (feedback) series, Okiishi’s use of digitized media emphasizes Manovich’s notion of technological imagery as a “synthetic” reality.

Ken Okiishi, gesture/data (feedback), 2015; Oil paint on flatscreen televisions, feedback, .mp4 files (color, sound); (left) 48 in.: 42

x 24 x 2 in.; (right) 40 in.: 35

x 20

x 2 in.; Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery.

4 Ken Okiishi, gesture/data (feedback), detail, 2015 (see figure 2 for full image).

5 “It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed of noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computergenerated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality.” Manovich, Language of New Media, 202; italics original.

The conflation of media and their screens is problematized when a viewer attempts to determine an image’s exterior references. Scholar Jonathan Crary argues that the rapid development of visual technologies in nineteenth-century Europe changed the ways in which people understood vision by introducing machines—such as the zoetrope—that split vision from our bodies, transforming it into something reproducible by incorporeal means. The reproduction of vision via technology creates what Crary refers to as an obedient “observer” who complies with the representational logic facilitated by the technological device. It is up to the observer to distinguish the disembodied, reproduced, technological imagery as an articulation of reality exterior to the body.6 But the machine’s ability to artificially mimic bodily vision through its scientifically produced replications can make it difficult for the observer to differentiate the mechanical representation from human vision.7 If the observer fails to make this distinction, then mechanically—and therefore, technologically—produced vision can become perceptually synony mous with corporeal vision. Expanding on Crary’s argument about nineteenth-century technologies, when the synthetic reproductions of vision are produced within the context of the technological screen and recognized by the observer as interchangeable with corporeal vision, I argue that the resulting misconception—the conflation of synthetic and actual representations on-screen—affects our very concepts of visuality for the twenty-first century.

6 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 26.

7 The distance of technology from everyday understandings grants it a status of “truth” that comes with the logical and procedural processes of science. See: Edward A. Shanken, “Historicizing Art and Technology: Forging a Method of Firing a Canon,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 43–70.

Okiishi’s diptychs do not propose that the technological is an alternative to corporeal vision, but rather frame the screen’s representations as incorporating both forms. This blurring of technologically produced vision and corporeal vision is palpable in the shifting nature of (feedback)’s images. Toward the top of (feedback)’s larger screen, an arc of light purple paint almost breaks the picture plane. Compositionally above it but visually beneath it, a copy of its form in midnight blue is reproduced in video (fg. 4). The dark blue mark is the video recording of the smaller screen’s composition, and the purple mark of paint on the larger screen’s surface was copied from

the video playing in the background. The rendering of the same mark in different materials manifests Crary’s problematic of the observer being able—or not—to distinguish between corporeal/material and synthetic/technological representations. However, by layering the different iterations of the mark in the same space, Okiishi suggests the possibility of reconciling their material separation through a flat tening of visual difference. The relationship between these two forms of representation in (feedback) maintains the distinction between technological and corporeal vision but, by doing so, produces a composite that increases the likelihood of the observer misinterpreting it as undifferentiated. Okiishi’s use of the word “feedback” in the title implies a response, or better yet, a chain-reaction that results from an output being reinserted into a system as an input, creating a looping effect. (feedback)’s combinations are a cumulative endeavor, a palimpsest of loops rather than a substitution of one image for another. To recognize the difference between representations—even as one views them simultaneously—allows Okiishi’s viewer to contemplate a generative model of imagistic production that accounts for both forms—material and digital—fusing as ubiquitous elements of contemporary visual experience.

Through the layers of material pigment, technological device, and digitized video, Okiishi’s diptych produces a new type of vision that marries the moving to the static image—a feat unachievable without technological aid. Cultural studies scholar Vivian Sobchack uses the term “technological vision” to describe this new model of vision that allows us to understand and engage with media in ways that extend beyond the limitations of analog production. Sobchack claims that, as a medium, film is “a subject of its own vision, as well as an object for our vision,” articulating a dual register for moving images that can be extended to the ephemeral quality of devicebased media.8 Within (feedback)’s larger screen, the video footage of the smaller screen becomes the subject of the larger screen’s vision, while remaining an object to the viewer. Turning this duplicity of technological vision onto itself, Okiishi reveals the dual role of the screen as both object and image.

8 “Thus, perceived as the subject of its own vision, as well as an object for our vision, a moving picture is not precisely a thing that (like a photograph) can be easily controlled, contained, or materially possessed—at least, not until the relatively recent advent of electronic culture.” Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Berkeley Press, 2004), 148–49; italics original.

The interwoven relationship between material and synthetic production that occurs within (feedback)’s frames creates a closed circuit of reference. The new painting created from the digitally reproduced video mirrored on Okiishi’s larger screen inverts the traditional system of representation that refers to a physically absent object.

fig. 5 Some units from the series are not diptychs, concealing the presence of an “original.”

Ken Okiishi, gesture/data (feedback), 2015; Oil paint on flatscreen television, feedback, .mp4 files (color, silent); 42 ³ ₁₀ x 24 ⁴ ₁₀ x 2 in.; Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery.

(feedback) performs an agency of synthetic representation, activating “technological vision” as a model of vision believable enough to generate copies of its own likeness (fg. 5). 9 When the technological screen synthetically reproduces the somatic gesture—the brushstroke— the representational convention of symbolic reference collapses onto itself. Supplanting the singular object for a synthetic visualiza tion problematizes an observer’s relationship to the physical world, implying that the differentiation between fact and fiction is no longer relevant, or even existent. The polarizing model of material versus synthetic representations, corporeal versus technological vision, and the vectors of reference and genesis between them become interchangeable, conflated and enabled by the technological screen. The outcome is an image that refers to the concept of representation by using another iteration of itself as its referent.

9 For more on the art historical practice of copying the techniques of master painters as a means of authenticating originality and its effects on representation, see: Richard Shiff, “Representation, Copying, and the Technique of Originality,” New Literary History 15, no. 2, Interrelation of Interpretation and Creation (Winter 1984): 333–63, accessed November 6, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/468860.

It is here that the paradox of representation circulated through technological screens connects most strongly to Plato’s model of the cave. The technological screen convinces the viewer that its imagery is synonymous with the objects it represents, mimicking the notion of the shadow being both referent and object to the prisoners in the cave. In (feedback), the screen allows the image of paint to be represented twice—the video mirroring the paint of the first screen, mirrored again by the reproduced marks on the second, larger screen. This doubling within the diptych creates a paradox: if the paint is presented as both a physical object and a digital image, then each reproduction simultaneously refers to itself as an absent object and a present image. In this way, when the technologically based (i.e., materially absent) image is considered as the (material) presence of a technological screen, traditional modes of representation begin to fail, unable to accommodate the screen’s fusion of referent and sign.

In order for the traditional model of representation to function, an exterior must always exist. Yet, within the technological screens of (feedback), this necessity is denied. The interaction between referents in (feedback)’s dual screens mirroring each other constructs the exterior of its diegetic space as a technological—and therefore interior—representation of itself.10 (feedback)’s production and reproduction of images on material and digital levels posit that the technological screen functions as a nexus for new production— a “blank canvas” suited for the generation of indexical gestures.11 Thus, to consider the technological screen as an active agent in

contextualizing its displays produces a new model of visuality specific to the fusion of digital and analog mediums that coexist in screen-based representations.

10 Media scholar Alexander Galloway defines the liminal exchange of mediatic forms in a diegetic space as “the interface effect.” This effect involves the contextualization of an image’s logic through a focus on the maintenance of either an interiority or exteriority.

See: Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2013).

11 For more on the use of the term “index” within an art context, see: Rosalind E. Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part I,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 196–209.

Allowing the technological image to inscribe itself as the foreclosure of an exterior forces us to ask whether we can continue to consider screen-based media as “artificial.”12 Ken Okiishi’s gesture/data (feedback) presents us with an unlikely amalgamation of gesture and data at a cultural moment in which conceptions of representation have been thrown into turmoil. In Plato’s narrative, Socrates speculates as to what would happen if a prisoner were to escape the cave and enter the world outside, beyond previous horizons of perceptual knowledge. The philosopher’s answer, of course, is that the escaped prisoner would choose to return to the comfort of the cave. Our own assumptions about screen-based representations as indistinguishable from traditional models provides us a similar comfort: we are enthralled by the idea that screens passively and innocently mediate rather than actively engage and create. On-screen media are our contemporary shadows, while the cave that obstructs our access to exterior context becomes the screen itself. The soft glow of the screen providing us with endless simulations seems preferable to the harsh light of the sun that illuminates a foreign, exterior world. In the all-encompassing simulation of the screen, the seemingly illogical return to the cave transforms from classic speculation to contemporary reality.

12 This substitution of synthetic representation for a metaphysical “truth” predicated on reality echoes the concerns of cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard as expressed in his 1994 book Simulacra and Simulations. See: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

Systems, Interrupted: Disrupting systems of social order and visual representation

Restructuring Respectability, Gender, and Power: Aida Overton Walker Performs Modernity

Veronica Jackson

From the beginning of her onstage career in 1897 to her death in 1914, Aida Overton Walker was a vaudeville performer engaged in a campaign to restructure and re-present how African Americans, particularly black women in the popular theatre, were perceived by both black and white society. A de facto member of the famous minstrel and vaudeville team known as Williams and Walker (the partnership of Bert Williams and George Walker), Overton Walker was vital to the theatrical performance company’s success. Almost from the beginning, she was their leading lady, principal choreographer, and creative director. Most importantly, Overton Walker was on a mission to execute her articulation of racial uplift while performing her right to choose the theatre as a profession (fg. 1).

This essay’s overarching aim is to examine Overton Walker’s fearless enunciation of the concepts of racial uplift as meditated through a feminist position—in other words, a belief that men and women are equal. During the early twentieth century, African American women were typically limited in their methods of participation for creating positive black images. Patriarchal domination confned black women’s respectable professions to those of schoolteacher, housewife, or domestic. Yet Overton Walker’s restructuring and re-presenting of these perceptions of black women refected her embodied pursuit of the strategy embraced by the educated,

1 George Walker, Bert Williams, and Aida Overton Walker on stage in a Williams and Walker production, 1905.

middle-class, African American elite, whose calculated goal was to deliver “respectable” images of black people while also promoting “exemplary behavior by blacks.”1 Extending well beyond the vocations prescribed for black women, Overton Walker’s contribution mani fested through her choreography and dance, comedic and dramatic performances. A reexamination of her oeuvre therefore allows us to consider Overton Walker explicitly as a woman countering the black male elite’s domination over the ideology of racial respectability.

1 Kevin K. Gaines, “Racial Uplift Ideology in the Era of ‘the Negro Problem,’” Freedom’s Story: Teaching African American Literature and History (National Humanities Center), accessed October 7, 2015, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865-1917/ essays/racialuplift.htm.

This was a complex time in American society. Racism in the early 1900s worked in tandem with blackface minstrelsy, which presented derogatory and demeaning depictions of African Americans and reinforced white supremacy. Jim Crow laws restricted black people’s economic advancement, while the white hegemonic system made it difficult for blacks to grow businesses, despite an economic boom flourishing all around them. The marketing of a “real” or authen tic blackness emerged in response to this climate, which largely circumscribed entrepreneurship for black people to manual labor or menial positions. In the midst of these restrictions, popular theatre aimed at white and black audiences alike became available to black artists as a market. For the purposes of economic empowerment, black entertainers in the early 1900s established themselves as real or authentic purveyors of African American cultural expression, distinguishing their acts from the imitative techniques of white minstrels. Marketing themselves as performers who possessed the ability to disseminate and define a true black culture was an astute fiscal strategy as well as a political one. The tropes of cultural authenticity embodied in song, dance, and humor were deployed by the Williams and Walker Company in order to define their version of performing “real blackness” on the vaudeville stage. Because white actors were mimicking other white performers lampooning the darky coon, their rendition of blackface minstrelsy was an act of imitation thrice over, a re-creation of an inherited stereotype. In contrast, as performance scholar and cultural historian David Krasner notes, “Williams and Walker [and a few of their peers in the entertainment business] displayed throughout their writings and actions an acute awareness of the ‘real’ as a cultural signifier and marketing tool.”2 Overton Walker “contributed to the creation of a revised American realism…[that] countered hegemonic and racist depictions [of blacks] by exploiting the desire for the real among whites.”3 The Williams and Walker Company’s version of onstage blackness was, more over, subversive. Its coded messages contradicted minstrelsy and

were aimed at and interpreted by black audiences while remaining illegible to white ones. For example: Williams and Walker often downplayed the stereotyped southern coon dialect and accentuated the clever and witty repartee between the main characters—Jim Crow (Williams) and Zip Coon (Walker). Traditional roles called for Jim Crow to be the indolent southern darky and Zip Coon the citi fied northern Negro speaking in malapropisms, but Williams and Walker dispensed with the common lampooning, presenting their double-conscious interpretations instead.

2 David Krasner, “The Real Thing,” in Beyond Blackface: African American and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 99.

3 Ibid., 101.

This is a paradoxical situation. Real or authentic blackness was offered as an immersive experience that involved the haptic as well as the visual senses. Krasner explains, “The ‘realness’ had to be transferable; in other words, whites not only had to observe ‘real’ blackness, they had to experience it as well. ‘Blackness’ had to be made marketable, a species not only in the showcase window…but something a buyer might sensuously ‘adorn.’”4 Overton Walker and her cohort took advantage of the demand for black realness and made black cultural expression available to their white society patrons at the same time as they were entertaining and delivering the message to their black audiences that minstrelsy could not define them. A central vehicle for this complex exchange was the cakewalk, a dance craze that took hold at the turn of the twentieth century (fg. 2).

4 Ibid., 108–09.

Both black and white Americans were swept up in the cakewalk frenzy; the dance was, as Krasner writes, a way in which the white elite went about “othering, without disrupting white notions of cultural behavior…. Cultural identification with blacks…supplied motivation for whites eager to explore black cultural experiences as an excavation into the exotic world of what they thought was… the inferior, but often fascinating, Other.”5 These whites explored exoticism by sampling a signifier of black culture, the cakewalk, as taught by a black instructor, Overton Walker.

In the early 1900s, a mostly urban white nouveau riche sought to learn the cakewalk as a way to define their up-to-dateness and to escape from tradition. Such definition was important because emerging middle- and upper-class white Americans had

5 David Krasner, “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking,” Theatre Survey 37:2 (November 1996): 79–81.

fig. 2 Overton Walker and Walker perform the cakewalk in In Dahomey, 1903. Tatler notice.

fig. 3 Cakewalk composite image (Southern plantation dance and Civil War cotillion), 1861 and 1864.

obtained their social status through money, not birthright.6 Krasner states: “For the new middle and upper classes, wealth was replacing lineage…the ‘formerly exclusive corridors’ of aristocracy by birth were being usurped at the turn of the century by ‘a conglomerate host that has climbed up from the lowlands of mediocrity,’ thereby acquiring social distinction ‘solely through the expenditure of wealth.’”7 The cakewalk was a commodity that could be bought and sold, and learning the cakewalk from the “real” or authentic instruc tor—Overton Walker—became the white elite’s cultural signifier.

6 Krasner, “Rewriting the Body,” 78.

7 Ibid.

Overton Walker brought authenticity to performing and instructing the cakewalk through her knowledge of its African roots and emergence as a dance conducted by enslaved blacks on the plantation. Many myths surround the origin of the cakewalk. Overton Walker biographer Richard Newman presumes that the dance developed “when slaves imitated, exaggerated, and in fact satirically mocked and mimicked formal white cotillions.”8 Dating from eighteenth-century France, cotillions are formal dances usually performed on the occasion of the debutante’s coming out.9 Once again paradoxically, under Overton Walker’s tutelage, the cakewalk exemplified a series of authenticities and imitations realized by a black female performer who, while revamping and bringing her signature grace to the dance in the 1890s, was imitating white minstrels. Such minstrels, through their inclusion of the cakewalk in their finales, were imitating black slaves on the plantation, who themselves were pulling from a West African festival dance while satirically parodying their white master’s formal cotillions (fg. 3). 10 Through the process of instructing the “better classes of white people on both sides of the ocean”11 how to

and thus integrating into white society, Overton Walker proved that a black

could make positive contributions

to if not better than those of respected male professionals.

8 Richard

9

the race,

10

11

Overton Walker was the “real cakewalker.” She branded herself as the authentic person from whom to learn the dance. As a result of her manipulation of the art form, she has been hailed by scholars such as Krasner as contributing to American modernity by transforming the dance from “old fashioned and vulgar to modern and stylish.”12 Overton Walker was the go-to person for the white upper- and middle-class society to learn the cakewalk, and receiving instruction from her was one way for them to demonstrate social status.13 She had either instructed or been invited to entertain some of the most noted people in high society, including British royalty; in 1903, while touring with In Dahomey in London, she privately tutored leading sophisticates in the art of cakewalking.14 She per formed a solo and afterward was granted an audience with King Edward VII, who, famous for his affections for beautiful women, bestowed upon her a diamond brooch.15

12 Krasner, “Rewriting the Body,” 80.

13 Krasner, “The Real Thing,” 109.

14 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 133.

15 Newman, “‘The Brightest Star,’” 470.

Overton Walker’s performances for and instructions to royalty and the white moneyed class in America exemplify how she used her talents and expertise to bridge the class and cultural divides. On and off the vaudeville stage, she trenchantly applied her performance skills to present a positive public display of her race and her gender. Her work was celebrated by white society, but more importantly, Overton Walker marketed herself as the premier cakewalker while simultaneously inventing an alternative role for black women to embody. She used her performances as tools for promoting herself as well as personifying racial uplift. This is demonstrated in her article in Colored American magazine, directed at the black elite:

It has been my good fortune to entertain and instruct, pri vately, many members of the most select circles—both in this country and abroad—and I can truthfully state that my profession has given me entrée to [white] residences which members of my race in other professions would have a hard task in gaining if ever they did…. The fact of the matter is this, that we come in contact with more white people in a week than other professional colored people meet in a year and more than some meet in a whole decade.16

16 Aida Overton Walker, “Colored Men and Women On the Stage,” 571.

Overton Walker was fully aware of the opportunity her position as a performer afforded her to not only integrate white society, but to remind the black intelligentsia that she had accomplished said task. Despite the black elite’s negative characterizations of the theatre as “unwholesome” and a “threat to racial progress,”17 she emphasized her contribution to racial respectability by stating twice that her pro fession engages with more white people than the other “respected” professions—an engagement that contributed to uplift because it demonstrated African Americans performing “exemplary behavior.”

At this early twentieth-century moment, when cultural identity was being redefined and reimagined by both black and white Americans, Overton Walker’s performances, cakewalk lessons, and magazine articles elucidated an emerging American modernity—departing from the limits dictated by tradition toward a new movement in which authenticity or realness moved in fluid opposition to imitation. For instance, even though she was deeply entrenched in the era of minstrelsy, Overton Walker never played the minstrel coon nor wore blackface. Her characters were respectably costumed, unlike her two male partners’ buffoonish portrayals of darky coon roles, as evidenced in a 1905 triptych of the trio featured in an advertisement in Vanity Fair (fg. 4). While most ads for the Williams and Walker Company featured the named principals only, in this instance, Overton Walker is given equal billing. Bert and George are the “Two Real Coons,” and Aida is strategically situated between them. Although the word “coon” was derogatory, used by both white and black society (including the theatre community) to describe southern African Americans recently liberated from the plantation, Williams and Walker proudly adopted the moniker to differentiate themselves from white minstrel performers. In George Walker’s own words,

We thought that as there seemed to be a great demand for black faces on stage, we would do all we could to get what we felt belonged to us by the laws of nature. We finally decided that as white men with black faces were billing themselves ‘coons,’ Williams and Walker would do well to bill themselves the ‘Two Real Coons,’ and so we did. Our bills attracted the attention of managers, and gradually we made our way in.18

17 Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2.

18 George W. Walker, “The Real ‘Coon’ on the American Stage,” Theatre Magazine 6, no. 59 (January 1906).

fig. 4 Williams, Overton Walker, and Walker advertisement in Vanity Fair, 1905; New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection.

fig. 5 Cast of In Dahomey, 1902, New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Helen ArmsteadJohnson Theater Photograph Collection.

fig. 6 Portrait of Overton Walker, 1905, New York Public Library Digital Collections, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division.

Even though Walker’s statement suggests that his aim was solely marketability, as an astute and ambitious player he was well aware of the benefits of his visibility as a dark-skinned African American on stage. Like Aida, George was concerned with racial uplift. As he said in 1908, “Because we feel that, in a degree, we represent the race […] every hair’s breadth of achievement we make is to its credit. For first, last, and all the time, we are Negroes.”19 Williams and Walker’s minstrelsy was performed with the aim to bring humanity to the darky coon character. Instead of the insidious lampooning enacted by white actors in burnt cork, Williams’s biographer Camille F. Forbes clarifies that Williams, while working within the strict parameters of blackface minstrelsy, “rearticulate[ed] and refin[ed] the Jim Crow stereotype, resolutely imbuing it with humanity, dignity, and individuality.”20 The Williams and Walker Company’s storylines acknowledged their African heritage, and many of their revues not only had Africanthemed titles—In Dahomey, for example—but turned on plots in which characters traveled to the continent (fg. 5).

19 George W. Walker, “Bert and Me and Them,” New York Age December 24, 1908, 4.

20 Camille F. Forbes, Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008), 25.

The triptych printed in Vanity Fair (fg. 4) illustrates Overton Walker’s tendency toward high drama rather than the comedic tropes of minstrelsy. Williams wears his signature blackface, exaggerated painted-on white lips, and a goofy expression, while a little hat clings to the side of his head. Walker’s big toothy grin beams so brightly that it almost eclipses his heavily applied makeup. He wears a floppy oversize hat and loose-fitting clothes, tropes of the southern coon. In contrast, Overton Walker is pictured in three-quarter profile striking a dancer’s pose, her shoulders relaxed and her head held high. Her eyes cut a side-glance, focused on the camera. Unlike her partners, she offers no smile, whether painted-on or real. Her costume is elegant with sequins and ribbons.

In another image from 1905, Overton Walker’s gaze is once again direct (fg. 6). Even though this portrait offers the perception of an innocent and proper young woman, the article she authored— addressed specifically to the black elite and in which this likeness appeared—says otherwise:

Some of our so-called society people regard the Stage as a place to be ashamed of. Whenever it is my good fortune to meet such persons, I sympathize with them for I know they are ignorant as to what is really being done in their own behalf by members of their race on the Stage.21

Overton Walker continued to employ the power of choice by embarking on a solo career after her break with Williams in 1911. She died of kidney disease at the age of thirty-four in 1914. The theatrical world mourned her passing and reminisced about her achievements for decades. Less than a week after her death, Variety published an obituary proclaiming Overton Walker as “easily the foremost Afro-American woman stage artist.”22 On August 10, 1929, the Chicago Whip newspaper wrote, “GREATEST OF ALL… say old timers [sic] of Aida Overton-Walker, world renowned actress.”23 And in his 1930 publication Black Manhattan, the songwriter, author, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dignified her as “beyond comparison the brightest star among women on the Negro stage of the period; and it is a question whether or not she has since been surpassed.”24 During this time of a developing American modernity, Overton Walker not only practiced feminism and contrib uted to racial uplift. She embodied both.

22 Variety, October 17, 1914, 13.

23 Chicago Whip, August 10, 1929, found in "Aida Overton Walker," Songbook, accessed March 18, 2016, https://songbook1. wordpress.com/fx/si/african-american-musical-theater-1896-1926/ bert-williams-george-walker-and-aida-overton-walker/ aida-overton-walker-slide-show-and-gallery/.

24 James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers Inc., 1988), 107.

21 Aida Overton Walker, “Colored Men and Women On the Stage,” 571.

the Digital Still Life

Teen Girl Tumblr Artists Make

Glitter, Goop, and Anti-Capitalist Angst:

Warm and cool shades of pink buzz annoyingly against one another (fg. 1). An incongruous phrase—“Existential Crisis”—is written in multicolored frosting across a generic white sheet-cake edged with bright blue frosting. All around the cake are strange baubles one would fnd tucked away in an adolescent girl’s bedroom closet. The fabric backdrop looks like the perky textiles typical of a little girl’s dress-up box. On the far left, a cobalt-blue teddy bear holds a “Victory” brand candy-cigarette box that actually offers a real tan-and-white tobacco cigarette. A perfectly round, peach plastic ball with turquoise script advertises itself as the “Magic Date Ball.” Beside it lies a hot pink, semitransparent dildo with a happy-face ring placed over the clitoral stimulator. These are things that might accumulate in an adolescent girl’s closet, saccharine keepsakes of her childhood intermingled with secretive treasures signaling an impending adulthood.

Artist Hobbes Ginsberg made existential in 2014 as part of a series of twelve still lifes collectively titled still alive . Ginsberg, who is now twenty-two years old and living in Los Angeles, calls herself a “low-key sad girl.” She is best known for her selfe and portraiture work focusing on the visibility of queer, nonbinary, racial, and gender subjects, and has become one of many artists embracing the vulnerability and emotionality archetypal to young American women— among them Petra Collins, Maisie Cousins, and Grace Miceli, as evidenced in Miceli’s

Ginsberg, existential crisis, from the series still

,

Digital photograph on Tumblr.

2015 show at Alt Space in New York, Girls At Night on the Internet. Saccharine teen-girl art production is certainly having a moment. But the writing about this moment tends to be dismissive and at times bizarre. In terrible taste, Hyperallergic compared the emergent genre to the 2013 tragedy of Elisa Lam, a young woman murdered and left to decompose in the hot-water tank of a Los Angeles hotel: “Like the Tumblr teen-girl aesthetic that is currently making its way through the veins and channels of culture, Lam is everywhere, seeping into the pores of the Internet’s most hidden corners.”1 Dazed Digital magazine mentioned Ginsberg in an arti cle describing Tumblr feminism as fourth-wave feminism.2 In April 2016, Huffington Post’s weekly newsletter “Culture Shift” described such work as “full of glitter and goop,” reductively commending the artists on their use of menstrual blood alongside soft, pink “girly accessories.”3 This newsletter perhaps intended to credit the innovations of these young photographers, but it actually epitomized the trivializing attitude typical of responses to such work, focusing on the outfits of the models, the personalities of the photographers, and the visual frivolity of the images.

1 Kate Durbin and Alicia Eler, “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic,” Hyperallergic, March 1, 2013, accessed November 2, 2015. http://dazeddigital.tumblr.com/post/142461391748/ in-defence-of-tumblr-feminism.

2 Ione Gamble, “In Defence of Tumblr Feminism,” Dazed Digital, April 8, 2016, accessed April 20, 2016. http://www.dazeddigital.com/ artsandculture/article/30679/1/in-defence-of-tumblr-feminism.

3 Maddie Crum, “Teen Artists Bring the Gunky, Glittery Realities of Girlhood to Life,” Huffington Post, April 18, 2016, accessed April 20, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ teen-dream-art_us_570fe0b4e4b088aea430d57a?utm_hp_ref=arts.

While the work of this cohort varies widely, the main tactic of this teen-girl Tumblr artwork is to push normative notions of fem ininity to an extreme, producing a caricature of girlishness. Dazed writer Ione Gamble remarks:

This latest wave of feminism has not been built on a desire to reject society-enforced notions of femininity, or what it tradition ally means to be female…Taking notions of femininity to extremes by championing the reductionist colour palette of pink enforced on women from birth, the latest generation of feminist activists attempt to subvert societal expectations. By pushing the archetypal woman to an almost cartoonish end, artists involved in the movement seek to expose the fallacies of this gendered stereotyping in the first place. While many of these artists (including Ginsberg) are indeed working with feminist motives, Gamble’s categorization is too neat. Gamble does nicely characterize some of the core concepts used by Tumblr artists, but her article repeats a typical oversight by writers covering “teen-girl” Tumblr art. These women are young, but most of

them are adults; their use of the term “girl” is deliberate, deployed in a specific social and economic context. These artists engage the language and visuals of childhood in order to comment on a larger contemporary issue for young adults: namely the delaying of indepen dence due to the post-2008 recession economy, student-loan debts, and a beleaguered job market. Economic instability is reflected in the value (or lack thereof) of cheap goods in Ginsberg’s photographs and in her cheap methods of disseminating the photographs online.

Ginsberg began her Internet-based art practice in 2013. This economic and social context, combined with her age, characterize Ginsberg as a millennial—a problematically classed categorization, in which access to technology and the mainstream job market are assumed. In her Dazed article, Gamble goes so far as to suggest that “photography in the digital age is arguably free from class restrictions.”4 This is simply untrue, as cameras, laptops, software, and payment of a monthly Internet bill are beyond the reach of many. But this is part of the difficulty of this moment, for there is cause for concern, as well, for young people who have enough to survive but not thrive.

4 Gamble,

The term “millennial,” in other words, is exhausted and problematic, often used pejoratively to address tech-happy, self-indulgent young people. In this essay, I nevertheless continue to use the term in hopes of situating this dialogue in our specific cultural context. Yet I acknowledge that this language is clumsy at best and homogenizing at worst.

Still alive reimagines still life for a millennial moment. Ginsberg’s images celebrate the tawdry materials circulating in an unstable economy, and simultaneously critique the capitalist packaging of femininity. The artist’s distribution of these images for free on Tumblr obstructs their capacity to be purchased, but these images are still entangled in capitalism and privilege, as they rely upon expensive technologies to be produced and digital literacy to be accessed. At the same time, Ginsberg’s artwork exhibits a selfaware optimism. She dares to make aesthetically satisfying and expressive artwork that exaggerates and yet genuinely celebrates an extreme, stereotypical femininity. But Ginsberg does not allow her images to be conventionally beautiful; they are too bright, too colorful, and too busy to be passively consumed. Ginsberg engages the still-life genre as a platform for beauty and luxury, but simultaneously subverts that historical agenda with gaucherie.

When I interviewed Ginsberg, she explained that she was not looking at specific examples of still life when she produced still alive; instead she drew from iconic associations accreted around

of

the genre, “what everyone imagines when you say still life, like grapes on a dark table.”5 The still-life genre developed as a valori zation of the material luxury afforded by Northern Europe’s colonial expansion in the seventeenth century, celebrating the most sensual, earthly properties of objects: the sheen of a crisp grape peel, the fine folds of soft and heavy table linens, the subtle translucence of pomegranate seeds clarified by light. These luscious materials were obtained through wealth; thus a celebration of materiality was a celebration of economic power.

5 Hobbes Ginsberg, interview with the author via Skype, February 19, 2016.

Imperialist traders imported exotic fruits, animals, and plants to Northern Europe, leading to unprecedented economic growth.6 The middle and upper classes benefitting from this wealth commissioned still-life paintings to reify their new opulence, and the still life thus operated in two ways: first, the subjects and rendering of the paintings reflected a social appreciation for materiality; second, still-life paintings themselves became esteemed cultural artifacts with high capital value, to be enjoyed at leisure.7

6 “Still Life Painting,” National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga. gov/kids/DTP6stillife.pdf. Accessed February 10, 2016.

7 S. Ebert-Schifferer, Still Life: A History (New York: Abrams, 1999), 130.

The objects in Ginsberg’s photographs also require time to enjoy, but these comforts are acquired cheaply. One untitled image from still alive (fg 2.) shows provisions for a bath, complete with skin-treatment products, fresh fruit for snacking, and a whimsical pink marabou fluff reminiscent of midcentury house slippers or robes. This scene implies an indulgent afternoon in, soaking and relaxing—but bathing is also a cheap way to luxuriate.

Though still alive presents inexpensive imitations of Dutch still life and representations of exaggerated femininity, these images are not exactly parody. There is something genuinely celebratory and aesthetically engaging in these pictures. They convey a sense of care through their indulgences, suggesting that viewers deserve to take a bath, to see lovely things. The colors, lighting, and arrangements satisfy an artistic impulse. And yet the bright and chilly lighting that emphasizes the garish colors of the featured objects simultaneously gives away their consumerist flatness.

Traditional still lifes celebrate tasteful and luxurious excess, whereas Ginsberg’s photographs celebrate an excess of throwaway objects in a visually saturated field. The objects in Ginsberg’s photograph dominate their spaces through close cropping, not because they are deluxe. They are artificially colorful; even the strawberries

fig. 2 Hobbes Ginsberg, Untitled, from the series still alive, 2014, digital photograph on Tumblr.

fig. 3 Hobbes Ginsberg, screenshots, 2014, 2015; Digital photographs assembled and posted on Tumblr.

are a kitschy, candy red, lacking the tonal range of great Dutch stilllife tradition. As a photographer, Ginsberg of course has the option to light her scene differently or alter it in postproduction. Instead, the photographs from still alive are unapologetic in regard to the poor quality of objects featured. The negative space of the bubble-bath photograph isolates the scene. Unlike the overflowing composition of the typical Dutch still life, this composition produces singularity, as if even this minor indulgence of a bath might not always be an option. This note of criticality complicates our ability to simply consume still alive as pretty pictures. The low-cost, yet pampering and time-con suming, activity of a bath suggests the position of the chronically underemployed. Underemployment offers long stretches of time, but reduces the resources allowing one to enjoy that time. Going on Tumblr is another cheap way to pass the time. Like other social-media feeds, a Tumblr feed consists of posts from blogs that the user follows, arriving chronologically in a seemingly unending stream. David Karp, creator of Tumblr, has been adamant that Tumblr’s design will remain minimal in order to focus atten tion on content rather than interface.8 But even with the promise for streamlined design and the seemingly simple operations of a scrolling feed, Tumblr is an excessive experience. Forbes writer Jeff Bercovici describes Tumblr as “far more sensory and emotive” than other social-media platforms, “a swirl of photographs, songs, inside jokes, animated cartoons and virtual warm fuzzies.”9 Tumblr’s discordant environment disrupts the viewer’s ability to take in images fully. Ginsberg’s still-life compositions are primarily vertical, privileging the scroll of the Tumblr feed over the horizontal orientation of the computer screen and accepting their own fragmentation in the motion of the user- operated scroll (fg 3.).

8 Jeff Bercovici, “Tumblr: David Karp’s $800 Million Art Project,” Forbes, January 2, 2013, accessed September 15, 2015.

9 Bercovici, “Tumblr: David Karp’s $800 Million Art Project.”

However, Tumblr is still a website based on scanning and acquisition; viewers encounter, like, ignore, comment, reblog, and collect images for their own sites. This system replicates capitalist consumption for those without the means to participate in capital ownership. Artists’ decisions to circulate these images digitally enters those images into a millennial context for consumption, with all the contradictions that this generational marker implies. Perhaps, in fact, Tumblr replicates the ultimate end-point of capitalist consumption: dumping. Tumblr accommodates unrestricted dumping; dumping of emotions, images, quotes, and feelings. Internet-based artists Carlos Sáez and Claudia Maté in fact describe Tumblr as a Digital Landfill, replete with the

thousands and thousands of nonsensical, stupid, and beautiful images floating on the internet….in the same way the garbage of a house can define the family that lives inside, a Digital Landfill could be a reflection of contemporary society or our visual culture.10

10 Ben Valentine, “Revisiting Tumblr as Art,” Hyperallergic February 22, 2013, accessed March 14, 2016.

A landfill implies a cycle of collecting, hauling, and discard ing a mass of stuff. To dump goods requires the inverse acquisition of things, and therefore a landfill indicates consumption. Landfills break down traditional hierarchies between objects and reassemble them in new relationships; precious trinkets, old blazers, vacu um-bag fuzz, old lettuce, coffee grounds, pet litter are no longer isolated in containers and assigned to separate rooms, but lumped together and labeled under one conquering name: refuse. Similarly, images, quotes, videos, diary entries, and articles that are posted to Tumblr merge under the single label “Tumblr.” The indiscriminate contents of the digital landfill recall a passage by Robert Sullivan, describing the trash heaps of New Jersey: The...garbage hills are alive…there are billions of microscopic organisms thriving underground in dark, oxygen-free communities…. [they] exhale huge underground plumes of carbon dioxide and of warm moist methane...I found a little leachate seep, a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso of refuse.11

11 Quoted in Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 6. Ellipses are Bennett’s.

The vibrancy and activity of Sullivan’s trash heaps parallel the movement of Tumblr as described by Bercovici. Similarly, in the aforementioned Hyperallergic article, Internet-based performance artist Kate Durbin describes “the teen-girl Tumblr aesthetic, [as based on] images [that are ]…constantly moving and perpetuating themselves on Tumblr, breathing and existing in time and space as a living body.”12 Of course, Tumblr images do not include the single-celled organisms that Sullivan refers to in the New Jersey gar bage heaps. Instead the swirling that Durbin mentions arises in the motion of the Tumblr feed, spurred on by the scrolling of the user.

12 Durbin and Eler, “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic.”

Ginsberg’s photographs wallow in the material promise of the affluent still life and patriarchal capitalist success. Still alive gratifies a craving for artistic exploration. But in enjoying these images, we must be critical, or we risk repeating a cycle in which we as viewers become girls vapidly consuming girlishness. Ginsberg’s photographs are earnest about the objects they depict

fig. 4 still alive, Hobbes Ginsberg, from the series still alive 2014; Digital photograph on Tumblr.

and about their skepticism, discontentment, and critique in regard to the systems that surround and generate them. Ginsberg’s artwork asserts that we deserve to critically indulge—because we are not dead yet; we are still alive (fg. 4).

Archives and Algorithms Compressing Socio-historical Distance

Tanya Gayer

Pencil drawing. Drawing art pencil. What is love. Romantic love. Drug addiction rehabilitation. Moral virtues. Catholic virtues. Panini sandwich recipes. –Erica Scourti, Life in AdWords

In 2012, multimedia artist Erica Scourti dictated this disjointed list in a performance video titled Life in AdWords. In the scene that features this audible statement, the artist is shown seated in the right third of the screen. Her hair is tousled, and she sits at arm’s length from her webcam (fg. 1). A large studio space is visible in the background, with light streaming into windows located behind her. Each of Scourti’s curt statements is spoken in monotone with a blank facial expression, leaving them to hang inconclusively in her open and bright setting. The words Scourti repeats are in fact advertising keywords, also known as adwords, generated through her Gmail interface.

From March 2012 to January 2013, the artist emailed herself a daily diary entry and subsequently read to her webcam the keyword headlines of suggested ads that appeared in connection with the emails’ content (fg. 2). The ads the artist reads throughout Life in AdWords range from helpful tips on her love life, to how to discover the existence of God, get rid of her

fig. 1 Erica Scourti, Life in AdWords, 2012–13; Still image from video performance. https://vimeo.com/39677781.

fig. 2 Tanya Gayer, Gmail interface, screen capture and digitally manipulated image, 2016.

body hair “for good,” or choose the best nonstick kitchen cookware. Her audience is provided with glimpses of her everyday life from the perspective of her webcam. We are privy to settings such as beach houses, her bedroom, airport lounges, and multiple artists’ studio spaces, as well as a variety of hairstyles worn by the artist, ranging from bedhead to well coiffed.

The ads that Scourti reads materialized in her email interface after Google-patented algorithmic calculations selected keywords from her diary entries and connected them with products, companies, and ideas packaged as consumer goods. Many tech companies, such as Facebook and Apple, utilize such algorithms to market products and information so that users feel that their life styles and personal interests are represented online. To facilitate such targeted marketing, a user’s regular online behavior is tracked and mined, usually without a company’s disclosing the extent to which an individual’s actions are documented.1 Users see a world of products that allegedly interest them, but they are typically unaware of the extent to which they are monitored in order to create this “personalized” environment.2

1 Geert Lovink, “Society of the Query: Googlization of Our Lives,” in Networks Without a Cause (Cambridge, MA, Polity Press, 2011), 152.

2 Eli Pariser, “Introduction,” in The Filter Bubble (New York: Penguin Group, 2011), 9.

Life in AdWords displays a user who subjects herself to the codes and categories of identity predefined for her by the tech companies and software designers who create data-mining algorithms. Although Scourti herself is concerned with individual virtual behavior and the surveillance of it by online service providers, the technology that she highlights correlates in important ways to the principles of legal and governmental archives that similarly taxonomize the individual and his or her social behavior. The content located in such archives is preserved by specific institutions and individuals who recontextualize the value and meaning of archived information via their reliance on the political interests, ideologies, and monetary systems by which the archive is tacitly or explicitly organized, yet such guiding factors remain detached from the infor mation that is documented. A comparison of Scourti’s work to the Alphonse Bertillon archive developed in Paris in the late 18th cen tury illustrates some of the ways in which archiving practices have perpetuated such ideological categorization, which in turn schema tizes institutional control over the individual.

The Bertillon archive was founded in Paris in 1893, when the photographic records of imprisoned criminals were rapidly accumulating without a proper storage space or a system through which to retrieve individual files. To mitigate this problem, police official

Alphonse Bertillon developed a specially-designed archival cabinet to organize the records, and conducted phrenological readings and bodily measurements of the criminals in custody to further distinguish one record from another (fg. 3). Each criminal’s skull, arm span, and height, along with the shape of ears, gender, and race were documented and plotted against the data of other criminals (fgs. 4, 5).

Considered from the perspective of 2016, the Bertillon archive with its use of mathematical measurements and scientific methods represents a system of social construction analogous to that examined in Scourti’s video performances, because both the algorithmic calculations of the adwords and those that underpin the Bertillon archive assert an authority over individual behavior and values. Scourti’s engagement with the adwords confronts such apparatuses of control that categorize the individual—not in order to suggest that the artist is free from such systems, but as a means of working within the system to ultimately defy it. Scourti’s direct confrontation is precisely what the institution intends the user to forego; corporate interests expect that one will accept these exter nal characterizations as delivered via “personalized” advertising content. An analysis of Scourti’s work explores the process through which such social constructions can be subverted to propose a sense of personal and cultural agency that resists the categorizations enforced by algorithms and archives. Scourti lays the groundwork for us as viewers to consider how our autonomies are at risk as we encounter innovative technologies in which our online experiences are controlled by algorithmic selections.

The coding examined in Life in AdWords reveal a number of assumptions regarding Scourti’s sexual orientation, gender, religious affiliations, and mental state. For example, Scourti repeats the phrase: “always feeling alone” and “depression-anxiety” a plethora of times throughout the video. The frequency of mental-health–related advertisements in her Gmail interface reveals that Google’s coders view this topic as a successful marketing opportunity. Such markers display how coders of algorithms taxonomize identity online. A user like Scourti could have written in her diary about a “black” article of clothing or how her cat was left “alone” in her apartment all day. To an algorithm, however, such words indicate that her emails contain signs of depression.

Scourti notes that she often exclaimed “oh god” in her emailed diary entries in Life in AdWords . Gmail’s algorithms then chose ads based on what could be derived from such content. 3 Scourti would see ads regarding Catholicism (“Catholic virtues”) or how to search for the existence of God (“is God good?”). These algorithmic interpretations signal that certain words or phrases have been limited to particular values and interests, diminishing the

user’s ability to choose between or beyond these values. The abundance of over-generalized advertisements provides evidence of the rigid parameters the coders of algorithms observe in order to create a so-called “personal” online environment.

3 Erica Scourti, skype interview with author, February 28, 2016.

In his essay “On Collecting Art and Culture,” scholar James Clifford accounts for a 19th century Western anthropological method that establishes categorical groupings of information and objects as a means of asserting “identity [as] a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience).”4 His term for this meth odology is “culture collecting,” which he critiques as the separation of elements from their original circumstances and their preserva tion in an administrative format, such as collections in museums or archives. Clifford insists that collected elements are seen by institutions or governmental entities as having been rescued from disappearance; collecting them ensures that they are preserved as valuable markers of identity and culture.5 In Life in AdWords, a user’s identity as framed within the platform of Gmail is categorized according to materials, products, and companies determined as legitimate by Google’s algorithms and their software coders. Google’s algorithms and coders thus act as culture collectors. Scourti is assigned a mental illness, a sexual orientation, the kitchen cookware she should buy, and how she should search for a religion. Yet of course, these categorizations inevitably deny the nuances that make up her individual lived experience and the culture she is connected to outside the online environment.

4 James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 218.

5 Ibid., 231.

The social effects of culture collecting can be located in Paris in 1893, just as they were seen in Gmail at the time of Scourti’s performance. Photographer and theorist Allan Sekula argues that the social divide enforced by Bertillon’s archive established an ideal class and appearance.6 As with the algorithms highlighted in Life in AdWords, Bertillon’s archive dictated which individual traits could represent health and deviance in culture. The size of each criminal’s skull or the length of his arms as documented in this archive determined how one was contextualized within Parisian culture at the dawn of the 20th century. These aspects solidified how indi viduals fit into a social hierarchy and, like the algorithms in Gmail, truncated the idiosyncratic value of a life, personality, family his tory, and intelligence. The control imposed by the archive and the

adwords is enforced through swift assumptions about individuals that effect how they are viewed in culture and how they see them selves. The historical distance between the Bertillon archive and Life in AdWords is compressed due to both cases’ interest in reducing individuals to a set of standards.

6 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter, 1986): 21.

Scourti’s work presents evidence of culture collecting as it is practiced in the digital age, but she also actively defies this method of cultural regimentation by establishing categories according to her own personal standards and environment. In doing so, the artist accounts for aspects of her identity that fall outside the superficial categories embedded within familiar online interfaces. Scourti does this by presenting a stark contrast between her everyday life seen through the webcam and the constant flow of the adwords, in order to dispel any notion that the coded terms she recites in this performance could truly be expressions of autonomy.

Over the course of this performance smaller, more localized gestures are offered for viewers’ notice—such as the shifts in light through her window as she films across seasons, or the growth of her hair, or how often she wears a certain sweater (fg. 6). The adwords may be plotting her supposed interests and values, but the artist reasserts her identity through such moments that operate outside the normative taxonomies presented in Gmail. The small gestures revealed to Scourti’s audience resist an easy reduction to standardized values or products; they are not imposed upon the user. The fact that viewers take notice of the growth of Scourti’s hair or the reappearance of her favorite sweater marks the striking gap between the interests and personality traits that the artist herself chooses to represent and her digital reflection in an algorithmic calculation. Elements of her appearance such as “hair cuts” or “red sweaters” never show up in her adwords. Yet, for the viewer, these are the observable classifications that appear most genuine.

Scourti’s reassertion of her personality through these dis tinct moments in Life in AdWords correlates to James Clifford’s interest in questioning the methods of culture collecting that use objects and ideas to “stand for” an individual or culture.7 Clifford notes that collections of objects ultimately lead to a devaluation of culture, because it is the institution rather than the individual that decides what is worthy for commerce, or aesthetically pleasing, or useful for scientific study.8 Associations formulated within an archive structure an idealized identity and culture that exist apart from the memories, beliefs, and traditions that the individual values as his or her own. The overabundance of generic words and

fig. 6 Erica Scourti, Life in AdWords, 2012–13; Still images from video performances. https://vimeo.com/39677781.

normative categories that Scourti lists in Life in AdWords denotes the type of hollow definition that Clifford criticizes. Scourti’s life could not be so simple nor so largely focused on “panini sandwiches.” To generate adwords for economic gain, algorithms and their designers value certain topics or ideas, while neglecting aspects that might be more relevant to the individual.

7 Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 144.

8 Ibid.

The intimate details that viewers note when watching Life in AdWords displace the corporate categorizations whose simplicity draws from traditional documentary methods of the nineteenth cen tury. Scourti’s video performance does rely on technology—the webcam, for example, with its own pre-programmed formatting—as a means to achieve an “accurate” self-representation online; in this regard, she does not suggest that users must completely separate themselves from technology and avoid data-tracking altogether. The more nuanced perceptions of her as an artist, woman, human, and user that viewers form when they notice aspects of her self-presentation like her favored sweater are produced in conjunction with the algorithmic assessments and cultural norms that remain online and offline.

For the artist, technology is leveraged to reveal both her identity ( by way of physical aspects like her staged settings and clothing ) and her online environment as a technological-human endeavor. In an interview with digital media journalist Marc Garrett, Scourti comments, “...my feeling is that opting out [of data-tracking systems]—if it’s even possible—can be a way of pretending none of this stuff is happening. I’m generally more interested in finding ways of working with the logic of the system.”9 Scourti re-asserts control over her body as it is produced and systematized by algorithms. The artist is indeed reliant on the adwords to uphold their part of the dialogue, but this condition of her performance provides her with an autonomy—however limited—through which she can notice and engage with personalization in technology. In doing so, she questions the progress of yet another iteration of ideological sorting associated with archival methodologies.

9 Marc Garrett, “A

Life in AdWords mocks a future where all human actions are calculated to exclude any unpredictable moments or personal growth. As algorithmic categorizations become more pervasive within everyday online interfaces, we make these constructions of identity invisible once we allow them to predict our next song, search query,

or movie that we want to watch on Netflix. The progression from archives to algorithms illustrates how systems of categorization have been employed to write our pasts, and thus our bodies, cultures, customs, and values for us. Scourti’s work offers a way in which we might use technological calculations as resources to interrogate this prescriptive logic rather than settling for its limitations.

The Prosthetic Body: Semiosis and Survival Beyond the Cyborg

Mailee Hung

In 1998, Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins posed on the cover of Dazed and Confused magazine (fg. 1). Clad in athletic running tights and carbon-fber sprinting prostheses, she is a vision of high-tech, functional sleekness. Her prosthetic legs seem to meld into her calves, the intimacy of the connection between the sprinting blades and her body rendering her a seductive fusion of human and machine—that is, a cyborg. Cultural studies scholar Marquard Smith echoes this reading when he observes that tabloid and reputable news sources alike portrayed Mullins as the “fgure of the quintessential Cyborgian sex kitten.” 1 As this reception of Mullins as a cover girl suggests, the confation between the amputee and the cyborg is seductive for its suggestion of seamlessness, implying, as Smith puts it, “the ultimate victory of technology over defciency.” 2 As new technologies continue steadily toward making the fctive cyborg a reality, this depiction of the amputee as cyborg has proliferated in American pop culture, coming to symbolize a contemporary technological paradigm.

2 Ibid.

A cybernetic organism generally understood as a hybrid between human and machine, the cyborg pervaded visual media just as sciencefction blockbusters were heavily shaping the

1 Marquard Smith, “The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney,” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 58.

zeitgeist; in films like Blade Runner (1982) and The Terminator (1984) and across television series like Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), the cyborg materialized as a figure of anxiety about the consequences of our increasingly intimate relationship to technology. As network technologies increasingly pervaded everyday experience and the enmeshments between the body and these technologies tightened and multiplied, the cyborg came to represent a challenge to the definition of “human.”

Amputees and their prostheses appear to be particularly potent figurations of the cyborg, their already uniquely intimate relationship to technological apparatuses evocative of the complete integration of flesh and circuit. Oscar Pistorius, who took the modern version of Mullins’s bladed prostheses to the Olympics in 2012 and was nicknamed “The Blade Runner” after the eponymous sci-fi film, was even turned into a chromed bionic man for Thierry Mugler’s A*Men Fragrance in 2011 (fg. 2). Three-dimensional printing technology has allowed cosmesis to be taken to new extremes by companies like Bespoke Industries, The Alternative Limb Project, and Alleles Design Studio, each of which offers their own version of highly customized and elaborate prostheses and prosthesis cover ings to their clients, and 2015 alone saw the release of three major films featuring female characters with prosthetic limbs—Kingsman: The Secret Service, Ex Machina, and Mad Max: Fury Road. At first, this proliferation might seem like an extension of the cyborg imaginary. But the figure of the amputee with prosthesis maps a different kind of subjectivity and carries very different ontological implications. Rather than be seduced by the technological promise of the wholly hybridized cyborg, Mullins, Pistorius, and the fictional characters that they inspire in fact demonstrate a preoccupation with, and anxiety about, the limitations of the technologized body. The sudden influx into mass media of stylized prosthetic limbs is indicative of a broad visual cultural interest not in the seamlessly integrated cyborg but in the prosthetic body—the composite configu ration of human bodies plus prosthetic devices.

When Donna Haraway first published her groundbreak ing essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” in 1985, she was responding to a dramatic shift in the cultural milieu of the United States: the development of the Internet. Affecting everything from biology to economics, the Internet encouraged a cybernetic mode of thought that reconfigured structures of knowledge as networked communication systems. Rather than studying the discrete human and machine, for instance, cybernetics invests itself in the system that emerges from the flow of information between the two; the individ ual units themselves are, to an extent, irrelevant. The fundamental consequence of this shift is a divestment from the imperative to

fig. 1 Aimee Mullins on the cover of Dazed and Confused, September 1998. Photo: Nick Knight.

fig. 2 Oscar Pistorius ad for Thierry Mugler A*Men fragrance, 2011. Photo: Ali Mahdavi.

define the borders between entities. What does it matter what the system’s components are when the meaningful data is determined by what the system produces? Within a cybernetic framework, boundary-drawing practices that differentiate between the organic and the synthetic appear obsolete. The cyborg was a response to this precarious position, and, for Haraway, this figure offers the possibility of a utopian future. As an always-already in-progress amalgam of socially constructed meanings, the cyborg subverts the Christian genesis myth of pure origin, and therefore also the myth’s necessary teleology—that is, Armageddon, the return to dust. Haraway argues that the cyborg is “outside salvation history,” outlining “a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.”3 By embracing hybridity and a fusion between the human and nonhuman so complete that the very categories lose their meaning, Haraway thought to obviate the obsession with purity of origin and the corollary anxiety of its pollution.

We have been living with the Internet for more than thirty years now. The enormity of its influence can hardly be quantified and certainly could not have been anticipated as early as 1985. As technological integration has become ubiquitous in Western culture throughout the early 2000s and into the 2010s, the question has no longer been whether or not we would become cyborgs: with smart devices, wearable tech, and near-continuous Internet connectivity, that question is precluded by technological suffusion—the normative contemporary subject has become a good cyborg indeed. Rather, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are facing an anxiety about what has been given up in order to make room for the very technologies that pervade our everyday experience, always so close at hand. This shift in focus is manifested, as the cyborg was, in the collective imagination of pop-cultural visuals: the prosthetic body, and with it, new ontological implications for a new age.

The prosthetic limb, for all its high-tech styling and inti macy, presupposes the fundamental trauma of loss. While cyborg embodiment presumes the potential for a complete fusion between organic and synthetic, prosthetic embodiment marks the rupture. To have a cyborg body is to meld human and machine to the point of obviating such categories; to have a prosthetic body is to maintain their separation. The boundary between body and prosthesis is ren dered as a highly visible disjuncture, drawing attention to the site of amputation and the trauma that occasioned it, perhaps even empha sizing the possibility of technological substitution. However, the varying success of the prosthetic substitute produces very different

3 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150.

effects. Effective substitution can work to reify normative subjectivity by asserting its resilience to radical fracturing, be it physical or psychic. Conversely, the incomplete or contingent incorporation of the prosthetic object into the body can provide opportunities for a more dynamic figuration of feminist becoming, one that does not depend on a belief in the fundamental wholeness of the human sub ject. The prosthetic body can iterate the anxious desire to recuperate fragmented subjectivity, but it can also offer ontological possibilities for those who fall outside such reactionary projects.

The effective substitution of the prosthetic limb for the amputated is part of a holistic project that involves using technology to reproduce the normative, “complete” subject despite traumatic loss. In this process, some representations of the prosthetic body attempt not only to ameliorate trauma but also to suggest a recupera tion of wholeness through the acquisition of, and social relationships to, material objects. This hope is especially available to masculine subjects, for whom the threat of emasculation is unendurable within patriarchal capitalism. Such a project can be seen in Lionsgate marketing director Ted Palen’s use of the model Alex Minsky in his 2014 Hunger Games “District Heroes” ad campaign (fg. 3). Utilizing a marketing technique known as “world-building,” the campaign depicted portraits of fictional characters from the film’s dystopian future, and was intended to be read as propaganda from the fascist nation-state Panem that features in The Hunger Games franchise. Panem is broken up into Districts, with each being responsible for a specific form of labor and production. This emphasis on labor works in tandem with the prosthetic body to reify the formation of masculine subjectivity. Minksy, a soldier-turned-model who lost his right leg below the knee in a roadside bomb explosion as a Marine on tour in Afghanistan in 2010, appears in Palen’s image as Elias Haan, the “hero” of District 7, the lumber district. As a male subject, it is import ant that Minsky is a real amputee—his amputation is a war wound and therefore patriotically “productive,” both within the diegetic framework of The Hunger Games and in the United States. The potentially emasculating fragmentation of his body is a reality to be mitigated, not a fantasy to be imagined.4

Minsky/Haan’s character is positioned as an archetype of outdoorsmanship and physical prowess, a lumberman and wood worker. He holds in his lap a beautiful wooden prosthetic leg, which he presumably carved. The photo’s staging emphasizes a recog nizable code of male ability, sexualizing the physical power and fortitude required to achieve the mastery of such manual work as

4 Lenore Manderson, Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011), 111.

fig. 3 Alex Minsky for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 “District Heroes” ad campaign, 2014. Photo: Ted Palen.

chopping wood and the skilled craft of woodworking. Palen’s photo of Minsky intentionally codifies such markers of male prowess and desirability. Minsky’s body and subjectivity are intended to be understood as heroically damaged but already remade as whole. The character Haan’s wooden prosthesis becomes a phallic symbol that at once asserts male virility and situates the prosthetic body as a complete figure, his lack substituted through the effective production and consumption cycle of capitalism in service to the state. In this case, prosthesis becomes a project of reasserting masculinity and wholeness in the face of real, physical loss. The still image fixes the fantasy, rendering it a fetishistic reification of normative desire.5

In contrast, the female body, already perceived within a patriarchal social structure as lacking, can claim the ideological space to explore more productive imaginings. While this lack subordinates female identification to male, it also allows for a critique of wholeness that the male body cannot offer and for an enunciation of the prosthetic body as a figure of feminist becoming. This generative framework can be seen in the protagonist Furiosa, an amputee with an easily removable robotic arm played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) (fg. 4). George Miller’s post-apocalyptic film extrapolates not a cyborgian interdependency but rather a contingency and partial becoming. For Furiosa, the limitations and separability of various technologies provide opportunities for a new, survivalist vision of futurity.

It is within the disclosure of limitation that the semiotic powers of prosthesis and the prosthetic body are revealed as a kind of contemporary ontology. The visual truncation of the body and clear difference between Furiosa's arm and prosthetic limb mark the amputation even when the prosthesis is employed (fg. 5). This distinction is maintained visually and functionally; the prosthesis is neither enhancement nor handicap, and Furiosa is shown to be just as capable of existing in the wasteland without the prosthesis as she is with it (fg. 6). Unlike Mullins, whose cyborgian depiction seamlessly joins her prostheses to her body, Furiosa’s prosthetic is not integrated; it is worn, much like a piece of clothing, attached via leather straps and metal buckles. The ease of its removal highlights the limitations of both Furiosa’s body and her prosthetic limb, continually reasserting not only their separation but also the incompleteness of the substitution (fg. 7). This incompleteness serves as a marker of trauma and operates as the driving force in Furiosa’s narrative—the most emotionally charged scenes for her are marked by the detaching of her prosthesis. One such instance of this important removal occurs when Furiosa is finally reunited with her kin, the Vuvalini. This should be

5 Smith, “The Vulnerable Articulate,” 67.

fig. 4 Furiosa and War Rig in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Film still: Jasin Boland.

fig. 6 Furiosa without prosthesis in hand-to-hand combat in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Film still: Jasin Boland.

fig. 7 Furiosa and the wives in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Film still: Jasin Boland.

fig. 8 Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Film still: Jasin Boland.

the triumphal scene, as she, after a lifetime of oppression, finally returns to the home from which she was stolen, the mythic Green Place. Instead, Furiosa learns that the “earth turned sour” and the Green Place is no more. At this news, she stumbles into the desert in a daze, simultaneously uncoupling herself from her prosthesis. Once she is free of the arm, Furiosa drops to her knees and screams (fg. 8). This moment of intense emotional release requires that she remove the prosthetic in order to reveal the trauma of her experi ence. The decoupling of the robotic limb from her body reiterates the fact that the prosthesis is a symptom of a larger condition, an imperfect substitute for what she has lost. Unlike Minsky’s triumphantly masculinist profile in The Hunger Games ad campaign, this configuration of prosthesis asserts that, whatever the promises of technology, it cannot ever replace or reproduce wholeness.

In fact, Fury Road goes so far as to suggest that, even as the traumatic loss of wholeness is mourned, such a loss is itself a phantasm. For Furiosa, the Green Place represents a time before trauma. By attempting to return to a place that does not exist, Furiosa was in fact hoping to return to a time that does not exist. It is actually the Citadel, the place from which Furiosa was trying to escape, that is the rare oasis in the vast wasteland; it is only when she decides to go back to the Citadel and defeat her original oppressor that she achieves any kind of fulfillment. This is a different narrative structure from that of Haraway’s cyborg, which offers a kind of optimistic “out” from the apocalyptic teleology of cybernetic integration: “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”6 Haraway’s ontology claims that if we are successful in accepting our cyborgian non-origins, we will have no desire to return to a place of purity; the very notion of “return” would be rendered incomprehensible. Rather than aligning with Haraway’s cyborgian prophecy of a world without genesis, without the garden, Furiosa’s failed return to the Green Place actually results from a misplacement of desire within the ontological structure that the movie posits. The very place that first produced her psychic trauma is also the most productive site for reconciling it. For the prosthetic body, it is not that there is no garden, but that the garden can in fact be found through the reclamation of the site of trauma. The key to prosthetic embodiment is not holism but redemption from the trauma of desiring the mythic unattainable—that is, the myth of purity and wholeness.

The prevalence of the prosthetic body in the current Western visual-cultural imaginary can be read as a manifestation of new beliefs about how technology operates in relation to human

subjects. Depictions of prostheses like Alex Minsky’s in The Hunger Games advertisements and Furiosa’s in Mad Max: Fury Road outline a new configuration for subject formation, one that distinctly feels the loss of the naturalized human and questions the effectiveness of a substitution technology that attempts to compensate for that natural organism. But rather than trying to sidestep disaster, as Haraway’s cyborg and its obviation of the mythological Fall once strove to do, prosthesis embodies a possibility for reconciling us to a destruction that has already occurred. At a time in our history when every summer sets a historical heat record, when the daily news reads more like a body count than a narrative, the utopian promise of the cyborg feels febrile; refusing apocalypse is not a viable survival strategy if it is already in progress. But fragmentation and partial integration also produce plurality, though perhaps not as evenly or seamlessly as full hybridity. Having survived trauma, prosthesis proves that there is life after apocalypse. The prosthetic body is not a rejection of possibility but rather an assertion that futures are available to us only by acknowledging trauma and disjuncture: let us not forget the cyborg, but let us see the seams.

Unsettled Legacies: Undermining colonial rhetoric through strategic art practice

Jesus Barraza

Lowriding as Social Form: Anishinaabe Grandfather Teachings as Decolonial Vehicles of Resistance

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.

–Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

In the spring of 2011, in East Lansing, Michigan, artist Dylan Miner organized a series of workshops that brought together high school youth, college students, and traditional elders to build a group of seven lowrider bikes (fg. 1). This was the beginning of Miner’s ongoing art project Native Kids Ride Bikes , a series of workshops wherein Anishinaabe cultural teachings were used as inspiration for the bikes’ designs. Taking place over a six-month period, the frst iteration of the project convened the intergenerational group to learn about the history and culture of the Anishinaabe people, who are from the Great Lakes area. The lowrider bike is a form Miner frst learned about as a youngster in rural Michigan; he built bikes with his friends, and they would go cruising through their neighborhood, showing off their accomplishments.

fig. 1 Dylan Miner, Native Kids Ride Bikes, 2011; installation view at the LookOut! Gallery, Michigan State University, September 2011; Multimedia installation consisting of seven custom-built lowrider bikes.

It is this collective spirit that Miner evokes in Native Kids, using the lowrider bike as a mechanism to not only build community but also— through the use of people-powered vehicles—to help youth think about issues of environmental degradation and the role they play in creating a sustainable future. In September 2011, after the conclusion of the workshops, the bikes were exhibited at Michigan State University’s LookOut! Gallery (fg. 1).

Miner’s workshops and the lowrider bikes in Native Kids operate as parts of a socially engaged decolonial process in which historical and cultural teachings are used as tools to resist cul tural disintegration and reintroduce cultural knowledge that was once an integrated part of everyday life but has nearly been lost. Implementing such strategies, artists like Miner use their artwork in a process of recovering traditional cosmologies and spiritualties while remaining grounded in the contemporary realities of detribalization, displacement, and globalization.

To define a socially engaged decolonial practice, I use the following approach: I first explore how Native Kids connects participants with a worldview premised on sustainability, one in which humans, living creatures, and the physical environment are understood as interconnected, thus allowing participants to consider the importance of people-powered vehicles as alternatives to fossil fuel–burning modes of transportation that pollute the environment. Second, I examine Miner’s methodology of visiting, which involves workshops that bring youth participants together with elders to create a space of collaboration, conversation, and making in which everyone is able to contribute to the design and construction of the bikes. Lastly, I show how these workshops establish a decolonial pedagogy through the use of The Seven Grandfathers, a set of Anishinaabe teachings that define how humans should live with each other. Together, these practices generate a dialogue among participants about traditional indigenous culture, the ways in which it has been disrupted, and how it is being reaffirmed through their work.

Decolonization is a process that actively challenges colo niality, which social critic María Lugones has described as the reduction of indigenous people to a racial classification that ren ders them as less than human beings.1 This process has produced a society in which Western culture has been privileged over the indigenous cultures of the Americas. As indigenous scholar Gerald Taiaiake Alfred argues, this disconnection from culture

is the precursor to disintegration, and the deculturing of our people is most evident in the violence and self-destruction that are the central realities of a colonized existence and

the most visible face of the discord colonialism has wrought in indigenous lives over the years.2

1 María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 745.

2 Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, “Colonialism and State Dependency,” Journal of Aboriginal Health 5, no. 2 (2009): 12.

To counteract the effects of the violence and dehumanization that has destabilized indigenous people’s lives, Miner engages the help of elders, who introduce participating youth to Anishinaabe history and sacred teachings as a form of cultural recovery. Miner’s research thus becomes a participatory pedagogy. Native Kids originated through an Artist Leadership research grant that Miner received in 2010 from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. For two weeks, he conducted research on indigenous modes of transportation that were used in the Great Lakes and plains areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intention of his research was to learn how his ancestors traveled before fossil fuel–burning cars and coal-burning trains were introduced to the areas. Two revelations of his research were the use of the birchbark, a canoe made of birch bark used by the Anishinaabe to travel the Great Lakes, and the prevalence of the Red River cart (fg. 2), built by the Métis, indigenous people of the Red River territory near Manitoba, Canada. The all-wooden cart was used through most of the nineteenth century on the Canadian prairie and northern plains of the United States to haul buffalo meat and hides during yearly hunts.3 It was this research that inspired Miner’s Native Kids. Although connections between the cart and the lowrider bike might not be readily apparent, they share some basic features. Both are simple, two-wheeled machines that do not require a fuel-powered engine. They are easy to take apart and put back together, easy to repair and customize. Both are inspired by European means of transportation but are upgraded with indigenous materials. Lastly, both are slow-moving vehicles that allow passengers to experience their surroundings. Based on these similarities, Miner used the Red River cart as a model for the lowrider bikes and for teaching young people about living in a way that doesn’t harm the environment.

As models of environmental sustainability, the bikes were the project’s starting point. But Miner didn’t select just any bikes. He chose to incorporate the lowrider bikes that he learned to build with neighborhood friends in his youth. These bikes have their origins in Chicano car clubs, whose members work together to customize

3 Dylan Miner, artist statement, from the exhibition Native Kids

Ride Bikes, LookOut! Gallery, East Lansing, MI, September 2011.

fig. 2 Ernest Brown, Red River Cart and Driver, c. 1860s.

fig. 3 Youth participants assembling one of the seven lowrider bikes built during the workshop. Photo: Dylan Miner.

lowrider cars that they use to go cruising and show off their artistic skills at competitions. This process of collective making inspired the emergence of the lowrider bike as an alternative for those too young to drive cars. Like the cars, these bikes are built by small groups or clubs that go cruising through their neighborhoods to show off their work. For Miner, Chicano lowriding is “an Indigenous way of moving through the world, that contrasts the speed needed to succeed in the contemporary capitalist world.”4 Lowriding provides youth with a way of experiencing the world that isn’t focused on moving through life as fast as possible. Instead, the bikes’ slow pace inspires riders to use their bodies to power their vehicles and to take time to experience the world around them. Miner captures this collaborative spirit of making through workshops in which students learn to design and build a series of bikes and learn about a way of making art in which experience is an important part of the making.

Native Kids participates in the field of contemporary art known as socially engaged art or social practice. These genres are not solely concerned with the creation of objects but use the processes of collective discussion and collaborative making as forms of active engagement, resulting in experiences that become part of the artwork (fg. 3). In this manner, the workshops provide a space where aesthetics are explored through hands-on experiences that include conversations about Anishinaabe cultural materials and forms like the deer hide drum, the Métis panel bag, peyote stitch beading, and leather working. Participants had the opportunity to adapt these traditional forms and create decorations that use the objects and the values they embody to enhance not only the appearance of the bikes but their meaning. Through this pedagogical relationship with making, participants engaged with each other while learning about the history of these crafts and how they relate to people’s everyday lives.

In this spirit of collaborative making, Miner incorporates his “methodology of visiting.” He defines this as an approach of meeting people and spending time with them, understanding their perspectives, and paying special attention to the knowledge elders contribute while engaging in conversation and collaboration.5 This process has its origins in a 2007 oral-history project that Miner led in Detroit, which consisted of a series of group interviews with retired Anishinaabe autoworkers. Elders in the group raised the topic of community building, emphasizing that the social practices of visiting and gathering that once represented a central part of tribal life have nearly been lost. This rupture followed the disintegration of social bonds brought about by the decentralization of the

4 Dylan Miner, Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding across Turtle Island (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 3.

Anishinaabe people. The elders’ critique of contemporary society inspired Miner to develop the “methodology of visiting,” which he translates into praxis by hosting workshops or intimate gatherings to create constructed situations and activities that foster convivial spaces where people can come together, get to know each other, and build community. Artist and author Pablo Helguera defines this type of work within the tradition of conceptual process art, characterized by “its dependence on social intercourse as a factor of its existence.”6 Critic Claire Bishop, furthermore, ties this history to an aspiration to free the public from “the dominant ideological order—be this consumer capitalism, totalitarian socialism, or military dictatorship.”7 She explains that artists respond to such issues through participatory practices that aim “to restore and realize a communal collective space of social engagement.”8 This form of artistic intervention brings the act of making into everyday spaces, such as schools, where participants become co-creators.

5 Dylan T. Miner, “Makataimeshekiakiak, Settler Colonialism, and the Specter of Indigenous Liberation,” in Re-collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest, by Nicholas A. Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), 14.

6 Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), 2.

7 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012), 275.

8 Claire Bishop, “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?” in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, edited by Nato Thompson (New York, NY: Creative Time, 2012), 36.

In Miner’s case, the project took place at Eastern High School with students from the Indigenous Youth Empowerment Project and East Lansing High School’s Native American Club. What makes Native Kids unique as a socially engaged artwork is the manner in which it incorporates a decolonial pedagogy. It teaches participants about the issues that led to the poverty and alienation experienced in indigenous communities and uses Anishinaabe traditions to counteract this legacy by incorporating traditional knowledge with art making. As LeQuan Cannon, a participant in the workshops, explains: “[we took] something that is man-made and manufactured usually in factories…[and] going back to our roots we put our heritage on it…showing that it’s not forgotten.”9 Through the lessons the participants learned, they were able to articulate how their culture persists in today’s world, regardless of the obstacles their ancestors faced.

9 Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag, dir. Christopher Yépez, YouTube video, 17:36, posted by Dylan Miner, February 4, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5tR2TsbPzU.

fig. 4 Native Kids Ride Bikes, 2011; Installation view at the LookOut! Gallery, Michigan State University, September 2011; Multimedia installation consisting of seven custom-built lowrider bikes. Photo: Dylan Miner.

Miner’s introduction of The Seven Grandfather teachings incorporates a decolonial pedagogy that calls for teachers, stu dents, and the community to participate in a rigorous critique of their society in order to develop an understanding of the conditions that shape their way of thinking.10 Participants learned about the effects of the colonial history that disrupted Anishinaabe culture, while the workshops created a space for them to consider how this process has shaped their lives. The teachings were presented as a strategy to help participants understand the Anishinaabe worldview as comprised by the concepts known as the Seven Grandfathers: Nbwaakaawin (wisdom), Zaagi’idiwin (love), Minaadendamowin (respect), Aakwa’ode’ewin (bravery), Debwewin (truth), Dibaadendiziwin (humility), and Gw ekwaadiziwin (honesty).

When the bikes were exhibited at the LookOut! Gallery, six lowriders were arranged in a row down the middle of the space, with the seventh on a pedestal in the window. The lead bike in the row was accessorized with a wooden birch basket on the handlebars, painted buckskin wheel covers, and, rising from the back-wheel mount, a tall metal antenna wrapped in green felt and decorated with nine eagle feathers draping from the top (fg. 4). The bike’s basket is similar to those once used to collect berries in the forest; the wheel covers represent the drum and the heartbeat of Mother Earth; and the eagle staff is a symbol of the integrity and honor of a warrior. Alone, each of these items has a purpose and meaning; placed together, they embody the teaching of Respect. This bike is a warrior’s vehicle, made for a person who respects all living things and whose sense of Respect drives the struggle to protect the people and the environment. Those who ride this bike understand that they must put others before themselves. But the teachings are never stand-alone ideas; they work in conjunction with each other. In this manner, Respect is also tied to Love, because a warrior cannot find Respect for life without having Love for all living things. These are the kinds of lessons participants learn by making the bikes—life is multidimensional. This hybridizing of cultural forms and teachings exempli fies Miner’s decolonial aesthetic. As Macie Vermillion, a workshop participant, says, “Before this I had never heard about The Seven Grandfather teachings, ever. I come from a Native American background so…it was cool to learn about something like this, especially, because that is where I come from.”11 Learning about these cultural traditions changed participants’ lives, giving them new perspectives through which to reconnect with their ancestral culture and, in effect, decolonizing their understandings of themselves and their

10 Ming Fang He, Brian D. Schultz, and William H. Schubert, eds.,

The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2015), 171.

community. The bikes become more than mere documentation of the participants’ experience; they are touchstones of Anishinaabe cul ture that represent a mixture of traditional and modern identities.

11 Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag, Yépez.

It is this type of interaction that, I believe, shapes a socially engaged decolonial practice. Miner does not just bring participants together to share an experience but also teaches participants about the history of cultural disintegration experienced by local indigenous people. At the same time, he presents them with the tools to counteract this process in the present day, helping them learn the lessons necessary to living a good life while working together in a community to produce beautiful art. Using their bodies to power the bikes they built, the East Lansing students learn to re-experience the world as they move slowly through space.

It for Others , Being for Itself

Ekin Balcıo

glu

At the beginning there is nothingness—a few seconds pass with just a plain black screen. A female voice breaks the stillness, speaking philosophically: “Objects exist outside of us.” She continues, “It is the confrontation of mind with matter that brings an object into being,” as a white frame within the black screen appears—an object has come to being (fg. 1). A second white frame, a second object, enters the frame and lies over the frst object, as we hear, “Through their use they provide subsistence, satisfy other human wants, and become the means and processes to produce more objects.” These grand and acontextual assertions come to an end as a third white frame—a third object—emerges, accompanied by the fnal stipulation: “The wealth of our societies exists as a vast accumulation of objects.”

The Irish artist Duncan Campbell’s ffty-four-minute essay flm It for Others (2013), made for the Scottish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, strikes a philosophical note with these frst four lines before embarking on a mind-boggling journey through historical, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions, to a fnal shot that symbolically references death (fg. 2) . 1 IfO achieves more than merely ftting its complex layers into a succinct format. Rather, IfO attempts to transcend its own limits by situating itself and its viewers within the grand historical context it depicts. IfO wants to meet its viewers in the present, subject to subject, in some

fig. 1 Still from Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013; 16mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min.

fig. 2 Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013/2014; Installation view, Palazzo Pisani, The Common Guild, 55th Venice Biennale 2013.

sense fulfilling the artist’s wish to display himself as a preobjectified subject.

1 The Scottish Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale was organized by the Common Guild for Scotland + Venice 2013 in the Palazzo Pisani (Sta. Marina). Outset Scotland supported the commission of new work by Corin Sworn, Duncan Campbell, and Hayley Tompkins. Scotland + Venice is a partnership between Creative Scotland, British Council Scotland, and the National Galleries of Scotland.

Campbell, born in Dublin in 1972 and currently based in Glasgow, has won international praise for his works, which often use archival footage to investigate the politics, economics, and social structure of his own historical context, Northern Ireland.2 In turn, he ties his subjective experience to larger philosophical ideas related to difference, otherness, and subjectivity. In 2014, the British art world awarded Campbell the prestigious Turner Prize for It for Others. The irony is that IfO not only explicitly criticizes the cultural and economic milieu in which it has achieved success, but it also embodies Campbell’s sentiments concerning the persistent colonial attitudes governing the British art world in general, and the British Museum in particular.

2 Campbell’s film Bernadette (2008) presents an open-ended story of Bernadette Devlin, the controversial Irish civil rights activist. The work fuses documentary and fiction in order to expose the fixed representation of reality in documentary form. To similar effect, Campbell’s film Make It New John (2009) tells the story of the American automobile engineer John DeLorean, his legendary DMC-12 car, and the workers at the West Belfast plant where it was produced between 1981 and 1982. His film Fall Burns Malone Fiddles (2008) presents a series of black-and-white still images of young workingclass people in Belfast in the 1980s, sourced from the Belfast community photographic archives.

IfO expresses a cinematographic critique of colonialism and the commodification of art. It features an array of artifacts from Africa; a dance performance by the Michael Clark Company; images of banal household objects; archival footage from Northern Ireland; and contemporary art objects that are for sale. It also references numer ous artists and filmmakers, among them Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Stephen Shore, and Sergei Eisenstein—each of whom, in different ways, is or was invested in a critique of commodification and capitalism.

In the first section of the film, which reenacts Marker and Resnais’s 1963 essay film Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), Campbell proposes that colonial subjects are histori cally forced by their colonial contexts to create their own forms of self-expression.3 In the performance by the Michael Clark Company (in part two of the film), Campbell explores how economic and political interests lie behind the formation of colonial and postcolonial contexts that breed colonial subjects. In “The General Object” (part three), he shows how these economic and political interests perform their dark operations to advance cultural imperialism. In “Reflexes,”

the final section, Campbell reveals that he is a colonial subject, too. He achieves this in two steps: first, by demonstrating that Northern Ireland is a colonial society and that Campbell regards himself as having grown up as a colonial subject under British rule; second, by revealing that the British art world remains a colonial context and that Campbell, as a colonial subject in the British art world, is forced to self-express within it. IfO is Campbell’s self-expression in the language he has chosen—the language of art.

3 Colonial subjects are forced to self-express in the sense that they

other option than to react.

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre discusses the interrelated notions of “being for others,” “being for itself,” and “being in itself.” Briefly and in a simplified manner, we can think of a “being-in-itself” as an object whose value is self-evident, closed within itself. A “being-for-others” is a social being, one whose value is defined by others; its being is for others to determine. Colonization causes colonized peoples to become beings-for-others, since their consciousnesses are defined by the colonizers. Lastly, a “being-for-itself” is one who resists being defined by others and seeks to claim self-definition. Sartre’s “being-for-itself” is more or less synonymous with my use of “subject” in this essay. In fact, at the end of Campbell’s chapter “The General Object,” we are told through the voiceover that there is a materialist interpretation of “soul,” which amounts to a materialization of the Sartrean notions within IfO. Campbell materializes his views on the problem of display by yielding IfO as a being-for-itself (i.e., a subject that resists being-for-others or existing as an objectified colonial subject) because, given the philosophical obstacles and historical context, this is the only way in which an artist can resist. Campbell acknowledges the contradictions in his approach, speaking in voiceover in the film:

And how can one person suppose to speak for these objects? That includes him, me, whatever proxy, does it matter? What should I say in order to have nothing further to say? But why say anything? It seems only natural once the idea of obligation has been swallowed that I should interpret it as an obligation to say something.

Instead of remaining silent in the face of paradox, Campbell attempts to decipher the indecipherable. His film self-referentially addresses its own making and itself as a moving-image museum displaying objects. It performs and responds to fundamental issues concerning the display of objects. Since a display

is a presentation of something that originates in another context, displaying something as it is prior to the framing act is impossible; the act of displaying is itself a recontextualization as well as a decontextualization. In order to represent something, there must first have been a presentation in the native context. Like Marker and Resnais, Campbell proposes that museums, as places of represen tation, perform recontextualizations that lead to the impoverishing and imperializing of cultures.

The philosophical opening of IfO historicizes its discussion by contextualizing the objects it presents. The female voice speaks again: “This is a film about objects. It refers to another film about objects, specific African objects: a ballad of their mortality and death: Les Statues meurent aussi.” Les Statues meurent aussi offers insight into the damaging cultural impact of colonization on African art as it is perceived by Westerners, removed from its original source and objectified (fg. 3). 4 Les Statues functions as a gateway through which Campbell enters into issues revolving around colonialism; in thinking historically, he turns the discussion from the African objects displayed via Les Statues to Négritude, the postcolonial resistance movement born in the 1930s in reac tion to cultural imperialism. As stated in the voiceover: “The instance when difference and identity become the interface for one another is part of a larger moment: Négritude.” The literary theorist V. Y. Mudimbe defines this emergence in dialectical terms: “The alienation caused by colonialism constitutes the thesis, the African ideologies of otherness (black personality and Négritude) the antithesis, and political liberation the synthesis.”5 The alienation caused by colonialism imposes otherness on a subject who comes to the realization that, as the target of the Western gaze, they are being colonized and objectified. As a form of resistance to becoming beings-for-others—i.e., in an attempt to become beings-for-themselves—colonized subjects desire “to decipher the indecipherable.” One resists being objectified, yet this resistance takes form in being objectified by the self. In sum, to escape being objectified, the colonial subject self-objectifies.

4 Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) was commissioned by the journal Presence Africaine in 1950. Now recognized as an early instance of anticolonial film, it was viewed as a threat by the French government. In 1953 the film was submitted to the censorship commission of the Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie (CNC) and banned outright. Film historian and Marker scholar Catherine Lupton states that Les Statues shows how colonialism and its effects, including objectification and appropriation, effectively kill African art: “Les Statues argues that colonialism murders African art by severing its roots in traditional ways of life, consigning it to the graveyard of Western museums and degrading its forms into mass-produced tourist kitsch that no longer expresses a cultural purpose—a prayer, as the commentary puts it—for the people who make it.” Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 38.

fig. 3 Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), 1953/2014; Installation view, The Common Guild, 55th Venice Biennale 2013.

fig. 4 Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013; still from 16mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min.

5 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Indianapolis, and London: Indiana University Press and James Currey, 1988). Quoted in Okwui Enwezor and Chinua Achebe, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994 (African, Asian & Oceanic Art) (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 11.

This paradox of Négritude is explained in a voiceover in IfO: “Négritude had to make do with a certain drift and delirium of the mystical and the concrete.” The Négritude movement is emblematic not only for its subject matter, blackness, but also for being a move ment of resistance, with which Campbell identifies. Négritude is the resistance of a particular oppressed people, but it shares traits with all resistances by the oppressed to their oppressors. Okwui Enwezor reiterates Sartre’s emphasis on this:

Sartre saw the Négritude movement as the moment of separation, of negativity, similar to the “antithesis” following the “thesis” of the colonial situation and preceding the “synthesis” in which not only blacks but all oppressed people would unite and triumph over their oppressors.6

Négritude is a particular case of colonial subjecthood, and in talking about it, Campbell is indirectly talking about his own colo nial subjecthood. Campbell suggests that he is a colonial subject forced to express his resistance as an Irish person operating in the British art world.

Campbell acknowledges his paradoxical yet hopeful task: “But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, as the people who employed it knew; they hoped to prepare the way for the realization of a human society without racism.” In the next line, Campbell declares the extent of his commitment to resistance through Négritude and its analogous forms: “Négritude is dedicated to its own destruction.” This line reads as a confession of Campbell’s paradoxical embrace of self-objectification as a means of resisting objectification by another. IfO operates as Campbell’s stage on which he displays his historical context, embedded in a larger history against which his colonial subjecthood reflexively comes into being. Campbell provides his viewers with fragmented but associated contents, often pointing to the ways in which the fragments are linked by referencing his own process of making IfO, and by referencing those who influenced him. Through montage, voiceover, and other techniques whose “comings and goings” catalyze this interplay of concepts, Campbell’s film forces us to attempt to decipher the “indecipherable.”

Campbell often shows disembodied hands entering the cinematic frame holding photos as a way to present the indecipherable

6 Enwezor and Achebe, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, 11.

for Others

fig. 6 Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013; Still from 16mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min.

fig. 7 Stephen Shore, Granite, Oklahoma, July 1972, 1972; C-print, 5 x 7 ½ in.

fig. 8 Duncan Campbell, It for Others, 2013; Still from 16mm and analogue video transferred to digital video, 54 min.

yet powerful effects of the circulation of images, including IfO itself, in everyday life (fg. 5). The indecipherable creeps in; what we see and what we hear demands that we seek something that isn’t there. The more material that unfolds, the more the viewer seeks a solid foundation, yet IfO never explicitly provides such ground. The viewer thus experiences the multidimensional work from an aesthetic perspective, and it is from this viewpoint that Campbell’s subjective world is illuminated.

The experience of engaging with IfO as a subject-like object is made possible by very particular features of the film. Reflecting a multilayered picture of reality, IfO is not just fragmented in its subjects and ideas; it is also multidimensional in form. Its collection of objects and references not only constitutes a multisensory (i.e., audiovisual) material experience but also invites multiple associations.

For example, Campbell re-creates an image by photographer Stephen Shore in which a cup of coffee sits on a light wooden table. In Campbell’s film, a hand enters the frame and puts the cup on the table (fg. 6). The hand then enters the frame again and puts Shore’s photo into the same frame, making the frame we are seeing a frame within a frame. At the same time, we hear the following line: “…the elements—the material objects of his comings and goings serve as points of departure for the forming of associations through which the play of concepts becomes possible” (fg. 7). Campbell generates a complicated referential connection between the re-created cup and its original image; he thus leads us to see, as explicitly as possible through moving images, how his film enables its disclosure to the viewer by depending on associations.

Campbell acknowledges the difficulty of his task as he reveals the general structure guiding his creation: the method of dialectics. He says: “It’s still very complicated to think in extra-thematic imagery, however; to show the method of dialectics.” Campbell thus quantifies the major segments making up IfO and re-affirms the associative links among them. “This will require four or five nonfigurative chapters,” he says.

The opening portion of the section titled “The General Object” demonstrates IfO’s aims in action. We see a hand putting a can labeled “Campbell’s Tomato Soup” into a plain and simple setting, while the words “The General Object” appear in a large white font (fg. 8). The voiceover says: “It’s settled: we’re going to film commodities, on Marx’s scenario about commodities—the only logical solution.” As the scene references the mass reproduction of commodities, the same hand returns the can to the same spot again. Campbell wants the viewer to think historically by reevaluating new material as it appears and re-assembling all past materials from the vantage point

of the present; he wants the viewer to think about the whole film as an object within the context of the contemporary art market. Looking carefully, we see that, on the product’s label, between the words “Campbell’s” and “Tomato Soup,” another word exists, one that could go unnoticed: “condensed.” The object that we look at is “Campbell’s condensed.” IfO visually references itself, in the sense that the film contains a condensed version of Campbell, the artist. Just as Campbell makes use of repetitive images to sig nal abstract notions, he uses other still images to signal his most abstract ideas; the voiceover says: “The maximum abstractness of an expanding idea appears particularly bold when presented as an offshoot from extreme concreteness—the banality of the stuff of everyday life.”

Campbell creates IfO as his Trojan horse. Though Campbell displays himself for others, IfO is not for others because it is for itself—and for Campbell. Hence, Campbell, who is a being-for-itself, expresses his colonized being as he subjectively experiences it. The “It” of the title is for itself. IfO is a being-for-itself whose being is resistance; its life is the film’s duration, and it dies at the end of fifty-four minutes. The film makes others aware of what has been happening all along: they have been determining IfO’s being, unbeknownst to themselves. Through repetition (as in the Campbell’s condensed scene) and faith in the viewer’s ability to create associations, the artist pushes the viewer to recognize the ways in which she has been complicit with the process of objectification.

IfO is a being-for-itself in that it determines its own being in its world, the art world, where it is of course objectified by the art market. IfO has been evaluated by the art world in terms of a prestigious prize with a monetary value—a £25,000 award. Presciently, IfO foresaw this evaluation of its worth. Amusingly, in the last minutes of the film, while the art market is being discussed, some books are laid on a table; one title reads “Pricing the Priceless,” as the voiceover declares the “objectifying effect of pricing” as a closure on an inherently open being.

We come to see that IfO does not consider itself to be historically unilateral, exclusively directed toward the past; rather, it thinks of itself in terms of possible future histories. Based on the film’s historical context and its lessons, it predicts the way that beings are valued in economic terms. IfO embodies the multidimen sionality of the reality it portrays, blurring the polarities of subject and object, form and content, life and death.

Icelandic Art, Because There Is Such a Thing

Bryndis Hafthorsdottir

Ask an arts professional with knowledge of the contemporary Icelandic art scene to characterize that scene, and you’ll hear a persistent refrain: Art made in Iceland is unorthodox, unpredictable, unrestrained. Gallerist Börkur Arnarson claims that contemporary Icelandic artists are unfettered by “tradition, discipline, [and] context.” In some countries, artists continue to extend or react against established local conventions, but Arnarson says that, “in Iceland, there’s a freedom to try whatever you want, and to get away with it” (fg. 1). 1 Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Iceland’s representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, credits her artistic ingenuity to “the freedom…Icelandic people have because of the lack of tradition.” In Iceland, she says, there is “an enormous space of nothingness” where cultural customs would usually reign.2 German art historian Christian Schoen similarly asserts that “Icelandic artists display a refreshingly disrespectful approach to art history,” and that if anything typifes art made in Iceland, it is its devotion to transnational trends.3 The current discourse surrounding Icelandic visual culture leads us to believe that it has severed its ties to a heritage, that it is unbeholden to any local or national expectations, and that, hence, there is no such thing as “Icelandic Art.”

1 John Rogers, “Icelandic Art, If There Is Such A Thing,” The Reykjavik Grapevine, May 9, 2014, http://grapevine.is/mag/ feature/2014/05/09/icelandic-art-if-there-is-such-a-thing/.

2 Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Hans Ulrich Obrist Interview with Gabriela Fridriksdottir,” I-D, March 2005, http://www.hamishmorrison.com/assets/files/Fridriksdottir-Gabriela/ Fridriksdottir-gabriela-Obrist-interwiew.pdf.

1 “Icelandic Art, If There Is Such A Thing,” John Rogers interview with Börkur Arnarson in the Reykjavik Grapevine, May 2014.

In its unboundedness, the work of Icelandic artists seems to have become prototypically postnational. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas defines postnationalism as the hypothetical end result of a “historically momentous dynamic,” which follows an “abstraction from local, to dynastic, to national, to democratic consciousness” and could culminate in a globalized society that transcends the “affective ties of nation, language, place, and heri tage.” The Icelandic art scene is not provincial or insular but open to foreign influence and attentive to globally shared interests. Yet when Arnarson, Schoen, and Friðriksdóttir claim that art made in contemporary Iceland is unencumbered by local tradition, they suggest that its significance and global relevance derive from the insignificance and irrelevance of its local borders and history.

According to Habermas, a postnational society may be expected to take into account “the autonomy, particularity, and uniqueness of formerly sovereign states.” Such a society represents a “new multiplicity” of interconnected cultures dedicated to the cultivation of complex forms of inclusion and belonging.4 The assertion that art made in contemporary Iceland bubbles up from a cultural vacuum or a “space of nothingness” threatens to homogenize Iceland’s best-known art into a kind of global artistic monoculture, erasing its singularity rather than acknowledging its place in a truly postnational constellation of hybridized cultures. In truth, Iceland’s cultural identity has not dissolved into that of a globalized community, or even that of mainland Europe. Such declarations can be dangerous, for when we interpret art within an exclusively global rather than postnational framework, certain cultural nuances are lost or misunderstood, as are the affective ties and forms of inclusion they generate. I argue that we come closer to achieving a Habermasian postnationalist ideal when we acknowledge contemporary art’s rootedness in the heritage of various national cultures than when we deny and devalue those roots.

The following case study presents an internationally success ful Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, whose art, I contend, is often misread because its national context is overlooked. Rather than con ceiving of Kjartansson’s work in terms of international postmodernism, as many critics and curators do, we are better served by reinterpreting it as playing along a continuum with the premodern performative practices of his Icelandic ancestors. In doing so, we acknowledge the work’s ability to foster a culturally sensitive international exchange; the

3 Christian Schoen, “Ragnar Kjartansson,” A Prior, no. 12 (January 2006): 161-63.

4 Jürgen Habermas and Max Pensky, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), xiv, 56, 75.

unification of a global public does not depend on the disappearance of traditional vernacular but may be achieved as multiple vernaculars interpermeate foreign aesthetics and motifs.

For the past fifteen years, Kjartansson has followed a spe cific artistic strategy: his artworks are episodic, appropriative, and structured through repetition. A performance piece titled Sorrow Conquers Happiness exemplifies this strategy. Dressed in a tuxedo, clean-shaven, with his hair slicked back, Kjartansson mournfully and repeatedly sings the phrase, “Sorrow conquers happiness,” to a subtly morphing melody composed by his friend, Davíð Þór Jónsson. Once Kjartansson completes his rendition of the song, he begins it again. The performance lasts seven hours. When Kjartansson debuted the piece on a small stage in a downtown Reykjavik restaurant, he sang in English while a local jazz trio accompanied him.5 Ten years later, performing in a train station in St. Petersburg, he sang in Russian, supported by a chamber orchestra and choir.6 The piece has also been transformed into a videowork titled God (2007), in which Kjartansson and an eleven-piece orchestra perform in a large concrete hall whose walls have been hidden behind gaudy pink satin curtains (fgs. 2 and 3). When God is exhibited in museums and galleries, the video loops on a large screen in its own room, which is likewise covered floor to ceiling in bright pink satin (fg. 4). 7

5 “sorrow conquers happiness.mov,” YouTube video, 1:48, from Kjartansson’s live performance of Sorrow Conquers Happiness at Iðnó Restaurant in Reykjavik in 2004, posted by Dallimus, October 7, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCe5JWpmJjY.

6 “MANIFESTA 10. Public program. Ragnar Kjartansson. ‘Sorrow Conquers Happiness’. (long version).,” YouTube video, 25:04, from Kjartansson’s live performance of Sorrow Conquers Happiness at MANIFESTA 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia, posted by Manifesta Foundation, November 2, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LH-LD8wD62M.

7 Ragnar Kjartansson, God, 2007; Video, 30:07 min.

Each of Kjartansson’s artworks centers on a discrete phrase or gesture (e.g., “sorrow conquers happiness”) that suggests an excerpt from a larger narrative—a solitary line or piece of choreogra phy isolated from some larger play or opera. These key phrases often cite the work of another artist, such as Jónsson, and are rendered in one of several conventional pop-cultural styles. In God, Kjartansson’s sleek getup, big band, and glamorous backdrop allude to Rat Pack crooners like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Although Kjartansson’s works are repetitive, they are not automated. While the artist could easily record a three-minute phrase and electronically loop it, he and his collaborators instead sustain the event through live action; they stretch their vocal chords to their limits, collapse on the stage in exhaustion, and make mistakes. In 2013, the artist hired an American band called

Ragnar Kjartansson, God

images from video,

4 Ragnar Kjartansson, God, 2007/2011; Installation view at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.

The National to perform their song “Sorrow” for six hours at MoMA PS1’s VW Dome. Lead guitarist Bryce Dessner played a slightly different guitar line for each of the 105 times he performed the song. Each of the song’s iterations was further distinguished by the drummer’s presence or absence, the state of the lead singer’s voice, and the enthusiasm and size of the audience.8 In Sorrow Conquers Happiness, Kjartansson varies each iteration of the song’s lyrics by holding different notes and varying the song’s melody and dynam ics ever so slightly. Each live performance of the piece is unique, adapted to the appearance and acoustics of the performance space, the size and makeup of Kjartansson’s band, Kjartansson’s physical condition, and, especially, the nature of his audience.

8 Drew Daniel, “The Song Remains the Same: Ragnar Kjartansson and the Quality of Quantity,” Parkett 94 (2014): 134–47.

Because art critics and curators operate on the premise that Icelandic art has no local precedent, they often associate specific elements of Kjartansson’s strategy with primary features of international postmodernism—that is, they associate his use of appropriation with pastiche and his work’s episodic looping with a schizophrenic conception of time. For example, Italian curator Cecilia Alemani interprets Kjartansson’s donning of the guise of a Rat Pack crooner in God as a detached and empty mimicry, maintaining that it preserves none of the masculine or romantic connotations that originally saturated the Rat Pack’s style, and generates none of its own. She compares Kjartansson’s work to a cabaret performance by a “Vaudevillian idiot savant”; it is interesting, entertaining, even “soothing” and “reassuring,” but otherwise deliberately meaningless.9 Understood within a postmodern framework, Kjartansson’s work, according to Alemani, represents an impasse in which elements of the past are neutrally replicated, without nostalgia or special concern for their import.

Critics who understand Kjartansson’s strategy in these terms have had difficulty reconciling the detachment and perpetual “present-ness” implied by this postmodern interpretation with the authenticity and sincerity that other audiences perceive in his work. Alemani identifies a “tension between authenticity and simulation, between sincerity and sophistication.” Curator Adam Budak has also read Kjartansson’s work as postmodern, describing his work as both “real and alarming” and “fake and kitschy.” But curator Caroline Corbetta claims, “Kjartansson’s attitude is always equipped with an emotional authenticity and intensity,” and Christian Schoen calls Kjartansson one of the “most genuine artists of his generation.”10

9 Ragnar Kjartansson et al., The End—Ragnar Kjartansson, ed. Christian Schoen (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 39–50.

While the contradictions Alemani and Budak perceive make for interesting analysis, I submit that it is unnecessary to invoke dis crepancy to reconcile Kjartansson’s strategy with the earnestness Corbetta and Schoen celebrate. Kjartansson’s strategy is not an exclusive invention of postmodernism—it is also a reworking of premodern mechanisms in the context of contemporary globalization.

10 Ibid., 7–45.

While it may seem farfetched to situate Kjartansson’s work within a premodern Icelandic tradition rather than a more contemporary transnational framework, the connection is less tenuous if we set aside Kjartansson’s status as an internationally renowned artist and consider instead his Icelandic heritage. The structure of Kjartansson’s artworks and the way in which he performs them subtly but pervasively resembles those of premodern Icelandic performers. Fourteenth-century manuscripts record the earliest Icelandic melodic verses, early relatives of the rímur (sing. ríma) that would develop as an art form over the next six hundred years. Rímur are orally performed epic poems that conform to strict formal rules: they are sung by performers called kvæðamenn (sing. kvæðamaður) to unique, repetitive, semi-tonic melodies, following complicated rhyming and alliterative patterns. For over half a millennium, kvæðamenn traveled throughout the Icelandic countryside, improvising new verses and performing old standards at farms and fishing camps in exchange for room and board or, occasionally, some form of payment (fg. 5). 11 Until electricity (and radio) reached the most rural districts in the latter half of the twentieth century, alliterative poetry was Icelanders’ choice of medium for entertainment, education, political discourse, and gossip.12 Even today, Icelanders perform traditional rímur and informally compose alliterative verse to commemorate notable events such as births, retirements, and political gaffes.13

11 Hreinn Steingrímsson, Kvæðaskapur: Icelandic Epic Song, ed. Dorothy Stone and Stephen L. Mosko, 2000, http://luxstar.org/ KVAEDASKAPUR/main.html.

12 Sarah M. Brownsberger, “Poetry, Hunger, and Electric Lights: Lessons from Iceland on Poetry and Its Audience,” The Cambridge Quarterly 44, no. 3 (September 2015): 202–12.

13 Watch elderly farmers perform traditional rímur at “Erlingur og Jóhannes kve ð a rímur.mpg”: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=aWadlEQBoyQ. Steindór Andersen and Sigur Rós’s collaboration, “Fjöll í austri fagurblá,” presents a more modern take on the traditional ríma structure: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?feature=player_ embedded&v=8yYP_Sw6fYQ. See also: Hreinn Steingrímsson’s e-book, Kvæ ð askapur , cited above, for rare audio recordings, transcriptions, and translations of traditional performances by professional kvæ ð amenn

Early Icelandic oral compositions relied on sketches, or brief modular episodes that were rarely performed in sequence. Each

fig. 5 August Schiøtt, Húslestur, 1861; Oil on canvas; Dimensions unknown. This painting by Danish artist August Schiøtt shows a kvæðamaður performing in the communal living space of an Icelandic farm.

episode could be contained within the length of a single stanza or short series of stanzas and could be combined at the performer’s discretion with a variety of other episodes to create a performance that lasted several hours. This performance could easily be carried on nightly for months on end. Lacking the lexical opportunity to loop back, reread, and be reminded of the events of earlier pages, listeners relied on redundancy or repetitions in the ríma to stay on track with the narrative and remain “in the loop.” In this sense, the conditions of premodern oral performances recall those of contemporary fine art installations and performances, which are generally unavailable for private perusal at home and are typically affected by viewers’ freedom to wander in and out of a venue, as well as by the interfer ence of noisy crowds. By performing songs repeatedly, Kjartansson displays a tolerance for these conditions. He caters his performances to audiences who will visit, linger a while, leave, and then possibly return hours or days later, looking to reenter the work at their conve nience without missing out on any of the content.

Premodern oral poets repeated episodes to ensure that their listeners could keep up with their stories, but they also repeated grander narratives in order to conserve hard-won knowledge. Poems typically contained a complex web of kenningar (sing. kenning), metaphorical devices that rely on allusions to the stories chronicled in medieval Icelandic texts.14 While oral poets sometimes invented their own kenningar, they often cherry-picked and rearranged old favorites to suit their topical messages and to make sure they were understood. This repetition and appropriation of timeworn metaphors helped poets meet formal alliterative and syllabic requirements extemporaneously, embedding new works within a long poetic lineage and conserving valuable cultural lore.15

14 “Graybeard’s mead-horn liquor” is a kenning for poetry; “Graybeard” is one of Óðin’s many epithets, and according to Norse mythology, Óðin brought poetry to mankind in a horn of magic mead he stole from dwarfs and giants. See: Halldór Laxness, World Light trans. Magnús Magnússon (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 44.

15 Julian Freeman, ed., Landscapes from a High Latitude: Icelandic Art, 1909–1989, (London: Lund Humphries, 1989), 16.

Kenningar also helped to assimilate ideas and episodes from foreign stories into Iceland’s poetic canon. Poets read or heard tales on their travels, which they then translated into Icelandic, cast in alliterative verse, and infused with familiar references so that the context would be accessible to their countrymen. For example, one of Iceland’s best-known poets, Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–1674), put the biblical First Book of Samuel and the Protestant catechism into verse. He also composed rímur based on One Thousand and One Nights, which had made its way to Scandinavia from the Middle East via Italy, and Kaiser Oktavianus, a German

chapbook that was introduced to Iceland via Denmark. Once these stories had been tailored to local audiences, they became com mon knowledge. As part of the Icelandic canon, these verses have withstood the test of time; some of Pétursson’s stanzas are still per formed in Icelandic elementary schools today.16

Kjartansson, like the oral poets of yore, quotes other artists and repeats familiar tropes whose authors have long since been forgotten. He chooses stories from both Icelandic and foreign sources and retells them; in Sorrow Conquers Happiness, he intro duces Jónsson’s melodic progression and reminds his audience of Rat Pack performances. By tailoring each of his own performances to its locale—for example, translating Sorrow Conquers Happiness into Russian for his visit to St. Petersburg—he makes sure that he is using his audience’s vernacular. Through repetition, he familiarizes his listeners with his performances’ content. In doing so, he not only adapts his peers’ and predecessors’ aesthetic for the benefit of his own song and audience, but he also places himself within a rich cultural lineage while simultaneously converting international pop culture into something canonical.

By re-presenting elements of globalized culture in a way that both engages and gratifies the requirements of contemporary inter national audiences, Kjartansson fosters a communal and empathetic environment. Bryce Dessner was astonished by the commitment view ers showed to The National’s performance of “Sorrow,” reporting, “[T]here were at least three hundred, four hundred people who were there for most of the six hours, often singing every note. By the end, Matt [Berninger, the lead singer] lost his voice and fumbled a verse, and the audience felt it and rose up around him and sang the whole song really loud.”17 Although the divide between the performers and audience members remains intact, listeners become vital contributors to Kjartansson’s project; they feel such an involvement in the performance that they adapt to maintain it when its continuation is threatened. As Caroline Corbetta puts it, “[E]ach iteration [of a phrase in Kjartansson’s work] takes on a different shading, gradually generating an emotional surge inside the performer which then expands out to the audience.”18 While this effect is somewhat lessened in Kjartansson’s installation works, where live performance is not included, specially designated spaces, such as the gallery covered in pink curtains in God, create at least an illusion of intimacy between Kjartansson and his audience. Through these emotional connections, Kjartansson transfers his devotion to the cultural elements he is perpetuating— from the Rat Pack to rímur—into interested audience members.

16 Margrét Eggertsdóttir, “Skáldið: Um Hallgrím Pétursson og Passíusálmana,” Passíusálmar Hallgríms Péturssonar, 1998, http:// servefir.ruv.is/passiusalmar/.

Whether its essence is premodern, postmodern, or both, Kjartansson’s work is notable for the way in which it engages an international audience. By appropriating other people’s work and deemphasizing private ingenuity, Kjartansson’s art moves beyond national and across historical boundaries, interweaving diverse elements and achieving a carefully crafted hybridity. It respectfully preserves and adapts pop-cultural gems for modern audiences while gently winning their emotional investment. When critics relegate Kjartansson’s work to the category of international postmodernism, however, they overlook its simultaneous transcendence and celebration of the “affective ties of nation, language, place and heritage.” It is only when we acknowledge Kjartansson’s Icelandic roots that we can fully appreciate his work as a poignant attempt to create an international and indeed postnational community—a series of connections that both acknowledge and penetrate national borders.

Ekin Balcıoğlu is an interdisciplinary artist born in Izmir, Turkey. She holds a BA in Fashion Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, and is currently pursuing a dual degree MA/MFA in Visual & Critical Studies and Fine Arts at CCA. Her artistic practice employs ideas often subversive and polemical in nature while exploring political, social, and cultural codes with a focus on depicting marginalization and resistance to oppressive systems. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibi tions both nationally and internationally, and she is a co-recipient of an IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Award from CCA’s Center for Art + Public Life for the project “To Lemon Hill,” a tutoring program for Syrian refugee children in Izmir, as well as a Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award. www.ekinbalcioglu.com

Jesus Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist and visual critic with a BA in Raza Studies from San Francisco State University. He is a co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaborative, and a member of JustSeeds Artists Cooperative; from 2003 to 2010, he was a partner at Tumis design studio. In 2013, Barraza participated in the Leeway Foundation’s “REVOLVE: An Art for Social Change Symposium” on the panel “Embedded in Community: What Is Social Practice?” In 2015, along with his partner Melanie Cervantes, he received a Community Recognition Award from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies. His prints and posters have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Jesus@DignidadRebelde.com

Sienna Freeman is a San Francisco–based artist, writer, and curator. Prior to joining the CCA community, she earned a BFA in photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhib ited across the United States as well as in Switzerland, London, Belgium, and Canada; her writing has been featured on Art Practical and Daily Serving. A former member of

the Philadelphia-based communal gallery Space1026, Freeman has served as director of Philadelphia’s Wexler Gallery and is currently gallery manager at San Francisco’s Velvet da Vinci. In 2015, she was the recipient of CCA’s All College Honors Award for MFA Fine Art. www.siennafreeman.com

Tanya Gayer is a curator and writer. Her recent curatorial projects include an exhi bition of work by Martin Wong at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, accompanied by her catalogue essay “The Actionability of the Archive.”

Her previous curatorial projects have been exhibited at Pro Arts Gallery, in Oakland, and Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, in San Francisco. In 2015, she presented her academic research at the 8th Annual PhD Art History Symposium at University of California, San Diego, and at the 40th Annual Art History Symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has held curatorial-assistant positions at Richmond Art Center, Arlington Public Art (Arlington, VA), and Espacio Mínimo (Madrid); currently she works at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco. www.tanyagayer.com

Elena Gross is a writer and cultural critic. She received her BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In the Bay Area, she has worked at, participated in, and contributed to a variety of arts organizations, including SOMArts Cultural Center, SFAC Galleries, Southern Exposure, SFMOMA, MoAD, CTRL+SHFT, Shotgun Players, and the GLBT History Museum. Her published writings can be found at Street Spirit and Daily Serving evgross90@gmail.com

Bryndis Hafthorsdottir was born in Boston and as a teenager moved to Reykjavík, Iceland. She received her BA in European Cultural Studies from Brandeis University, where she specialized in German and Soviet cinema and literature and researched ways in which art

addresses the effects of totalitarian oppression and war. After graduation, she worked for Artspeak and the Vancouver Community Arts Council, in Canada, and for Hverfsgalleri, in Iceland. Her most recent academic projects concern nationalism, postnationalism, immi gration, exclusion, and belonging. Her writings can be found in Art Practical. bryndislillian@gmail.com

Mailee Hung is a San Francisco–based writer and critic whose research focuses on the conceptual and material intersections of technology and the human body. She holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2015, she received the All College Honors Graduate Award for Critical Nonfction from CCA for her essay “Decolonizing the Future: The Black Cyborg in Art and Culture.” She has presented her work at the 2015 Science Fiction Research Association Symposium at SUNY Stony Brook, and at the AICAD 2015 Symposium “Exploring Science in the Studio” at CCA. Her published writing can be found in Art Practical. mailee.hung@gmail.com

Veronica Jackson makes connections across the various disciplines of visual culture— art, architecture, and design—as compiled in her multi-decade portfolio in the areas of exhibition, interpretive, and communication design. Examples range from the African Voices project produced for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., in 1995, to Discovering the Civil War, installed at the National Archives and Records Administration in 2011, also in Washington. With the intent of integrating subjects related to her personal ontology and professional practice, Jackson’s graduate-school work examines identity, agency, and empowerment as performed by women of color in visual culture. veronica@jacksondesigngroup.com

Forrest McGarvey is an artist and writer cur rently residing in the Bay Area. He received a BFA in Fine Arts from the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. His visual work has been shown at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Artists Space in New York, locally in San Francisco, and in the independent magazine 3:1; his writing has been published in Art Practical and Daily Serving. In conjunc tion with his VCS degree, McGarvey has also received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the California College of the Arts. forrestmcgarvey@gmail.com

Eden Redmond is a multimedia artists and critical writer from Sacramento, CA. Her proj ects are invested in public displays of emotion, Internet-based artists and communities, girl gangs, queer kids, bedroom culture, found objects, and chance encounters; she writes with particular focus on the power of materiality in a digital context, and has published in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. Redmond is a founding and active member of the Bad Girls Club artist collective from Oregon, and has been a production assistant for Art Practical She is currently Director of Public Programs at CTRL+SHFT Collective in Oakland. edenredmond.squarespace.com