Sightlines 2017 by viscrit

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 Sienna Freeman, Program Manager cca.edu/academics/graduate/visual-critical-studies viscrit.cca.edu

Table of Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

1. (In)visible Bodies: Dis/ease, Exhaustion, and Affect Jamee Crusan Kristin Landowski Lindsay Tunkl

12 16 28 38

2. Imaginary Territories Gilda Posada Angela Berry

46 50 62

3. Constructed Territories/Sites of Construction Amanda Walters Becca Roy O’Gorman Carolina Magis Weinberg

76 80 92 104

Bios

118

Sightlines 2017

Introduction ART MATTERS

Introduction “Artists must never choose to remain silent,” Toni Morrison wrote the day after the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004. Yet despair was bogging down her writing. When she confided this to a friend, he reaffirmed her profound conviction: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”1

1. Toni Morrison, “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” The Nation (November 2004; reprint March 23, 2015), accessed March 9, 2017, https://www.thenation. com/article/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/. 2. Suzanne Preston Blier, “Art Matters,” convocation address, College Art Association, Feb. 15, 2017, accessed March 9, 2017, http://www.collegeart.org/ news/2017/02/24/caa-2017-convocation-presidents-address-art-matters/. 3. Ibid.

The 2016 election stopped many of us in our tracks. Business as usual was just not possible. But what to do? It’s our job as visual critics, poets, artists, architects, curators, designers, and scholars to go to work. We must roll up our sleeves and do what we have been trained to do and what we do best. To do it with more conviction than ever, that’s our job. We must speak even louder and think even harder than ever before, in solidarity with the embattled communities we constitute and represent. This year, professional organizations like the College Art Association, as well as many universities and schools, have broken with a tradition of neutrality to declare sanctuary zones, resist the new regime, defend hard-won civil (that is to say, human) rights, reject policies and edicts that oppress some to the advantage of others and ravage the most vulnerable among us. At the convocation of this year’s College Art Association conference in New York, the organization’s president, Suzanne Preston Blier, challenged CAA members to reflect on the close connections between art making and activism, and the vital roles that artists, art scholars, critics, and curators play in speaking out about the critical issues of the day: war, poverty, racism, sexism, immigration, or “other forms of discrimination and ethical derogation.”2 “Art matters,” Blier affirmed, echoing our own college’s motto: Make Art That Matters. Art serves as an arena “not only of engagement and resistance, advocacy and education, problem solving and invention, but also as a vital means of opening up and reenvisioning the world around us.”3 Given escalating threats to the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences (the assault on the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment of the Humanities, Environmental Protection Agency, etc.), it’s clear that mattering, the

Sightlines 2017 materialization of alternative ideals, is of paramount importance. Performing care and commitment in creative ways matters. Denouncing racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, climate-change denial, and anti-immigrant campaigns matters. Combating anti-intellectualism, given the scope and urgency of these human rights imperatives, might not seem like a top priority. But we need our critical thinking faculties, our mental agility, our intellectual rigor and stamina, in order to forge alliances and galvanize effective, sustained action. We must learn and teach with even more conviction now, and reach out farther beyond our campuses, beyond city, state, and national borders. The thesis research undertaken by this year’s graduating cohort was well underway before the November elections. Under the best of circumstances, student scholars find thesis research projects challenging to complete. This year, bringing such projects to fruition has required a specific kind of courage, courage of the conviction that scholarship matters. These VCS thesis projects have, from the start, addressed the urgency of speaking, seeing, being seen, imagining, revealing, activating, mattering. Today, these concerns matter even more urgently. Angela Berry reflects on Roni Horn’s lithographic series Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), and helps us to see how the artist sharpens the viewer’s vision and activates the mind’s eye. Jamee Crusan talks us through performances by the trans artist Cassils that materialize resistance to “the straight white cis-patriarchy.” Kristin Landowski thinks critically about the implications of “pink-ribbon culture” and the “pinkwashing of breast cancer.” Carolina Magis Weinberg focuses on the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander to consider what it might mean, in the global arena, for visual art to have an “accent.” Gilda Posada traces the histories of Galería de la Raza’s murals and their (sometimes violent) reception to reveal the power of visual culture in campaigns of decolonization. Becca Roy-O’Gorman deconstructs the colonial gaze framing museum displays of Native American art and history. Lindsay Tunkl bases claims about “what art can do in times of despair” on deep readings of works by Dario Robleto and Nietzsche’s philosophy of aesthetics. Amanda Walters critically considers landscaping in Florida, from the tropical–Mediterranean revivalist Miami Biltmore

Introduction Hotel to the ordinary south Florida backyard, against a colonial historical backdrop. This thesis research carries forward the ethical commitments and critical standards that have hallmarked Visual & Critical Studies since the program’s inception. The authors recognize that it is their/our obligation as visual critics to speak out, stand up, bear witness, make visible that which is invisible, trouble with our making, writing, and speaking assumptions about the “natural.” I know I can speak for the VCS faculty, advisors, alumni, and staff when I say that we are inspired and empowered by these students’ individual and collective efforts. Tirza True Latimer, Chair Visual & Critical Studies

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Acknowledgments

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. Frances Richard led the way as primary VCS thesis director. Thesis Director Viêt Lê prepared students for the VCS Symposium and assumed responsibility for the production of Sightlines 2017, as well as the exhibition posters. The following colleagues provided invaluable guidance and critique as internal and external advisors: Internal Thesis Advisors Fred Dolan, advisor for Angela Berry Karen Fiss, advisor for Kristin Landowski Jordan Kantor, advisor for Carolina Magis Weinberg Ranu Mukherjee, advisor for Gilda Posada Mitchell Schwarzer, advisor for Amanda Walters Tina Takemoto, advisor for Jamee Crusan and Lindsay Tunkl Kathy Zarur, advisor for Rebecca Roy-O’Gorman External Thesis Advisors T. D. Allan, advisor for Amanda Walters Paula Birnbaum, advisor for Rebecca Roy-O’Gorman Ana Paula Cohen, advisor for Carolina Magis Weinberg Fred Dolan, advisor for Lindsay Tunkl Elizabeth Freeman, advisor for Jamee Crusan Elisabeth Lebovici, advisor for Angela Berry Tamar Tembeck, advisor for Kristin Landowski Susy Zepeda, advisor for Gilda Posada Christopher Dare copy-edited and proofread the essays. MacFadden & Thorpe designed this book. Visual & Critical Studies Program Manager Sienna Freeman kept everyone and everything on track. From start to finish, she exercised her considerable executive skills with enthusiasm, generosity, and resourcefulness. The work we do in VCS is made possible by the support of the Humanities and Sciences Division administrators Mike Rothfeld, Assistant Director, and Juvenal Acosta, Dean.

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1. (In)visible Bodies: Dis/ease, Exhaustion and Affect 13

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Jamee Crusan EMBRACING DISORIENTATION IN QUEER EXHAUSTION: PULSE AND CASSILS’S 103 SHOTS

Jamee Crusan

2. Cassils, 103 Shots, video, directed by Heather Cassils, YouTube, June 27, 2016, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=cpEyQVKif_k.

When living in a world where one’s desires are treated as abnormal and deviant, a club like Pulse offers a safe place away from those who choose to condemn our desires simply because we love and desire differently. The film 103 Shots (2016) by Cassils1 was made in response to one survivor’s statement: “You’re sitting there having a great time at a club and you hear what sounds like fireworks and balloons popping, and you assume it’s part of the show, and then you realize it’s not the celebration you thought it was.”2 103 Shots responds to the Pulse massacre and to the disorientation created when fear and anxiety impede expressions of love under the eye of violence. Peggy Phelan writes in Mourning Sex, “Queers are queer because we recognize that we have survived our own deaths. The Law of the Social has already repudiated us, spit us out, banished us, jailed us, and otherwise quarantined us from the cultural imagination it is so anxious to keep clean, pristine, well-guarded.”3 Unfortunately, the labeling of queer love as deviant has not been exhausted. On June 12, 2016, a shooter entered Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and killed 49 people and injured 53 others. When I heard what had happened in Orlando, I was sitting at my parents’ home in a small coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania, where my partner at the time and I were visiting. My partner sat on the couch watching MSNBC, panicked. I had no words to console her, simply because I had not understood what had just happened. She felt horrified, saddened, scared, and completely disoriented in

3. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 2009), 33.

1. Cassils’s work confronts queer desire, and homophobic and transphobic violence, while testifying to the struggle and endurance it takes to sit outside the hetero-/homonormative structure of the binary.

It is the realization that the lost ones are not coming back; the realization that what life is all about is precisely living with an unfulfilled hope; only this time with the sense that you are not alone any longer— that someone can be there as your companion—knowing you, living with you through the unfulfilled hope, someone saying: I’ll be with you in the very process of your losing me. I am your witness. — Dori Laub in Trauma: Explorations in Memory

Sightlines 2017 rural Pennsylvania with a partner who was unable to offer her any emotional support. She excused herself and went upstairs. My mother looked at me and asked, “What’s wrong with her?” At that moment, I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach. I felt numb, had nowhere to turn—my mother had inadvertently confronted me with my invisibility as a trans* identifying person and the invisibility of my love. Simultaneously, I realized that those people in Orlando could have been me, my friends, or my lover. The term “queer exhaustion” has been in the vernacular of queer discourse for quite some time. I am adapting the term to outline a theory of queer exhaustion that names the stressful dialectic of social and political visibility and invisibility as experienced by queer, trans, and intersex individuals in contemporary American culture. Queer exhaustion is the endless struggle between self-erasure and self-abnegation driven by continually negotiating hegemonic histories, desires, and experiences. The negotiation between invisibility and visibility requires those outside the heteronormative constructs to pivot on a dime for their safety. This continual swivel and whirl create disorientation. Desiring queerly proves to be an exhausting endeavor when revealing your love for someone can lead to your death. In turn, concealing love produces trauma. By further examining disorientation in 103 Shots and queer exhaustion, can we create an entrance for empathy? By empathy I mean, in the most basic sense, sharing feelings of the “other” by providing a feeling of oneness. I suggest Cassils activates empathy in 103 Shots, with sharp cuts and assaulting sound disorientating the senses, creating embodiment in the viewer. Weeks after the shooting at Pulse, I attended San Francisco Pride. Pride is supposed to be a celebration; however, under the gaze of snipers perched atop the buildings surrounding Dolores Park, I watched two individuals get engaged under the “protection” of those guns. Being “protected” by the same weapons of war used to kill our companions creates disorientation. Both psychic and physical distresses are implicit in the idea that people need to be protected to celebrate and proclaim their love. Also under the watch of those snipers during Pride was Cassils, filming participants for 103 Shots. Couples participating in 103 Shots were asked to stand far enough apart for a white balloon to occupy the space between

Jamee Crusan 4. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

them. The weight of the couples’ bodies provided just enough resistance so the balloon did not fall. The flexible rubber structure and malleable nature of the balloon, when filled with the oxygen from individuals’ lungs, allows for pressure to be applied. Once positioned face to face in front of the stark white background, anchoring the gaze of intimacy, the couples onscreen tighten their embrace (fig. 1). The gesture of an embrace encourages one to hold tight. The expression of an embrace implies crossing a distance to visibly show love’s existence, romantic or otherwise. The balloon is an object of celebration and seems harmless. The action of the embrace implies affection or love, so when the embrace or loving gesture causes a pop, mimicking a gunshot, disorientation occurs. Sara Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, “We are affected by what we come into contact with. In other words, emotions are directed to what we come in contact with: They move us toward or away from such objects.”4 When the couples make the choice to embrace, bodies come together, bursting the fragile balloon that was keeping them apart. Unsure of when the balloon will burst, the participants’ reactions in 103 Shots vary from pleasure to pain and apprehension. Grimaces, closed eyes, tense jaws, and indirect gazes are visible as some embrace quickly, some slowly, others reluctantly. Mimicking feelings of pleasure and pain, sexual orgasm and falling in love, the explosiveness that occurs when a balloon is suddenly put under too much pressure is both exciting and frightening. The audience witnessing 103 Shots sees a rise and fall of the chests during the embrace, signaling a violent loss of breath and even loss of life, as well as signaling the act of kissing or sexual excitement. The burst balloon ejects from in between the couples like a bullet from a gun. When someone is shot, flesh vibrates from the impact of the bullet, and the body falls. The sound of the bursting balloons causes the viewer to blink hard and recoil, like when one hears a gunshot or the impact of pots and pans hitting the floor. In 103 Shots, the cadence of the exploding balloons quickens as though someone is firing a semiautomatic weapon, creating a pulse that runs through the film. The viewer becomes increasingly aware of their body as their chest tightens and fills with fear due to the loud pops occurring during each embrace. Although the bodies act as stand-ins for the lives of the couples at

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Figure 1: Film still, 103 Shots, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, NY.

Figure 2: Film still, 103 Shots, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, NY.

Jamee Crusan 5. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2006), 197.

Pulse, viewers realize they have just witnessed something akin to dying in the arms of your beloved (fig. 2). The use of black-and-white film renders the participants timeless, evokes past struggles with violence and loss within the LGBTQI+ community, and suggests the infinite gradations of gray in relation to expanding the black-and-white binary of male/female, boy/girl, man/woman. The black-and-white also suggests the genre of memento mori, and the tight cropping of bodies becomes reminiscent of some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images, specifically Embrace (1982) and Self Portrait (1975) (fig. 3). Kobena Mercer talks about Mapplethorpe’s images as memento mori: “In this mourning, there was something horribly accurate about the truism that death is the greatest leveler, because his pictures have now become memento mori, documentary traces of a style of life and a sexual ethics of the ’70s and early ’80s which of now largely disappeared and passed away into memory.”5 It is by grappling with such passing away into memory and the possibility of such tragedy becoming forgotten that 103 Shots functions as such an important reminder not only to the LGBTQI+ community but to society at large. Cassils brings together homophobic and transphobic violence throughout their work, which allows the LGBTQI+ community to come together and realize all of our bodies have suffered violence, no matter how you identify: queer or trans, gay or lesbian. A minute into 103 Shots, a still image in the film allows the viewer’s gaze to rest on the back of someone’s head, with their arm stretched out across a white background. Their gender becomes unidentifiable. The outstretched arm and white background recall Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait (1975), which shows the young, smiling artist with his arm stretched out across a white photographic background, fingers spread, looking directly at the camera (fig. 4). This image was eventually cropped in true Mapplethorpe style to make Arm (Self-Portrait) (1976). His arm appears lifeless, the stark white skin translucent as blue veins spread over his arm. Another Mapplethorpe image, Embrace (1982), was taken at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic and shows a black and white couple embracing (fig. 5). They’re naked from the waist up, wearing jeans, and their heads, pressed together, press their faces into one another’s shoulders. The couple is deeply entwined, as if afraid to

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Figure 3: Film still, 103 Shots, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, NY.

Figure 4: Self-Portrait, courtesy of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Sightlines 2017 let go. The intensity of this embrace shows a deep need in both parties and speaks to the fear and anxiety created during the AIDS epidemic. In comparison, a still from 103 Shots shows a couple embracing, naked from the waist up, wearing jeans, but they are not burying their heads; rather, they are militantly gazing directly at the camera. The power of the gaze as explored through much of the film suggests that it allows participants to claim a sense of forcefulness, which makes them fearless in their love, confronting the viewer. When Cassils shows a couple wearing sunglasses, the direct gaze is reminiscent of Benglis’s Artforum Ad and Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait (1975) (fig. 5). In these specific choices, Cassils is claiming the same unapologetic confronting gaze as Linda Benglis’s November 1974 Artforum Ad, demanding to have their body and those of their subjects seen. There can be immense pleasure in being visible—after all, recognition determines viability. Ideas of pleasure tie into visibility in a club or social setting, where one not only desires recognition but simultaneously desires to be desirable, as in the case of the Pulse nightclub or at SF Pride. Individuals gather in what they have understood to be a safe place not only to come together, but also to allow themselves to be desired in a sexual way. We desire to be desired; we desire connectivity. There is an unease in the relationship one has with desire, including the distance one must traverse to act upon it (fig. 6). The bodies in 103 Shots represent a spectrum of gender and sexual identity. There are multiple ways one can desire, and this film underlines the beauty and tragedy, or the pleasure and pain, of queer desire. Cassils’s and Mapplethorpe’s works depict lost lives, utilizing death as the greatest leveler while confronting the viewer not only with recognizing these bodies, but also the desire and death they hold. Many demonized our desire as the cause of our deaths, rendering AIDS deaths and those in Orlando unable to be grieved by the public at large. Death does not see color, sexuality, or gender; death comes for us all. Fragility in the balloon creates a point at which it does break. The balloon ruptures, it breaks, it breaks up, and breaks apart. Grief, trauma, and loss seemingly break apart all in its wake, especially after the loss of a loved one via a breakup, breakdown, or

Jamee Crusan Figure 5: Film still, 103 Shots, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, NY, and Self-Portrait The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Figure 6: Linda Benglis Artforum Ad, Film Still 103 Shots, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, NY, and Self-Portrait The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Sightlines 2017 death. Through disorientation, one gains another, and the empathy created within 103 Shots allows people to become a witness to the testimony of queer love and loss, not implicated in its destruction and refusal. The balloon stands in for the multitude of things keeping lovers or families apart: belief systems, fear of loss, miscommunication, etc. To explain or understand the barrier, one must break apart and relinquish the most familiar parts of oneself to truly know someone. If one is to truly know the other, one must embrace the disorientation that comes with these things. 103 Shots and Embrace show the struggle that occurs when fighting against what normalized modes deem the right way to love or to come into being. To quote Butler: For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you” by trying to translate but finding that my language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human being comes into being again and again as that which we have yet to know.

Language must break up and yield, leaving one speechless, for there are no words to encompass trauma, loss, or grief. Perhaps it is empathy, perhaps it is exactly this, knowing there will be moments with unfulfilled hope and incomprehensible pain, and perhaps having someone show up as your companion and being allowed to know that you is what we gain. Tremendous importance lies in having someone show up as your companion, someone who is allowed to witness your exhaustion, your pain and disorientation. Pulse, Pride, and a family’s home are supposed to be safe places, but when you have nowhere you can truly feel safe and seen, this is exhausting. Returning to the story of when I first heard about the Orlando shooting: I needed my partner. But I also needed to be a partner. I needed to bear witness to her pain and disorientation. I needed to see her struggle to finally come face to face with the invisibility of my desire and love to my family. I failed to fully witness my partner, just as my mother failed to see us, see me. By making our way through disorientation, we find where and who we come to feel at home with, and in witnessing others’ pain and

Jamee Crusan trauma, we come to know our own. The dilemmas of love and desire don’t yield simple answers, for they create feelings of attachment. In these feelings of attachment and love, one realizes there is potentiality for great loss. The couples in 103 Shots stand within reach of one another, yet the distance between threatens to divide, the chance to embrace slips away. 103 Shots asks us to hold tight to one another in the face of fear, suffering, and great loss. The idea of embracing through the giant, unexpected “pop” is asking us not to let go but in fact squeeze harder. The realization that the lost ones are not coming back becomes the most disorienting, painful, and exhausting thing to navigate. How does one let go of someone when life without them is brutally exhausting? When unfulfilled hope is the only option one has, how can one ever really let go?

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Kristin Landowski PICTURING DIS-EASE: ADVERTISING BREAST CANCER IN PINK-RIBBON CULTURE AND THE NARRATIVE WORKS OF JO SPENCE

Kristin Landowski 1. BreastCancer.org, “U.S. Breast Cancer Statistics,” http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/understand_ bc/statistics.

One in eight women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime.1 This is the current statistic. In the 1970s it was one in nine, enough to fuel the beginning of a national health campaign to increase awareness of the disease and raise funds for research of a cure. Starting in 1985, the month of October has been dedicated to breast cancer awareness. Since then, thousands of corporations, supporting hundreds of nonprofits, have launched initiatives and fundraisers dedicated to the cause. To cite just one example, in 2007, Dyson and Target joined forces for a breast cancer fundraiser. Specifically, for every Dyson DC07 vacuum cleaner sold at a Target store, 10 percent of the purchase price was promised to be donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. But well-meaning customers were not made aware of the exact terms of their support, and the companies involved were not so altruistic as they hoped customers would believe, as I will soon show. In this paper I will explore how breast cancer is blatantly appropriated by corporations and even nonprofits, to the extent that a term has been introduced into the breast cancer lexicon—“pinkwashing”—to describe products sold by companies that leverage the pink ribbon symbol and the sympathies it calls up, and/or use their support of breast cancer charities as a marketing technique to increase their profits. Shockingly, many of these companies, at the same time that they wave the pink ribbon, manufacture products containing ingredients linked to the disease. And perhaps not so shockingly, many of them, in the very same ads in which they show their support of breast cancer, reinforce constructed, conventional, antifeminist standards of female beauty that are directly detrimental to the mental states of those afflicted. In opposition to all of this, I will examine how Jo Spence, an artist who lived with breast cancer from 1982 to 1992, just before the advent of the pink ribbon, rejected such patriarchal visions of female beauty in her staged self-portraits, which foreground suffering, grimness, and mortality. Spence’s work is anything but beautiful, but it is powerful, and it offers a powerful alternative to the enforced positivity of pink ribbon culture and its perpetuation of stereotypes regarding how the female body should look. Whereas the pink ribbon subverts the patient’s personal narrative, Spence’s work championed it—and perhaps offers us one possible path away from the pink ribbon’s cultural stranglehold.

Sightlines 2017 2. Although even in this, it is vague. Where exactly is the money going? PR campaigns for awareness? Clinical research? Both? continuing elsewhere in the culture. See Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performances in the Asias (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 14, 26, 122–125.

3. This term is shared in the LGBTQI community in a different context regarding political and public relations strategies. Specifically, in the United States and other countries, support of LGBTQI pride parades (for instance) diverts attention from human rights abuses

To return to the Dyson and Target ad, it is ostensibly about breast cancer awareness and fundraising for the cure,2 but I would argue, and probably without much opposition, that it is baldly designed to appeal to conventional ideals of how the female body should look and act. It specifically recalls bygone 1950s–60s gender roles as manifested in TV shows like Leave It to Beaver, featuring super-housewife June Cleaver. The underlying heteronormative idea is that the woman’s place is in the home, and that that home is clean and well kept for her husband, who we imagine coming home from work to sit in his chair of power and authority. The ad is geared toward a privileged white demographic, in which the fit white housewife—who is well-groomed from the waist down, at least, and is wearing high heels (not the best shoes for cleaning, but certainly pretty ones)—can afford a state-of-the-art machine to keep her home perfectly manicured. The pink ribbon is supposed to be a symbol of awareness, community, positivity, and hope. And in this Dyson and Target ad, it appears in an unusual place—on the white Maltese dog (also meticulously groomed). Today the ribbon can be applied to anything, as this ad makes clear. Also implied here is that bodies presented in the context of breast cancer awareness must be seemingly healthy; Dyson and Target are surely not presenting a diseased body, or if they do, it is one whose breasts are safely out of sight, out of mind. This woman is perky and presentable. The ad declares that the two corporations will donate up to one million dollars to the cause. But this amount, while impressive, is capped. Corporations contributing to breast cancer research and awareness do not notify the public when they have reached their goal. After the cap is met, they will resume their full usual profit margin. Breast Cancer Action, located in San Francisco, coined the term “pinkwashing” to refer to manifestations of the pink ribbon such as this.3 Within the breast cancer community, pinkwashing refers in part to controlling the perceived experience of breast cancer and obscuring the realities of the disease—for instance, suppressing images of those actually afflicted with it. Pinkwashing also occurs when corporations use the pink ribbon in a way that contributes to the rather antifeminist idea that a woman must be carefully packaged and made up, beautiful by

Kristin Landowski 4. “Avon Claims to Fight Breast Cancer, But Are Its Products Safe?” Ecouterre, http://www.ecouterre.com/ avon-claims-to-fight-breast-cancer-but-are-its-products-full-of-carcinogens/avon-breast-cancer-walk-2/. 5. Although given the statistics stated at the outset of this article, more women, not fewer, are diagnosed with breast cancer now than in the 1970s, and it is unclear whether we are closer to a cure than we were then.

conventional standards, in order to be accepted by those around her. In 2012, for example, Avon utilized the pink ribbon to advertise their breast cancer research organization Breast Cancer Crusade. Avon proved strategic in playing on the emotions of the ill, naming their shades of lipstick Courage, Hope, Faith, Passion, and Honesty. This particular deployment of the pink ribbon pulls on the emotions of the diseased woman, her friends, and her family members: If they buy the lipstick shade Hope, they will have hope. A 2011 issue of Environmental Justice cited Avon’s “Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer” campaign as one of the company’s most “poignant instances of pinkwashing,” because despite the fact that the lipsticks were raising funds for breast cancer research, these very lipsticks contained hormone-disrupting ingredients linked to breast cancer.4 Once you are looking for the pink ribbon, it is ubiquitous, but I question who it is actually benefiting. One beneficiary is surely the corporate sponsors who freely use it on their products, advertising their support of nonprofit organizations, which themselves wield much power in the breast cancer community. They are the ones with the power in marketing—not the people with cancer. Returning to the plush, cozy, authoritative chair in the Dyson/Target ad that declares “The Power of Pink,” it’s not too much of a stretch to connect this grand chair to the chairs in the corporate boardroom, and from there to the more abstract idea of the patriarchal power of administration. These are the powers that actually control and limit women, whether by knowingly selling them harmful chemicals for consumption, withholding the option to receive birth control, or wielding a Foucauldian power of knowledge of the disease and authority in diagnosis. Nonprofits like Susan G. Komen have done a lot for breast cancer research,5 but I question the transparency of their motives, as they have been shown on numerous occasions—as for instance with their acceptance of money from Baker Hughes, known for fracking—to care more about their bottom line than their ethics. In 1982, the artist Jo Spence was diagnosed with breast cancer. In ten short years it would kill her. Spence is not so well known today, but she was pioneering in the representation of breast cancer. Her staged self-portraits predate pink ribbon culture, which began in earnest in 1992, the year she died, and they offer an alternative

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Figure 1: Dyson and Target Ad, 2007.

Figure 2: Avon, Breast Cancer Crusade, 2012.

Kristin Landowski 6. Nancy G. Brinker, Promise Me: How a Sister’s Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer (New York: Crown Archetype, 2010), 147. 7. Jo Spence, Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression (New York: Routledge, 1995), 198. 8. Jorge Ribalta et al., Jo Spence: Beyond the Perfect Image, Photography, Subjectivity, Antagonism (Barcelona: Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2005), 73.

to the constructed positivity of pink ribbon ad campaigns. Her work was prescient in its exploration of illness and the challenge it poses to the oppressive stereotypes that insist that women must constantly be beautiful—stereotypes that pink ribbon culture relentlessly supports. However, despite the fact that the work offers a strong critique of today’s expectations surrounding breast cancer—expectations that the Susan G. Komen Foundation (the most powerful organization) has encouraged—it would be wrong to interpret the artist’s intentions in that way. Ironically, Spence was responding through her work to a very similar impetus that led to the creation of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. The same year as Spence’s diagnosis, 1982, a dying Susan asked her younger sister Nancy to promise that breast cancer would be much more widely talked about, and not kept in silence, “so women know and don’t die.”6 This was a time when the silence surrounding breast cancer was immense. Spence independently and bravely made an analogous decision to change her artistic trajectory—to veer through photography into new, “dangerous territory of seeing myself as Other, as Monstrous, as potentially powerful through a display of my vulnerability and my wounds.”7 Regarding the scarcity of images about breast cancer at the time she was working, she recounted in an interview with Ros Coward: “There are no images for what I want to say. I can’t go to anything which already exists and either deconstruct and then reconstruct it, neither can I create images out of my imagination, because they don’t exist in the culture.”8 Spence was indeed charting new territory with her exploration and representation of breast cancer through self-portraits. Her focus on the patient’s personal narrative is, to me, the work’s most compelling aspect because it foregrounds suffering. It dares to be ugly, to refuse narratives of female beauty that would impose upon the ill a conventional vision of female beauty as somehow a rescue and cure for female suffering. In the paragraphs remaining here, I will examine Spence’s 1990 series Narratives of Dis-ease. Through this photographic documentation, Spence made the invisible—her internal feelings regarding her cancer experience—visible. Illnesses become narratives very quickly. In her book published in 1978, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag—who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1975 and wrote this book about her experience—discussed how the metaphors associated with disease

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10. Jesse Green, “The Year of the Ribbon,” New York Times Magazine, May 3, 1992, http://www.nytimes. com/1992/05/03/style/the-year-of-the-ribbon.html. Also see https://www.worldaidsday.org/the-red-ribbon.

9. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1980), 64.

stigmatize the disease and the ill person. Her book laid important groundwork for further conversations about disease and its interpretations, one of which came in 1997, when the feminist theorist Jackie Stacey—herself diagnosed with cancer in 1991—wrote Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, which continued the discussion regarding how disease is perceived and experienced—indeed, how it is a cultural phenomenon. These explorations of breast cancer from Sontag, Stacey, and Spence all emerged out of the personal, and then expanded to involve educating others: other women living with the disease, their friends, their loved ones. Their work continues to remind us not only that we cannot remain silent, but—more importantly than ever today, amid pink ribbon culture’s relentless erasure of personal narratives—that sharing real stories is empowering. An important point that all three of them made is that the words associated with disease can be powerful for good or bad. Sontag discusses in her book, and Stacey expands upon in hers, labels such as “hero,” “monster,” “victim,” and “villain.” These, and the word “teratology” (deployed by Stacey in her book’s title) are useful frames for thinking through how Spence visualizes herself in photographs such as Exiled. According to the Oxford Dictionary, “teratology” is the scientific study of congenital abnormalities and abnormal functions. The prefix terato means relating to monsters or abnormal forms, and its origin is Greek, terat, meaning monster. The suffix ology is medical jargon that means a branch of knowledge. In one recollection of her experience with cancer, Stacey examines two pictures: one in which she looks well but actually had cancer, and another of her after treatments, when she appeared ill but had been deemed cured by her doctors. A seemingly healthy body can house a disease, and a diseased, mutilated body can be healthy; Stacey points out the strangeness in this, and in the idea that society thus fears the healthy body becoming grotesque, a monster. There is something perverse in the idea that a “healthy” body, post-cancer, could be one that pink ribbon culture cannot sell because it looks close to death. Spence’s work aligned quite closely with these modes of thinking; several photographs show her effectively equating herself to a monster. And whereas pink ribbon culture exerts a kind of tyranny of cheerfulness, Spence was addressing the tyranny of being the

Kristin Landowski object or victim. She created Narratives of Dis-ease in collaboration with the psychotherapist Dr. Tim Sheard. The title’s play on words manifests her dis-ease with the disease of breast cancer, and the loss of control that occurs during a diagnosis and thereafter. Through the pictures she reclaims the voice of power, illustrating just one of the multiple narratives to be considered. In Narratives of Dis-ease (Exiled), Spence stands nearly nude before the camera. Focus is centralized on her torso, which is exposed by her opening a green gown. Her face is partially covered with a white mask, with black paint chipping off, reminiscent of the mask of the Phantom of the Opera. Spence is clearly aligning herself in a lineage of monsters, of outsiders in society, as was the Phantom. She does not allow us to see her eyes, but we can infer from her gesture of opening her gown, exposing her body like a flasher to an unsuspecting crowd, that she is allowing a trauma to become visible. In case there is any room for doubt in the matter, Spence has written the word “MONSTER” in an arch above her breasts, in all-capital letters, with black marker. She is announcing unambiguously how society will perceive her now that cancer, and the surgery to remove it, has disfigured her body. In Narratives of Dis-ease (Expunged), Spence again shows us the area that was removed from vision in the Dyson/Target ad, making visible the trauma of breast cancer. In her 1980 book The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde relates how women have been programmed to view their bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to themselves. Everywhere, she says, we are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function.9 With her title Expunged, meaning to erase or remove completely something that is unwanted or unpleasant—which we easily understand to mean the cancer removed—and her display of a “booby” prize, Spence challenges this idea of being whole again, of being named a “survivor.” Spence again stands nude, and this time we only see half of her pale, aging torso. Her head is removed from the frame and we cannot see the expression on her face. Her body has been tanned by the sun; the tan echoes the marks that radiation can cause on the breast during treatment. Toward the center of the image, we encounter her misshapen breast. The nipple is pulled, creating a diagonal line leading to the darkness where the

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Figure 3: Jo Spence and Dr. Tim Sheard, Narratives of Dis-ease (Exiled), 1990. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

Figure 4: Jo Spence and Dr. Tim Sheard, Narratives of Dis-ease (Expunged), 1990. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

Kristin Landowski incision hides. The breasts in the “booby prize” are asymmetrical and cartoony. At first glance, they could be read as eyes, but the comparison to the deformed breast and the words make us realize that this is a prize for the diseased. The colors of the ribbon call to mind the red AIDS awareness ribbon, and the pink one for breast cancer awareness, but Expunged was created in 1990, well before the advent of all that, and thus we need to look elsewhere for the artist’s intended meaning.10 This is a ribbon readily found in adult novelty stores, awarding the prize for the best breasts, yet the artist is using it for the exact opposite purpose—to celebrate (however ironically) the individual removed from society, the one that others might wish to be a phantom. She is bodily here, insistently present. Although it predates the explosion of pink ribbon culture, I argue that Jo Spence’s work offers a valuable example of a path forward out of the various tyrannies and constraints of that culture. Whereas the pink ribbon campaigns of companies such as Avon injuriously insist that women must always be happy in the face of their own mortality, Spence asserts otherwise. Whereas Dyson and Target insist that a woman must be tidy and perky, relentlessly dedicated to maintaining patriarchal power structures, Spence asserts otherwise. I have seen firsthand through my own mother’s experience with breast cancer how the pink ribbon’s tyranny of cheerfulness can be hurtful and condescending, even infantilizing to the person living with cancer. And the easy labels of pink ribbon culture—hero, victim, survivor, and so on—leave us with what Jackie Stacey and others criticize as an overly simplistic narrative that leaves behind more personal stories. While pink ribbon culture cultivates a vocabulary of positivity, it denies the alternative—the anger and traumas of the disease. Jo Spence asserts another way.

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Lindsay Tunkl TRAGIC OPTIMISM: ANGST, AFFECT, AND AFFIRMATION IN THE WORKS OF DARIO ROBLETO AND FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES

Lindsay Tunkl 1. Tonight I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 2099, A library, Whiteout, ink. Liner Notes: “In an effort to buy us all a little more time, on January 26th, 1996, research was begun in the University library, searching for all references to the end of the world. The dates were then whited-out, and Armageddon was delayed by writing in an additional 100 years to these predictions; for example 1999 became 2099. The piece will continue indefinitely or until I am satisfied all references have been changed.” Dimensions variable, 1996 – Present. 2. Dario Robleto, interview with author, December 2016.

In 1996, Dario Robleto entered his university library, and began searching through books for references to the end of the world. He systematically altered, with white-out and pen, all the dates referencing Armageddon by adding one hundred years. In the text that represents the artwork, Robleto writes that this project will continue indefinitely until he is satisfied all references have been changed and that the action was taken “in an effort to buy us all a little more time.”1 He titled the work Tonight I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 2099, a riff off of Prince’s top hit and Y2K anthem 1999. Robleto does not tell us the specifics of how he found the books, how many he altered, or if the project actually continues to this day—allowing the work to exist somewhere between the concrete and the speculative. On the surface, this work reads as an attempt to save the world, but with a deeper analysis it is clear that it isn’t a refusal of the end. Rather, it is a surrender coupled with a tender gesture that intently accepts that someday the world is going to end, but also offers a consolation—a little more time. Robleto is a self-identified “tragic-optimist” and “materialist poet”2 whose massive archive of work ranges in subject matter from pop music to dinosaur extinction, civil war to teenage heartbreak. Drawing from a collective history and a collective material archive, Robleto deploys objects like meteorite fragments, vinyl records from his mother’s collection, woolly mammoth bone marrow, 1900s antiques and artifacts, and human bones recovered from battlefields across America. Most importantly, Robleto destroys many of these rare and sought-after objects so he can convert them into another form and include them in his sculptures. While the subjects and materials are vast and varied, each piece resonates deeply with a few pertinent concerns: love, loss, longing, and art as a means to heal from despair. Within Robleto’s practice love doesn’t just refer to romantic love, it extends much farther, to the love we feel for our fellows, for the world, for art. For songs that become anthems, for idols who place us in the role of unrelenting fans, and for moments both banal and profound that suspend us in awe. In an interview about his work, Robleto shared the questions his practice aspires to answer: “Can art give someone the thing they are missing? Can art complete something that is unfinished? Can art right a wrong? Can art heal past wounds?”3 Looking at the

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4. Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2002), 208.

The first chord of Tristan and Isolde, known simply as “the Tristan chord,” remains the most famous single chord in the history of music. It contains within itself not one but two dissonances, thus creating within the listener a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution-yet-not-resolved.4

3. Elizabeth Dunbar, Alloy of Love: Dario Robleto (Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2008), 213.

long trajectory and evolution of Robleto’s work, it would seem that he believes art can do these things, that art can embrace what is tragic and transform it into something more. Because tragedy is a subjective experience, what we consider to be tragic can vary between remarkable bounds. There is no limit as to what might emerge as a tragedy. The end of the world is tragic, but so is teenage heartbreak—Romeo and Juliet taught us that. When tragedy occurs, grief follows, and humans have the common propensity to question the meaning and purpose of such occurrences. The despair that arises when one cannot make meaning of such events, when there is no meaning to justify profound suffering—this is what Friedrich Nietzsche defined as nihilism and what he spent his career as a philosopher trying to understand. Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872. The book is a philosophical consideration of art and can be characterized as a love letter to his contemporary, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche championed Wagner’s music, and wrote of it as a composition of aesthetics that could succeed in affirming life’s value in the face of nihilist despair by performing a synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics—a doubling of oppositional, yet complementary, affects such as tragedy and beauty or desire and fear. The concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian originate from Greek mythology’s Apollo and Dionysus, sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of rationality, logic, and reason; Dionysus is the god of impracticality, irrationality, and chaos. While their traits are oppositional, the Greeks did not perceive them as opposing forces. They were embraced as intertwined and harmonious. Nietzsche further illuminates the nuances within the Apollonian and Dionysian while focusing much of his writing on the opera Tristan and Isolde, which has since been written about extensively. Contemporary Philosopher Bryan Magee writes:

Lindsay Tunkl 5. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ; and the Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. (New York: Vintage, 1967), 130. The Birth of Tragedy first published in 1872.

What Magee is emphasizing here is how the chords and progressions of this music have been crafted to push and pull at the viewer, creating moments of tension and resolution, and a constant oscillation between the two. This oscillation is synonymous with Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian and is from where I extend my analysis. I will examine the works of Robleto and his artistic influence Félix González-Torres within this frame to illustrate how art and its practice can in fact ease the ache of certain meaninglessness. One can see the Apollonian and Dionysian synthesis present in Robleto’s Tonight I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 2099. The work was not shown publicly until 2008, and until then was solely intended for those who might unexpectedly come upon these subtle interventions—for the student researching global warming, for the teacher preparing a lecture on religion, for the librarian returning books to the stacks. In an intimate moment with the trace of another’s hand in the midst of a public place of research there is a tension that is sparked by the simple, anonymous gesture that simultaneously eludes and gives. The work is funny, but remains earnest. It is realistically ineffectual, but unimaginably time-consuming. It references pop culture while engaging humanity’s very real fear of the end. It is vandalism, but it’s also a remedy. It is tragic and futile and completely satisfying. What Magee and Nietzsche are speaking to in the music of Tristan and Isolde, without naming it, and what I am speaking to in Robleto’s work, is affect: the gathering of sensation, emotion, and feeling, both physical and otherwise, and the movements in and around, through, and beyond these states, instigated by events, objects, and encounters.5 Nietzsche believed in art’s ability to harness these affects to create a profound and curative experience for the viewer. He writes: Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence. He is nauseated. Here when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.6

Sightlines 2017 7. Dario Robleto, “When You Cry I Only Love You More,” ArtLies (2001). Figure 2: Félix González-Torres, Untitled (USA Today), 1990.

Figure 1: Dario Robleto, I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away, 1997. Liner Notes: “Candy wrappers, thread. Paper airplanes constructed out of candy wrappers from Félix González-Torres’s piece Untitled (USA Today).”

For Nietzsche it was Wagner’s operas that succeeded in this task. For me, it is Robleto. For Robleto, it is Félix González-Torres. In 2001, Robleto wrote an essay about González-Torres that could be characterized as a love letter, titled “When You Cry I Only Love You More.” Robleto writes, “It amazes me that his [Félix González-Torres] work can so amorphously adapt to any pain or joy that enters my life. I don’t want to know a world without it. If art can be anything anymore, then it must be this.”7 In these few sentences, the themes that Nietzsche expresses as being so important in art’s purpose are highlighted. As a gay man making work about his loves and losses in the 1990s, citing the AIDS crisis as an incomprehensible reality, González-Torres used his great disappointment in the world around him to operate within a strategic framework of harmonious opposition. González-Torres made prolific, often minimalist artworks reflecting on various subjects such as capitalism, loss, violence, and love. Robleto has made artwork out of the artifacts of González-Torres’s takeaway works, illuminating a similar dynamic to that of Nietzsche and Wagner. Robleto’s 1997 work I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away (fig. 1) is made of candy wrappers from González-Torres’s sculptural work Untitled (USA Today). Robleto folded the candy wrappers into airplanes and hung them from the ceiling with white thread, emulating fighter jets caught mid-flight. From afar, tiny metallic specks of red, blue, and silver collect in a suspended cloud. Their colors signify the American dream, airshows, and sunny days at the carnival. González-Torres’s Untitled (USA Today ) (fig. 2), the work from which Robleto retrieved the candy wrappers for his airplanes, manifests as a large pile of candy wrapped in metallic red, blue, and silver cellophane and spilled into the corner of a room. Again, the colors signify things closely linked to the American dream and the carnival, but in this configuration—candy wrappers wrapping candy—the colors also hint at Memorial Day contests, half-off sales, and the American adage, “Go big or go home.” Weighing 300 pounds at its initial installation and again with every replenishment, the pile shrinks because viewers are invited to take as much candy as they like, devour it, and throw away the wrappers (or keep them and make art with them). Viewers consume the candy, the art, and the ideas, and they engage in the

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Perhaps between public and private, between personal and social, between fear of loss and the joy of loving, of growing, changing, of always becoming more, of losing oneself slowly and then being replenished all over again from scratch. I need the viewer, I need the public interaction. Without the public these works are nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility, to become part of my work, to join in.8

By taking the candy wrappers from González-Torres’s work, saving them, and turning them into something new, Robleto replies to González-Torres’s ask with a clear and concise, “Yes, I will help, I will take responsibility, I will become a part of this work.” This commitment includes not only the artwork itself, but the work of affirming life’s value in the midst of great and incomprehensible anguish. Robleto takes the candy wrappers and elevates them to a new height, communicating that the loss, love, and lessons of grief will not be wasted. They will mean something still, long after the candy has dissolved on the tongue. In taking a closer look at the paper airplanes in Robleto’s piece, one can see that some of these airplanes have been made from cut and reshaped pieces of foil. Some have been given wings

8. Nancy Spector and Félix González-Torres. Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), 28.

activities of everyday capital. Three hundred pounds is the combined weight of González-Torres and his lover Ross Laycock, measured soon before Laycock died of AIDS-related causes. Not much context is given, but if the viewer is thoughtful, they might consider how light 300 pounds is for two men—though it makes sense if one of them is dying. In the moment, as a sugary communion of the dead is taken and taste buds are emboldened with sweetness, the body of someone’s lover dissolves. The opposition of tactile enjoyment and metaphorical loss confront each other, and the affective qualities of the Apollonian and Dionysian synthesis are engaged. As viewers, we participate in love, whether we intend to or not, and we participate in the disappearing of a lover as well. González-Torres’s gesture compels us to ask what loss tastes like, what it smells like. It asks, “How heavy is love?” It compels us to reckon with affect—with our senses and emotions in a critical way. González-Torres writes about his works and the public’s interaction:

Lindsay Tunkl that have been adhered with glue, creating a union between two distinct pieces. This gesture insists that the artifacts of loss can be pulled apart and recuperated by art. They are lifted up in monument as emblems for what Gonzalez-Torres lived and died through, reminding us that while we will never learn to defy death, we have learned to defy gravity. In this, planes become metaphors for the profound events that humankind has navigated through, for the histories of impossibilities becoming possible: the first airplane flight, the first space exploration, setting foot on the moon. We might also be reminded of the moments in which humanity has failed itself: the Challenger disaster, the 9/11 attacks, the fact that airplanes are used to drop bombs. The same vessel that becomes an emblem of hope becomes an emblem of hopelessness, creating a space where tragic optimism resides. I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away also points to the power we have as subjective individuals to affect and be affected. As we move around the almost weightless hanging airplanes, they drift and swing and sway. Our presence animates them and allows them to live out their potentiality. The closer we get, the more the airplanes are jostled alive. The work reaches poignant flight as we approach, or as a breeze runs through the space. The work’s existence relies on other forces for completion. Its existence at all would not be possible without the life of another, foregrounding that we rely on each other for survival, and that those we rely on will be the sources of both our greatest joys and our greatest disappointments. These works ask the viewer to acknowledge that while the world is a tragic place, we can still have joy, and laughter, and we can still be together, feeling awe as we see an airplane fly loop-deloops over our heads. Like the moment a crowd of strangers comes together when moved by a single chord. It’s not that we need these representations to know these tragedies exist. It’s that art as a form has the power to demand more than despair in the face of certain meaninglessness. These dualities will always be present, and when they can be present in one single moment—an embrace of everything—despair is no longer despair as we know it, but despair as we need it, a moment of nourishment.

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2. Imaginary Territories

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Gilda Posada LOW N’ SLOW: THE EVOLUTION INTO XICANX

Gilda Posada 1. The spelling of the term “Chicano” will change throughout this article. When referring to the decade of 1960s the spelling “Chicano” will apply. “Chicanx”/ Xicanx is used in this article when talking about the current community that has decolonized the term to be inclusive of gender-fluid, gender non-conforming, queer and trans folks. 2. Dylan T. Miner, Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 3. 3. Ibid. 4. Jorge Esteban Muños. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 22.

Low-riding has been a form of social practice in the Chicanx community since before the Chicano movement.1 I am interested in the representation found in low-rider aesthetics as incorporated in automobiles. Cars render aesthetics mobile and make low-rider identity, pride, and culture accessible to multiple sectors of Chicanx communities across Aztlán. However, this social practice has not always been welcoming to all due to the focus on masculinity and heteronormative ideologies. This article focuses on the low-rider aesthetics found in the Por Vida digital billboard mural at Galería de la Raza, and the practices enacted by local Bay Area low-riders and the gallery staff, myself included. In June 2015, I invited Maricón Collective to create a digital billboard mural through my position as Galería de la Raza’s Studio 24 fellow. Manuel Paul of Maricón Collective created Por Vida, which put forward a queer representation of low-rider culture and centered trans lives. In investigating Por Vida, and the four occurrences of vandalism of said mural, I intend to bring forward queer low-rider aesthetics and reshift the discourse of what it means to be part of the Xicanx community. I will do this through the queering of Dylan Miner’s concept of “low-riding through Aztlán.” In his book Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island, Miner describes Aztlán as neither primordially given nor fixed, and as constantly changing; it is a space that serves as utopic for Xicanos in its detribalized, indigenous notion of spatiality.2 Miner presents the idea of low-riding as an intentional “slowness” that “seamlessly repositions us between various temporalities.” Low-riding through Aztlán becomes a way to investigate Aztlán through engaging precolonial indigeneities alongside colonial, modern, and contemporary Xicano responses to colonization.”3 I am proposing to queer this concept of “low-riding through Aztlán” and investigate it through a lens of fluidity that allows for intersectional experiences to come forward when considering Xicanos. While the term queer on its own has been critiqued for having the same problems as white normativity, being that it is as much a site of antagonism as is heteronormativity, a “queer lowriding through Azltán” takes into consideration multiple antagonisms that index issues of class, gender, race, sexuality, and decoloniality.4 I am proposing that “queer lowriding

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6. Tanisha Love Ramirez and Zeba Blay, “Why People Are Using The Term ‘Latinx’,” The Huffington Post, last updated April 7, 2017, accessed April 17, 2017, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-people-are-using-the-term-latinx_us_57753328e4b0cc0fa136a159. 7. Manuel Paul. Email exchange with author, May 24, 2015.

5. Susy J. Zepeda, “Queer Xicana Indígena Cultural Production: Remembering Through Oral and Visual Storytelling,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 3, no. 1 (2014), 121.

through Aztlán” brings forward women of color or queers of color, to create a disruption or queering of colonial legacies that impose norms of patriarchy, heteronormativity, and machismo, while actively creating space for decolonized Aztlán.5 This queering would then investigate the limitations, biases, and boundaries that still exist in the current state of the Xicano community. As it stands, there has been a push toward breaking the binary that exists in the term “Xican@.” While the term has allowed many to claim ownership of this subjectivity, it still brings into question the replication of gender binaries and leaves out folks who are gender-fluid, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, or trans.6 For this reason, the decolonization of the term “Xican@” has advanced into “Xicanx.” A queer “low-riding through Aztlán” would thus embrace Xicanx. Xicanx is defined as always in formation and in process toward decolonization and deconstructing oppressive structures/hxstories, an act that builds on the reflections, desires, visions, and critiques of previous generations. Through this lens, I propose that Maricón Collective’s Por Vida billboard and the steps taken by Galería de la Raza upon its vandalism opened a decolonization process in the Xicanx/Latinx community in the Mission and online, one that put Xicanx identity into practice. Maricón Collective was a queer Chican@/Latin@ DJ and artist collective working to preserve East Los Angeles queer history by bringing together queer people of color (QPOC) and allies through art, music, and celebration. Maricón was founded in 2014 by Rudy Bleu, Carlos Morales, Manuel Paul, and Michael Rodriguez. They shared an appreciation for traditional Chicano art forms and a dissatisfaction with the homogeneity of heterosexual machismo in Latino culture. In reclaiming the term “maricón,” a crude word for a gay man used by cis men and women to insult gay men or to question the masculinity of straight men, the group sought to redefine the term to empower QPOC. Maricón was best known for DJ events and the images used to promote their events. Paul’s role was as the lead visual artist. Most figures portrayed in Paul’s work represent a lifestyle that Maricón Collective was inserting into queerness (fig. 1). In a Low N’ Slow process, the queering of Aztlán began with Paul’s Por Vida, “created to celebrate Transgender life, especially in the Latino community.”7 The mural demonstrates a queer

Gilda Posada 8. Ben Chappell, Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars (Austin: University of Texas Press. 2013), 79. 9. See John Leaños and Artemio Rodríguez’s Muerto Rider, and Gilbert “Magu” Lujan’s low-riders.

Chicana/o low-rider aesthetic and falls in line with what Ben Chappell calls “a means of performing masculinity” normally present in low-rider car paint jobs.8 In an image that resembles low-rider artwork, Paul centers a figure as the object of the gaze, for consumption and to take into the imaginary. Paul is not in the business of replicating sexualized women on the hood of a low-rider. Instead, he presents a transgender vato for consumption. Aesthetic choices like the roses create a border around the vato, allowing him to be the focus of viewers. This is further emphasized by the yellow airbrush quality behind the figure and the roses that strategically and geometrically reflect each other as they are placed along the body. A scroll under the central figure is reminiscent of the way low-riders create messages to honor their subjects. Often low-riders feature text to amplify their message; here Paul writes “Por Vida,” a term often used by Chican@s to signal dedication to a lifestyle—in this case both low-riding and being queer and trans. The lines that radiate outward in all directions from the transgender vato also help in centralizing and framing him as the main image. These lines allude to the rays that stream outward in traditional images of La Virgen, which is a frequently replicated visual in low-rider art.9 In this sense, the rays coming from the trans vato automatically elevate them into a level of praise and sacredness. The mural is composed of three central images that make for a triptych. A scroll behind all of the figures fills the entire image area. Additionally, the space is filled with roses, chains, and an underlay of color with airbrush effects. In the center of the billboard is the transgender vato, with a yellow backdrop; they are shirtless, have a teardrop tattoo on their left eye, and wear a hairnet. Paul depicts stereotypes associated with a vato, but on a closer look, one can see that under the figure’s chest, those are not rose thorns but instead surgery scars emblematic of a trans figure. This central vato is then supported by two opposing images. On the left of the mural are two vatos. The vatos have goatees and ribbed white tanks. One is resting his head on the back of the other, and beams radiate from the right side of the men, signifying a motion of embrace. On the right side of the work, there are two women placed on top of a pink airbrushed background. The two women have pompadour hairstyles, dark lipstick, and sharp eyebrows, and are gazing into each other’s eyes while touching the other’s face with their hands.

Sightlines 2017 10. Laura Waxmann. “Police and Community Address Spike in SF Mission Gang Violence,” Mission Local (October 2016). 11. Rivera and author’s visit to SFPD office at Valencia and 17 St. on June 23, 2015.

12. Kevin L. Jones, “Mission District Gallery’s Queer Cholo Mural Defaced Again,” KQED Arts, June 22, 2015. The article states that Paul and other Q-Sides artists had reportedly received homophobic comments and even threats of bodily harm through social media.

Once again beams radiate from where the women are embracing one another, but stemming from the parts where their bodies touch. The chains frame the mural, creating a border, and the only points where they do not meet are in several places around the transgender vato, which can be read as a breaking of chains. The flowers on the bottom left and right of the mural are not yet in bloom, but the flowers that surround the trans person have come into fruition. The blue color behind the vatos, the pink behind the women, and the yellow behind the trans person are used to purposely address gender binaries and to pay tribute to previous generations, who have informed the change in a decolonial identity formation: Xicanx (figs. 2–4). After three days on display, the mural was defaced with blue and red spray paint. The color of the spray paint defacing the mural is relevant because blue and red are the colors affiliated with gangs. The Mission District and Bernal Heights are home to the largest Latina/o populations in San Francisco and both neighborhoods have seen a spike in gang violence over the last couple of years, especially dealing with cases of Latina/o youth.10 The Mission District is home to many and the Bayview is home to their opposing rivals, Sureños. Thus, the message that was sent was that local gangs set aside their differences to stand in solidarity against this mural. Ironically, the center image of the trans vato was left untouched, signifying that the community felt a connection with the center vato. That is, until the following day, when El Tecolote published an article disclosing that the center image was a transgender person. On the same night the article was published, the trans vato was tagged, an indication that the community no longer felt represented by him. These actions clearly reflect a colonial mode reliant on distinguishing severe gender formations that enforce a heteronormativity. The mural was reinstalled the following week and defaced the same night with black spray paint. This time, the defacement covered all figures and also made sure to cover the words “Por Vida.” Galería Executive Director Ani Rivera reported the incident to the San Francisco Police Department, but they said that because there were no direct threats made to individuals in the space, or graffiti that stated direct hate speech toward a group of people, they

Gilda Posada could not label the vandalism a hate crime incident.11 Around this time, social media conversations surfaced that called the mural an appropriation of low-rider culture. Media outlets were labeling it a “Gay Cholo” mural, which complicated the situation as it was describing protesters as angry, stereotypical gang members. Simultaneously, individuals on social media were going onto Maricón Collective’s Instagram account, finding users on their page, and threatening them directly.12 SFPD suggested that these messages and threats be reported to Instagram directly, as it fell outside of their jurisdiction. It is important to note that because these communities were being threatened, the primary instinct was to go to the police to seek protection. As a queer low-riding of Aztlán allows us to see, police are part of a larger structure of oppression that has affected communities of color for generations, but that consciousness would come later. So what did this all mean for a queer Aztlán? As queer Xicanx were targeted, many showed support by donating funds for a mural replacement and installation of cameras. The mural was to be reinstalled for a fourth time, this time on a new vinyl form, which would allow graffiti removal and a faster installation. The mural installation was followed by a community vigil condemning the vandalism, and with Galería installing cameras to discourage vandalism from recurring. Once more, self-defense tactics were linked to colonial modes of surveillance and militarism, but in the eyes of many, this would protect the visual manifestation of a queer Aztlán and trans and queer lives. Still, that did not stop vandalism and hate from occurring on social media and in person (fig. 5). Community members fell into agreement that the mural should come down. The majority who rallied against the mural did so because it showcased LGBTQIA individuals and pushed “the gay agenda.” Comments suggested that it belonged in the Castro, not the Mission, indicating that there was a place for queer folks in SF, just not in the Mission. Some claimed that Cesar Chavez and other Chicano figures would have stood against the mural—invoking machistas to stand against homosexual and trans peoples (fig. 6). One summer night, two individuals took to Bryant Street and set the mural on fire. SFPD responded to the scene, took the footage from the cameras, and left a police officer on duty for an entire week. During this same time, local youths who were against

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Figure 1: Manuel Paul, Por Vida, 2015; digital billboard.

Gilda Posada Figure 2: Manuel Paul, Por Vida 2015; digital billboard (First Defacement, June 16, 2015).

Figure 3: Manuel Paul, Por Vida; digital billboard (Second Defacement, June 17, 2015).

Figure 4: Manuel Paul, Por Vida 2015; digital billboard (Third Defacement, June 20, 2015).

Sightlines 2017 13. CALLES PROGRAM: Community-Based Street Intervention Program, HOMEY, accessed April 17, 2017, http://www.homey-sf.org/calles-streets.html. 15. “Community Forum and Conversation” at Galería de la Raza.

14. If any youth were taken in for breaking the gang injunction, they would be arrested by undercover police and it would go on their record. Three write-ups equaled a trip to juvenile detention, and if the youth was on parole, they would automatically go back into the system on the first strike.

the mural were coming to the gallery and standing outside of it in protest of the mural being reinstalled once again. This occurred for about two weeks, during which time SFPD declared the incident a double felony—arson and hate crime. Though the Galería decided not to, SFPD released video footage of two Latino men setting the mural on fire. As soon as the footage was released, news outlets began pursuing the men responsible through their channels. After the manhunt, SFPD started implementing gang injunctions targeting the youth who were standing across the streets protesting the mural. The police frequented the Muni stop and would arrest four to five youth on a daily basis. Galería staff had to make a decision as to whether to intervene. These individuals might be among those who set the mural on fire, or in support of that, and may have made threats to LGBTQIA individuals. Yet these folks also formed part of the Chicana/o community that Galería aimed to engage and support. Galería then made the choice of not pressing charges for the individuals who set the mural on fire. Upon staff consensus, it became clear that the solution was not to keep engaging police, as police represent an aspect of the prison–industrial complex that has already damaged many families in our communities. It was here that Galería took the step towards Xicanx and decolonization, as it embraced engaging in a neverending process of consciousness that would better serve its communities. In this awareness, Galería reached out to local organizations that engage in restorative justice practices, such as HOMEY, which works directly with youth on the street to offer interventions and alternatives to violence and involvement with the juvenile justice system.13 Galería received training on what to do if cops showed up to arrest the youth. To facilitate Xicanx practice, Galería staff were aware that they had to keep pushing away colonial and oppressive structures that would in the long term affect the records of the youth. That is why Galería began opening its doors to the youth protesters to sit and protest inside the gallery space.14 In support of Galería’s approach, other Bay Area groups that engage in decolonial and healing practices provided space for healing circles and limpias, ultimately resulting in a community forum at Mission City College, where all parties were invited to join

Gilda Posada Figure 5: Instagram comments, screenshot, 2015.

Figure 6: El Tecolote, Por Vida; digital billboard (Fourth Defacement, Arson June 29, 2015)

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Figure 7: SFPD Por Vida Mural Arson Video Release, July 18, 2015.

Figure 8: Youth protesters and SFPD undercover police; Photo by Author, July 23, 2015.

Gilda Posada 16. Yolanda Lopez statement at Mission City College Community Forum, July 25, 2015. 17. “Community Forum and Conversation” at Galería de la Raza. 18. Elisabetta Silvestro, “Galería Forum Well Attended But Not by Mural’s Opponents,” El Tecolote, last updated July 31, 2015, accessed April 17, 2017, http://eltecolote.org/content/ en/news/galeria-forum-well-attended-but-not-by-murals-opponents/.

the conversation. The forum consisted of two panels that were followed by community conversation mediated using a restorative justice approach by a third party.15 Galería reached out to community elders, artists, scholars, and activists to speak on the panels and facilitate a community conversation. Yolanda Lopez, a Xicana elder present at the event, took a stance in front of everyone and told Paul that “The mural created an opening” and that he “became the spear that finally pierced a hole to what the Chicana/o movement was fighting for all those years and what we thought had long been closed.”16 Lopez indicated that Paul’s mural had created a transformation and allowed for the boundaries of the subjectivity of the term “Xican@” to continue to be expanded in the transformation into Xicanx. With “Xicanx,” Galería put out a statement that it “will continue to outreach to both supporters and opponents of the mural, with the goal to have as many perspectives on the issue,” acknowledging that our experiences are fluid.17 Although no one from the opposing viewpoints showed up to the community forum, the mural became a space where praxis occurred, and ultimately that is the stage in which Xicanx is advocating to operate in.18 Xicanx is not an end, it is rather a way of life, a constant negotiation with oneself to open up and to keep making ways for inclusions, instead of marginalizing and excluding others, as we have done for generations because of colonization. If we are to low-ride our way through Aztlán, we have to be aware that although we carry roots to this land, it belongs to no singular person or experience. In this sense, a low-rider queering of Aztlán allows for a collective ownership and accountability of us all. As Juan Fuentes said, “We are a community por vida,” and we have to reach a place where we can transform together, not against each other.

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Angela Berry W(H)ETTING THE WORD: RONI HORN NOTES THE VIEW IN STILL WATER (THE RIVER THAMES, FOR EXAMPLE)

Angela Berry 1. Most Heraclitus scholars agree on the following translation: “On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow. ”Daniel W. Graham, “Heraclitus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 08, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/.

The dangerous, unpredictable, and varying conditions of a river require one to rest alert. Like the sharpening of a knife against a whetstone, looking at river water sharpens one’s attention to the view. Critical information rests in minute details. How tight is the earth packed along the bank’s edge? What is the distance between rocky points puncturing the surface? How wet is the stone? Is it a stick or a snake? How fast is the current? Where is the bottom? From a young age I learned a set of rules particular to rivers that protected me from their wildness: no touching; supervision required; no standing near the water’s edge. Predictably, the rules of engagement amplified the allure, arousing desire for touch, for entrance, and for intimacy. The erratic behavior of river water stimulates desire. Rivers are dangerous. Rivers are opaque. Rivers are deceptive. Their reflections mask rocks, snakes, fish, bodies and trash; you never know what you’re looking at or into when you look at river water. Rivers are playful. What they reveal or obstruct is hypnotic; participating in the river’s game of hide-and-seek demands your full attention. The rivers I’ve encountered, despite how much they vary, have two main things in common. They are never the same. They always confound expectation. Regardless of where I am, when I stand in front of a river, two questions surface. What is in the water, and where does it come from? When you consider these two variables, you must consider multitudes—content(s), source(s). Every conclusion one could make about a river begins another. Therefore, thinking about any water inside of a river produces new thoughts and, as a result, new knowledge. The way rivers act on the mind has a history of producing metaphor. For example, Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. ca. 500 BCE) used the metaphor of river water’s variability to define flux as a law of the universe. From a single volume of Heraclitus’s translated fragments arose the well-used saying, “You can’t step into the same river twice.”1 Another example can be found in the work of contemporary American artist Roni Horn (b. New York, 1955). Throughout a career of over three decades, Horn has investigated the confluence of geology, identity, and place through the subject matter of water, focusing significantly on London’s major urban river, the Thames. In this work, Horn images the

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3. Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, New Mexico: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), plate 8, footnote 27. 4. Roni Horn, Another Water (The River Thames, for Example) (Göttingen: Stiedl, 2011), footnote 104.

2. “Tideway,” Wikipedia, accessed January 22, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tideway.

raging surface of the Thames tideway, which produces the most movement and variation in the water’s appearance, from an aerial perspective.2 Horn paradoxically captures the moving water as a motionless surface. Horn likens water to a “master verb: an act of perpetual relation.”3 In this article, I consider how Horn reconstructs the landscape view as a dynamic, active subject rather than as a passive object, through her verbing of the River Thames. By irregularly deploying the exacting systems of photography, language, and perspective, I argue that Horn has converted these tools of reason (logos) to river logic. As a result, landscape does not become a symbolic form; it remains a stage where projection yields to the indeterminacy of an unquantifiable subject. Horn was commissioned by Minetta Brook in New York and the Public Art Development Trust (PADT) in London to complete a project on the Thames between 1998 and 2000. During this period of production, Horn created three bodies of work. In this article, I focus on Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), which consists of a suite of fifteen footnoted, offset photolithographs (fig. 1). The paratextual footnote system in Still Water rests in the photolithograph’s bottom white margins. The footnotes were written and compiled by Horn. Each photolithograph measures 30½ by 41½ inches. The superscript numbers appended to the notations at the foot of the plate are matched to digits that are placed intermittently on the paper’s surface over the river. (fig. 2) Still Water is the only iteration of Horn’s work on the Thames produced for a museum exhibition. (fig. 3) Uniquely featured in Still Water are the rogue superscript digits overlaying the surface of the Thames. These aquatic numbers offer a redress to the historical construction of linear perspective in the “landscape” genre of Western art, which imaged nature as a stage for political and religious narratives. Canonical works like Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (1863) depict landscape as an unyielding backdrop to the ideology expressed by the figures in the foreground (fig. 4). Still Water omits a horizon line, and there is no vanishing point. Instead, the foreground has enfolded the background. Horn’s removal of recessed space formally deconstructs distance. This strategic maneuver challenges one of the most powerful inferences of perspective in the history of Western art:

Angela Berry

Figure 1: Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames, For Example) (Plate 9), 1999 (TATE Modern. American Fund for the Tate Gallery), accessed January 11, 2017, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/horn-no-title-p13071.

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Figure 2: Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (Plate Detail), 1999, in Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, NM: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), Plate 15.

Figure 3: Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), installation view, in Lynne Cooke, Thierry de Duve, Roni Horn, and Louise Neri, Roni Horn (London: Phaidon Press, 2001).

5. Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, New Mexico: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), plate 4,footnote 8. 6. Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, New Mexico: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), plate no. 2, footnote 31. 7. Ibid. 8 . Ibid. 9. Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, New Mexico: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), plate 12, footnote 6.

the God’s-eye view. Without linear perspective, the viewer cannot master the view. Instead, in Still Water, Horn has created a reciprocal coordinate system, empowering every point with contradictory content. Unable to express ideals, they elevate difference. Still Water offers a “DIY” map, permitting the viewer to create value and meaning through the associative logic of still (or dry) water. The adjective “wet” describes something covered by water or saturated with liquid. In this definition, when something becomes wet, it shows a character of yielding. Yielding could be interpreted to mean a lack of forcefulness, submissiveness, or even weakness. In this interpretation, to become fluid is the dilution of strength. Horn states that, “‘Wet’ always seemed to be one of the more appropriate words to apply to water. But when I look at water ‘wet’ is rarely the adjective that comes to mind.”4 I apply the adjective of whetting to Still Water as a metaphor for Horn’s verbing of landscape. To whet is to sharpen, an act of stimulation that heightens awareness. I propose that Horn’s yielding is a strategic strengthening—a whetting. As you read Horn’s view, the water cites Horn and you. In return, the viewer’s sight is sharpened, whetted against an alternative regime of visual, linguistic, and spatial perspective. Water is indifferent to monolithic projections of power. As Horn says, “Water brings the distance near.”5 Horn’s erudition of image, language, and perspective inverts the ratio, equalizing the scale of image to the scope of the text. Most significantly, Horn’s survey inverts the top-down hierarchy of knowledge production, which is typically wielded by experts and bestowed upon the layman. Further, in Horn’s mutated aberration of surveying, the human perspective is merely a footnote. Horn sights water; water cites Horn. Horn cites viewer; viewer sights Horn and water. Although, as Horn points out, “The Thames is us!”6 Horn’s work arrives through fugitive structures contained by the material conditions of unbridled, yet tempered, forms. By operationalizing motifs of redundancy and accumulation, her work resists monolithic projections of vision. This aesthetic strategy prioritizes the viewer’s affective perceptual experience over “idealistically detached” and autonomous observations.7 Thus, her art demands corporeal presence and is often site-specific. Horn states that her works,“necessarily exist a priori … these objects exist in very literal relationship to human presence, not without

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These numerical digits match a superscript number that is inserted at the beginning of the footnote in the paper’s bottom margins. According to the Chicago Manual of Style, which has been the definitive writing guide for American English since 1906, writers should begin the superscript at 1 and proceed numerically. The rules of American English clearly state, “Do not start the order over on each page.” Predictably, for the whet mind, the rules of engagement amplify the allure of discord and invite dissent. (EasyBib. accessed April 16, 2017, http://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/ chicago-turabian/footnotes/).

10. In academic writing, footnotes acknowledge which ideas or quotations used by the author are derived from sources and discourses beyond the text. Footnotes are paired with a superscript number. The superscript number is inserted at the end of a sentence where an author has cited outside references.

human presence; not in the making and not in the viewing.”8 Paradoxically, her work relies on the limitations of autocratic systems, such as footnotes, language, geometry, meteorology, and perspective, to achieve the desired effect of affective presence. For example, in Still Water, the footnotes are so minute they are initially difficult to recognize; intimacy is integral for the work’s legibility (fig. 5). Paradoxically, intimacy with the work creates disorientation; viewers become performers in an uncertain visual field. Herein lies the strategy through which Horn creates a “vertigo of meaning.”9 The closer one is to the work, the further one is from organizing the triangulation of visual systems. As Horn implies through her invocation of vertigo, being off-center inside the Western codes of aesthetics and writing creates distortion. Horn’s footnotes, like the weather and water, structurally interrupt the main body on the page.10 The notations reference a body of water rather than a body of text. Therefore, they do not support arguments (or logos) born out of sentences. This paratextual system follows the nonlinear logos of the river and surfaces the mysterious and material conditions of its content(s) and origin(s); its muthos.11 The superscript does not proceed numerically throughout the suite of fifteen plates. Each photolithograph begins again at one (fig. 11). These aquatic digits punctuate the image randomly, and the footnotes are arranged in columns and appear fragmented. The columnar notations are atomic in scale. The minute size of the font creates illegibility. Each footnote amplifies water’s relational properties and references aspects of the river’s physical, cultural, literary, psychological, and geographical history. Horn’s footnotes include quotations that summon cultural references to water, in general, and the River Thames, in particular, from a large expanse of literary references. For example, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem] (1939), Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River” (1955), and Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865). Recurrent eyewitness and secondhand accounts of lives lost on the river are interspersed throughout the notations. Reports of murder, suicide, and accidental drowning are contextualized alongside the graphic appearance of water. Apparently, the Thames served as a burial site for bodies dismembered by the London parliament. Countless references are made about the river’s

Angela Berry Figure 4: Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus, 1875. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435831.

Figure 5: Visitors to The Museum of Modern Art view Still Water by Roni Horn. Image credit: Frances Roberts / Alamy Stock Photo. License details: Thursday, April 06, 2017. Expiry date Wednesday, April 06, 2022.

11. Muthos is what the ancient Greeks called a myth or story that truthfully attempted to describe metaphysical beginnings of the world and of people. Notably, unlike its contemporary framing as fiction, muthos could not be debunked, because it was not a “false fact.” (Catalin Partenje, “Plato’s Myths,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 16, 2017, https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/plato-myths/).

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13. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 9. 14. Ibid. 15. Roni Horn. Roni Horn Aka Roni Horn: Subject Index (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 135. 16. Ibid..

12. Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, New Mexico: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), plate 3, footnote 28.

contamination. Horn points to reflections on the water’s surface and asks, “Moonlight or Mercury?”12 Footnotes choreograph the reader’s departure and return from the main body of text. As a result, footnotes are often seen as extramural. The fact that they inhabit the same page as their referent makes them easier to access, as opposed to an endnote. However, their recursion raises resistance, intolerance, and even rejection by readers who want to stay to the point. What is the significance of forcing the action of reading upon viewers in a work of art? One thing that reading a visual work does is force an onlooker to sustain the view. Looking at, reading, and recognizing letter characters demands time. The marginal details of Horn’s text recall those hidden beneath the water’s surface. Stick or snake? Moonlight or mercury? Time creates experience. The requirement to read a view interrupts the act of looking at the picture, signaling a departure and a return. In academic scholarship, footnotes provide a discursive space of meaning in the margins, situating the hermeneutics of the text inside of a broader lineage of thought. The history of the footnote is the topic of Anthony Grafton’s book The Footnote*: A Curious History (1997). Grafton offers many examples of how footnotes are used in scholarship. His working list of uses includes claiming authority, invoking muses, legitimacy, entertainment (also referred to as scholarly assassination), omission (as political statement), accessibility, and authenticity.13 Grafton states, “To the inexpert, footnotes look like deep root systems, solid and fixed; to the connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.”14 Grafton identifies the footnote system as a dynamic and unstable culture. Coincidentally, ants were the topic of one of Horn’s earliest works. Horn completed Ant Farm (1974–75) at RISD in 1975 (fig. 6). Originally presented in her studio as a silent performance, the piece consists of Horn observing an ant farm housed between two sheets of glass inside a minimalist wooden frame. The materials Horn lists in the work include oak, glass, earth, and ants. In an entry for Ant Farm in Horn’s Subject Index (2009), she states, “Eyewitness is usually associated with a criminal act. But what you’re really talking about is people owning up to their experience… I have this ambition to make the meaning of a work people’s experience of it.

Every eyewitness is an authority.”15 (fig. 6) Linda Norden, author of the entry for Ant Farm in Subject Index, recalls Horn describing this work as a “culture.” Horn defines “culture” as “any work that brings things together and makes me aware of something I wasn’t aware of before. The performance wasn’t me looking at the piece; it was me opening up a space in which my looking at this culture was being viewed by others as a culture…together.” In figure 6, we see Horn looking at, through, and with. Her revolving gaze parallels the gaze of the contorted viewers observing Still Water in figure 5.16 Nearly twenty-five years later, Horn adds water and whets the word, citing hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the river and inviting those of us outside of the frame to witness the culture of the river together. To understand how Horn has effectively sharpened the view through a textual, rather than optical system, we must first understand the regime of vision Horn’s work refutes—linear perspective. Looking at Ant Farm recalls Albrecht Dürer’s Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device, published in The Painter’s Manual in 1525 (fig. 7). This canonical work illustrates the regime of perspectival construction that Horn’s work is refuting. In figure 18, we see the illustration of a perspective machine being used in an attempt to organize a view of the female nude. The male painter signifies the advancement of culture, order, and geometry. The female nude stands for nature, disorder, and asymmetry. Here, woman is both matter and material, a symbolic form. The conversion of matter and material into form is celebrated as a triumph in this image. Culture has conquered nature. Holding Dürer’s perspective device in mind, let’s reconsider Horn’s constructed landscape. Formally, distance has been obliterated, and there is no hierarchy of organizing principles. In Still Water the viewer is contorted and the River Thames absorbs our projections. This structural arrangement challenges one of the most powerful inferences of perspective in the history of Western art—the God’s-eye view. In Still Water, Horn has created a reciprocal coordinate system, giving every point unique content. Her points do not express “ideals,” they elevate points of difference; they encourage and celebrate alternative perspectives. Rather than direct the view through an equilateral recession toward the distance, they offer a DIY aesthetic, allowing the viewer to create free associations in

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Figure 6: Roni Horn, Ant Farm. 1974 – 75, oak, glass, earth, and ants. Image Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London. Tate online: http://www.tate.org.uk/ whats-on/tatemodern/exhibition/roni-horn-aka-roni-horn/ roni-horn-aka-roni-horn-explore-exhibition-2, accessed March 1, 2017.

Figure 7: Albrecht Dürer, Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device, 1538. Found in the Collectionof the University of Erlangen. Getty Images: http://www.gettyimages. com/detail/news-photo/artistdrawing-a-nude-with-perspectivedevice-1538-found-in-news-photo/464443243#artist-drawing-a-nudewith-perspective-device-1538-found-in-the-of-picture-id464443243, accessed March 1, 2017.

Angela Berry 17. Warhol’s Do It Yourself references the painting-by-numbers art kits, which were originally created by Max S. Klein, engineer and owner of the Detroit-based business Palmer Paint Company, and Dan Robbins, a commercial artist, in the 1950s. (“Paint by Number,” Wikipedia, accessed April 16, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Paint_by_number). 18. Jan Avgikos, Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, and Roni Horn, Still Water (Santa Fe, New Mexico: SITE Santa Fe, 2000), footnote 10, plate 4.

perspectival space. When viewed in comparison with the scientific, rational construction of space, Horn’s points do create offset linear perspective, but only because they refuse visual mastery and autonomy. The paradox of Horn’s distortion of the habitual view through autocratic systems recalls Andy Warhol’s Do It Yourself series (1962–1963). Composed of five large Prestype works on canvas, Do It Yourself appears before the viewer as half-Warhol, half-template. The unpainted areas of canvas are outlined and contain subscript digits that correspond to an absent color palate. The unpainted areas of canvas are outlined and contain digits that correspond to an inaccessible palate, referencing the paint-bynumbers arts kits (figs. 8–9).17 In Do It Yourself (Sailboats) (1962), we see a deep blue background with pink clouds. The foreground is largely incomplete (fig. 9). The incomplete nature of the instructions makes this work a collaborative effort; the viewer and Warhol work together. Like Warhol’s Do It Yourself series, the completion of Still Water’s system of triangulation, which references the Thames points-blank, is contingent upon participation. Horn’s work demands intimacy. The annihilation of distance in her landscape views creates geographic imaginaries between the artist, the viewer, and the view. It is not possible to be separated from Horn’s moving subject. In Horn’s own words, “Water brings the distance near.”18 When a photograph is oriented horizontally in the genre of landscape, typically the composition leads the eye to a point in the distance (or “Godward”). When text is read from left to right in the Western tradition of linguistics, the reader goes from point A to point B, or from capital to period. The intent of these knowledge systems is to derive reason from meaning. Instead, Horn reroutes our attention to unconsolidated fragments, narrative contradictions, and an imaginative geography that unquantifies the landscape view. For Horn, nature is neither an amenable muse nor a noun and modifying adjective. Therefore, nature cannot be a nurturing mother, a pristine woman, or a positive teacher. In Still Water, landscape neither stages nor services the ideological authority of the foreground. Horn is refusing these normalizing, phantasmagorical associations. Still Water’s aerial perspective of the undulating surface of the Thames recalls a human perspective, rather than

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Figure 8: “Palmer-Pann Craft Master New Artist Series 10 Series 12 and Series 18, page 1.” Palmer-Pann Corporation: Toledo, OH. May 19, 2013. Paint by Number Museum: https://www.paintbynumbermuseum.com/catalog-page/4571. (Accessed March 1, 2017).

Figure 9: Andy Warhol, Do It Yourself (Sailboats), 1962. The Andy Warhol Museum, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. The New York Times:https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/arts/design/ warhol-museum-is-adding-long-sought-do-it-yourselfsailboats. html (Accessed March 1, 2017).

Angela Berry the view afforded to God, a bird, or a drone. As a result, this work offers Horn’s audience a communion with the view presupposed by the entirety of human experience—the whole of it, its corruption, mythology, literature, history, geography, psychology, politics, and suicide. Horn calls this experience of water a type of “a priori communion.” Origins are contested in Horn’s mythology. Man never fell from grace; instead he seeps up through the disgusting drain of filth of an urban river and watches his reflection float downstream. In Still Water, we are given an aerial perspective looking down at the river. When we look down at the river, we miss our reflection, but make amends with the echo of Horn’s language. Her use of redundancy overwrites endings and affirms origin(s); we conclude only to begin again. We are given columnar cradles of rhetorical interruption. We are descending, rather than transcending, Earth’s kingdom. The kingdom is here. There is no stage affixing our projections. The field of view is that afforded to a pigeon, a horse, or a fish. The heaven Horn’s work gives us is a falling away from reason, a falling into place, and the ability to see the freedom beneath our feet.

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3. Constructed Territories/ Sites of Construction

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Amanda Walters CONSTRUCTING TROPICAL PARADISE: THE SOUTH FLORIDA NARRATIVE THAT STUCK

Amanda Walters 1. W. J .T. Mitchell, introduction to Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1.

The aim of this book is to change “landscape” from a noun to a verb. It asks that we think of landscape, not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.1 In his insistence on a critical reading of the field of landscape painting, W. J. T. Mitchell begins to destabilize a genre that has historically been read as harmless and truthful. Mitchell’s argument in the book Landscape and Power lays the groundwork for a critical reading of landscape beyond the painted image. I argue that landscape itself is a cultural medium with an agenda outside of its pleasurable aesthetic. This landscape is presented to its visitors and inhabitants as an image of the state’s tropical identity. It passes as natural, neutral, normal, inoffensive, nonconfrontational, and even “native.” The use of this landscape as a cultural medium goes unsuspected. Plants don’t say anything, they just “are.” But, in fact, they do say something. These plants in particular narrate a history of the colonization of the tropics through a spatial-temporal simulation. To analyze the construction of this landscape beyond commercial interests, this study will branch out into several areas of history and perception: from the history of shifting perspectives on wilderness, which led to the designation of the national parks, to the role of colonial expansion in the development of Western images of the tropics, which informed the landscape designs in south Florida. The landscape was designed to bolster the tourism and commodification of newly developed south Florida. The aesthetic of the landscape, as incorporated in the garden park attractions and the resorts that accommodated its tourists, cohesively disseminated the same vegetative compositions of a pan-tropic escape. The pleasurable aesthetic of these spaces quickly spread throughout the region, and soon all vestiges of the pioneer era that tropical Florida replaced was a nostalgic memory. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, south Florida’s landscape was transformed from the pine and oak forests of the state’s pioneer era, to the bright flowers and palm groves of tropical paradise. The landscape was constructed by developers

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2. The term “crackers” later came to represent the white, native-born Floridians who did not support the new culture of tropical tourism that was being developed in south Florida.

to create a new tourist economy in Florida, offering American northerners tropical travel within the United States. The design of the new landscape embedded the colonial rhetoric of the domestication of an untamed tropical culture. The new Florida landscape was informed by mis-representations of the torrid zone that were made by travel writers and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Henry Walter Bates’s etching from the travel and natural history book The Naturalist on the River Amazons is illustrative of those mis-representations (fig. 1). The people in the image are portrayed very small so as to render the plants and the jungle massive. The humans are given the same amount of detail, if not less, than the foliage, to establish that they are but a part of the jungle, as they blend into the vegetation. Etching and lithographic processes like this were preferred over photographic representations, even after the technology was available, for their ability to manipulate the scene, incorporating plants that wouldn’t have existed in those regions, and pushing elements together to compose a compelling vista. The inhabitants depicted in these prints were as interchangeable as the foliage, as physical traits of people from one geographic region were portrayed in completely different landscapes. This transition marked the death of the frontier fantasy in Florida, and the birth of a fantasy of the state as a pan-tropic Eden. The frontier fantasy was formed around the found landscape. The myth of the frontier was built of colonial rhetoric: the illusion of free land, the civilian militarization of armed occupation, and the desire to get back to nature while stepping away from modernity. Like similar, and larger, migrations to the western United States, Northerners came to Florida in search of “free land,” and the fantasy of freedom from civilization and rugged individualism that came with it. After the formal occupation of Florida by the United States government in 1821, an influx of migrants came to establish agricultural settlements. They predominantly came from the neighboring states, but also as far as the country’s northmost regions. The new frontier settlers raised cattle and hogs, and some grew crops, especially corn. A group known as “crackers”2 was identified among these settlers. Crackers were known for their transience, creating settlements on whatever land their travels led them to. Squatting on the land they currently occupied, they were not a part

Amanda Walters 3. James W. Covington, “The Armed Occupation Act of 1842,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1961): 41–52.

of the frontier fantasy, which was ingrained in the value of landownership. It was Florida’s next wave of settlers that established the frontier fantasy in the state. In the Armed Occupation Act of 1842, the U.S. government offered free land to any white men who could establish settlements in Florida. Each man received weapons, food, and 160 acres of land. The act came at the end of the Seminole War, which had deterred homesteaders from settling in Florida up until that point.3 Soon after this migration, the frontier fantasy was thought to be dead, as the last parcels of (what pioneer settlers considered to be) free land in the United States began to disappear. In less than a century, all vestiges of this era would disappear in Florida, replaced by the tropical paradise fantasy established by a new wave of northern migrants. These transformations were first enacted in the landscape of resorts, as sites of domestication and leisure. Landscape architects like Frank Button carefully constructed tropical landscapes that clustered small areas of calculated chaos, surrounded by welltrimmed lawns. In addition to designing the Miami Biltmore Hotel’s interior and exterior gardens, Button designed the landscape for the entire community of Coral Gables when the city was originally established in 1925. Each home and yard were given an independent design, but were connected by the ethos of the domesticated tropics. Each yard featured a few of the expansive variety of palms found throughout the community, almost all newly naturalized to the Florida landscape, which had previously boasted thirteen species. Densely planted beds of colorful shrubs surrounded each of the palms, and all were surrounded by a manicured lawn (fig. 2). This equation was repeated in each yard, with varying densities, variations of palm and shrub species, and the addition of tropical fruit trees or bamboo to contribute to the diversity of flora, color, and texture. This formula continued to spread beyond the borders of Coral Gables, and eventually extended throughout all of south Florida. As the tropical theme was disseminated throughout south Florida, it was first inserted into the already present fantasy of Florida as a rugged frontier, a theme in many ways at odds with the tropical fantasy—the refusal of modernity versus the domestication of wild nature. To incorporate the new tropical identity into the former frontier, a hybrid of both aesthetics was created. Sites of

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Figure 1: Henry Walter Bates, “Interior of Primaeval Forest,” The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 1863; etching.

Figure 2: Packer Residence in Coral Gables, photographed 1925 by William A. Fishbaugh, Collection of HistoryMiami Archives and Research Center.

Amanda Walters 4. Federal Writers’ Project, The WPA Guide to Florida: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s Florida, written and compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Florida (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 5.

domestication were buffered by unruly wilderness, incorporating the new message of the tropics and the old message of the pioneer lifestyle. This in turn gave visitors glimpses of “untouched” nature before returning them to the comfort of the familiar landscape of capitalism: billboards, roadside vendors, and accommodations, each of these offerings referring back to the experience of the wild landscape, either as souvenir or simulation. In a 1939 book financed by the Works Projects Administration, an unknown author describes the early pioneers’ transition into the economic landscape of tourism as seen through Florida’s roadside economy:

5. Pine trees are the state’s most common tree, even today, after a century of tropical landscaping.

…carved coconuts, polished conch shells, marine birds made of wood or plaster, cypress “knees” pottery, bouquets made of tinted sea shells or dyed sea oats. And an endless assortment of other native and imported handicraft…but, to maintain the contrast, long stretches of uninhabited pine woods intervene with warning signs, “Open Range—Beware of Cows and Hogs.”4

The psychological state of the tropical land of leisure was introduced to Florida, and the pioneer’s way of life was slowly pushed aside. The appeal of the former homestead culture lied in its connection to labor. By the end of the pioneer era, in the late nineteenth century, that way of life was already nostalgic for much of the country. The new developments in Florida produced a radical shift away from the lifestyle the pioneer sought in the state. Members of the lingering settler culture tried to find their way into the new capitalist culture by making craft goods. This effort was unsuccessful as an unalienated form of labor, because the material goods that were created were souvenirs of a simulated landscape built to fortify a capitalist fantasy. The preserved pine from the excerpt operates as a sign of the projected identity of Florida as a wild and uninhabited frontier, creating temporal distance from the pioneer era. The pine tree represents a nature untouched by civilization. The images that construct the frontier fantasy in Florida are dependent on the pine. It’s the pine tree that the settler chops down with the axe; it is the pine tree that is used to construct the log cabin.5 When clearing the land for the city of Coral Gables, Frank Button and Coral Gables developer and proprietor George Merrick retained small hammocks

Sightlines 2017 of the original pine. For Coral Gables, and all of south Florida, the preserved hammocks offer a nostalgic reminder of the pioneer past—a fantasy itself made up entirely of nostalgia—and exoticized Florida’s own history, along with those locations appropriated through the vegetation. Prospective developers moving to the state at the turn of the century saw the palmetto palms that dotted the pine forests as a symbol of the tropics and Florida’s tropical potential, and expanded the symbol’s impact by adding diversity and variation to Florida’s palm populations. Palm trees became a state obsession. While only fifteen palm species are known as native to the state, by the 1930s over one hundred species had been added, according to the WPA Guide to Florida.6 Travel writers and naturalists had previously framed the palm tree as an iconographic symbol of the tropics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Katherine Manthorne depicts the palm’s construction as a sign: “Traversing the continent, travelers saw countless palm varieties—many which lacked species names—and therefore held them in their minds synonymous with the tropics. The stately palm became a genius loci of these southern regions; its nearly ubiquitous presence in the painted and verbal imagery indicated transport to the torrid zone.”7 By increasing the diversity of palm species in Florida, developers re-created the mythos of the fruitful variation of the tropics. To promote the new landscapes being constructed across the region, advertisements were circulated in northern newspapers and mailers (fig. 3). The 1930s State Department of Agriculture produced an advertisement depicting the lawn of a resort, foregrounding the state’s psychological export: a domesticated version of the tropics, first, and the state’s most marketed commodity, oranges, second. To establish the domestication of Florida’s wild landscape, the “Know Florida” image depicts a perfect balance between unbridled wilderness and cultivated terrain. The forced perspective draws the focus to the information in the distance: an unkempt forest that surrounds the resort, framing the leisure space and bisecting it from the agricultural space of the orange grove. Seen next to the well-manicured lawn of the resort space, the forest wall is presented as an immersive presence of south Florida’s savage nature, but contained to the perimeter for the visitor to enjoy safely in the distance. The unkempt forest

Amanda Walters 6. Federal Writers’ Project, The WPA Guide to Florida: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s Florida, written and compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Florida (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 22. 7. Katherine Manthorne, “The Quest for a Tropical Paradise: Palm Tree as Fact and Symbol in Latin American Landscape Imagery, 1850–1875,” Art Journal 44.4 (Winter 1984), 374–382.

simultaneously creates a view of the savage nature of Florida and acts as a lush barricade protecting the visitors from unwanted intrusions, where the foliage performs the role of wall. For tourists visiting a resort like the one depicted in this brochure in the era the advertisement was created, the 1930s, the forest wall would have been more of a representation of a fearful and savage wilderness than the actual presence of such. By the turn of the century, cultural perspectives of wilderness had undergone a shift. In previous eras, wilderness was perceived as wasteland, savage, the realm of Satan, where Moses was lost and Jesus was tested, or more generally sites to be feared. In the new era, wilderness was sanctified; it was bestowed with grace and fragility, and understood as a site in need of protection from civilization. By the turn of the twentieth century, fearful representations of nature were nostalgic, and while the forest wall surrounding the resort in the advertisement is actually a forest wall, preserved while the rest of the grounds were cleared and developed, its purpose is for entertainment. The first move toward sanctification of the wilderness came in the eighteenth century, when wilderness was imbued with qualities of the sublime. But the sublime is not devoid of fear. For Immanuel Kant, overwhelming landscapes that mix pleasure and fear trigger the sublime. The landscapes that most evoked the sublime were often the most treacherous. The awe was earned in the fear one experienced while braving such a landscape. Kant believed the sublime was the feeling of absolute freedom that one experienced in awesome landscapes. This perspective on wilderness gave way to the frontier narrative. In the American wilderness, the United States constructed its national identity. The myth of free land and an opportunity to shed civilization and start a more primitive life became the ideal American experience. As the country’s development progressed, the free land that established America’s national identity vanished, and the impetus to preserve some of the free land was born. Wild landscapes were preserved as national monuments, but also as sites of entertainment. By the nineteenth century, the feelings of fear, the sublime, and the absolute freedom infused in the wilderness landscape had given way to a more sentimental observation. As more tourists set out for the wilderness,

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Figure 3: Seaholts, Know Florida, 1930s, Florida State Department of Agriculture, Collection of Wolfsonian–Florida International University.

Amanda Walters the landscape became more accessible and domesticated. Fear gave way to the souvenir, and as the great outdoors stepped into capitalism, it became merely a site for amusement. Through the nature of its pleasurable aesthetics, Florida’s tropical simulations show no signs of stopping. It replicates itself perfectly, and most perfectly in residential landscapes. The aesthetic and vegetative myth is consumed and reproduced, over and over again. Domestic landscape architects of the region know no other version of the state. In a promotion for a south Florida landscape architect (fig. 4), Australian foxtail and Chinese fan palms line the garden’s edge, bright red Hawaiian ti plants grow on top of a South American selloum, and the bushy Brazilian xanadu fills out all of the undergrowth. All of these surround the perfectly manicured lawn. Hemmed in by the immersive presence of the thick tropical vegetation, the lawn becomes the site of Western domestication of the tropics, and a safe reprieve from the visual stimulation and implied danger of the thick brush and dark crevices of the jungle. The backyard is authenticated as “tropical” through this excess of its re-creation. Over time, the cultural associations of those compositions have been transformed to read as the genius loci of Florida. The backyard perfectly reproduces the formula first produced by the Miami Biltmore Hotel. As the convention is repeated, the landscapes of Henry Walter Bates’s etchings advance toward a reality, through the quantity of the strategically composed vistas. Together the endless sequence of the tropical backyards mirror his collection of landscapes published in the book of his travels. The yard comes at the end of a lineage of colonialist landscape production, whether in representation or reproduction, that is so far removed from its original context that it is hard to recognize the landscape’s implicit power. Each depiction of plant life within the resort from the advertisement reinforces the psychological and atmospheric conditions being sold, the domesticated form of a dangerous tropics. Sculpting the chaos of Bates’s Amazonian jungle into an orderly scene, the lawn’s every position offers a perfectly composed vista. Brightly colored flowers surround walking paths in perfectly symmetrical clusters. Each color rotates in its order, offering a hint of the exotic that is immediately tamed into the submission of a pattern. Monumental palm trees dominate the composition and dwarf the resort guests. Wandering in a contour along

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Figure 4: South Florida backyard landscape design, Sanibel/ Captiva R. S. Walsh Landscaping, Inc.

the drive, the palms offer just a hint of “wild” with their slightly unkempt shag of dried and dead frond. In a show of power over the barbarian palm, the wicker dining set that seats a group of visitors weaves the shaggy palm detritus into a perfectly structured grid. All are surrounded by the closely shaved sprawl of the great lawn, which allows for panoptic views from any position within the resort grounds. Visitors can sip their juice in the shade and enjoy the power of their view. Where the Amazonian people of Bates’s etching were relegated to the landscape as nonhuman elements that add exotic character to the jungle, the subjects of “Know Florida” are featured prominently, bright, shiny, and white. The humans are presented as props, demonstrating how the landscape is used, in images imagined by white, Western illustrators that dictated those locations’ narratives. The relationship between the viewer and the human props in each image differs. In the “Know Florida” advertisement, the viewer is meant to identify with the resort guests; in the Bates print, the human subjects are anthropological specimens from a time long ago and a place far away, demonstrating white European and American superiority. “Know Florida” portrays the future of Bates’s colonial dreams, and that landscape fantasy continues to reinforce its survival as it is subsequently repeated in one backyard after another. The pan-tropic aesthetic that was first brought to Florida by landscape architects and developers like the Biltmore’s George Merrick and Frank Button, informed by fictional representations of the tropical South, spread throughout the region to create a new tropic, a singular location that encompasses the entirety of a region that spans the globe. South Florida became a domesticated form and hybrid of all these disparate regions.

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Becca Roy O’Gorman CONSTRUCTED ENCOUNTERS: PERFORMANCE AND THE COLONIAL GAZE AT PLIMOTH PLANTATION

Becca Roy O’Gorman 1. Wampanoag, which translates to “people of the first light” or “people of the dawn,” are the native people who originally inhabited southern New England. Currently there are two federally recognized Wampanoag tribes: Mashpee and Gayhead; and four state recognized tribes in Massachusetts. 2. “Our Founder,” accessed October 24, 2016, https:// www.plimoth.org/about/who-we-are/our-founder. 3. “Our Founder,” accessed October 24, 2016, https:// www.plimoth.org/about/who-we-are/our-founder.

In 1947, Plimoth Plantation was established as a nonprofit corporation by Henry Hornblower II, a Boston-based stockbroker (and eventual vice president of Shearson Lehman/American Express). Hornblower attended Milton Academy, Andover Academy, and Harvard University, but spent the summers of his childhood in Plymouth, consumed with daydreams about Plymouth Colony, the Pilgrims, and the Wampanoags.1 Hornblower conducted archeological excavations and research in the area, and funded numerous other digs in the area. Plimoth Plantation’s website tells us that Hornblower’s goal was to tell the “remarkable” story of “the small and fragile colony in Southeast New England” and the “Pilgrim’s struggle for survival to the people of America.”2 I am interested in the ways in which Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, functions as an instructional site for understanding and experiencing first contact between the European American “Pilgrims” and the American Indians. Performance, role-playing, and visitor interaction are implemented within the space to direct visitors in their experience and understanding of a prescribed narrative. The bodies of the performers, interpreters, and the visitors are employed in this encounter in order to reenact specific moments in colonial American history. James Luna’s performance Take a Picture with a Real Indian (1991) mobilizes the idea of performing a stereotype and suggests the fallacy of the authentic Native. Plymouth Colony was settled by a community often referred to as “the Pilgrims.” The colony was founded in 1620, when passengers on the Mayflower disembarked after a sixty-six-day voyage from England. The Mayflower carried 102 passengers, including about thirty crewmembers called “strangers,” who were not members of the religious sect.3 The pilgrims were considered Separatists, an isolationist wing of Puritanism—English Protestants critical of the Roman Catholic influence on the Church of England. On the frequently asked questions page, the plantation’s website responds to the question, “Who will I meet at the Wampanoag Homesite?” All of the staff in the Homesite are Native People—either Wampanoag or from other Native Nations. Asking staff what Native nation they are from is a great way to begin a conversation…While their

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5. After more than 150 years with no fluent speakers, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project has established Wôpanâak as the first Native American community to reclaim a language with no living speakers. http:// www.wlrp.org/project-history.html.

The clothing worn by the interpreters is often made of buckskin and decorated with beadwork, quillwork, or fringe (figs. 1, 3). Obviously, the Native interpreters are not reenacting 1627, because as “they speak from a modern perspective about Wampanoag history and culture,” they speak English rather than Wôpanâak, an Algonquin language.5 However, as these Native interpreters speak English, their clothing allows us to aestheticize the Native body and perpetuates the fantasy of the authentic Native. The rupture between the “traditional” Native dress and the contemporary narrative allows for a fantasy about a pastoral past to remain visible. The implementation of the third-person voice in the Wampanoag Homesite allows the interpreters to discuss an array of topics with visitors, from the War of 1675, the early and relatively peaceful colonial period, and other colonial settlements, to genocide, tribal hunting rights, contemporary stereotypes, and current events. The staged nature of the Native interpreters’ “costumes” and activities suggests that role-playing is occurring at the homesite, but in a slighter, subtler manner than in the English Village. In the adjacent English Village, interpreters are dressed in reproductions of period clothing, speak in the dialect of the characters’ home regions, and inhabit the roles of the actual, documented inhabitants of the original colony. Each season, the Pilgrim Village at Plimoth Plantation stages the year 1627 for visitors. The settlement, buildings, meetinghouse, and gardens have been re-created based on archeological evidence, while Hobbamock’s Homesite is more generalized, placed in proximity to the English village for contrast and convenience. Interpreters address visitors in a first-person-present voice. These pilgrim actors perform tasks and dress in outfits that have been researched and fabricated according to seventeenth-century standards. The interpreters who occupy this site speak from a heavily researched lexicon that has been edited for any references to events that occurred after the mid-1600s.

4. “Homesite FAQs: What to Expect, How to Prepare,” accessed October 24, 2016. https://www.plimoth. org/what-see-do/wampanoag-homesite/homesite-faqs#Who%20will%20I%20meet.

clothing and houses are traditional, the Native interpreters you meet are not role players. They speak from a modern perspective about Wampanoag history and culture. This enables the staff to talk with you about historical as well as contemporary issues, events, and information about the Wampanoag.4

Becca Roy O’Gorman Figure 1: Two interpreters in the Wampanoag Homesite. Photograph taken at Plimoth Plantation, August 26, 2012.

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Figure 2: Screenshot of Plimoth Plantation website, which features the trademarked slogan, “You can’t change history, but it could change you,” accessed October 24, 2016, https://www.plimoth.org/about-us.

Becca Roy O’Gorman 6. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.

As Jacques Derrida explains: There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.6

7. “About Us: Seven Decades of Living History,” accessed October 24, 2016, https://www.plimoth.org/ about-us. Emphasis in original.

The archive is therefore not simply the guardian or repository of history, but its legislating and enabling force. However, how events, objects, and ideas are included in an archive dictates how they can be interpreted and remembered. This is illustrated in the close historical character analyses that occur at the English Village compared to the more broad interpretations that happen at Hobbamock’s Homesite. Before a visitor makes the trip to Plymouth, she is likely to visit Plimoth Plantation’s website, a virtual archive of the physical and embodied space of the plantation. In a consideration of Plimoth Plantation’s website, the marketing and branding strategies expose fissures in the institution’s educational objectives and performance mandates. The trademarked slogan of the museum—“You can’t change history, but it could change you”—is printed on promotional material and on its website (fig. 2).7 This claim is powerful for its two distinct suggestions. First, let’s examine the assumption that history is unchangeable. This works to position that history and the museum itself as fixed and predetermined. This fixity, and Plimoth Plantation’s depiction of it, cannot be changed by visitor interactions, understanding, or interpretations. The second part of the sentence, conversely, presents a possibility for change and growth in the viewer. Encountering this history via its interpreters can be a powerful personal experience. Plimoth Plantation can perhaps create new connections for viewers, or alter their understanding of the history of the U.S., Massachusetts, or personal genealogy. The italicized “could” emphasizes the contingent nature of this transformation: It is not a guarantee. While Plimoth Plantation’s English Village attempts to revitalize an almost sacrosanct understanding of history based on the archival documents of the seemingly infallible forefathers, and Hobbamock’s Homesite attempts to approximate the environment and activities of a traditional Wampanoag summer

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9. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46-49.

8. Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy, eds., Enacting History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 6-7.

camp, each individual interaction between an actor or interpreter and a visitor has the potential to create an experience that is more accessible, effective, and individual than the archive alone has the potential to create. This would seem to be the underlying principle of living history museums: to create a space for individual interpretations, imaginings, and experiences of the past.8 Plimoth Plantation’s motto disregards the idea that one’s personal and embodied experience has the potential to alter one’s understanding of history. A photograph of a reenactment found on the website illustrates Plimoth Plantation’s problematic relationship with its own performance mandates (fig. 3). A golden-brown turkey sits on a platter in the center of the image, on a table set with silver goblets and an earthenware pitcher. Three figures are seated at the table. The bearded man on the right is dressed as a traditional pilgrim: wide-brimmed felt hat, ruffled collar, and black doublet coat. The woman on the left and the man in the center are dressed in what appears to be traditional Native dress. The woman holds up a silver spoon, and the two seem to be looking at their reflections in the convex surface of the shiny metal. The Pilgrim man is looking at them looking at themselves. Here the mirror functions as a heterotopic and utopian space and a microcosm of the institution. The interpreter sees her image projected into the simultaneously unreal and real space of the spoon. Michel Foucault writes, “From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I am over there.”9 Similarly, the contemporary Native body in the museum is a mirror image and a constructed projection in a fabricated environment, which reflects an implied historical absence. Foucault considers museums to be heterotopias because they are simultaneously mythic and real. This is doubly apt for Plimoth Plantation as its foundational narrative is based on a story of American exceptionalism and so-called “rugged individualism” that sidesteps large swathes of history that allow viewers to ignore histories of violence and oppression. Plimoth Plantation functions as a contradictory site, representing both the actual colony of Plimoth, and a microcosm of the American ideals and histories it attends to. In this image, and in the Wampanoag Homesite and the English Village, the viewer experiences a break in traditional time. This image asks

Figure 3: Image from Plimoth Plantation website, accessed October 24, 2016, https://www.plimoth.org/about-us. Attribution unavailable.

Figure 4: James Luna, Take a Picture with a Real Indian, 1991; performance and installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Sheldon Collins. http://www.uwo.ca/visarts/research/2005-06/cohen/cohen_luna.html.

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11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998), 270304.

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10. Suzan Shown Harjo, ed., Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2014).

us to imagine a moment in the past when this moment might have happened. Plimoth Plantation asks visitors to imagine a time when Wamapanoags cooked all of their meals over an outdoor fire and to imagine they are traveling to a time where all clothing is made by hand. This temporal turning is indicative of both ephemeral and eternal spaces. At once the visitor sees the enduring legacy of American colonialism, and the absence of the contemporary Native body. This image and the reenactment it depicts manifest an assumption about the Wampanoags as naive, uncivilized, and uneducated. They are mesmerized by what is considered a common utensil of dining etiquette. This attraction to shiny objects later led to massive swindling by traders who took advantage of the Native Americans’ unfamiliarity with certain objects and traded them inexpensive trinkets such as bells, beads, and metals for large quantities of expensive beaver pelts, hides, and land.10 This image functions in opposition to Plimoth Plantation’s mandate that the Native interpreters do not perform themselves. Therefore, even if the premise is historically accurate that the inaugural Thanksgiving feast occurred in the early seventeenth century, even if a Wampanoag was surprised by her reflection in a spoon, this reenactment opposes the museum’s message. These Native interpreters at Plimoth Plantation are performing a caricature from the past, rather than depicting a contemporary Native message. James Luna’s performance and installation work Take a Picture With a Real Indian was first staged in 1991 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was later reperformed on Columbus Day in 2011 in Union Square in Washington, DC, in front of a statue of Christopher Columbus. Luna challenges and disrupts the assumption of authenticity that museums strive to maintain by inviting visitors to have their picture taken with a “real” Native person. In the performance, Luna appears in three different outfits and invites visitors to take their picture with him in each: khakis and a T-shirt, a leather breechcloth, or a feather headdress and beaded breastplate. During the installation, visitors could choose to be photographed with life-size cutouts of Luna dressed in the same three outfits. Visitors were instructed to take two pictures: one to take with them, and one to leave for display. Luna instructed, “Take two. Leave one, and take one home.” In this act of reciprocity, which is

Becca Roy O’Gorman 12. For more discussion of the exhibition of living native bodies see Deborah Willis, ed., Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Temple University Press, 2010), Pamela Newkirk, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (New York: Amistad, 2015), Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New Press, 1995), and Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 13. Jane Blocker, “Ambivalent Entertainments: Jame Luna, Performance, and the Archive,” Grey Room no. 37 (Fall 2009): 52–77.

typically an exchange a tourist would pay for, each person benefits from the relationship. The visitor and Luna each get a photograph as a souvenir and visual verification of an “authentic” encounter. However, in order for Luna to engage with the visitors and receive the photograph, thus completing his photo documentation of the performance, he willingly subjects himself to stereotyping. In Luna’s self-conscious vulnerability, he exposes the unconscious assumptions of the viewer. Luna engages in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has termed “strategic essentialism,” a process of temporarily accepting an essentialist position in order to interrogate essentialist terms and dismantle thought or achieve a strategic goal.11 Underlying Take a Picture with a Real Indian is the idea of the Native body as entertainment and tourist attraction.12 Historically, museums have often become repositories for artifacts created by Native people and actual tombs for Native bodies, as funerary objects and bones were highly coveted in early anthropological collections of Native objects. Similarly, museums also became places where these Native bodies functioned as entertainment. Jane Blocker describes the opposition between the ethnographic impulse to classify and collect objects, and performance-based practices, which elude the archive.13 She uses a metaphor of bone and flesh: the bones are the archival materials and the flesh is the performative, embodied action. Although literal bones and funerary objects were coveted by nineteenth-century archaeologists and ethnographers, the bones Blocker refers to are the physical artifacts that make up archives. The ethnographer, anthropologist, or museum situates itself around objects and collections and within the logic of the archive. In this type of collecting and archiving, which often privileges objects over the accounts, words, and memories of living Native people whose objects are being collected, the assumption that objects can tell truths about the past is a guiding principle. According to Blocker, performance is contingent on the bodily presence of both the performer and the audience, and therefore is ephemeral and resists the archive. This experience is what Blocker deems “flesh,” which opposes materiality. Blocker writes: Key to the hegemonic European episteme is the supreme value given to alphabetic systems and thus to denotation (wherein one

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16. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146–166. Also Schneider.

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15. Rebecca Schneider, “Archives Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6, no. 2 (Summer, 2001): 5.

Because of this opposition between the “hegemonic epistemology” of the archive, which emphasizes accuracy, science, and truth, and forms of knowledge that privilege performance and the possibility for transformation, these embodied forms of knowledge go unrecognized. Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider also explores this metaphor of flesh and bone. “In the archive, flesh is to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh.”15 Therefore, the archive is unable to codify experience. Using this metaphor, the performance cannot be indexical because if is ephemeral; only physical objects can be indexical. The archive, collection, and museum are founded in materiality, in a constellation of physical objects that create and support a narrative. Experience, performance, and embodied knowledge consequently become superfluous to the object; they don’t fit, or they overflow the containers of the archive. Similarly, Peggy Phelan claims that performance is given to disappearance, that it resists the archive. Phelan proposes that performance and the body create ways of understanding or knowing that might radically counter archival or museological ways of knowing.16 The visitor’s experience at Plimoth Plantation is predicated on an interaction with the actors and interpreters—their experience is made complete by engaging with the actors and interpreters. Performance transpires in both the English Village and Hobbamock’s Homesite in various degrees of intentionality. However, despite the possibility for radical interpretations and readings of history, Plimoth Plantation’s motto, “You can’t change history,” rejects this possibility and these basic tenets of performance, by stating the impossibility that the individual could impact or experience change. If the past is performed, or made visible as re-enactment, it might function as this type of bodily transmission of knowledge, a counter-memory, or a striated space for disagreement. A sensory access point to this type of knowledge provides a different experience and an opportunity to perform and thus change memory and history. However, this rhizomatic type of knowledge that may result from improvisational and creative performance challenges

14. Jane Blocker, “Ambivalent Entertainment: James Luna, Performance, and the Archive.” Grey Room 37 (Fall, 2009): 52-77.

thing, one sign, reliably and perpetually stands for another) and the rejection of embodied forms of knowledge.14

Becca Roy O’Gorman Plimoth Plantation’s authority. While performance-based learning is embraced throughout the museum in a didactic sense, its radical potential is stifled by the possibility of rupturing the narrative that supports Plimoth Plantation’s foundation.

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Carolina Magis Weinberg THE VISUAL ACCENT AS STRATEGY: INTERRUPTION AND DIFFERENTIATED VIEWERSHIP IN RIVANE NEUENSCHWANDER’S SUNDAY

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1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry: Questions of Sociological Poetics [1926] (Oxford: PT Publications, 1983), 5.

When I speak in this foreign place I cannot escape my accent. When you listen to me, you also cannot escape my accent; in fact, we are both co-implicated in its construction. My voice is us, together. When I speak, I am speaking my foreignness, my strangeness, my out-of-placeness, and my contextlessness. I am close and remote to you at the same time. You can hear my voice as accented because we are not from the same place. When I speak my accented voice I am speaking my difference. When an accented subject speaks, both message and accent come through in her voice simultaneously. Every process of communication requires a context of enunciation; within it, the accent comes in as a twist, a discomfort, and a discontinuity. The voice travels from the mouth of the speaker to the ears of the listener, where the words are received and their inflection evaluated. The accent is always relative; the speaker’s accent will exist only if it differs from that of the listener’s. For an accented speaker to exist, a non-accented listener is required. The accent materializes the context, leading the interlocutors to negotiate their presence in relation to one another, and to the space in which they are inscribed. The accent is an element that foregrounds what is true for language at large. It is always already defined within a social context. For semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin, language is not only words, but their combination with the context of enunciation, the two together defining the formation of an “utterance.”1 Words are not discrete entities operating in a void; when spoken, they come into the social, economic, and political frames of the world, which provide a context for the interaction between speaker and listener to happen. Thus, sociality is intrinsic to language; the role of the accent is to make it evident. For the utterance, an accent operates as a rupture of the continuity between word and context. The accent reveals the original conditions of language, highlighting the extraverbal content of an utterance, making the social evident in the context of enunciation. In fact, the accent is individual and social at the same time, offering the notion of a culturally defined personal rhythm that accompanies speech. Through the accent, the remote is brought into the familiar. This essay proposes to take the accent—considering all the

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Sightlines 2017 complexities of language it brings forward—and expand it as a critical term into the field of visual art. When considering art as a form of language, the migration of the concept of accent becomes purposeful. The linguistic model of the speaker-and-listener exchange creates a parallel with the co-implicated role of the artist, the viewer, and the context of enunciation. The construction and display of the accented work are seen as moments when the sociality of these processes come forth. For the visual accent, the shift from linguistics into visuality is key, turning the accent itself into a foreign, migrating stranger in this new field. In the space of the visual, the accent is a stranger. Rivane Neuenschwander, born in Brazil in 1967, is an artist who straddles between internationality and extreme locality in her career. This accented in-betweenness is visible in her production, making her a generative case in which to consider the role of the visual accent. This always-contextual twisting accent offers a critical and multilayered approach to her work, already transitional and translational, centered on the disparities of language, measuring systems, and rules. This essay proposes a project of detail, of constant reconsideration, of spinning terminology on its head, willing to consider all of the possibilities entailed by the visual accent in relation to her work. In Accented Cinema, film scholar Hamid Naficy offers a seminal critical text from which the accent sprouts into the field of visuality. Centering on the maker of a film, as this essay centers on the visual artist, Naficy argues that “authors exist outside and prior to films.” This is a central consideration for a displaced maker that is forced to develop a fragmented and multilingual style. The continuous simultaneity of experience within the accented film insists on marking the sociality in the creator’s accented experience of the world. Rivane Neuenschwander is an accented maker living between London and São Paulo. She developed an international career after studying art in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the 1990s. Her work offers a poetic deconstruction and reconstruction of forms determined by social standards for language, cartography, and memory, locating her accentedness in an exploratory production that looks at the maker as much as to the audience. A work that is already critical of

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Carolina Magis Weinberg and playful with language proves to be ideal for this project. In 2010, Neuenschwander created Sunday, a five minute and seventeen second video made in collaboration with her brother, the neuroscientist Sergio Neuenschwander. Sunday is an accented utterance in which the accent is understood in relation to the artist as speaker, the audience as listener, and the exhibition space as the context of enunciation. The accent can be located in all or none of these points at once (fig. 1). As Sunday begins, the viewer has the impression of having stumbled upon a quotidian domestic situation, just a given Sunday—the slow day of rest and leisure. The space is not remarkable: a radio sits on a shelf at the back of a room, and a few homely elements are distributed in the space; a potted plant sits next to the radio, while a red broom rests in the corner. In the foreground is a green Amazon parrot perched on a branch in an open cage. The radio inundates the scene with a male voice that narrates a football (soccer) match. The parrot moves around the cage, eating (fig. 2). Suddenly a close-up of the parrot’s beak breaks the sense of quotidian familiarity. These are not just any seeds; they have been inscribed with symbols and punctuation marks. This unexpected detail in such an expected environment suddenly disorients the viewer, generating an immediate break. Fifty seconds into the video, the entire mood of the scene has shifted with a parrot that enjoys the feast of commas, question marks, and parentheses. Throughout the remaining four minutes of the video, the parrot continues to eat. As the parrot continues to devour the seeds, the narrator’s words are affected, mixing and confusing the narration until it becomes an incomprehensible, unpunctuated gibberish. Sunday is a snippet of a specific “Brazil” that can be seen and heard by the viewer. This is an explicitly accented video used strategically by Neuenschwander as a space of empowerment, performance, and critique. Heavily stereotypical “Brazilian” elements, such as a parrot and football, coexist with unexpected actions, such as the eating of seeds inscribed with punctuation. The interaction between all of these elements materializes accentedness. Sunday is constituted by stereotypical elements that explicitly read as “Brazilian,” namely the parrot and the football match. On the one hand, the parrot reads as Brazilian because it is actually native to the region, and it also does so visually because the

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Figures 1,2,4,7: Rivane Neuenschwander in collaboration with Sergio Neuenschwander, Sunday, 2010. HD video projection, 5 min, 17 sec, Edition of 8; 2Aps, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Figure 3: Walt Disney’s Zé Carioca, created in 1942. Credit: Walt Disney

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Carolina Magis Weinberg 2. Neuenschwander’s Zé Carioca Series (2003) is a central work in this context, where the artist used the comic-book pages as surfaces where she used the background colors to cover up the comic interactions between the characters, composing a grid of bright colors. The work nods to constructivist painting and to abstraction, as well as to popular culture, in an empowering subversion of Disney’s essentializing trope.

colors of the Brazilian flag echo its vivid blue, yellow, and green feathers. But the fact that the parrot is heavily visually accented also depends on filmic historical constructions, a larger context of enunciation that is emphasized by the accent (fig. 3). The viewer might see the parrot and also see Walt Disney’s Zé Carioca (which translates as “Joe from Rio de Janeiro”). This character was created in the 1940s as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy. Nelson Rockefeller, as coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the U.S. Department of State, led the cultural programs, in an attempt to introduce South American culture to a United States audience. Among the many cultural projects funded was a trip to the region by Walt Disney and his crew from which came two great hits: Saludos Amigos (1942) and Los Tres Caballeros (1944). Zé Carioca was the main character of both films, serving as a tour guide for Donald Duck around the Americas. After the release of two films, the character became extremely famous in Brazil, expanding from the films into different circulations, such as a comic-book version that runs to this day. Neuenschwander has directly referenced the character in her work before,2 using it to show how an image of a playful, funny, and rogue character was imposed on Brazilian culture by a foreign force, and, more importantly, how it stuck (fig. 4). More broadly, beyond the cultural specificity of Zé Carioca, parrots have been defined by their capacity to imitate human speech. Because of this ability, parrots usually operate symbolically as mirroring characters, bouncing back the sounds they have been trained to replicate, and receiving treats in compensation. But strategically, Neuenschwander’s parrot is not performing this expected role. Sunday’s main character is not such a parrot. In a sense, this parrot is misbehaving: eating all the treats in its cage, it does not speak to the audience. Contrastingly, the overflow of treats in turn creates a complete absence of speech. With this central gesture, the artist has broken expectations; the parrot will not perform for the audience, but decides to indulge in the meticulous and repetitive act of eating the seeds instead. The amount of seeds the parrot eats goes beyond reward and nourishment into excess and gluttony. The radio in the background and the sound coming from it convey a second Brazilian stereotype: football. The rhythm and

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4. Roberto DaMatta, Sport in Society: An Essay on Brazilian Football, VIBRANT.6(2): 28.

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3. This is one of the nicknames for the Brazilian national football team, whose uniform colors resemble those of a canary, or, in this context, a parrot.

tone of the narrator, in conjunction with the cheering crowd, allow the viewer to construct an image of a football match. At the same time, the black-and-white seeds in the cage, appearing against the parrot’s feathers, are reminiscent of the ball rolling on the green grass. The parrot becomes the football players, wearing a matching verde-amarela uniform of “La Canarinha.”3 The bodies of the players are decidedly absent, but their presence is conjured. At this point, a viewer who shares the codes and speaks Portuguese will be able to listen to the voice and understand the details of the match. This is where a second break occurs, strategically dividing the accented and the unaccented viewers, creating barriers of comprehension through language. While certain viewers will only get an overall sense of the football match through the cadence of the voice, the Brazilian Portuguese-speaking viewers will recognize its specificity: it is not any match, but the 2002 World Cup Final (fig. 5). This is a particularly emblematic match, a symbolic moment that the artist selected with detail. In this match, Brazil beat Germany, ratifying its superiority in the sport as the world’s longtime champion, and becoming a World Cup victor for the fifth time. The voice in the radio is not narrating just any game, but an instance of Brazilian splendor. The sociologist Roberto DaMatta has analyzed football as game in which Brazilian identity is constructed: “In order to triumph, a football player (like a samba dancer) must have jogo de cintura, the capacity to use the body to provoke confusion and fascination in the public and in their adversaries.”4 Brazilian football has been defined by this distinctively playful and responsive style, in which success comes from bewildering the opponent and breaking the rules without being discovered. In a tactical move, every step is valuable, and this is the case for Sunday. The references Neuenschwander is mobilizing go beyond football, given that in Brazil the game itself goes beyond the field; as sociologists understand, it is a performance of culture. Football presents the free, strategic, resourceful body in the form of the Brazilian player, flexible and always in motion (fig. 6). In Sunday, Neuenschwander is performing a conceptual jogo de cintura, a symbolic play of the hips that is ultimately a strategic performance of culture and expectations. Her movements are at the same time like dancing samba and dribbling a ball, strategically

Carolina Magis Weinberg Figure 5: The Brazilian National Football team celebrates their triumph in the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup Final. Credit: Alex Livesey, Getty Images Sport

Figure 6: Performing jogo de cintura, Brazilian player Rivaldo breaks through German players Ramelow and Schneider in the 2002 World Cup Final, Yokohama International Stadium, Japan. Credit: AllStar Picture Library.

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5. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age,” Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 355.

repositioning her against the narrowing expectations of an essentializing adversary—that powerful Hollywoodesque other that names and caricatures. That is, she takes her inescapable accent and mobilizes it in her favor. But the strategic jogo de cintura is accessible only to certain viewers who share the artist’s accent. In this video, Neuenschwander has created a moment of viewership in which the audience evaluates their position in relation to the work, becoming aware of their own personal belonging or not belonging to the conversation, to the space, and to the narrative. The viewers become aware of their standing in relation to the work. Somehow, the artist’s accented utterance has foregrounded the social context in which the viewers are inscribed. By implicating the audience to this degree, exactly like the accent that exists in the listener’s ear, the artist has made evident that viewing itself is also an act of participation; viewing is performative. This duplicity of experience for the viewer of the artwork happens in relation to the context of enunciation, which for an artwork becomes the exhibition space itself. In the case of Neuenschwander, the exhibition of her work happens in a globalized art-world setting. The global context allows for a multiplicity of viewerships to be held simultaneously because of the plurality of the audience. A diversity of personal accents is met with a specific one, and depending on this encounter, comprehension will be different. Film scholars Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have explored the moving image in its globalized setting of production and distribution. In Multiculturalism in the Postmodern Age, they acknowledge how a plurality of audiences produces a plurality of experiences. They explain: “Screening films for mixed audiences […] can create a gap between cultural ‘insiders’ who laugh at the jokes and recognize the references, and the ‘outsiders’ who experience an abrupt dislocation,” being “reminded of the limits of their own knowledge and indirectly of their own potential status as foreigners.”5 Yes, everyone can see the image, but only a few can glean the references and ultimately understand the layers of meaning embedded in them. This is the strategic power of an accented artwork. It points at the limits of each viewer’s comprehension, marking the distance another language can create. In Sunday, Neuenschwander is also hinting at the fact that

Carolina Magis Weinberg this image has been composed. Beyond the sense of quotidian domesticity, the unexpectedness of the setting attests to its own construction. The artist is both hinting at the hand of the maker, and denying the human body visually, replacing it with the voice of a narrator, and the parrot that refuses to speak, that refuses to be “human.” Other elements hint at a body that has recently left the space—the broom resting in the corner, the radio playing, the careful inscriptions on the seeds become tangible echoes of the artist’s hand-editing, staging, constructing, directing, cutting. The fact that the game was played eight years prior to the making of the video is another evidence of the construction of the image. Even the effect the parrot has in the decomposition of the voice evidences the artist’s manipulation of every detail. Sunday insists on itself being a delicate, constructed gesture, but this is evident only to some viewers that share Neuenschwander’s accent. Every element in the video is taken over by the inscribed seeds. The punctuation marks and other symbols that are drawn on the seeds are the visual representation of silences or absences. These marks are inserted in written form to open up prose, providing room for pause and breath, which ultimately facilitates comprehension. These marks lay out the sound cues—pauses, breaks, exclamations—that regulate the overflow of spoken language. If these marks are removed, comprehension is hampered and language runs freely. In Sunday, the parrot is eating them away. Dismissing their authority, the parrot pierces through the marks, literally emptying them of content. It is slowly eating away the methodical technique of the punctuation marks, leaving only the unruly playfulness of incomprehensible language. The act of devouring performed by the parrot is yet another hint for certain viewers, a discrete yet powerful conceptual citation. Devouring is a gesture of empowerment in Brazilian artistic tradition, and Neuenschwander’s reference is not gratuitous. Sunday’s is an anthropophagic parrot, reminiscent of the “Antropofagia” movement of Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s. This movement, led by artist Oswald de Andrade, who published the “Manifesto Antropófago” in 1928, appropriated the colonialist notion of the cannibal that had been imposed on Brazilian culture by the foreign European eyes who observed traditions in these lands. The exoticizing notion of the cannibal was appropriated and overturned by

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Sightlines 2017 this avant-garde movement. For Antropofagia, Brazilian modernity was a digestion of European tradition and an excretion of it in a new, local form. Through this anthropophagic movement, Brazilianness was constructed as a strategic artistic national identity. In Sunday, Brazil wins—not only the team that actually won the match itself, but the self-identified idea of Brazil takes over. Antropofagia, a regenerative and empowering concept, is offering a reconsideration of the character’s role, from object of observation and study to subject with agency and power. The anthropophagic Brazilians win, as the parrot continues to devour those dogmatic markers of silence. Neuenschwander marshals a series of subtle rhetorical maneuvers, from the artist to the viewer, eventually turning the stereotypes around and conveying a critical message. By pointing at the mechanisms by which images are constructed and culture is performed, Neuenschwander is offering accented viewers a possibility of dislocation from within. She will be the expected Brazilian artist, giving us a playful parrot and a football game, but in doing so, she will propose that even the smallest of details are a space where the viewer is implicated, and where culture, history, and power reside. In Sunday, Neuenschwander is offering a way to navigate these suffocating structures skillfully and pleasingly, proposing at the same time both a bewildering sequence of stereotypical images for one viewer, and a liberating strategy of response for another. Neuenschwander brings the unexpected inside the familiar, demonstrating that powerful critical ruptures have to come from within (fig 7).

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Carolina Magis Weinberg Figures 1,2,4,7: Rivane Neuenschwander in collaboration with Sergio Neuenschwander, Sunday, 2010. HD video projection , 5 min, 17 sec, Edition of 8; 2Aps, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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Contributor Bios Angela Berry is an artist, curator, and writer whose work investigates the mysterious, material, and cultural production of landscape. She is currently a Bernard Osher Foundation scholar at CCA, completing her MFA/MA Visual & Critical Studies. Angela earned a BA in Art and Art History from Sewanee: The University of the South. Between 2008–2015, she worked actively in New Orleans at the Contemporary Arts Center (educator, visual arts coordinator), The Front (artist collective member), and for the roving national conference, Hand-inGlove (co-organizer). Her art and curatorial collaborations have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Art Papers. aberry@cca.edu Jamee Crusan is an interdisciplinary artist and writer with two BFAs from the Cleveland Institute of Art and is a candidate for an MFA in Studio Practice and MA in Visual and Critical Studies. They put contemporary takes on queer exhaustion, traumatic relationship breakdowns, unavoidable melancholy, and the nonsensical nature of it all. Crusan has exhibited work across the United States, including at Fused, SomArts, and SoEx. On April 26 they will be participating in the Emerging Scholars Program, organized by the Queer Cultural

Center, and in 2016 they were the recipient of the Barclay Simpson Award. jcrusan@cca.edu Kristin Landowski is an Oaklandbased artist, educator, and writer. She received her dual degree BFA in Ceramics and BFA in Sculpture and Art History minor from University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Her work and research delves into the intersections of women’s identity and body issues involving disease, particularly the representation of breast cancer in popular culture and in fine art, as well as trauma and abjection. She has exhibited work locally in the Bay Area and across the United States. She teaches ceramics classes at the Richmond Art Center and Center for Community Arts in Walnut Creek. www.kristinlandowski.com Carolina Magis Weinberg is a whether reporter, and a sight specific artist and writer. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the National School of Painting, Engraving, and Sculpture “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City in 2013. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Colombia, France, Germany, and the United States. Being equally fascinated by theory and practice, she joined CCA’s Dual Degree in Fine Arts and VCS as a Fulbright-García Robles, Fonca-Conacyt, and Hamaguchi scholar. She is enthralled by the inescapability of speaking her

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own accent, and is forever committed to continue exploring the perplexing condition of communication across languages, boundaries, and points in the map. www.carolinamagisweinberg.com Gilda Posada is a cultural worker from Southeast Los Angeles, CA. She received her AB from UC Davis in Chicana/o Studies and Comparative Literature. Her interdisciplinary practices are rooted in working from, with, and by the Xicanx community. Gilda’s projects are invested in decolonial practices that challenge patriarchal heteronormative oppressive structures. She is an active member of the artists collective Espacio Tercero (www. espaciotercero.com). Her work has been exhibited nationally, most notably in the 6th Chicana Chicano Biennial. She has been featured in publications such as Art Practical and Third Woman Press Anthology. www.gildaposada.com Becca Roy-O’Gorman is an educator, curator, and writer based in San Francisco. She earned her BA in Fine Arts from St. Lawrence University and is currently pursuing an MA in Visual and Critical Studies and an MA in Curatorial Practice from CCA. Before attending CCA Becca has worked in the Public Programming department at MASSMoCA and the ICA/Boston. rroy-ogorman@cca.edu

Lindsay Tunkl is a multimedia, conceptual artist and writer with a BFA from CalArts and is completing an MFA/MA at CCA. Tunkl uses performance, interactive objects, and one-on-one encounters to explore subjects such as the apocalypse, heartbreak, space travel, and death. Her work has been shown at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Center For Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, and Performance Space, London. She is the author of the book When You Die You Will Not Be Scared To Die (2017), published by Parallax Press, and in 2016, she was the recipient of the Barclay Simpson Award and the CCA All College Honors Award. www.lindsaytunkl.com Amanda Walters is a Bay Area artist and writer whose work is focused on the construction of the natural world, simulated space, myth, loss, and narratives of her home state, Florida. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA in Studio Practice at California College of the Arts. Before moving to California she worked as an archivist for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited locally and throughout the Midwest. www.amandawalters.org

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Sightlines 2017

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Sightlines 2017

Articles inside

Jamee Crusan