Sightlines 2018

SIGHTLINES 2018 / VISUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES / CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

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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 Jacqueline Francis, VCS Program Chair Sienna Freeman, Senior Manager of Academic Programs in H&S: VCS and Dual Degree Options cca.edu/academics/graduate/visual-critical-studies viscrit.cca.edu © 2018 by California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco CA 94107. All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission.

Table of Contents

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INTRODUCTION

Zahra Axinn Queer Pop Music Video: Fantasy Aesthetic in Hayley Kiyoko’s ‘Sleepover’

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María Esther Fernández Engaging the Spirit: The Curative Curatorial Challenge to the Contemporary Art Museum

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Carlos Francisco Jackson Visual Enclosures: One Pylon in Chicano Park

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Charmaine Koh Picture-Perfect: Revisualizing Public Housing in Singapore

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tamara suarez porras (re)Arranging Pictures and (re)Reading Histories

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BIOS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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In the 1973 film adaptation of John Jay Osborn Jr.’s novel The Paper Chase, the first-year law school student James T. Hart receives his semester grades by mail. Without inspecting them, he folds the paper into an airplane and zips it into the ocean, smiling as it floats away.

From this sequence—the movie’s final one—we shouldn’t conclude that performance reviews don’t matter. They do. What is inspiring about Hart’s gesture is that it is a demonstration of self-knowledge.

After an up-and-down year marked by uncertainty and success, he has realized that he has developed measures to assess what he has learned and how he has grown. A single yardstick cannot fully account for any individual’s progress; each is responsible for fashioning appropriate standards, benchmarks, and criteria to take stock of where she has started and where she ends up.

Each year, students enter the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA) fully aware that such accountability is a prerequisite for advancement. They have chosen to undertake graduate study, bringing their life experiences and work expertise to the seminar room. Some are excited and curious about research projects they already have in mind, while others develop interests in newly discovered subjects and creative practices. All are mentored by the distinguished VCS faculty, for our goal is to sharpen the tools that these artists, curators, designers, educators, historians, and writers working in the interdisciplinary field of visual and critical studies need: research, writing, and presentation skills; the ability to form a convincing case about the import and significance of art object and artistic practice; and the nuanced understanding of ethics and culturally determined power dynamics. Impressively, VCS students put these capabilities to use before graduation. They put them to the test in their internships, workplaces, and communities, evaluating their efficacy, adaptability, and practicality. They are energetic thinkers who bring their unique outlooks to their topics.

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Zahra Axinn examines popular-music videos through the lens of queer theory, finding that the contemporary performer–producer Hayley Kiyoko has created disruptive nonlinear narratives around the nostalgic tropes of adolescent love and safe domestic spaces.

Inspired by the interdisciplinary practice of contemporary artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez, María Esther Fernández presents a curative curatorial model that disrupts the marginalizing displays of Xicanx artists’ production in mainstream U.S. museums. Carlos Francisco Jackson looks back at the establishment of San Diego’s Chicano Park in 1970, and the ways in which two key murals on the site decisively informed the identificatory term “Chicano.” Charmaine Koh considers photographs of Singapore’s public-housing estates, once overlooked structures that are now presented as symbols of the nation. tamara suarez porras closely reads the works of contemporary artist Leslie Hewitt, illuminating the significance of photo-driven archival research marshaled to poignantly represent collective and personal memories.

These essays, shaped for the Sightlines publication, are just one aspect of the students’ culminating Master’s Project year. Each has written an 8,000-word thesis; each will give an oral presentation of their research in the VCS Annual Spring Symposium. The Master’s Project Directors, Michele Carlson and I, and Faculty Advisors Karen Fiss, Vîet Lê, Frances Richard, and Jeanette Roan have mentored the students throughout this final year of study. Faculty, in turn, are supported by key administrators in CCA’s Humanities and Sciences Division: Michael Rothfeld (Director of Academic Administration) and Sienna Freeman (Senior Manager of Academic Programs and Manager of VCS and Dual Degree Programs). Mike and Sienna are treasured colleagues who are intimately acquainted with the rigors of the VCS program and the challenges of forging artistic careers.

Across VCS, we are deeply grateful for the support of Juvenal Acosta, the Dean of Humanities and Sciences, CCA Provost Tammy Rae Carland, and CCA President Stephen Beal. Together, we salute the authors who are featured in the Sightlines publication of 2018, for we are immensely proud of the work that represents the VCS program.

Jacqueline Francis, Chair Visual & Critical Studies

Introduction

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Zahra Axinn

A projector whirs while a camera pans across orange floral wallpaper, past a lamp, to reveal an ornate gilded headboard. The camera turns to show a woman lying on her side, dressed in a long-sleeve Henley T-shirt and underwear, her bare brown legs taking up the frame as the shot progresses.

Then the camera turns again, as music starts, to reveal a woman sitting on the edge of the bed—the singer Hayley Kiyoko. The scene cuts to the corner of the room, where a vase holds a bouquet of wilting roses and a hydrangea. When the shot returns to Kiyoko in the same spot on the bed, we see the other woman kissing her neck. The first half minute of Sleepover, a music video that premiered on YouTube on March 2, 2017,1 presents a mysterious love affair in which Kiyoko and Rose—the name of the character played by the video’s other star, Christina Santini—flirt, dance, kiss, and embrace each other, alternately cut with shots of Kiyoko in the same spaces, alone.

Sleepover is directed by its star, Hayley Kiyoko, who worked as a child actor before turning to pop music. 2 She’s known for featuring female love interests in her songs and videos, and does not shy away from using pronouns such as “she” or “her,” rather than defaulting to heterosexual conventions common in the music video industry.

Sleepover shows an example of Kiyoko’s directing style, and through a captivating visual setting, remains grounded in a particular narrative of queer self-discovery.

In this piece, I examine Kiyoko’s portrayal of queer desire and the way it challenges heteronormative conventions in music videos, but also present a critique of the way in which she comes up short by reinforcing some of the genre’s shortcomings, such as the persistence of female objectification, queerness notwithstanding.

Sleepover employs a vision of queer fantasy through an aesthetic that disorients ambiguous desire. This desire becomes a space of utopia, joy, and intimacy coexisting with alienation, loneliness, and uncertainty. This aesthetic comprises visual cues from the spatial 1. Hayley Kiyoko, SLEEPOVER, YouTube, March 2, 2017, accessed May 03, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

2. Katie Heaney, “Hayley Kiyoko Is Living Her Queer Teenage Dream,” BuzzFeed, January 11, 2018, https:// www.buzzfeed.com/katieheaney/hayley-kiyokos-great-gay-pop-music-takeover.

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manipulation of the camera, the domestic setting and quotidian objects within the video, and the displacement of the two women between shots. The song lyrics also contribute to the video’s aesthetic by providing a narrative that emphasizes uncertainty and speaks to elements of fantasy. Sleepover presents a vision of queerness through fantasy, inviting the viewer into a liminal space that pushes the narrative beyond the normative by challenging ideals of what a romance or attraction might look like.

For my purposes, queerness is a turning away from the normative or a subversion of the expected toward the elusive or the desired—that which is wanted and possibly attainable. José Esteban Muñoz describes queerness as being “primarily about futurity and hope…always in the horizon.”3 Here, queerness involves a yearning beyond the prescriptive and beyond the present to imagine a new future. In Sleepover, the figure of Kiyoko expresses hope and desire through the narrative of the video and its lyrics, but it is not ultimately clear whether she attains what she seeks. Therefore, the hope portrayed in the video lies within the horizon of what the video introduces.

Sarah Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation particularly interests me when applied to the ways in which the camera moves throughout the space of the video in order to build a sense of fantasy. The camera moves over and around the figures, turning to create motion and instability. In this context, fantasy is a projection of desire that generates imagined actions. In Sleepover, fantasy blurs the difference between real and imagined by employing a sense of queer orientation4—that is, what seems to belong to a space may not only be stable but may also transgress in more ways than one (fig. 1).

The music video opens with a shot of a delicate floral pattern, wallpaper in a rich shade of orange. The camera pans and the first title appears center screen while the top of a lamp shows up on the right side of the screen. This lamp indicates the orientation of the room: The camera is turned on its side. However, the title text that appears horizontally must be read left to right, counter to the lampshade’s top-to-bottom orientation. This tension between the orientations of the room and the text creates a sense of being “out of place.”

Sara Ahmed explains that instead of “making the strange familiar,”5 “[bodies] feel ‘out of place’” and this creates a “[pointing] toward other places, even ones that have yet to be inhabited.”6 This queer 3. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 11.

4. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 11.

5. Ahmed, 11.

6. Ahmed, 12.

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Figure 1: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

orientation suggests a dreamlike setting. Immediately, the world is turned on its side. By the time the first thirty seconds pass, the camera turns and rights itself, landing in a conventionally “correct” horizontal position. This turning disorients by changing the perspective and sense of stability within the frame, and places the video in the realm of the dream, the fantasy, the imagined, and the horizon.

According to José Esteban Muñoz, “[I]f queerness is to have any value whatsoever, it must be viewed as being visible only in the horizon.”7 Muñoz introduces the concept of the horizon to encapsulate the idea that visions of the future can be glimpsed but not quite touched—that the horizon is a metaphor for a future. Sleepover suggests Muñoz’s definition of queerness in that its camerawork, like much of contemporary music-video form, presents an especially disoriented spatiality. This spatiality is a visual presentation that works to guide the viewer along a certain line of view. Rather than conforming to an expected type of motion, the camera rotates across several 7. Muñoz, 11.

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Figure 2: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

Figure 3: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

Zahra Axinn

shots in a counter-clockwise direction (fig. 2). The video’s perspective is inconsistent with the static, rectangular boundaries of the screen.

A two-second shot features a headboard, a pillow-topped bed, the character Rose, and the lamp, all out of focus in the background, which is on a diagonal slope relative to the edges of the screen. In the foreground, Kiyoko swings to the right side of the frame as the camera zooms and rotates, complicating the viewer’s sense of the scene.

There is no way to get a firm grounding with this kind of motion; the room is unreachable for the viewer. Like the horizon in Muñoz’s analogy, the space portrayed in Sleepover is unstable and presents a distance between the viewer and the scene.

In addition to the disorientation created by the camera, the aesthetics of Sleepover indicate another level of queerness. The frame in Figure 3 shows Kiyoko and the character Rose in a bathtub.

The bathtub and bedroom continue to locate the world of Sleepover in the domestic, and in turn the domestic suggests familiarity and comfort, contrasting with the sense of disorientation rendered by the topsy-turvy camerawork. Muñoz says, “The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of utopia that is queerness.”8 The aesthetic of Sleepover creates a domestic space in which there is a kind of anachronistic and even nostalgic setting. The color palate has a subdued and aged effect, with its oranges, browns, and blues. The furniture is dated, with the ornate headboard, the old rocking chair, and in particular the wallpaper, which seems to be from another era (fig. 4).

Muñoz explains that looking to the past to critique the present is an employment of queer futurity. 9 Sleepover points toward a relationship that has a different future potential than exists in the present.

In relation to Muñoz’s explanation of the queer aesthetic, Sleepover performs the visualization of those blueprints and schemata through the framing of this domestic setting, coupled with the changing representations of Kiyoko and Rose together. As such, Sleepover presents a utopic depiction of queerness through its combination of the ornamental and the quotidian.

In the frame shown in Figure 3, the edges of another floral wallpaper, this time striped, are visible in the top of the frame. The two women sit in an old-fashioned bathtub full of milky pink water. The bath becomes an ordinary object and a representation of fantasy, 8. Muñoz, 1.

9. Muñoz, 18.

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Figure 4: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

Figure 5: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

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Figure 6: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

Figure 7: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

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both quotidian and ornamental. In contrast to the prior camera placement, this shot’s perspective of the room orients us conventionally.

However, the tight framing of the shot lends a feeling of confinement.

Ahmed points out that “[one does not have] to leave home for things to be disoriented or reoriented: homes too can be ‘giddy’ places where things are not always held in place, and homes can move, as we do.”10 Since this bathtub is both a familiar and fantastic object, it is a component of that type of “giddy” home within the world of Sleepover. The varied presentation of spaces within the home offers a queer orientation through illogical camera movement and inexplicably changing placements of objects and human figures.

Perhaps most pointedly, the queerness of this video lies with its subjects. Kiyoko and Rose are women, and their interactions range from affectionate to sexual to intimate. The frame in Figure 5, which occurs toward the end of the video, reveals a close-up of Rose and Kiyoko. Rose touches Kiyoko’s mouth. Both their eyes are closed.

Rose, on the left side, faces Kiyoko, who is more or less centered in the frame. The question is whether this desire is actually happening in the video’s story or whether it is merely a fantasy of the video’s protagonist—an indication of the fragility of the queer desire about which Kiyoko sings. The singer utters the phrase “at least I got you in my head” nine times in the song.

Rose disappears from the screen at certain moments, indicating that the narrative sequencing of the video is nonlinear and fragmented, and that some sequences are constructs of Kiyoko’s imagination (fig. 6). Here, Rose is under the covers. Kiyoko is touching her own mouth with her own hand, rather than Rose touching Kiyoko.

Rose’s disappearances are unaccounted for in the narrative. She is there and then she is gone; she vanishes and reappears so often that it creates discomfort, which is almost familiar in its recurrence. For example, we later see Kiyoko alone in the bathtub after she and Rose are pictured there together (fig. 8). Muñoz argues that “the negative becomes the resource for a certain mode of queer utopianism.”11 The disappearance in this sequence indicates a negative, which establishes the sense of queer utopianism Muñoz suggests. Once Rose’s presence becomes inconsistent, Kiyoko’s desire for her to remain stable becomes palatable for the viewer. The possibility of Rose being consistently present is the utopia that Sleepover suggests but never fully actualizes.

10. Ahmed, 9.

11. Muñoz, 13.

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Figure 8: Hayley Kiyoko, Sleepover, still from video, directed by Hayley Kiyoko (2017; YouTube), last modified March 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W6jxPFtIAnw.

12. Ahmed, 20.

13. Ahmed, 24.

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The fantasy of Rose’s touch is firmly planted within the space of the home, which represents the site of traditionally accepted heterosexual desire. As Ahmed points out, “The lesbian body does not extend the shape of this world, as a world organized around the form of the heterosexual couple.”12 Kiyoko’s presentation of fantasy troubles the convention of the bedroom as a space of straight love and sex. Whether she and Rose actually embrace does not matter, as the psychic representation of this desire is sufficient to indicate queerness. Additionally, the racialized bodies of both women—Kiyoko being white and Japanese American, and Rose a light-skinned Black woman—represent a further complication. According to Ahmed, “Being mixed might also involve a queer departure from the lines of conventional genealogy.”13 This subversion of white, straight desire locates this video as queer. Still, we cannot avoid taking into account Kiyoko’s and Rose’s appearance as conventionally attractive and palatable for mass-media consumption, which somewhat impedes the total subversion of hegemonic desire.

While there is doubt in Sleepover, there is also clearly expressed delight and pleasure in many scenes. In Figure 7, Rose and Kiyoko dance in front of a television screen flickering with static, the slightly anachronistic CRT model indicating the fantasy mode. As the television does not show any “real” images, there is no point of reference to the outside world. The television plays static, a kind of nothingness. It is a queer object. Queer objects mean something specific for Ahmed, who states, “A queer phenomenology…might start by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are ‘less proximate’ or even those that deviate or are deviant.”14 The television deviates from what a television is supposed to do, instead orienting the scene away from any expected or anticipated presentation.

Kiyoko does not sing along when she dances with Rose; in contrast, when she faces the camera, her mouth moves. Rose’s back is close to Kiyoko’s front. Rose smiles and dances close to Kiyoko, who also smiles and stretches her arms out in a happy and relaxed gesture. While Kiyoko shows sadness and fear in shots in which Rose has disappeared or moved away, there is a palpable enjoyment in dancing. Ahmed suggests that “if we stay with…[queer] moments then we might achieve a different orientation toward them; such moments may be the source of vitality as well as giddiness. We might even find

14. Ahmed, 3.

15. Ahmed, 4.

16. Muñoz, 10.

17. Ahmed, 20.

Zahra Axinn

joy and excitement in the horror.”15 In the video, queerness lies precisely in that tension between joy and horror, doubt and delight.

Muñoz posits that “the felicitous…is always eventually disappointed.”16 Kiyoko oscillates between the felicitous and the disappointing, ultimately landing squarely in the realm of the disappointed.

There is a contrast between the moments when Rose and Kiyoko are together and the ones when Kiyoko is alone. Kiyoko shows emotions through her body language and expressions, suggesting her disappointment. Situating the disappointment of Sleepover’s fantasy is key to understanding its queerness. Negativity is a disorientation.

Ahmed states that “disorientation is a way of describing the feelings that gather when we lose our sense of who it is that we are. Such losses can be converted into the joy of a future that has been opened up.”17 The undulating emotionality, the frequent disorientation, the aesthetic choices, and the dizzying sense of space within Sleepover extend beyond relying on the representation of same-gender affection between the women. There are more layers. The video’s strangeness is not only about the lesbian narrative. There is a tension that expands upon the tropes and cues of the music-video genre as established in the 1980s. While the premise of the story and song—unrequited or uncertain love—is broad and universal, the specific ways in which Sleepover presents its story create something different: a vision of queerness and the future.

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María Esther Fernández

Upon arriving in the gallery at Triton Museum of Art, Celia Herrera Rodríguez lays out her materials and proceeds to burn copal, a natural resin used to cleanse the space, in preparation for installation of her work Mitote for the group exhibition Xicana: Spiritual Reflections/Reflexiónes Espiritúales.1 A small plume of white smoke rises up from the copal as the flame is placed at its center. Copal is a tree resin sourced from the sap of a torchwood tree, and is widely used throughout Mexico and the Americas. Predominantly used to cleanse, copal smudging is understood as preventative and curative, and its use dates back to pre-Columbian time. For Herrera Rodríguez, this is a fixed process that she replicates regardless of the work being constructed or the environment in which it is being activated. In this instance, the copal smudging is not part of a performance for an audience or community ceremony, but rather a private ritual to aid in the creation of this work. At the museum, it is a cleansing of the institutional space in preparation for the installation.

The curative function of the copal and its use by Herrera Rodríguez for cleansing underscores the fraught history of Indigenous artists and their representation in the contemporary art museum. My attempt is not to present the museum as a monolith, but to speak to the continued underrepresentation and misrepresentation of communities of color, be they artists or the viewing public. 2 There is a need for more curators of color, but more importantly for a critical look at current modes of curation so that we might develop practices that mitigate this inequity within the contemporary art museum. It is in working with artists who deploy decolonial practices, such as Celia Herrera Rodríguez, that I am able to glean how museum curatorial 1. Xicana: Spiritual Reflections/Reflexiónes Espiritúales was held at Triton Museum of Art from March 20 to June 13, 2010. I curated this exhibition, which featured six Chicana artists, all exploring spirituality in one form or another.

2. There is a large body of research and critique on the inequity in American museums, the need for greater representation of people of color among museum staff, and failed attempts toward inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism. See Willful Neglect: The Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Latinos, a report of the Smithsonian Institution Task Force

on Latino Issues (1994); and Ivan Karp, et al., in the Museums and Communities publication, one of two that were published for conferences sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution in 1988 and 1991. In addition, see Bridget Cooks in Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum; and Karen Kosasa in “Pedagogical Sights/Sites: Producing Colonialism and Practicing Art in the Pacific,” in which she looks at how Western culture predominates in museums that employ specific strategies that obscure structures of power and construct space as empty of ideology.

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practices perpetuate misrepresentation. Her work disrupts how the contemporary art museum exhibits, collects, and constructs the art object, requiring curators to consider new methods of interpretation that decenter colonial perspectives and incorporate memory and Indigenous spiritual traditions as sources of knowledge production.

Celia Herrera Rodríguez’s artistic practice is a rigorous remapping of Indigenous thought for diasporic, de-tribalized Xicanx people. 3 It is a realigning of contemporary art practice with the spiritual to reframe social, historical, political, and economic narratives that have shaped identity in the social consciousness of the Xicanx community.

This remapping of a more complex understanding of identity formation harnesses memory through the incorporation of traditions that are functional, serving a specific purpose, intention, and prayer. Herrera Rodríguez explains that although Indigenous spiritual practices have changed over time due to the invasion of the Americas and the subsequent fragmentation of cultures, the materials have remained the same. 4 Her work is a “looking through the rubble,” remapping the Indigenous thinking that has endured. 5 Her conceptual practice explores the philosophical underpinnings of ceremonial practices through the use of objects that have remained, divorcing them from their anthropological contextualization by Western institutions in an effort to elicit the thought behind their creation. This is a useful framework that can model how to unpack Western constructions of Indigeneity that are embedded and perpetuated in curatorial practices.

Memory plays a key role in Herrera Rodríguez’s practice. She activates objects through functional acts, such as copal smudging, and harnesses embodied memory. M. Jacqui Alexander argues that practices of (re)membering function as transformative spiritual labor and as forms of knowing that empower the individual to break free from the boundaries placed upon them by institutions. This allows for the creation of historically grounded and specific frameworks that are intersectional, relational, and that look beyond the material to the metaphysical.6 Her practice reaffirms Indigenous spiritual traditions, presenting ceremony as a legitimate form of political resistance that provides communities with a new framework through which to understand systemic oppression. While Alexander’s broader application of spirit knowing is focused on the impact of the sacred on the self and their daily interaction with institutions, Laura Pérez’s reading 3. I define Xicanx as an identity centered on a recovery of Indigenous spiritual tradition rooted in a queer, feminist framework.

4. Celia Herrera Rodríguez, interview by María Esther Fernández, November 5, 2017.

5. Herrera Rodríguez, interview by María Esther Fernández, November 5, 2017.

6. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 253–254.

María Esther Fernández

of the spiritual in Xicanx art practice implies that it has agency in redressing neocolonialism in a direct assault on capitalist institutions.

Pérez explains specifically how Xicanx art “is politically and historically operative…returning to our field of vision a politically engaged spiritual consciousness.”7 She argues that capitalism and imperialism are challenged by Xicanx artists who engage with the spiritual in a restorative effort to heal historical trauma, providing a much-needed intervention against cultural imperialism and its devastating effects on the individual, the community, and the planet. 8 This construction of the spiritual as a political framework for community underscores how Herrera Rodríguez’s reconstitution of Xicanx spiritual practices within her artistic work can have the potential to disrupt contemporary art-museum practice by exposing the limitations that museum professionals place on alternate ways of knowing and being.

Herrera Rodríguez’s installation Mitote, at Triton Museum of Art in 2010, was inspired by the mini ceremonial structures, or “god houses,” located in the mountains of Mexico (fig. 1). Mitote is the name of a dance that is practiced by various Indigenous communities across the Americas. It brings community together to envision and manifest a communal understanding of how they want to live. This installation was an exploration of the structures inhabited for prayer and, in the spirit of the Mitote dance, a testament to an Indigenous Xicanx futurity in diaspora. The “god house” was erected using willow branches held together with fabric, twigs, and prayer ties (fig. 2).

Prayer ties are small pieces of paper tied with string, each holding an individual prayer of the maker that is burned in offering. The prayer ties now hold tobacco, but in Mexica culture they once held blood.

Herrera Rodríguez explains that “upon burning the prayer tie with your blood, it releases a smoke that is an essence or literal representation of one’s own spirit.”9 She explains that it was understood that our blood holds the spirit, so then ritual becomes a conversation with one’s past, a conversation with the ancestors. Her creative practice is a way of conversing with the spirit, and through the incorporation of materials used in ceremony, Herrera Rodríguez is harnessing spiritual knowledge. In the interior of the god house was a mesa, an altar-like arrangement on the ground used for healing and prayer (fig. 3). The assortment of items on the mesa represents, holds, and embodies the elements of water, fire, and earth assembled to “feed the spirit.” This is the function of the mesa in prayer. An assortment of bottles, tins, 7. Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 46–47.

8. Pérez, 21 & 23. Pérez explains that historical trauma, or cultural susto, is the “‘frightening’ of spirit from one’s body–mind in the colonial and neocolonial ordeals, the

result of which is the ‘in-between’ state of nepantla, the postconquest condition of cultural fragmentation and social determinacy.”

9. Celia Herrera Rodríguez, interview by María Esther Fernández, April 7, 2017.

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Figure 1: Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Mitote, 2010, mixed-media installation.

Figure 2: Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Mitote (detail), 2010, mixed-media installation.

María Esther Fernández

paper, and other mundane items rested along the side of the installation’s mesa, representing its function in everyday life. The remaining installation was not intended to be used in prayer, but ceremony and prayer were invoked during its installation. Mitote was constructed in a prayer of remembrance of how one carries life and light within them.

Several Indigenous concepts inform Herrera Rodríguez’s practice, giving insight as to the creation and function of her installation: the Tree of Life, Axis Mundi, and el Ojo de Dios.10 These concepts, or philosophical ideas, inform many spiritual, religious, and cultural traditions around the world. Although regional differences result in varied interpretations and applications, the common belief is that there is an enduring connection between the physical and spiritual realms.

Mitote is a reclamation of space within the contemporary art museum: a visual intervention remapping ways of knowing and being in the creation of work that engages the spirit. Herrera Rodríguez’s remapping of Indigenous thought complicates Chicanx identity in that it strips back the veil of colonialism that has obstructed Indigenous ways of knowing and being in diaspora.11 Remapping redresses the colonial delimitations around identity, giving a sense of place to individuals and community. In discussing the importance of presence through “strategic acts of visual representation,” Margo Machida asserts that the visual arts are an “expressive capital” toward the building of a collective social imaginary that allows for a powerful reclamation of space for the marginalized.12 The implications of her reconstituting Xicanx within an Indigenous worldview extend far beyond individual or collective identity formation. She is putting forth a model for reclaiming alternative ways of knowing and being that upends neocolonial practices and has powerful implications for institutions.13 Mitote disrupts the status quo at the contemporary art museum.

Herrera Rodríguez’s copal smudging in the museum indicates that the institution needs to be prepared to receive the work in a ceremonial effort to rid the gallery, if only for this exhibition, of the fraught ideological imposition of museums on Indigenous artists. This is a direct

10. The Tree of Life, with roots in the underworld and branches that stretch up into the sky, is symbolic of the central tree. It is featured in many world cultures, and in Mexica/Native cultures represents the sacred four directions (either north, south, east, and west, or the summer, fall, winter, and spring). Axis Mundi is the mythical cave where the underworld and the sky meet, typically represented on a mountaintop, also understood as the center or Ojo de Dios.

11. I use “Chicanx” as distinct from “Xicanx,” which is used by those who have openly reclaimed an Indigenous way of life. Colonialism resulted in varied manifestations of indigeneity and mestizaje.

12. Margo Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 48.

13. Celia Herrera Rodríguez’s educational work has informed the artistic, educational, and political practices of countless artists and scholars for over 30 years.

Cherríe Moraga, La Red Xicana Indigena, Mujeres de Miaz, and countless others have been influenced by Herrera Rodríguez’s work constructing a Xicanx methodology that is applicable across disciplines.

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Figures 3–5: Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Mitote (detail), 2010, mixed-media installation.

María Esther Fernández

challenge to the Western construction of the museum and is the first indication that two opposing epistemes are converging. Herrera Rodríguez’s artistic practice is an epistemological break from the institution and is best understood in the philosophical underpinnings that inform how she thinks of and works with the art object. Jesus Barraza explains that through the use of Indigenous aesthetics, artists are creating a “site of intervention…an indigenous understanding of site that destabilizes the history of colonialism and displacement.”14 Her creative process incorporates Indigenous ways of knowing and being that challenge the contemporary art museum’s understanding of the art object and its function. In looking at this epistemological difference, we can begin to understand how the museum marginalizes Indigenous artistic practices. Herrera Rodríguez’s practice, installation process, and resulting art object have the potential to disrupt contemporary art-museum practice because they require a new understanding of the art object and its function, which has implications for the curation and visual analysis of this work.

It is important to understand how intangible concepts like spirit and memory function as material, because it is in their activation during Herrera Rodríguez’s art pieces that the epistemic differences between her practice and the contemporary art museum are made clear. Herrera Rodríguez’s practice accesses the forgotten or the unknown through ceremonial acts, which activate the mundane cultural objects that have endured and remained in the present; Cherríe Moraga describes these objects as sacred because they carry knowledge and retain memory.15 Herrera Rodríguez’s use of them in her installations activates the spirit through memory, which is a sacred act. Mitote disrupts museum practice, not through the use of “unconventional” materials, but in how she activates them. This esoteric quality of the sacred act becomes material to her artistic practice, which requires it to be so in the curatorial process as well.

Her use of the copal—the introduction of water, earth, and fire into the gallery—is heavily policed by museum practice. In allowing new ways of knowing and being to inform curatorial practice, new lines of interpretation and inquiry emerge, expanding the visual landscape. It is important to understand how the spiritual is made material in artistic practice so that the visual analysis can be extended beyond the anthropological crutch often used by curators in their misreadings of this work. Curators’ inability to read these acts is 14. Jesus Barraza, thesis, Looking Back, Seeing Forward: Indigenous Tactics and the Development of Decolonial Aesthetic, 2016, California College of the Arts Library.

15. Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 204.

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what subjects this work to narrow dialogues around authenticity and essentializing themes of race and identity that fail to present the historically grounded complexity of the Chicanx community. Herrera Rodríguez employs the spiritual as material, and that is crucial to understanding the work and the ceremonial functions necessary for its installation and interpretation.

A key epistemological difference between Herrera Rodríguez and the museum is how their practices conceive of the art object. In the Nahuatl language, there is no direct translation for the word object.16 Herrera Rodríguez explains, “I don’t really think of [the material in my installations] as objects, I think of them as symbols, as part of a whole. Those things are not individual. So the meaning of them is of them together, not each thing that needs to be spoken about [as] a symptomatic list, which doesn’t indicate the whole relationship.”17 Contemporary art museums focus on materiality within the context of Western artistic practice. Although artists use unconventional materials in the museum, they are primarily understood as adding an aesthetic value, and their use is heavily monitored.18 Herrera Rodríguez selects material for its capacity to animate the spirit, for its ability to activate the space, which gives the art object a completely different function. For example, copal smudging, which is both a mundane and ceremonial practice, is used to cleanse the space. In addition, earth, mud, branches, and water are key materials in Herrera Rodríguez’s practice for their ability to represent and harness the spirit.

The museum commodifies the art object and therefore thinks of materials in terms of their collectibility, value, and aesthetic function.

Museums require, if they permit their use at all, that organic materials be secured in airtight containers over a certain period of time to sterilize them before they can be used for installation. The negotiation of material between the institution and Herrera Rodríguez exposes a fundamental difference in how they understand materiality. Museum practice requires organic materials to be mediated to preserve the sterile environment of the gallery, divorcing them from their ceremonial context and stripping them of their function. They dictate how these sacred materials can be used without regard to Herrera Rodríguez’s artistic practice. Her work requires that the museum reconsider its understanding of the art object’s materiality and function to prevent myopic policy from impacting cultural production. In addition, how she approaches these materials informs interpretation, 16. Nahuatl is the Mexica language predominantly spoken by the Aztecs, and there are many iterations of it spoken

by Nahuatl people in central Mexico and El Salvador.

Generally, Nahuatl is considered the native language of Xicanx people.

17. Celia Herrera Rodríguez, interview by María Esther Fernández, April 27, 2017.

18. Museums dictate what is conventional and deem some practices unconventional, leveraging policy to restrict the latter.

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Figure 6: Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Mitote (detail), 2010, mixed-media installation.

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so it is incumbent on the curator to understand opposing practices.

The integrity of Herrera Rodríguez’s spiritual artistic practice would fundamentally change should she have to adhere to strict policies in the creation of her installations. “If I can’t create these pieces the way I make them in community, then I can’t go to the gallery and make something different. That’s fake. To remove its function means to take the spirit out of it. To take the heart out of it.”19 The objects used in her installations are not selected solely for aesthetic purposes; they are used for their ability to harness memory and hold the spirit.

Herrera Rodríguez’s use of the object for its ability to animate the spirit is unconventional when considering how museums commodify the art object. Many of her objects are reused and repurposed in the creation of other installations, defying museum collection practices. Herrera Rodríguez’s motivation for creating these works is not for them to be permanently housed within the institution, sold, or reinstalled by a preparator in another exhibition. She creates these objects to provoke recognition in community, and to disrupt institutional practices that marginalize Indigenous ways of knowing and being. In Herrera Rodríguez’s practice, the art object’s importance is in its spiritual capacity, but for the contemporary art museum, it is a commodity.

For example, water is used in her installation, though not for its properties or aesthetic attributes; the physical form of the object is secondary to its spiritual function. It is used because it is a sacred element that embodies, represents, and holds the spirit. The ceremonial acts that inform her artistic practice not only reshape our understanding of the art object and its function, but also inform how the art piece holds space in the museum over the course of the exhibition.

The importance of how she constructs the altar or conducts the copal smudging is not only in the materiality that results, but also in the energy that it produces. To engage her practice in terms of the spiritual requires that the museum suspend its conception of materiality and mediate an experience for the viewer that is less focused on the visual and more on the visceral. 20 This (re)understanding of material impacts the ways in which curators work with the object, and how the museum conditions the experience for the viewer.

Celia Herrera Rodríguez’s artistic practice reconstitutes Indigenous spiritual practice for a diasporic Xicanx community, introducing alternative ways of knowing and being, bringing forth a new way for 19. Celia Herrera Rodríguez, interview by María Esther Fernández, November 6, 2017.

20. This can be mediated through curatorial choices in the selection of work, lighting, and informational text that can inform the viewer’s experience.

María Esther Fernández

curators and viewers to engage with the contemporary art object, and exposing how Western ideology is so deeply embedded in museum practice. Spiritual artistic practices create moments of disruption that intervene in existing curatorial practices, allowing for more equitable and curative models for exhibiting the work of marginalized communities. Herrera Rodríguez’s practice is a call toward the spiritual in a decolonial effort that has the potential to hold institutions accountable in recognizing other ways of knowing and being so as to develop curative practices that redress this marginalization. Interpreting Mitote requires relational approaches to curation to remediate the shortcomings of contemporary art-museum practice in equitably representing this work. The call is not only for more curators of color, but for a particular brand of curation that decentralizes Western ideology and leaves room for multiple epistemologies to inform a more curative curatorial practice.

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Carlos Francisco Jackson

As you enter Chicano Park, there are hundreds of murals, spaces, and performative acts that actively signify meaning in the park. The park is 7.4 acres and features an estimated eighty-nine murals that adorn highway pylons, handball courts, and almost all available wall space imaginable.

These murals range from low walls that one can sit on to pylons that are more than seven stories tall. There are playgrounds, rest areas, patchy grass lawns, public restrooms, and ceremonial and performance spaces, as well as picnic tables and herb gardens where families and the community rest, play, celebrate, sleep, and seek refuge (fig. 1). These are spaces that encourage the production of subjectivity, both visually and performatively.

Signifying this park as “Chicano” was a significant act tied to the ideas formed by the Chicano movement. The park was created through a community takeover on April 20, 1970, whereby Barrio Logan community members occupied the dirt plot of land under the newly constructed Coronado Bridge (State Route 75), using their bodies to stop the bulldozers from starting construction on a California Highway Patrol substation. Chicano Park sits underneath the Coronado Bridge and Interstate 5 freeway interchange, which cuts directly through Barrio Logan, San Diego’s oldest Mexican American/ Latino neighborhood. The occupation and formation of Chicano Park emerged out of the context of the Chicano movement.1 As a result, the park is both historically significant to a broad national intellectual and cultural public and contemporarily relevant to the local community2 (fig. 2).

The question of what the “Chicano” in “Chicano Park” signifies is complex and has no singular correct answer. But there are places within the park where one can view how various cultural workers 1. Several texts demonstrate the historic links between the formation of Chicano Park and a broader national Chicano movement: Eva Cockcroft, “Story of Chicano Park,” Aztlan: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research, vol. 15, no. 1 (1984): 79–103; Marilyn Mumford, Chicano Park, 1988, VHS; and Isidro Ortiz, “¡Sí Se Puede!: Chicana/o Activism in San Diego at Century’s End,” Chicano San Diego: Cultural Space and the Struggle for Justice, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 129–157.

2. In January 2017, in one of the last acts of the Obama administration, Chicano Park was named a National Historical Landmark and can now be read as a living museum to the local community and broader Chicano movement. Gary Warth, “Chicano Park Named National Historic Landmark,” San Diego Union-Tribune, January 11, 2017, accessed February 5, 2018, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/ sd-me-chicano-historic-20170111-story.html.

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Figure 1: Chicano Park Day, April, year unknown.

California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA 12). Photographer unknown.

Figure 2: Chicano Park Takeover, August 1970.

California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA 12). Photographer unknown.

Carlos Francisco Jackson

have argued, fought, and debated for a signification that is generous, generative, and oriented toward social justice. These debates center on whether “Chicano” is an enclosure or is a plastic sign open to continued signification. An enclosure of “Chicano” would be to signify it as a Mexican American–specific nationalist and patriarchal subjectivity. “Chicano” as a plastic signifier is open to signification and representative of an ideality that seeks to manifest futurity. The binary I have outlined is arbitrary and simply serves as a starting point for navigating how language is formed within Chicano Park. This debate should be generative, encouraging dialectical engagement with the visual and performative culture so that one can walk through the park while asking, is “Chicano” an enclosure?

Out of the enormous scope of muralism and culture visualized and performed within the park, there is one pylon in Chicano Park that contains two murals, Leyes: La Familia and Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, that visually represent the debate over signification of the sign “Chicano.” This pylon is one of two that were assigned to the Royal Chicano Air Force, an influential Sacramento-based Chicano Art collective, to paint during the second wave of muralism that occurred in 1975. 3 The pylon that holds Leyes: La Familia and Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky is approximately three stories tall, with a long, narrow shaft that crosses a geometric T-shaped structure supporting State Route 75.

If you approach this pylon from the Logan Avenue parking lot, the ground will subtly shake from the noise and traffic that bears down on you from both State Route 75 and Interstate 5. You’ll first encounter a mural titled Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, originally painted in 1975 and restored in 2012 by Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Rosalinda Montez Palacios, Irma Lerma Barbosa, Glory Galindo Sanchez, Nayeli Guzman, Veracruz Sanchez, Montserrat Granados, and Patricia Aguayo. 4 Initially, the Royal Chicano Air Force leadership planned to have a group composed only of men take direction on the four potential murals that would result from the two assigned pylons.

Having been denied access to representative leadership, this group of women left before their male RCAF counterparts in 1975, occupied one side of this pylon, and began their own mural. As a result of this occupation, RCAF leadership court-martialed these artists for circumventing the collective’s decision-making processes. This is well documented in Marilyn Mumford’s 1988 documentary, Chicano Park, 3. An important study of the Royal Chicano Air Force was recently published. See Ella Maria Diaz, Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

4. Barbara Desmangles and Antonia Perez were part of the 1975 effort but did not participate in its 2012 restoration. Gail Pérez, “Women Hold Up Half of Chicano Park,” La Prensa, June 29, 2012, accessed February 5, 2018, http://laprensa-sandiego.org/featured/womenhold-up-half-of-chicano-park/.

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in which Jose Montoya, RCAF co-founder and early patriarch of the Chicano movement, describes the reasoning for the court martial while making light of women’s critiques of patriarchy within the collective. The documentary treats Montoya’s discussion lightly, in a humorous tone. Yet when the mural was restored in 2012, the local community newspaper La Prensa did an interview with the lead artists of Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky in which they made clear the court martial was anything but humorous.

Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky can be read as an occupation that mirrors the larger occupation that formed Chicano Park (figs. 3 and 4). It is an occupation that sought to create space for subjectivities and methodologies that had been excluded from full representation. The 1975 iteration of Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky foregrounded female agency. Within the T-shaped pylon structure, women crouch in the narrow space, metaphorically holding up the sky. Their arms are extended and with little effort uphold the sky, which is simultaneously the freeway. Down the pylon’s shaft, a woman holds a child who sits within a vessel that simultaneously represents a map of the Global South. Further down, the pylon’s symbolic representations of Chicano indigeneity visually intersect with two naked women playing flutes. Throughout the mural, water is subtly represented through a solid blue background and waves that rest at the bottom of the mural. In 2012, a majority of the original artists would return to Chicano Park to restore this mural and in doing so would activate water as a generative life force and as a precarious commodity that has been rendered inaccessible to historically marginalized communities.

In 1975, the artists of Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky occupied one side of the RCAF pylon and resignified “Chicano” to “Chicana/o.”

I read Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky as a visual articulation of this signifying gesture. The gesture works against enclosure of “Chicano” as an essentialist and nationalist signifier. Instead, it argues for “Chicano” as a plastic sign that is continually in formation. Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky accomplishes this through strategic absences.

In this mural, heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity are rendered obsolete by a foregrounding of feminist agency that is transnational.

Within the realm of feminist interventions of the 1960s and 1970s, Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky may slip into tropes of women as generative, productive forces. Yet within the context of Chicano Park,

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Figure 3: Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, in progress, 1975. California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA 12). Photographer unknown.

Figure 4: Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, 1975. [Mural on right.] California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA 12). Photographer

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and specifically this pylon, Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky is a radical intervention that visualizes Chicana agency and representation. 5 Walk around Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky and on the opposite side of its pylon. You’ll be standing before Jose Montoya’s mural Leyes: La Familia (fig. 5). This mural is composed of three figures: man, woman, and child. The man stands behind the woman, who in turn stands behind the boy. The boy stands fully exposed before the viewer, holding a book with the title “LEYES.” The man towers above the woman, his arms extended outward across the top of the T-shaped pylon. His arms are free and the pylon is his. The woman, who stands before the man, looks off to the side with her arms tightly bound to the boy, whose arms are tightly bound to his book. The book’s title, “LEYES,” translates as “laws.” For the boy, this book is his instructional manual for participation within the Chicano movement.

The Chicano movement serves as the contextual atmosphere for the mural. The family represented in Leyes is not isolated. They stand as a metonym for subjectivity within the broader Chicano movement, which is represented in the background of the mural through the United Farm Workers logo. The UFW Huelga Eagle was initially a union-specific logo that emerged during the organization’s formation in 1965. Between 1965, the formative moment of the Chicano movement, and 1975, the moment in which Leyes was painted, the Huelga Eagle was resignified from a union-specific logo to an expression that signifies the broader Chicano movement. Within Leyes, the movement is patriarchal and heteronormative, whereby entry into this subjectivity and method is learned through a careful study of its “laws.”

Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky was painted first through an occupation. Leyes, coming second, became a reinscription of heteropatriarchal nationalism. Within the context of this pylon, Leyes is a direct response to the agency represented in Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky. Within Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, women’s arms uphold the sky, generate new life, and produce culture. Within Leyes, the woman’s arms are bound to the child. In Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, men are absent; within Leyes, the man towers above the family occupying the pylon. On its own, Leyes follows many tropes of early Chicano muralism, but within its context on this one pylon in Chicano Park, it reads as an effort to bind feminism through a patriarchal pronouncement of Chicano nationalism.

5. Here Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s article is one of a cohort that argues for intersectional feminist interventions into Chicano–Xicanx language. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, But I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chica-nos (Girl,

Us)/Chicanas—Into the Movement Script,” Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81–96.

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Figure 5: Jose Montoya, Leyes: La Familia, circa 1975. California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA 12). Photographer unknown.

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Figure 6: Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Rosalinda Montez Palacios, Irma Lerma Barbosa, Glory Galindo Sanchez, Nayeli Guzman, Veracruz Sanchez, Montserrat Granados, and Patricia Aguayo, Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, originally painted in 1975, restored in 2012. [Mural on right.] Author’s photograph.

The question of what motivated Leyes persists. Guisela Latorre, author of Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California, notes that Montoya created Leyes during a time of “growing divisions within the Chicano movement as a threat to the initial ideological unity of and integrity that defined the early work in Chicano Park.”6 The takeover of the pylon and the creation of Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky are representative of a challenge to ideological unity for the Chicano movement. The divisions represented by Latorre are evidence of the long-standing debate over the meaning, goals, and intentions of the Chicano movement, and can be read as a struggle over which ideology, strategy, and subjectivity will create generative pathways for future social-justice engagement.

In 2012, Leyes: La Familia and Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky were restored as part of a $1.6 million grant to restore and maintain the complete integrity of the murals within Chicano Park as part of a multi-decade effort to seismically retrofit the Coronado Bridge and Interstate 5 freeway interchange. Leyes was restored in exactitude.

6. Guisela Latorre, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 164.

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Figure 7: Jose Montoya, Leyes: La Familia, originally painted in 1975, restored in 2012. [Mural on left.] Author’s photograph.

This stands in stark contrast to Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky, which was significantly updated with deeper indigenous symbolism and visual references to the contemporary material conditions of the community (figs. 6 and 7).

In 2012, no opportunity was taken to imbue Leyes: La Familia with new meaning, again reaffirming its patriarchal vision. On the opposite side of the pylon, Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky advances its initial intervention of “Chicana/o” visuality by molding the sign to “Xicanx.”

Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky achieves this resignification by destabilizing nationalist and gendered scripts for a focus on decolonization that is rooted in the material conditions of the community. Within this single pylon, the viewer engages two drastically different signifying practices for Chicano subjectivity and practice. Both visions, sitting back to back and holding up State Route 75, are debating for control over how the sign “Chicano” is to be signified.

The most significant change in the 2012 restoration of Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky is the representation of water as a decolonial

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ceremonial element and as a precarious commodity within the Chicano community. As in the original, women still crouch, holding up the sky within the narrow T-shaped space of the pylon, but now these women are more explicitly transnational and intergenerational indigenous women who uphold the same sky that produces water.

The water manifests as decolonial indigenous motifs, both iconic and primordial. While the imagery in this mural could remain within the realm of the symbolic and metaphorical, the artists ground water as an enclosed commodity that has been rendered precarious for historically marginalized communities. At the bottom of the mural, standing on the ground and at eye level with a passerby or viewer, a woman stands and holds a five-gallon water bottle in front of a water dispensary. Text along the side of the water dispensary reads, “El Agua es Sagrada. El Agua es La Vida.” (The Water is Sacred. Water is Life.)

She stands in stark contrast to those at the top holding the sky. Both are exerting labor, but the women holding the sky exert very little effort. It is as if the sky were weightless. Yet the figure at the bottom is clearly weighed down by the five-gallon water bottle, struggling to walk forward toward the viewer, so as to persist.

Due to the divergent approaches to restoration, Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky can be read as an incomplete mural still in formation, mirroring the incomplete, ongoing signification of the sign “Chicano.” The fixity and static nature of Leyes gestures toward “Chicano” as an enclosure. This divergence highlights a larger debate over the role of a mural within a community context.7 Some approach murals as monuments to a moment in history that should be maintained so as to preserve memory. Others see the deterioration of the mural as an opportunity to reimagine the mural with relevance to an ever-changing contemporary community context. The first approach naturalizes meaning, while the second views meaning as a social construction.

The generative power of these Chicano murals is in their form as a community effort that is fragile and temporally subject to deterioration by the natural elements and climate. The emergent period of Chicano muralism was not sponsored by the state and often was enacted with minimal supplies and funding, and painted with acrylic paints that frequently lacked any coatings or surface fixes.

As a result, the Chicano murals were easily subject to deterioration, making them temporal art objects. Chicano muralism’s generative 7. Here I am referencing efforts such as ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals Under Siege, an exhibition and catalog that charts the deterioration and erasure of the early generation of Chicano murals. Erin M. Curtis, Jessica Hough, and Guisela Latorre, ¡Murales

Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals Under Siege (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2017).

Carlos Francisco Jackson

expression rests in the necessity of either updating the murals after they begin to deteriorate or starting anew. While Chicano murals can appear as fixed visual objects, if they are outdoors and within a community, they are in fact deteriorating from the moment of their creation. The 2012 restoration of Leyes as a restatement of the original is an intentional act that reaffirms the mural’s visuality as an enclosure of Chicano subjectivity.

The question of how artists were to consider the restoration process is addressed in a short introductory essay to the Chicano Park Mural Restoration Technical Manual by David Avalos, one of the early muralists in Chicano Park. Avalos describes discussing the restoration process with Guillermo Aranda, a fellow Chicano Park muralist, who shares that he’d prefer to think of the restoration process as a revitalization rather than a mechanical effort to replicate the original mural. In speaking of his discussion with Aranda, Avalos states, “His dilemma, like all invited to re-create their original work, is how do you ‘restore’ a living memory?”8 Avalos also speaks with Salvador Roberto Torres, a key organizer of the early mural campaign, who shares his opinion “that the park artists must consider the original murals incomplete.”9 Both Torres and Aranda speak to Chicano muralism’s lack of permanence, identifying its incompleteness as an opportunity to make historic murals relevant to the material conditions of the community. For a mural to remain relevant, it must be updated, imbued with the character and spirit of the changing contemporary context. In this regard, Avalos, Aranda, and Torres are arguing for the mural to be activated as an agent for constructing language.

By delimiting one pylon, cutting it out of the mass of culture that exists within the park, one can locate the moments where debate over signification of the “Chicano” in Chicano Park exist. Women Who Hold Up Half the Sky and Leyes: La Familia are speaking to each other through the concrete mass that separates them. In speaking to each other, they are simultaneously speaking to each one of the viewers who passes by to intentionally look at the murals and/or to simply seek refuge in the park. These two murals are making visual arguments for what the Chicano movement was, is, and can still be. Their debate reminds the viewer to, at all costs, resist enclosure and see oneself as a producer of language. Through the continuing construction of language, futures are built.

8. David Avalos, “Introduction,” Chicano Park Mural Restoration Technical Manual, ed. Victor Ochoa (San Diego: Caltrans District 11 and the Chicano Park Steering Committee, 2006), 8.

9. Ibid.

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Charmaine Koh

Tidy rows of flats peep from behind long corridors, their doors and windows forming a pattern of alternating squares and rectangles (fig. 1). Little signs of everyday life dot the scene: potted plants adding touches of green here and there, laundry hung quaintly out to dry.

The horizontals of the corridors intersect with the verticals of external pillars, composing the image’s contents within a neat grid. Aik Beng Chia’s photograph of an old apartment block, posted on Instagram, typifies a mode of portrayal that has become ubiquitous in recent imagery of Singapore’s public housing, firmly entrenching the latter within the popular Singaporean visual lexicon.1 Unlike standard zoomed-out formats that present buildings in their entirety and in perspective, this mode of portrayal comprises cropped views of just the front façades of public-housing blocks. In its flatness, it emphasizes patterns in the blocks’ gridded structures; by zooming in, it makes visible the everyday details that would otherwise be lost amid the blocks’ immensity. As shorthand, I will dub it the gridded mode of portrayal. Gridded images of the public-housing blocks—or Housing and Development Board (HDB) blocks, as they are called—pop up on social-media feeds, win photography competitions, retail as collectible prints, and adorn books, shop displays, clothes, and crockery. A simple Google search for recent HDB photography turns up ample examples of such imagery (fig. 2).

Often, these images are contextualized as windows into Singaporean life, whether through titles, marketing blurbs, journalistic descriptions, or social-media hashtags. Chia’s photograph, for instance, is written about in an online magazine as proof of the warmth, community, and character of the Kampong Arang estate, “a cornerstone of Singaporean identity.”2 Such characterizations exemplify how the HDB estates have become synonymous in the popular imagination with Singaporean-ness.

1. Chia is a graphic designer who started photographing everyday sights in Singapore when he began using a smartphone in 2008, and has since achieved local renown. He shoots mainly using a mobile phone.

2. Daphne Boey, “Singapore Through a Viewfinder,” Going Places Singapore, September 11, 2014, https://www. goingplacessingapore.sg/people/2014/ABC.aspx.

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Figure 1: An HDB block in Kampong Arang, Singapore.

Photograph: Aik Beng Chia, in “Singapore Through a Viewfinder,” Going Places Singapore, September 11, 2014.

Figure 2: First twenty results of a Google image search for “recent HDB photography,” January 30, 2018.

Charmaine Koh

In this essay, I reflect on the role that the gridded mode of portrayal has played in shifting popular perceptions of the HDB estates and Singaporean identity. Many other factors—social as well as political—undergird this shift, but I focus on its visuality, as this is a significant yet understudied aspect. I consider how, on one hand, by revisualizing the HDB estates, the gridded mode of portrayal plucks them out of their perceived banality and affirms their everyday-ness as a source of shared experience and belonging. Yet, on the other hand, it risks constraining and fixing notions of what counts as authentically Singaporean into a specific time, place, and way of life.

Just over a decade ago, the HDB estates were neither subjects of popular visual representation nor trendy signifiers of Singaporean-ness. Whether Singapore even had much of an identity was a persistent, open question. As a tiny, young, and globalized city–state, with a population of largely immigrant origin, Singapore could seem like an entirely modern, postcolonial construct, lacking any of the grand histories and natural wonders that—as cultural geographer Tim Edensor points out—people often turn to for sources of national identity. 3 The HDB estates had exacerbated this perceived lack of identity, as they had replaced entire neighborhoods, cultural sites, and shared ways of life. 4 In less than half a lifetime, the percentage of the population living in public housing had skyrocketed—from 9 percent in 1960 when the HDB was established, to 80 percent in 1985, a figure that holds true today. 5 Early HDB estates were built in a modernist style that made them appear generic, and with a view to speed, functionality, space- and cost-efficiency, in order to resolve what had then been a long-standing housing crisis.6 They were a far cry from the rambling kampong (traditional villages) and messy shophouses of yore. Their resulting reputation as prosaic and characterless persisted despite design variations in newer estates.7 The HDB estates had become the dominant feature of Singapore’s landscape, and home to most Singaporeans— many of whom had grown up in them, knowing nothing of kampong 3. Most Singaporeans trace their roots back to immigrants who arrived only after British colonization in 1819, and who, until Singapore’s independence in 1965, largely spoke different languages and had largely separate cultures. Singapore has thus experienced much angst over its national identity, a situation exacerbated by its exposure to globalization as a small, open economy. For Edensor, see Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 1–12.

4. Many older dwellings, like kampong (traditional villages) and shophouses, were demolished to make way for the HDB estates due to Singapore’s severe land constraints (at 278 square miles, it is smaller than New York City).

5. See Singapore’s Housing and Development Board, “HDB History and Towns,” last modified November 23, 2017, http://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/ history; and Valerie Chew, “Housing and Development Board,” last modified 2009, http://eresources.nlb.gov. sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1589_2009-10-26.html.

6. At the time of the HDB’s founding in 1960, the majority of Singaporeans lived in overcrowded slums and squatter settlements that posed health and safety concerns.

7. Newer HDB estates from the 1990s and later have been built with an emphasis on each estate having its own distinct visual characteristics, and also incorporate increasing levels of lifestyle amenities.

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and shophouses. Yet they were widely perceived as devoid of both culture and visual interest.

But at the same time, as the HDB estates housed the majority of Singaporeans, they formed a common ground that facilitated the everyday production of collective identity. The everyday, as Edensor observes, does this by generating “shared meanings, habits, rituals, and ways of speaking which comprise resources that facilitate communication and establish a sense of national belonging.”8 As the primary site of the everyday in Singapore, the HDB estates have helped to shape new, shared ways of life that, with all their quirks and peculiarities, have become markers of Singaporean-ness. In the past decade or so, with the rise of social media and smartphone cameras, the HDB estates have also entered the endless exchange of online imagery produced by individuals documenting their lives and surroundings. Arising out of this circulation, the gridded mode of portrayal facilitates popular recognition of the recognizably Singaporean everyday that the HDB estates have become home to.

How does the gridded mode of portrayal make the HDB estates appear noteworthy where they did not before? The short answer is that it gives the estates graphic appeal, which plays to contemporary sensibilities that are increasingly influenced by design. Such appeal is difficult to achieve in zoomed-out landscape formats that depict the HDB blocks in their three-dimensional entirety, as is typical of older images like what one might see in newspapers—the main source of imagery in public circulation prior to the internet. The following photograph from The Straits Times shows the Toa Payoh estate in 1969 (fig. 3). Architecturally, the HDB blocks here are similar to the one in Kampong Arang that Chia photographed—large, rectangular slabs with long, open corridors running across their front facades. However, here they appear cold, mundane, and anonymous, their repetitiousness not composed into pattern but overwhelming the horizon, and their giant size dwarfing the people below into barely visible specks. It does not help, of course, that they are in black-and-white, as were all images in Singaporean newspapers before the 2000s. If this was how the HDB estates usually looked, it is understandable why they were perceived as a cultural void.

In contrast, the gridded mode of portrayal makes the HDB estates attractive by focusing on individual blocks, abstracting them into patterns, and miniaturizing them into more human-scale, 8. Edensor, 20.

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Figure 3: Toa Payoh housing estate in 1969.

Photograph: The Straits Times.

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relatable tableau. This mechanism can be understood in terms of art historian Rosalind Krauss’s analysis of grids as visual devices.

Krauss observes that, “In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface.

In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree.”9 Although she writes in the context of modernist fine art, her observation also applies to gridded images like Chia’s photograph. Chia’s photograph does not attempt to give a sense of the HDB block’s dimensions. Its flatness is such that even shadows, which usually give objects depth and grounding, here become part of the overall pattern of alternating shapes and colors—a matter of aesthetics. Krauss further writes that the grid “present[s] [its subject] as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric…operating…outward, compelling our acknowledgment of a world beyond the frame.”10 As a visual fragment of the HDB block, Chia’s photograph appears indicative of life in the HDB estates at large, even as it crops out the reality of what lies beyond. In the absence of actual information, one is led to extrapolate the intersecting lines outwards, complete with cute potted plants, tidy doors and windows, laundry hung quaintly out to dry, the odd bicycle or two, and national flags draped across balustrades. Together, they suggest that life in the HDB estates is rather picturesque. The photograph’s cropping and zooming in also allows the viewer to discern a woman in a doorway sufficiently well to imagine what she might be doing—her homely attire suggests she is not going anywhere in particular; perhaps she has come out to take in the cool, night air; perhaps it is National Day, as the display of flags would suggest, and she wants to catch a glimpse of the fireworks. Far from being inhuman or dull, the HDB block in Chia’s photograph holds a story.

What does the gridded mode of portrayal’s story of the everyday comprise? The scene in Chia’s photograph is simple, peaceful; it breathes with life, but also repose, the lit windows speaking of families back in their flats after a day’s work. The old HDB block is neither the most glamorous nor the most convenient to live in, as the hanging laundry attests to, but it is home. In its age—for it is among the earlier HDB estates to be built—it is indelibly linked to older and poorer generations of Singaporeans, those who, as popular discourse goes, worked hard to build the nation in its early years of independence. It 9. Rosalind Krauss, Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art (New York: The Pace Gallery, 1978).

10. Krauss.

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is also linked to childhood via the humble beginnings of many who have since moved into newer, fancier abodes. Chia’s photograph weaves all of this into a portrait of a way of life, one that, despite its urban character, bears distinctly pastoral qualities.

The pastoral—traditionally a convention of landscape portrayal but applied also to cities—romanticizes ordinary dwellings and ways of life.11 In doing so, it can powerfully shape collective and even national identities. As communications scholar Greg Dickinson puts it, the pastoral image “combines a sense of place…and time…rooting the nation into a resonant aesthetic that structures social, temporal, and geographic relations.”12 This is precisely what Chia’s photograph does. It paints a picture of a distinctly Singaporean everyday, set in the HDB estates, that is filled with down-to-earth but cute simplicity, hard work but also peace and repose, and a sense of home and belonging—an idyll of Singaporean life that entices not just visually, but ideologically.

Pastoral modes of representation have been criticized for the way in which they at times appropriate the trappings of less privileged communities’ ways of life as material for consumption by more privileged outsiders—for instance, aristocrats decorating their mansions with pastoral paintings of peasants in the fields. It seems unlikely that such class dynamics underlie the gridded mode of portrayal; given the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans living in the HDB estates, many of those taking pictures of the estates and sharing them online probably also inhabit them. However, this does not mean that the pastoral representation of the HDB estates is entirely unproblematic.

The HDB pastoral bears striking similarities to the American pastoral of which Dickinson writes, and which he locates in the nostalgically imagined past—that of the pre-World War II homestead farm, imagined as a site of pioneering perseverance, but also leisure and retreat, hearth and home.13 All are qualities that I identified earlier in Chia’s photograph. As noted, older HDB estates are widely associated with older generations of Singaporeans, and with childhood. They also differ in design from newer ones—crucially, the latter lack the long, open corridors that are indispensable to the visuals of the HDB pastoral, as without them the patterns of everyday life in the estates cannot be clearly displayed. Moreover, older HDB estates are themselves now falling prey to the wrecking ball amid Singapore’s unrelenting march of urban renewal; some have already been demolished.

11. For example, see William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935; reprint, New York: New Directions: 1974).

12. Greg Dickinson, Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015), 66.

13. Dickinson, 87–88.

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The resulting sense of both actual and impending loss has motivated popular efforts to document older HDB estates in particular.14 On one hand, the nostalgia of the HDB pastoral forms a bridge with the ever-shifting yardstick of Singapore’s past—a band-aid on the wound left by the times, places, and ways of life that so quickly evaporate. It is what Dickinson terms a “memory image,” which “offer the possibility and hope for reconnection” amid the profound dislocations of the present.15 On the other hand, by seeking recourse in an imagined past, the HDB pastoral also constitutes—to again borrow Dickinson’s words—“a walling off of the present…[whereby] the memories offered and engaged in these spaces are not designed to open residents to new possibilities or imagine new ways of making homes, but rather to create spaces in which there is a hope of return to a simpler and clearer past.”16 In other words, the nostalgic HDB pastoral fossilizes the ideal Singaporean everyday in the mythic good-old days of the older HDB estates, literally and metaphorically cropping out the messy contradictions of actual everyday life.

State and commercial interests alike have leveraged the gridded mode of portrayal and the HDB pastoral in their marketing, thereby further fixing a certain ideal of everyday Singaporean life. In the case of state narratives, as literary scholar Angelia Poon points out, Singapore’s government has long seen the HDB estates as a vehicle for its nation-building goals, utilizing various homeownership policies to promote a multiracial society of hardworking citizens, centered on the nuclear family.17 It has also fostered a discourse around the estates as the country’s metaphorical heartland, a once-controversial term that has come to signify “authenticity, political centrality, and a particular notion of the local.”18 The HDB pastoral endows this notion of the local with specific visual contours, presenting the state with a means of giving its vision of the nation an aesthetically compelling form.

The cover image of Living the Singapore Story (fig. 4), a book commissioned by the National Library Board in conjunction with a nationwide campaign to celebrate Singapore’s fiftieth year of independence, provides an example of how state narratives can capitalize on the HDB pastoral. The book comprises a collection of stories about the lives of Singaporeans from various walks of life; echoing this, the cover image pictures the nation as centered on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

14. For examples of such efforts, see Natasha Ann Zachariah, “The Ubiquitous HDB Flat Has Become a Muse for Photographers in Singapore,” The Straits Times, April 8, 2017, http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/home-design/think-outside-the-block.

15. Dickinson, 30.

16. Dickinson, 93.

17. Angelia Poon, “Common Ground, Multiple Claims: Representing and Constructing Singapore’s ‘Heartland,’” Asian Studies Review, vol. 37, no. 4 (2013): 561–562.

18. Poon, 561.

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Figure 4: Cover image of Living the Singapore Story: Celebrating Our 50 Years, 1965–2015, a book commissioned by the National Library Board, and published by the Straits Times Press in 2015.

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Figure 5a: Cover image of HDB: Homes of Singapore, a photobook by KEYAKISMOS and Tomohisa Miyauchi, published by KEYAKISMOS in 2017.

Figure 5b: Display in Uniqlo, Orchard Central, Singapore. August 2017. Photograph by Pong Siu Qey.

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Figure 5c: Display in Uniqlo, Orchard Central, Singapore (detail). August 2017. Photograph by Pong Siu Qey.

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The pastoral tropes that were a subtle undertone in Chia’s photograph are here amplified through highly constructed narrative and pictorial elements. The sense of family and community is magnified through the sight of multiple groups of people across multiple floors of the HDB block, including young and old, and encompassing all of Singapore’s main racial categories (Chinese, Malay, and Indian). An air of leisure pervades the scene—people are chatting, strolling about, playing with a ball, toting a birdcage, or pausing midway through hanging laundry to greet a neighbor. The HDB block is, of course, an old one, with all its associations of the past, pioneering generations of Singaporeans, and childhood. The dominant colors of red and white, echoing those of Singapore’s flag, and the words “Living the Singapore Story,” blazoned across the rows of corridors like writing on the lines of a page, stamp all of these pastoral contents and connotations as a portrait of the nation.

In the commercial realm, the HDB pastoral has been harnessed to market consumer products, both directly through gridded images of the HDB estates on prints, books, clothes, and collectibles, and indirectly through styles and objects associated with it. Figures 5a, b, and c show this dynamic at play in the marketing first of a photo book, and subsequently of products by Uniqlo, an international, mass-market clothing company that originated in Japan.

Figure 5a shows the cover of a photo book titled HDB: Homes of Singapore, by KEYAKISMOS and Tomohisa Miyauchi.19 A photograph of an old HDB block fills the cover, depicted in the familiar gridded mode of portrayal, and evoking similar themes of a simple, serene, and picturesque everyday life. Figure 5b shows the same photograph— albeit a fuller version of it—printed onto an enormous floor-to-ceiling poster that proclaims “CELEBRATE HOME” in bold red against the white of the HDB block, recalling the colors of Singapore’s flag. Part of a display in a Uniqlo store in Singapore during August 2017, the month of the country’s National Day, the poster suggests that to celebrate home and nation, the customer should buy Uniqlo’s products. Alternatively, for S$53.50 (US$40), one could buy the book itself, displayed in front of the poster on a round, tiled table like those found in old HDB void decks, complete with an old-fashioned enamel mug and a Chinese chess board of the type that older Chinese Singaporean men would typically play on these tables to while away the time (fig. 5c).

Setting aside the issue of a dominant foreign brand co-opting notions 19. KEYAKISMOS are a pair of Japanese artists, and Miyauchi is a Japanese architect. All live in Singapore.

KEYAKISMOS independently published the book— which features the interiors of 118 HDB flats—in 2017, with funds from an Indiegogo campaign.

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of localness (which is specific to this case), the general problem with such commodification of the HDB pastoral is that it elevates a particular style of everyday life as what one should aspire to as a Singaporean, and ties the attainment of this to particular products. Living the ideal Singaporean everyday then becomes fraught with issues of access—a matter of who can afford it.

Thinking back to Edensor’s theories, one would expect the everyday, in its “open-ended, fluid, and generative” nature, to give rise to a sense of national identity that is likewise dynamic. 20 To some extent, the gridded mode of portrayal and the HDB pastoral that it conjures are proof of this. Their emergence demonstrates the potential of average Singaporeans’ engagement with their daily surroundings—aided by digital means of image production and circulation—to transcend essentialist notions of culture as inhering in premodernity, and to see value in their everyday environments. The result is an organic, ground-up validation of the shared patterns of everyday life arising out of the HDB estates, and the collective identity that these produce.

However, as the HDB pastoral is harnessed in state narratives and commercial marketing to privilege a particular version of this world, it risks re-fossilizing Singaporean identity into the imagined past of the old HDB estates, with a nostalgic vision of how everyday life should be—an uncomplicated idyll of hard work rewarded with leisure, centered on family and community. Visualizing the everyday of the HDB estates hence cuts both ways—dynamically generating a sense of Singaporean identity that was once found lacking, but also re-congealing it into a static still life.

20. Edensor, 23.

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The surface of an artwork may beckon touch but rarely gives it. This is the unrealizable desire of the photograph.

A delicate, descriptive rendering—of wood, a softly worn book, or a glossy snapshot—will never give tactile satisfaction.

The objects in a still life cannot be held, felt, or smelled. One can only imagine memories of their density, softness, or rough edges through a mediated visual. The matte surface of a photographic print seems to exude the soft glow of daylight filling a studio, as if each print in its frame on the floor is a window that may be reached through. But the surface cannot be breached, as with a memory that can never be known or seen closely enough (fig. 1).

Leslie Hewitt’s photographic series of in-studio assemblages, Still Life, explores dynamics of collective memory. Hewitt arranges a library of archival and everyday materials and photographs those arrangements for the camera. Each photograph rests inside a large wooden frame and features a square of wood, a critical Civil Rightsera book atop two other anonymous books, and a rotating selection of vernacular photographs, citrus fruits, and other ephemera.

Through the qualities of the photographic object, archival research, found photographs, and sculptural arrangements, Hewitt addresses the multiplicity of personal and collective memory as retained in and shaped by visual culture. The Still Life series explores legacies of the Civil Rights Movement through photographic and sculptural means. The arrangement of different memories forms a new, changing, sometimes disjunctive whole. Hewitt’s (re)arrangement and (re) photography are active processes of remembering: ways to read histories, evolve them, and keep them alive.

Hewitt’s photographs lean against the wall and floor, resting unattached in heavy wooden frames. At a first glance, the photographs seem identical. However, looking at the other images reveals their object system: a block of wood, a small stack of books, a rotating cast of photographs, and a cut lemon. The meaning constructed in Hewitt’s work is poetic and open. There are few clear indicators

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Figure 1. Leslie Hewitt, Untitled (Median) , 2013.

From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

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of the specificity of photographs (who is in them, or where), leaving them less as specifically personal considerations and more like broad questions about the tenuousness of memory. “Much of my work creates relationships between images and objects whose connection is not necessarily apparent,” Hewitt writes. “Elements that seem dissimilar, when paired in a formal space, reveal unexpected affinities.”1 The arrangements interweave objects of different origin, without distinguishing what is Hewitt’s and what is found. Slight shifts in arrangement underscore the slippery nature of memory—its inevitable cracks and conflicts in collective remembering. The stark similarity between the photographs is what beckons for a closer look.

Differences are foregrounded and become the entry point to objects occupying multiple meanings. Similarity and repetition also speak to Hewitt’s hand, placing objects in conversation with one another in different dialogues within subtle (re)arrangements.

The square of wood in the center of each photograph recalls the shape of snapshots commonly found in the 1950s and ’60s, the wood’s blank surface simultaneously a void and a possibility. It is a receiving surface for meaning derived from object relationships and the viewer’s specific library of personal and collective memories.

Constructed from the same maple as the photograph’s frame, the wood references the function of framing devices, calling to mind photographic process as well as museological presentation. The plywood presents a moment of pause within the photograph, one that allows imaginative possibility for any who view it. One may attempt to read Hewitt’s work by deducing the significative relationships between objects and images, but the centering of the wooden square obstructs and interrupts this possibility. The blank wooden square is almost frustratingly ambiguous. It leaves the photographs intentionally open and available to the limitations and conflicts of memory.

The wood and objects around it become a site of departure to Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory. Postmemory explores modalities of working with inherited memories in ways that neither appropriate previous generational experiences nor let the past supersede the present impact of those histories by exclusively elevating the memories of previous generations. 2 Hirsch also identifies archives as recurring artistic material for artists working within postmemory.

Central to these works is the transformation of the original meaning of existing objects to connect to and stand in for elements of 1. Leslie Hewitt, “Leslie Hewitt Talks about Untitled (Structures),” Artforum.com, December 15, 2012, https:// www.artforum.com/words/id=38369.

2. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writ-

ing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2012), 35.

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the artist’s history. These found materials become pathways and possibilities to (re)envision established narratives in the artists’ lives.

This found material often contends with an absence (of a narrative, of information, of a significant person) through the presence of an object, whether photographic, text-based, or otherwise. 3 The assembly of objects from different origins alludes to the composition of memory, a collection of different, sometimes disjunctive, parts that add up to a continually evolving whole. In this sense, though Hewitt’s autobiographical experience is certainly a part of the work (or perhaps an origin point), it is not the single or root meaning.

Memory can also be passed outside of familial lines, a fact that is particularly salient when community works as a source of historical record to augment or counter institutional history. Hewitt’s work accesses postmemory by arranging a space in which the Civil Rights Movement and history are not defined within a single narrative.

Multiplicity of meaning underscores memory’s particular mutability when affected by the arrangement of information. Firsthand memory is not the singularly defining historical narrative, thus opening entry to postmemory.

In the lower third of Untitled (Perception) is a stack of worn hardcover books (fig. 2). The only book whose title is discernible is The Fire Next Time, which rests atop two other hardcover books, their inward-facing spines a pedestal on which James Baldwin’s text rests, symbolizing all that led to its writing. The book’s precarious physical form will continue to age, to the point where the already-degrading title will no longer be readable; fraying threads and cracked glue will further wear away to dismantle the binding holding together the pages. The delicate state of the book transforms with the passage of time: marks of wear signaling hands that have held it and turned its pages, frayed edges developed from the transportation of the object across land and time, discoloration from the sun bearing down on a dust jacket that will eventually become lost or discarded.

Throughout The Fire Next Time, Baldwin illuminates the psychological impact of a raced society on national culture, identity, and the human experience. He raises the impact of dominant cultural narratives of race on both Black and white communities, underscoring that systemic racism is a narrative that spreads harmful effects across lines of race. Baldwin calls for an expansiveness of thinking, to realize a multiracial national identity fueled not by fear and stereotype, but 3. Hirsch, 36–38.

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Figure 2: Leslie Hewitt, Untitled (Perception) , 2013. From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

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rather by inclusion and openness to newly conceived (and multiple) cultural narratives of race. This calls for historical memory that is not singularized but rather is multilayered and allows for contradiction. The first of Baldwin’s two essays is a letter written to his young nephew— a missive form that Still Life echoes. The arrangement of vernacular objects to form a reading of the past that is preserved and transmitted across temporal and spatial lines is not unlike the impact of a letter, particularly Baldwin’s in mass distribution.

In Untitled (Solidity), an already simple composition is made further minimal. The Fire Next Time has turned to face the wall; its spine faces inward and refuses to be named. This move to withhold information, however, is not obfuscation. It is, instead, a beckoning. Meaning within Hewitt’s work lies not within a single photograph, but across the series.

A reading of Untitled (Solidity) before realizing that one of the books is The Fire Next Time will shift after engaging another photograph like Untitled (Perception). The intentional inclusion of smaller objects (text, snapshots, all appearing close to life-size) coaxes the viewer toward changing their bodily habits in the gallery. The photograph directs the viewer’s physical relationship to itself. The photographs say: bend down, read, look closer, take time. In this, difference, meaning, and multiplicity emerge (figs. 3, 4, 5, 6).

The photographic objects in Still Life are formally characteristic family snapshots of the 1960s–1990s, marking a span of Hewitt’s childhood and young adult years: warm-toned prints with rounded corners and date-marked margins, and 4 x 6 in. glossy one-hour photo prints. Temporality embedded in the form of these objects echoes how memory is passed across generations, constructed through these documented visual moments, then arranged into albums, and shared again through story. Artists working within postmemory utilize archival language to these ends. The found photograph is not a tabula rasa, ready for artists to find new life within. It must be transformed via a mark-making that decouples the found photograph from its prior lives.

Hewitt’s materials evoke the sharing of firsthand experience through recollection, though they do not enclose their meaning to a specific origin point. These photographs, and specifically the wood within, exude the power of ambiguity within inherited memory; these works intentionally hold their cards so as not to privilege one reading or perspective over another. 4 The photographs ask questions, rather than lead the

4. Here it is worth recalling Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” to ground conversation about multiplicity of meaning and reading in text and photographs. It is worth foregrounding the idea that though Hewitt is the author of these works, so to speak, to read these works

exclusively through a lens determined by this fact is one that closes the work, rather than opening it as the work asks us to do.

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Figure 3: Leslie Hewitt, Untitled (Solidity) , 2013.

From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

Figure 4: Leslie Hewitt, Untitled (Blue) , 2013.

From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

Figure 6: Leslie Hewitt. Untitled (Myopia) , 2013.

From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

Figure 5: Leslie Hewitt, Untitled (Candid) , 2013.

From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

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viewer to discover answers. There is no singular meaning to deduce, but rather an associative conversation between images and objects that changes over time.

Still Life imagines what else these photographs could become if recontextualized, rearranged, and reread. Family photographs are intimate, and the subjects within are distinctly known when in the family album. When Hewitt incorporates decontextualized snapshots in her work, there is a palpable sense that these images have been separated from their origin and thus their history, though they do not lose affective resonance. Instead, they resonate a collective familial imaginary. When these photographs depart their album contexts through the winds of discard, those photographed become impenetrably anonymous. Who are the people photographing each other in Untitled (Median)? Are they part of Hewitt’s family, or strangers? The snapshots are not deductive objects, but rather visual markers from which to conjure meaning through relationships between the object and context within the photograph. Working with vernacular images can be an exploration of the mutability of photographic veracity. Still Life decontextualizes already ambiguous photographs from original— or at least prior—truth, then recontextualizes them to weave new, different meanings. Hewitt’s use of family snapshots is not to construct empirical truth as much as a site for the possibilities of imagination.

A photograph, like memory, is not only a site of arrival at remembrance, but rather a site of departure. As with the composition of a memory, the objects in a Still Life photograph exist individually before being assembled into a stitched-together interpretation of a whole. A key mark in Still Life is thus the arrangement within each photograph. In Untitled (Zenith), for example, a horizon is not always a horizon. A clockwise turn makes the snapshot’s horizon a vertical line. Varied, conflicting memories can come together, not seamlessly and singularly, but rather as a multivalent whole that acknowledges the complexities of remembering and knowing. In the movement from the book at the bottom of the frame up through the imaginative space of the wood to an image whose literality has been flipped, photographic veracity morphs. Arrangement transforms a seemingly fixed horizon into a new zenith. Seams are visible across Still Life; the edges between books, wood, wall, and floor remain intact. Collective memory takes shape disjunctively, its conflicting perspectives and

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access to different stories creating a collection of visible parts.

While Hewitt’s arrangements evoke assemblage, Still Life also embodies qualities of the family photo album, drawing upon the power of the family album and family snapshots to establish and upend historical narratives. Family albums and personal vernacular collections within African American history are key counterarchives that upend white-colonialist narratives of the Black familial experience. Hewitt uses materials that reclaim and recontextualize in order to realize and make present physical objects that contend with the reality of absences. In the absence of representative canonical histories within postcolonial contexts, family albums become stand-ins and rewritings. Shawn Michelle Smith explores W.E.B. Du Bois’s Georgia Albums in her Photography on the Color Line, and in particular their role as a core rewriting of the African American slave narrative. Du Bois organized these albums to illuminate a vernacular picture of African American life that bypassed existing “evidentiary” photographic records constructed to maintain a system of Black subjugation. Intriguingly, Du Bois provided minimal explanatory text to identify the specific content of the photographic archive. He presented the images largely without caption text or a clear chronological, geographical, or familial organization method. The photographs did the talking. 5 The existence of the photographs alone was meant to evoke an alternative document of the African American community of the time through affect, rather than fact. By invoking the familiar structure of the family album, Du Bois positioned viewers of the albums to feel the affective impact of the photographs and thus experience this work as a counterarchive to the dominant photographic narrative of the African American experience.6 Smith notes: Once an archive is compiled, it makes a claim on history; it exists as a record of the past. The archive is a vehicle of memory, and as it becomes the trace on which an historical record is founded, it makes some people, places, things, ideas, and events visible, while relegating others, through its signifying absences, to invisibility. In this sense, then, archives have an ideological function not only in the moment of their inception but also across time, for they determine in large part what will be collectively remembered and how it will be remembered.7

5. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

6. Smith, 15.

7. Smith, 8.

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Counterarchives employ vernacular material to fill gaps in histories that have been lost or un/miswritten; bringing such ephemeral or excluded material into the archive preserves it from invisibility. Hirsch also sees the album as a counterarchive and site of resistance to both institutional narrative and erasure. During the Holocaust, family albums of imprisoned Jews were secretly kept by allied non-Jewish families. Jewish photographers made pictures in ghettos and concentration camps that were often kept secret in some way. Photography is a site of power in the perpetuation of propagandistic and fictional narratives, and it is also a site of resistance within underground documentation and archival practices. The family album, in form, function, and content, is a site of possibility for artists working in postmemory. 8 Although Hewitt’s arrangements are constructed for the camera, to be photographed and represented as prints, it is worth considering why they are not shown as sculptures. The reproducibility of the photograph allows visualization of the impact of iterative changes in arrangement and also creates a boundary that mediates and determines how closely the viewer can look. Hirsch notes that the postmemory impulse approaches vernacular photographs by scaling miniscule details to large sizes, in an attempt to see beyond the limits of sight. Hirsch writes of zooming in to the collar of a parent’s overcoat in a photograph, to try to reveal the star patch that would indicate the pain of the Holocaust, as if that would reveal information hidden within the grain. However, as Annette Kuhn writes, “You will get nowhere…by taking a magnifying glass to [a photograph] to get a closer look: you will only see patches of light and dark, an unreadable mesh of grains. The image yields nothing to that sort of scrutiny; it simply disappears.”9 Resisting the urge to look closer and closer at a photograph is a turning away from the search for fact and toward “an expanded context for more affective knowing.”10 Peering at a print through a magnifying glass reveals only more grain, not more detail in the photographs. The surface of the print becomes a wall as much as a window; the objects beckon but are not given. A book cannot be opened and read. A snapshot cannot be turned over to read the inscription. There is a clear degree to which the viewer can know, and the rest is left tantalizingly ambiguous.11 In this way, Hewitt constructs the experience of and represents memory as a concept, rather than the content of it. The detailed rendering of the objects makes it feel 8. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust.

9. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London, New York: Verso, 1995), 13.

10. Hirsch, 75.

11. To recall Barthes again, here Camera Lucida, the very notion of looking for the punctum becomes upturned in Hewitt’s work, in that a key source of punctum—the face, the place—is left unknowable, to find emotional resonance less in specificity than in what these visual markers raise for each person viewing the photographs.

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almost possible to lift the cover of the book or peek around a corner to see more, as if the objects are there. But it cannot be done. There is a palpable promise of more information within the depths of the frame, then a boundary that cannot be crossed. Unlike with the possibilities of a sculpture or object in hand, Hewitt uses the formal qualities of the photographic object to both pull a viewer toward the work and maintain distance. Knowing more has to be reached through imagination rather than concrete fact, a key link to artistic methods of postmemory.

Hewitt’s investigations of photographs, memory, and archival practices challenge assumed photographic veracity, deductive reading practices, and singularity of meaning. Her works both imply and implicate autobiography, yet do not rely solely (or sometimes at all) on images and objects that point exclusively to the artist’s autobiographical archive as the through-line for the work. Still Life engages with the slippages and complexities surrounding family photographs and other vernacular images by underscoring how multiplicity is inherent to the derivation of meaning from visual culture, in connection with the unreliable experience of memory and the reading of histories as an ongoing process. In this, exactly who or what is pictured within each photographic object matters less than how the picture sparks a memory that may be totally separate from the specific content within the frame. From this work emerges the concept that photographs do not have inherent truths or meaning, but rather are read through context and exist within a multiplicity of meaning.

Returning to the back-turned books, this other move away from legibility points to the possibility of knowing more, even if arriving at some “right answer” is ultimately futile. The photographs tempt with the notion that perhaps if one continues to search for pictures, if the figures could somehow turn to face us, if the books could open, if the right arrangement is made, we would find who and what we are looking for (fig. 7).

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Figure 7: Leslie Hewitt, Untitled (Zenith) , 2013.

From Still Life. Digital chromogenic print in custom maple frame, 52 x 60 in. (framed).

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

Zahra Axinn is a multi-genre writer whose work includes plays, fiction, creative nonfiction/memoir, poetry, reviews, and critical writing. Zahra writes about interaction, identity, and intersectionality—including relationships, race, sexuality, gender, class, queerness, illness, and nationality. She graduated from Stanford University in 2013 with a BA in English and Theater & Performance Studies. In 2016, Zahra was awarded the CCA All College Honors Award for creative writing. She was a 2017 Amiri Baraka scholar at the Naropa Summer Writing Program and is a 2017 VONA alum. Zahra’s hometown is Berkeley, CA.

María Esther Fernández was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Inglewood, California. She received her BA in Chicana/o and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Since 2004, she has served as the Curator of Art & Education at the Triton Museum of Art and in 2017 was promoted to Chief Curator. Fernández has curated numerous group and solo exhibitions, notably Xicana: Spiritual Reflections/Reflexiónes Espiritúales and Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Welcome to Flower-Landia. She is the recipient of the Standing Committee on Education American Association of Museums’ Multicultural Fellowship, the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Fellowship, and a member of Silicon Valley’s Multicultural Arts Leadership Initiative.

Carlos Francisco Jackson, a visual artist and writer, was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is Founding Director of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer and currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC Davis. He has exhibited his large-format screenprints nationally and in 2009 University of Arizona Press published his book, titled Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte. In 2011 the University of Illinois, Springfield, published a catalog on his artwork titled Mi América/My America: Carlos Jackson and in 2012 he was a featured artist and essayist in the exhibition catalog Estampas de la Raza published by the University of Texas Press.

Contributor Bios

Charmaine Koh is a Singaporean artist and writer based in San Francisco.

Her work explores how experiences of place and self in Singaporean contexts are mediated through postcolonial legacies, urban redevelopment, globalization, and online media. Her two most recent projects in this regard examine Singapore’s public housing estates and her personal relationship to nature, landscape, and language.

Her work is held in several private collections and has been shown in the U.S., Singapore, and Italy. She is currently completing her MFA in Fine Arts and MA in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts.

tamara suarez porras is an artist, writer, and educator from Brooklyn, NY, currently based in Berkeley, CA. Her lens-based practice spans across photography, installation, writing, filmmaking, and performance.

She considers the ways vernacular photography and archives can inform and rewrite histories. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, International Center of Photography, En Foco, and Deitch Projects in New York City, and fused and Embark Gallery in San Francisco. She earned her BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Photography + Imaging.

She is pursuing an MFA/MA at California College of the Arts in Fine Arts and Visual + Critical Studies.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS On behalf of the students and the VCS program, we would like to acknowledge a few of the individuals who helped bring this year’s thesis projects and the Sightlines journal to fruition. Jacqueline Francis led the way as Master’s Project Thesis Director. Thesis Director Michele Carlson prepared students for the VCS Symposium and assumed responsibility for the production of Sightlines 2018, as well as the exhibition posters.

The following colleagues provided invaluable guidance and critique as faculty advisors: Frances Richard, Faculty Advisor – Zahra Axinn Vîet Lê, Faculty Advisor – María Esther Fernández Jeanette Roan, Faculty Advisor – Carlos Francisco Jackson Karen Fiss, Faculty Advisor – Charmaine Koh Karen Fiss, Faculty Advisor – tamara suarez porras Christopher Dare copy-edited and proofread the essays.

MacFadden & Thorpe designed the book.

Visual & Critical Studies Senior Manager of Academic Programs Sienna Freeman kept everyone and everything on track.

The work we do in VCS is made possible by the support of the Humanities and Sciences Division administrators Michael Rothfeld, Director, and Juvenal Acosta, Dean.

SIGHTLINES 2018 / VISUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES / CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS