Sightlines 2020 by viscrit

Introduction

The Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

California College of the Arts • San Francisco

Sightlines 2020

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: Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, CA 94107 USA 415.551.9251 Jacqueline Francis, VCS Program Chair, jfrancis@cca.edu ShawnJ West, Senior Manager of Academic Programs in the Division of Humanities & Sciences, and Administrator of VCS Dual Degree Options, shawnj@cca.edu https://portal.cca.edu/learning/academic-programs/ visual-critical-studies-ma/ http://viscrit.cca.edu/ ©2020 by California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any matter without permission. Designed by Karoline Hatch at MacFadden & Thorpe

Table of Contents IN T R O D U C T IO N

I. Interruptions: Remaking Space

In Mourning and In Rage: Successes and Failures of Second-wave Feminism

A M A N DA R US H

I Buoni di Riace: Migration Crisis as a Chance to Resist Mafiopoli

B A R B A R A PR IO LO

The Unkempt “Uh”

AVA M O R TO N

II. Object(ing)/(Em)bodying/Revising

Racial Impersonation: Emma Hallberg's Perpetuation of the Blackface Minstrel

A L IC IA M c DA N IE L

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine

J US T IN R . N AG L E

Orthostates: A Ghost Resisting Erasure

YO M N A O S M A N

III. Institutional Critique

Rogue Pixels: The Tactics of Invisibility in Hito Steyerl's How Not to Be Seen

LU C Y A S H TO N

Pricing and Specification: Corcraft* and 91020000

112

B E C C A IM R IC H B IO S A K N OW L E D G M E N T S

130 134

Introduction

What does writing about art and visual culture mean during a time of crisis? This volume is going to press with a shelter-in-place order in effect in California, the world’s fifth largest economy. Similar measures have been issued across the United States and in countries across the globe. The essays in this volume were written before March 12, 2020— the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. By the time of this publication’s release, its contributors will have spent much of the last year researching their topics, drafting and revising their tex ts, and settling upon the perfect pairings of illustrations and writing. We congratulate them on completing this work despite the challenges they face as citizen-subjects in truly anxious times. Their achievement deserves special recognition. Wherever and whenever it appears, the written word is a triumph. Critical writing is a skilled response: the outcome of thinking about something, figuring it out, and explaining it to readers. Of course, this is easier said than done. Legions of writers have written about the struggles with our craft— namely, the hours of labor spent on composing a tex t with an eye for detail, mastering the mechanics of punctuation and grammar, and organizing claims and evidence into a solid, sensible argument. With the completion of each venture, writers judge their own efforts and situate the attainment in their careers. Writing in the fields of the humanities is especially rewarding, for as creators, critics, and scholars of history and expressive culture, we advance deeper engagement with the human experience, past and present.

The Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) VCS students are cultural producers who “make” writing. The award-winning VCS faculty guide them. We illuminate paths of interdisciplinary thinking and inquiry, and then get out of the way so that students can dive into the histories of visual culture and identify intellectual allies whose scholarship will aid their analyses. VCS students demonstrate their progress in seminar papers, oral presentations, and short-form articles. Sightlines is one of the culminating activities of the VCS program: each essay is drawn from the student ’s eight-thousandword Master of Arts thesis. Students also deliver formal talks about their theses in the VCS Annual Spring Symposium. After such preparation, graduating students take jobs in the cultural sector as arts administrators, critics, curators, editors, educators, journalists, and working artists with research-driven practices. Some VCS alumni continue with graduate study, deciding to pursue the Ph.D. in Visual Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, Anthropology, and other disciplines at institutions in the US and elsewhere. The diversity of their routes is a solid measure of their training and their passion.

The 2020 Sightlines Essays To write about art and culture at any moment in time is a brave and creative endeavor. This year’s Sightlines authors question the status quo and the status quo ante. Their essays, like the imaginative works they scrutinize, are meant to disturb the peace, stir generative debate, and offer alternative solutions to the problems of everyday life. Barbara Priolo writes about a community currency, designed to redirect our attention to social justice, urban renewal, and the tenets of human rights. Priolo discusses the activist strain of I Buoni di Riace (Riace Vouchers), launched by Domenico Lucano in 2016, when he served as Riace’s mayor. She highlights the mitigating impact of

Jacqueline Francis

introducing an alternative monetary system in Riace, a small coastal city in Italy that contended with depopulation, racist attitudes towards newly arriving migrants who looked to settle there, and the grip of mafia control on the civic economy. Amanda Rush analyzes Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus’s In Mourning and In Rage (1977), a performance art piece. In direct response to gender-based violence against women in Los Angeles in the 1970s and the sensationalized media treatment of it, these artists staged actions that raised public awareness and encouraged women to speak up, speak out, and fight back against sexism and misogyny. Rush argues that Lacy and Labowitz-Starus’s intervention not only challenged long-held norms, but also contributed to legal reform and inspired the subsequent generation of feminist artists working in the United States. Alicia McDaniel addresses Emma Hallberg’s inflected representations of popular African-American cultural identity. Using makeup that darkens her skin and additive products that curl her hair, Hallberg, a twenty-year old Swedish model, transforms her body for glamorous photos that she posts on Instagram. McDaniel links Hallberg’s contemporary “ Black fishing” to the Black face minstrelsy that proffered distorted images of people of African descent on nineteenth-century stages and in twentieth-century films. McDaniel concludes that motifs of Blackness are veritable commodities, creating profit for and advancing the interests of others who are not Black . Self-imaging lies at the center of Justin R. Nagle’s examination of the archive of Bulk Male, an erotica magazine published during the 1990s. The pictures and articles explore explictly sexual subject matter aimed at readers who, as Nagle identifies, were part of the fat and gay community. Nagle thinks through the content and materiality of the periodical, which he places in conversation with James Unsworth’s Girth and Mirth series (2015). Citing the incorporation of a photo spread from an issue of Bulk Male in one of Unsworth’s collages, Nagle positions the latter as a response to the former’s affecting pull. For Nagle,

Introduction

Unsworth’s art is a representation of desire, expressed as longing in the magazine’s classified ads. Ava Mor ton’s investigation of the multimedia installation Uh Landscape (2014) by Nikita Gale reveals the conceptual artist ’s targets: constructed and gendered notions of the natural landscape that have resulted in the continued conquest of land and peoples. Morton asserts that Gale deploys the interjection “uh” as a marker of thought and feeling, one uttered with hesitation, ambivalence, and uncertainty. Juxtaposed with projected videos of landscape images and experienced in a landscaped gallery space, “uh” is projected as a word to be read and heard as a sound; as a result, it disrupts ideological narratives and creates the possibility of redefining and reimagining the self and the social world. Lucy Ashton’s focus is Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). In this fourteen-minute, single-channel video, Steyerl, a German artist and scholar, proposes invisibility as a protective counter to omnipresent surveillance. Ashton delineates the manner in which Steyerl’s lessons on invisibility teach us to use technology, such as pixelation and distortion, to cover and disguise the human body. Ashton concurs with Steyerl that the body that can’t be seens can’t be recorded and unknowingly added to government archives and private company databases. Becca Imrich also considers the expansive objectives of an artist who is a researcher. She looks to Cameron Rowland and his acclaimed 2016 installation 91020000 at Artists Space, New York , an austere display of discrete objects made by incarcerated people in US correctional facilities. These functional objects, purchased from the company Corcraft and other employers of free and exploited labor, were displayed along with acquired historical artifacts related to American bounty hunting and documents that threw the legacy of chattel slavery into relief. In Rowland’s critique of the prison industrial complex , Imrich finds effective visual and tex tual language marshaled against the private and public partnerships that have institutionalized racism.

Jacqueline Francis

Yomna Osman traces the branches of a more recent New York exhibition, Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019. Osman unravels the narratives of this collaboration between the museum and the Lebanese artist Tabet. One story is of Tabet’s great-great grandfather who participated in the archaeological recovery of ancient stone sculptures in Syria in 1911; another is of the Met ’s acquisition of these treasures in 1943. Osman also relates the origins of Tabet ’s exhibited Orthostates (2017-ongoing), charcoal rubbings on paper of these antiquities now held by the Met and other Western institutions. In doing so, she follows the arc of an important trajectory of our era, namely, the productive reframing of histories of art, colonialism, museology, and science-based inquiry, placing the very shaping of knowledge and power under a strong, bright light.

Acknowledgments Graduate students are supported by dedicated staff and faculty teams who mentor students throughout their rigorous program. Jordan Reznick helped the Class of 2020 create research plans and forge steady, researching habits. Master’s Project Directors Thomas O. Haakenson and Kathy Zarur supervised the writing of the Master’s theses and the Sightlines essays, and Zarur organized the 2020 VCS Spring Symposium. As the Thesis Directors did, Faculty Advisors Kim Anno, Anthea Black , Vanessa Chang, Florian Grosser, Frances Richard, and Leslie Townsend shared their expertise with students to do close readings of objects, navigate historiographies, and develop their scholarly voices. Interim VCS Chair Tirza True Latimer and I also served on the thesis committees, presiding over Candidacy and Final Reviews that provided direction to students and assessed their progress. Editor Vivian Sming used a fine-toothed comb to proofread the Sightlines and Symposium program publications. Key administrators in CCA’s Humanities and Sciences (H&S) Division provided vital assistance: Director of Academic

Introduction

Administration Mike Rothfeld and Senior Manager of Academic Program ShawnJ West have been beloved, fellow travelers on this cohort ’s journey. The VCS Program is indebted to H&S Dean Tina Takemoto, CCA Provost Tammy Rae Carland, and CCA President Stephen Beal. They join us in celebrating the achievement of the Class of 2020. — Jacqueline Francis, Chair Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

Interruptions: Remaking Space

Amanda Rush

In Mourning and In Rage: Successes and Failures of Second-wave Feminism

A motorcade of seventy women dressed in black circles Los Angeles City Hall. They are followed by a hearse. A substantial audience, full of suspense, gathers. Journalists, local law enforcement, curious onlookers, and feminist activists wait to see what is about to unfold before them. Once the vehicles stop, six ty women exit to join the crowd on the public steps, while the remaining ten begin a ritual of both mourning and rage. With the direction of artists Suzanne Lacy and Leslie LabowitzStarus, a performance (fig. 1) countering violence against women in the Los Angeles area ensues, igniting the crowd. Violence against women, rape, and femicide have an undeniable and normalized presence within society, which is further heightened by media influence. 1 News reports doubling as entertainment, offer sensationalized and oversaturated accounts of brutality. Through consistent exposure to violent crimes, the potential for the public to become immune to these happenings increases, ultimately leading to both acceptance and disregard. In Constructing Danger: Emotions and the Mis/Representation of Crime in the News, criminologist Chris McCormick argues that media coverage of violence against women is both isolated and sensationalistic— an approach that not only mystifies the problem, but further contributes to its invisibility. 2 Negligence is especially prominent when women deemed undesirable and unimportant by society are the ones primarily impacted. I argue that gender advocacy is not enough and that through artistic intervention and intersectional feminist actions, political and social change can occur. 3 This paper 1

Unless stated otherwise, I use the terms women and woman in relation to biological sex or sex assigned at birth. This reflects the usage by the artists, activists, and theorists referenced within this paper.

Christopher Ray McCormick, “Domestic Terrorism: The News as an Incomplete Record of Violence Against Women,” in Constructing Danger: Emotions and the Mis/Representation of Crime in the News (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2010), 58-77.

Gender advocacy, according to Celeste Montoya, promotes gender equality through supporting women’s movements and gender policy that span the local, national, and transnational levels. This includes, but is not limited to social action, democratic performance, intersectionality, multi-level governance, and policy effectiveness. Celeste Montoya, From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); intersectional feminism, first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, describes how race, gender, class, and other characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. Intersectionality acknowledges the fact that there is no all-encompassing experience or identity. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241-1299.

Amanda Rush Figure 1. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977. Performance, December 13, 1977, Los Angeles City Hall. Photo: Maria Karras. Restaged at SFMOMA, 2019. Courtesy of the Artists.

considers how feminist artists and activists can present alternative approaches to challenging and dismantling the status quo and societal passivity concerning abuse orchestrated against women. Through an examination of Lacy and Labowitz-Starus’s piece In Mourning and In Rage (1977), I offer a critical reading of the artists and their intentions. While acknowledging the successes of this work , it is also essential to recognize the problematic nature of two cis-gendered, white women speaking for a community that is not entirely their own. Second-wave feminism, which spanned from the early 1960s to the 1980s, at its peak formed during the work of Lacy and Labowitz-Starus. This wave prioritized issues encompassing sexuality, gender expectations, reproductive rights, race, class, domesticity, family, and the workplace. As the ideals shifted for the women’s movement, the prioritizations of ideology and action were combined. Through this development, women established the importance of their participation and efforts. 4 As innovative as the undertakings of second-wave feminism were, the exclusion of women outside of the white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, and academic communities remained consistently present. Artists and activists from these communities pushed 4

Charlotte Kroløkke and Anne Scott Sørensen, “Three Waves of Feminism: From Suffragettes to Grrls,” in Gender Communication Theories & Analyses: From Silence to Performance (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2006), 1-24.

In Mourning and In Rage

for radical change and all-encompassing participation but were rarely heard. Roles of leadership were continuously reserved for those that represented the power structure of white, patriarchal America. Women of color, members of the LBGTQ community, and those of lesser means were often ignored, with their work passed off as unimportant. Lacy and Labowitz-Starus were not immune to these violent actions and were in fact perpetuating them. Both artists held societal power through their race, class, cis-gendered presentation, and education. While their work focused on women’s issues and rights, it seldomly centered on topics such as race and class.

The Hillside Strangler In Mourning and In Rage had its genesis in a series of events that took place between October 1977 and February 1978. During this timeframe, an unknown assailant kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered a total of ten female victims between the ages of 12 and 28. The victims were discovered by unsuspecting passersby amongst the hills surrounding the greater Los Angeles area, marking the region with mystery, fear, and confusion. Thus, “ Hillside Strangler” became the designated moniker for both the identity of the perpetrator as well as the events. Whether the name was invented by the press, police, or word of mouth remains undetermined, yet the sensational epithet quickly proceeded to overshadow the search for the offender. The responsibility was essentially thrust upon the women of Los Angeles to keep themselves safe from the proclaimed “monster” on the loose. This burden was especially consequential to working women, women of color, and those outside of protected communities. The media continuously reported the acts as being the work of a single individual, but eventually two killers were found to be involved: cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. 5 Five young women succumbed to the duo’s actions in the first thirty days alone, understandably leaving the city of Los Angeles in a panic. Major newsstands and papers would not print the actual footage of the naked, abused bodies 5

Suzanne Lacy, “In Mourning and in Rage (with Analysis Aforethought),” in Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, eds. Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 317-321.

Amanda Rush

of the women, yet smaller, local outlets were not as delicate. As the number of murders increased, decency surrounding the privacy of the victims diminished. Eventually, all publications leaked repugnant photographs of the victims, providing the public with the horrifying facts of their deaths as well as unfounded stories of their lives. Exploitative versions and incomplete accounts of the truth further provoked the fabrication of reports by local media, such as the Los Angeles Times. 6 Stories circulating publicly focused on the randomness of the crimes and how the perpetrator was still on the loose, stalking, and waiting for women around every corner. These accounts included presumed facts along with gruesome details of the killings, such as descriptions of the strangled, decaying bodies alongside roads where they were left to rot. The media-generated narratives centered on graphic and violent details, nurturing a sinister interest in the deaths while encouraging the spread of inaccurate information. Lacy has argued that what the public knew and shared became a spectacle for a mass audience and a form of entertainment, making the Hillside Strangler murders one of the most important stories to impact the city of Los Angeles in years. 7 As women continued to die, the media constructed a fictionalized crime series: a murder-mystery story produced to compete with Hollywood in hopes of keeping viewers interested. In the essay “ In Mourning and in Rage (with Analysis Aforethought),” Lacy reflects on this interpretation: Consider this scenario: a maniacal killer stalks young, beautiful and helpless women. He is caught in the end, but not before a good deal of graphic violence has been accomplished for the satisfaction of the audience. Given the current appeal of such themes in the popular environment, it should not surprise us to see the Hillside Strangler news coverage following this paradigm.

While the press continuously treated the murders as a “series,” journalists were confronted with a lack of information, which led them to look elsewhere to maintain interest. Prompted by the desire to keep the audience captivated, they not only disclosed the lives of the victims, 6

John Hurst, “Strangler’s 11th Victim: Girl Searched for Love but Found Death Instead,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1977, 1, 30–31.

Lacy, “In Mourning and in Rage (with Analysis Aforethought),” 319-321.

In Mourning and In Rage

Figure 2. John Hurst, “ Strangler’s 11th Victim: Girl Searched for Love but Found Death Instead,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1977, 1, 30.

but frequently exaggerated them. The families, friends, homes, lifestyle, and especially the appearance of the women and girls were revealed by the media as if creating a biopic. The fantasy provoked by mainly male reporters transferred to audiences, which Lacy claims fueled the enthusiasm. To illustrate this fascination, Lacy cited a Los Angeles Times article from Sunday, December 18, 1977, which contains the headline “Girl Searched for Love, But Found Death Instead” (fig. 2). The piece, written by John Hurst, begins with the dramatic opener, “ When Kimberly Diane Martin was a baby, her mother deserted her.” 8 Hurst mentions this not for the importance of understanding the victim’s death, but to set her story up as one of despair, neglect, and of the wrong path. The romanticized notion of searching for love acts as a signifier to the audience that Martin was a desperate individual, to the point of sacrificing herself for the sake of love. Hurst ’s story brought the life, the circumstances, and choices of the victims into discussion, such as clothing and profession, which alluded 8

Hurst, “Strangler’s 11th Victim: Girl Searched for Love but Found Death Instead,” 1.

Amanda Rush

to “wrongdoing” on the part of the woman. When details emerged that the first two victims frequented Hollywood Boulevard, which was often associated with sex workers, the press claimed that the women were to blame— that they must have succumbed to these crimes not because of random targeting, but because they were prostitutes or at least mistaken by the killer to be prostitutes. This conclusion was exemplary of the lack of care and coverage during October and early November of 1977, which suggested that the victims were culpable in their own demise. 9 Devoid of sympathy, this response demonstrates critical theorist Judith Butler’s argument in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence that only specific lives are worthy of care; sex workers and women of color are among those deemed unworthy. 10 The community and media, in this case, did not demand specific evidence and clarification until the murder of five women from aff luent and middle-class neighborhoods accumulated. Butler further considers how political life intersects with our exposure to violence and our complicity within this system. She acknowledges mourning as a task that follows and the importance of community while navigating what mourning means. Butler questions who counts as a human, whose lives count as lives, and what makes a grievable life. Women of color, poor women, sex workers, and those who do not neatly fit within societal expectations of productivity and appearance have been placed in the category she describes as “ungrievable lives.” Society chooses to forget and neglect them in death, just as they were in life. It remains the duty of their community to remember, to mourn. Thus, when the public discovered that the first two victims, Yolanda Washington and Judy Miller, were sex workers, it was both convenient and uncomplicated to disregard their deaths as an expected outcome. In December 1977 amid the Hillside Strangler killings, Lacy and Labowitz-Starus aspired to offer an alternative interpretation of the happenings: one that ultimately disregarded the false narrative of the media. Lacy and Labowitz-Starus, along with participants from the 9

This is in relation to Judith Butler’s definition of which bodies, sex, and gender matter within society, in accordance to power structures dictated by heterosexual, patriarchal hegemony. Judith Butler, “Bodies That Matter,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 27-56.

10 Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 19-49.

In Mourning and In Rage

Woman’s Building, the Rape Hotline Alliance, and the City Council, came together with the feminist community and families of the victims. To represent a more realistic understanding, the contributors performed a public ritual of both mourning and rage. By including the city of Los Angeles and the women directly impacted by the crimes, this ritual invoked a sense of community-building and togetherness. As the media focused on the victims’ individual lives and histories, Lacy and Labowitz-Starus strove to represent the continuation of violence against women and used the bodies of performers as a reminder. Even though the performance focused on the events of the Hillside Strangler, the participants aimed to connect what was currently happening in the Los Angeles area to the more significant issues of nationwide violence against women and its passive acceptance by the general public. Women were no longer asking for answers, but demanding them.

In Mourning and In Rage As the motorcade in the performance drives off, six ty women are left on the steps amongst the audience. One by one, the ten remaining women exit from the back of the hearse and into the street. Lacy takes a moment with each performer and visibly situates their costumes and posture. She then closes the doors to the vehicle, initiating the ritual. The first nine women are dressed in full mourning robes, reminiscent of those worn in the nineteenth century. Each woman additionally dons modest black heels and thick , broad, mourning headdresses complete with veils. 11 This combination makes the women appear to be over seven-feet tall, which contributes to their imposing and dramatic nature. The women performing as mourners deny spectators the right to see their faces and unabashedly stare out into the crowd as if daring the viewers to look . Filing into a single horizontal line, the nine individuals reconvene as one and wait for the tenth performer (fig. 3). She is not in full mourning 11

Nineteenth-century mourning dresses became increasingly important during the reign of Queen Victoria. While in mourning, individuals, specifically widows, would wear modest black clothing for up to two years. This included but was not limited to dresses made from dull crêpe silk, black head scarves, veils, jewelry, piping, collars, cuffs, and buttons. Lou Taylor, “Mourning Dress, 1800-1910,” in Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (New York: Routledge, 2010), 120-163.

Amanda Rush Figure 3. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977. Performance, December 13, 1977, Los Angeles City Hall. Courtesy of the Artists.

clothes, but instead wears bright scarlet robes, and her face is left unbarricaded by fabric. Behind the formation, four women hold large banners that read: “ IN MEMORY OF OUR SISTERS, WOMEN FIGHT BACK!” The nine mourners represent the nine victims of the Hillside Strangler and line up to speak grievances to the gathered crowd. One by one, each declare their sorrow, following with the chant: “ In memory of our sisters, we fight back!” As this chant progresses, the woman in scarlet reappears with a bright red cloth. She now clearly represents the strength for women to fight back , the capacity for self-defense, and the acknowledgment of justified anger. She affectionately drapes the fabric over the mourners’ shoulders, as if to offer protection and compassion. As the ninth and final mourner steps away with her newly given scarlet shawl of strength, the woman in red walks up to the microphone and proclaims: “ I am here for the rage of all women. I am here for women fighting back!” With a look that holds both authority and confidence, the woman in red briefly turns away and rejoins the nine mourners on the steps. The chorus once again echoes, “ In memory of our sisters, we fight back!” as the ceremony commences and transitions into its nex t phase of

In Mourning and In Rage

Figure 4. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977. Performance, December 13, 1977, Los Angeles City Hall. Photo: Maria Karras. Restaged at SFMOMA, 2019. Courtesy of the Artists.

celebration. With the large banners still flying behind them, the ten women triumphantly grasp the red cloths and raise their clenched fists in resistance (fig. 4). These declarations, followed by an offering of mourning for those killed, work to place blame and demand accountability and atonement. It is with this format that the artists guaranteed both successful physical visuals, as well as emotional responses from the audience. Just as the press continuously attempted to maintain viewers’ attention, In Mourning and In Rage enthralled the spectator with the ritual.

Accomplishments and Accountability The performance proved to spark a greater interest in the safety of women throughout Los Angeles, yet there was still much to be accomplished, as well as acknowledged. The most notable achievement made by Lacy and Labowitz-Starus was the conversion of funds by the city of Los Angeles. At the height of the murders, the city offered a $100,000 reward for the arrest of the Strangler. However, instead of continuing with this original promise, they recognized Lacy and Labowitz-Starus’s

Amanda Rush

list of commands and used this money to fund free self-defense classes throughout LA . The city continued to design similar programs and encouraged the public to take part in subsequent years. The artists, as well as local politicians, appeared on talk shows and meetings with the press, which significantly increased the airtime and attention that the performance received. In Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s, writer Nancy Princenthal claims that by directly inviting politicians to participate, Lacy and Labowitz-Starus aligned their performance and agenda to government rhetoric. 12 Their strategy was not unlike the one deployed by the media and press, which ultimately paid off for the artists. The influence and sensational interest created by the media proved to grasp public attention, even if for the wrong reasons. While the press generated fear, dangerous assumptions, and confusion, the artists strove to redefine these tactics to accomplish greater awareness surrounding the murders. Following the performance, a news reporter who had been covering the piece confronted a telephone company representative concerning active emergency listings and more specifically, sexual assault resources. The phone company began to list rape hotlines in the front of phonebooks shortly after. The listing is arguably one of the most compelling outcomes, as a member of the press— a community which the artists were vehemently against— initiated this action. As revolutionary as this work was, there remained a significant disconnect between the artists and their contemporaries who were producing similar work . Their lack of acknowledgement is exceptionally prevalent when considering the amount of labor women of color and those in the LGBTQ community were contributing to the greater feminist collective. Tactics such as protests and public performances had long been utilized as a means of activism, strategies which Lacy and Labowitz-Starus were solely borrowing. In her essay “ The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde considers what community means, who is allowed to participate, and who receives credit for their actions. She 12 Nancy Princenthal, “Taking Action,” in Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 108-124.

In Mourning and In Rage

not only critiques white and academic feminism but discusses how “acceptable women” hold the ability to prosper off the efforts of those deemed unworthy. 13 The work of Lacy and Labowitz-Starus remains significant; however, it is crucial to recognize their hypocrisy and lack of awareness. If the victims had not fit within the realm of “acceptable women” and the established community of the Lacy and LabowitzStarus, would the artists have fought so hard? I argue that through public performance in combination with activist actions, Lacy and Labowitz-Starus propelled In Mourning and In Rage and the Hillside Strangler events into national recognition and further established a feminist foundation for later activists and artists. While condemning the motives of the media, Lacy and Labowitz-Starus also recognized the power and attention gained and took advantage of this potential. However, I maintain that these actions were not enough and that through significant work , recent feminists have sought to address historical exclusions. A stronger community has been forged by artists and activists alike, through participation in intersectional feminism, giving credit where credit is due, and greater support for voices oftentimes ignored. I ultimately contend that through art, activism demonstrates considerable potential. Despite significant shortcomings, Lacy and Labowitz-Starus succeeded in advancing the recognition and attention of violence perpetrated against women. By connecting their work to present-day projects, access as well as an acknowledgment is granted to the long history of feminist activists and artists who have paved the way for contemporary endeavors. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Karen Fiss, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz-Starus, SFMOMA , my Thesis Committee, and all loved ones who helped me along this journey.

13 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2018), 16-21.

Barbara Priolo

I Buoni di Riace: Migration Crisis as a Chance to Resist Mafiopoli

San Cuosimu e San Damianu porgitimi la manu ca sugnu foresteru e biegnu di luntanu! (Saints Cosmas and Damian, please lend me your helping hands, as I am a foreigner and come from faraway!) — lyric from popular Calabrian song In this paper, I consider the visual and material strategies Domenico Lucano employed as mayor of Riace, Italy with I Buoni di Riace, an initiative developed in response to two significant social issues in the city: depopulation due to mafia activity and massive increases in migratory fluxes. 1 Lucano’s tactic was to manipulate money to make it an instrument of social cohesion and inclusiveness within the small Calabrian city of Riace. I Buoni di Riace (Riace Vouchers) was a community currency (referred to from here on as co-currency), a series of thirty-six colorful paper banknotes that circulated between 2008 and 2018 within the city of Riace in the south of Italy. Alternative currencies are parallel monetary systems, often created by the NGO sector or artists, which are used within a specific place and community. These currencies are implemented as an expedient and have been adopted increasingly in recent years, especially after the global economic crisis in 2008, by small marginalized communities around the world in order to keep their local economies moving. Indeed, alternative currencies provide people with liquidity even if their country’s national economy is in crisis. Domenico Lucano, now former mayor of Riace, was elected for three consecutive terms from 2004 to 2018. 2 When he was first elected, he had the vision of a new Riace, which he called a “global village,” made 1

In the years I Buoni di Riace was introduced, Riace was a destination of continual migrant landings. More recently in 2018 and 2019, the Italian government restricted possibilities for NGO organizations to land their boats, full of migrants rescued at sea, at Italian ports. The restriction caused a decrease of the migratory flow in the peninsula.

In 2010, Lucano placed third as World Mayor, a world competition organized by the City Mayors Foundation that ranks best mayors in the world every two years. In the same year, he appeared in fortieth place in a list of most influential leaders in Fortune magazine.

Barbara Priolo Figure 1. In Riace, a man shows some banknotes from the series I Buoni di Riace (€10 Ernesto Che Guevara; €20 Martin Luther King; €50 Mahatma Gandhi), 2014. Photo: John Laurenson.

of elderly people from Calabria as well as young migrants from Kurdistan, Nigeria, Iran, and from other countries. Lucano introduced I Buoni di Riace in 2008 to provide liquidity to these migrants, circumventing the long waiting periods for public money allocated by the Italian state to get to migrants, which would have taken up to one year due to bureaucratic issues. Lucano instituted I Buoni di Riace (fig. 1) as an effort to create social cohesion in the city through various activities. 3 With I Buoni di Riace, Lucano also took aim at organized crime (known as the mafia) in southern Italy in an attempt to repopulate the city. Riace had become a ghost town due to the oppression of the Calabrian mafia ’Ndrangheta and to the consequent lack of job opportunities for young people. Like many other borghi in Calabria, Riace is a magical place. 4 Two of the most ancient Greek sculptures of all time, I Bronzi di Riace (Riace Bronzes), were found under the Ionian Sea of Riace’s coast. Yet, it is also one of the most oppressed places by the mafia in the entire country. One of the ’Ndrangheta’s prerogatives is to build its fortune by suffocating the local economy in order to gain more and more control over the territory. 3

I Buoni di Riace was part of a series of actions aimed at repopulating the abandoned Calabrian village: a public well, an educational farm and clinic, a multiethnic kindergarten, an olive oil mill, several restaurants and shops, a hotel, and the recycling collection of garbage. Everything was run by both citizens and migrants.

In the Middle Ages in Italy, a borgo was the space of the city dedicated to its citizens, situated out of the fortification walls that embraced the castle. The word borgo is still used to refer to the historic center of small cities that were built in the Middle Ages.

I Buoni di Riace

The principal instrument used to rise up against mafia violence and create a transnational anti-racist solidarity through hospitality was the visual profile of I Buoni di Riace banknotes. First, to design the co-currency, the mayor drew inspiration from various artistic productions that were created in the town by Riace citizens and migrants, following its repopulation by immigrants. These included murals, installations, road signs, and colors from flags corresponding to the migrants’ countries of origin (mostly Kurdistan, Syria, and Turkey)— all of which appeared in public spaces throughout the city. Second, the thirty-six banknotes showed mafia violence and injustice by featuring the faces of victims of the Calabrian and Sicilian mafia. Last, the co-currency portrayed other national and international personalities as symbols of peace, culture, anti-racism and inclusion, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Che Guevara, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. From a visual point of view, another crucial aspect of the banknotes was that they resembled the off icial European currency, the euro. Indeed, they were also known as the Euros of Riace as they display the euro symbol “€” many times on the front and back side, nex t to the banknote value number (fig. 2). In off icial euro banknotes, a vertical band is shown on the right, with the value and the euro symbol “€” beneath (fig. 3). On Riace banknotes, the word “€URO” in capital letters is found on top of two vertical bands (fig. 2). This element is reminiscent of the off icial banknotes, where the value of the coin is written in Latin: “ EURO,” Greek: “ EYPΩ,” and also in Cyrillic: “ EBPO.” The off icial currency design also comprises the European Union flag on the left, with the signature of the European Central Bank President under it, and its acronym in nine languages: “ ECB, ECB, EЦB, EZB, EKP, EK T, EKB, ECB, and EBC” on the left. The repetition of the euro symbol “€” on I Buoni di Riace, as well as the complete word “€URO,” demonstrates the mayor’s desire to create a visual connection between the alternative monetary system of the city with the country’s off icial one. By making recognizable visual

Barbara Priolo Figure 2 . The front side of I Buoni di Riace €1 banknote, 2019. Photo by the author.

Figure 3. The front side of the official €20 banknote, 2019. Photo by the author.

elements of the off icial money on the community currency, both the citizens in Riace and the migrants were more open to trusting the new local economic system. Thus, the emphasis on the visual similarity to the euro can be understood as part of Lucano’s strategy to get people used to the new currency and gaining confidence in the new system. This tactic also allowed the mayor to circulate images that were evocative of specific values based on his understanding of the community’s needs through the banknotes. Once the strategy to convince users of the reliability of the local currency was developed, the mayor’s second step was to exploit the design of the banknotes for a visual narrative. As previously mentioned,

I Buoni di Riace Figure 4. Coco Cano, Mundos, 2008. Mixed media installation. Photo: Amedeo Petrocchi, 2019.

the European flag is displayed on the off icial banknote (fig. 3). On the Riace co-currency, however, no off icial country flag is depicted, but instead, some triangular and colored paper cut-outs that recall the shape of a flag appear. More precisely, these irregular paper cuttings are scattered on the upper part of the front of each banknote and are very vibrant in color with details in red, yellow, orange, purple, blue, and green (fig. 2). Not coincidentally, they have a strong pictorial profile. In 2008, the artist Coco Cano, an immigrant from Uruguay, was asked by Lucano to create an installation for Riace’s central square. Thus, Cano produced a site-specific installation, called Mundos (Worlds), composed of a half-moon mosaic surrounded by other individual mosaic pieces. The pictorial elements were painted on the fragments and included fantastical creatures in bright colors (fig. 4). The design of I Buoni di Riace, in particular the half-moon shape surrounded by mosaic fragments, was inspired by Cano’s work (fig. 2). The colored triangles on both Cano’s artwork and the Riace vouchers are reminiscent of the flags from the native countries of the migrants and current residents. Indeed, the title of Cano’s artwork ,

Barbara Priolo Figure 5. Welcome signs in Riace, 2019. Photo: Nicola Zolin.

Mundos, represents the union of different worlds in Riace. The city’s welcome road sign included flags and names of the countries from which immigrants came (fig. 5). In nine different languages, “ Benvenuti a Riace” (“ Welcome to Riace” ) also appeared on the sign. Behind the word “ Riace” was a rainbow, which appeared throughout the city, including on the stairs of the central amphitheater (fig. 6). Lucano, therefore, found his visual references in the off icial euro, in the reproduction of the artistic work of migrant painter Cano, and of visual elements derived from public spaces in Riace. Thus, the visual narrative of Lucano’s co-currencies references artworks throughout the city, some of which were created by migrants. This evokes the inclusive reality of the village, an inclusivity that was aimed at protecting migrants and was recognized as a chance for Riace to be reborn. Because the cause of Riace’s historical depopulation was mafia oppression, Lucano tried to avoid a new period of criminal oppression by showing mafia violence and injustices on his banknotes. Among the thirty-six banknotes, twelve display the faces of mafia victims. The

I Buoni di Riace

Figure 6. The amphitheater of Riace during Riace in Festival, a cultural event in 2018. Photo: Riace in Festival.

most portrayed figure is Giuseppe “ Peppino” Impastato. He appears on several banknotes, in particular, on the 100 euro note in the series. Impastato was an Italian journalist and activist, a member of the Proletarian Democracy Party. He was well known for his rebellion against criminal activities by Sicilian mafia Cosa Nostra. He was assassinated on May 9, 1978 for his resistance. Impastato is iconic because he was born into a mafia family, but he decided to rebel against and fight their power through the foundation of a new radio station called AUT Contro-Informazione Radio Diff usa (AUT Counter-Information Diff used Radio). Impastato’s most ironic and effective radio program was titled Onda pazza a Mafiopoli (Crazy wave in Mafiopoly) where he invented caricatures of real mafia bosses in Palermo and made fun of them publicly. In 2009, many Italian artists arrived in Riace to take part in Colors of Memory, an entire week dedicated to the production of murals and installations in Riace with the help of residents and migrants in the city. On this occasion, the logo of Impastato’s radio station, as well as his

Barbara Priolo Figure 7. Mural dedicated to Giuseppe Impastato, Riace, 2011. Photo: Natale Bianchi.

portrait, were painted on wood panels and installed as a mural in Riace (fig. 7). On the mural, Impastato’s face is depicted as a black and yellow stencil against a background with colored lines. These lines, alternating orange and blue, move out from behind Impastato’s head towards the left like rays. On the right, the rays, impressed on a black background, assume different colors (red, yellow, orange, purple, white, and light blue) and are curved. Their sinuosity recalls sound waves, and indeed, they culminate in the logo of the AUT Contro-Informazione Radio Diffusa. The word “AUT” is colored in red, and it is inscribed on a yellow square with the image of headphones painted nex t to it. The image of the mural is partially transposed onto the €20 banknote of I Buoni di Riace (fig. 8). Here, a detail of the mural is reproduced with Impastato’s face and the background of lines and rays. As in the other banknotes of the series, the image is inscribed into a half-moon in the middle of the front. On the top curved border of the half-moon read “ LIBERTE’, EGALITE’, FRATERNITE’” (“ FREEDOM, EQUALIT Y, FRATERNIT Y” ), a motto from the French Revolution. Below the image, “ NO RAZZISMO” (“ NO RACISM” ) is repeated several times,

I Buoni di Riace Figure 8 . I Buoni di Riace €20 banknote (Giuseppe Impastato), 2019. Photo by the author.

appearing larger in the middle. All of these design choices are linked to Lucano’s objective to emphasize, through the visual profile of his banknotes, mafia atrocities and the crucial value of pacific resistance and anti-racism ideals. Lucano aimed to repopulate Riace, and most of all, to influence a radical overhaul of the culture of the city, promoting migrants’ social inclusion and criticism of the mafia. To do so, he portrayed mafia victims onto the banknotes, giving Impastato a crucial role; he immortalized international symbols and figures of anti-racism and peace such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks (figs. 1 and 9); and finally, he used the rainbow colors found in Riace road signs, murals, and migrantscitizens’ co-artworks that were installed in the city. The co-currency system introduced by the mayor was realized through a visual, but also material strategy that comprised the manipulation of money. From a material point of view, even though the dematerialization of society through digitization had already started back in 2008, the only valid version of I Buoni di Riace was a paper one. Indeed, in order to use the vouchers in exchange for products and services,

Barbara Priolo

Figure 9. I Buoni di Riace €50 banknote (Rosa Parks), 2019. Photo by the author.

the migrants had to meet the local Riace merchants in person, faceto-face. This meant social interactions, dialogue, and direct contact. The only available digital version of I Buoni di Riace was created later in recent years by the non-profit organization Chico Mendes within the project Solidali con Riace (In Solidarity with Riace), in the form of an online catalog (fig. 10). In 2018, when the conservative party Lega was elected to the government of the country, mayor Lucano was arrested with the accusation of fraud and corruption in the management of public funding for migrants in Riace. As soon as he was accused, public funding was denied and many local merchants, who expected a reimbursement by the state for having accepted the vouchers as money, remained unsatisfied and literally lost thousands of euros. Chico Mendes scanned the banknotes and shared them online in order to sell them and donate the earnings to Riace merchants. The solidarity project ended on February 17, 2019, and they collected over 77,000 euros. In the meantime,

Figure 10. Screenshot of one page from Chico Mendes’s online catalog of I Buoni di Riace, 2019. Photo by the author.

a democratic party, Partito Democratico, replaced the Lega at the government of Italy, and Lucano was released. The legal trial is still in progress, but most of the accusations against the former mayor have been dismissed. During the Lega government, Riace’s road signs were removed and replaced with new ones that display the faces of two Catholic saints, Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, who are recognized as Riace’s protectors. No traces are left of the migrants’ native countries’ flags. Impastato’s portrait on the wood panels has also been removed. The catalog on Chico Mendes’s website (fig. 10) is rudimental and testifies to the exclusivity of the original paper Riace vouchers.

Barbara Priolo

The digital version shows all the paper defects and wear due to the banknotes’ use. At that time, Lucano needed occasions for Riace citizens to meet with the newly arrived migrants. By inventing an exclusive paper currency, he literally created those occasions for direct contact and building of social relationships. In addition, the local businesses were able to survive the Italian economic crisis thanks to the circulation of the co-currency that would have been impossible without the migrants’ arrival. Indeed, the vouchers represented a legitimate stipend provided by Italian migration law to the migrants. The tangibility of the vouchers, their materiality, was part of Lucano’s tactic aimed at the creation of a new community where people with different cultural backgrounds had to interact and coexist. As Impastato suggested in the choice of Mafiopoli as the title of his radio program, the capitalist system is intertwined with the criminal organization. Nevertheless, Mafiopoli is reminiscent of the word Monopoly that derives from the Greek word monopṓlion, which is composed of mónos, “alone, exclusive” and pōlion, “sale, selling.” Thus, Mafiopoli suggests the domain of mafia over the economy of a place— the monopoly of the mafia. This elucidates the link between the criminal organization and the capitalistic system, and at the same time, clarifies why Lucano chose to manipulate money— the capitalist tool par excellence— to protest against it. Mayor Lucano developed an alternative banknote system that had three goals: support migrants as they became a part of the new Riace community after its depopulation; mitigate racist attitudes in order to let the new community grow; and weaken the mafia and its economic control of the city. His strategy to realize this project was both visual and material, and he integrated these into the design of the banknotes. Lucano promoted the notion of Riace as a “global village” by drawing on public art in Riace, including Cano’s Mundos, the off icial euro currency, iconic figures, and anti-racist and anti-violence messaging. By using only paper banknotes, migrants could integrate into the social fabric of the city. No online transactions or digital surrogates were

I Buoni di Riace

possible in Riace. Instead, Lucano’s strategy required face-to-face interaction. Finally, through both visual and material strategies, resulting in the manipulation of money— capitalism’s principle signifier— Lucano critiqued the capitalistic system and its implications with the mafia asset. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Alessio, Angela, Antonio, Daniele and his family, Eduardo Pineda, Elisabetta, Fabrizio, Frank , Jacqueline Francis, Kathy Zarur, Marina Pugliese, Nunzia, Peggy, Pino, Piero Polimeni, Stefano, and my VCS cohort.

Ava Morton

The Unkempt “Uh”

We are taught to know, to be sure, and to be right within the logic of the contemporary American neoliberal culture. The identity of American nationhood is predicated upon an ideology of manifest destiny, in which settler colonialists conquer the Western landscape. The mythology of the American West was developed in tandem with visual culture, by those like the painters of the Hudson River School who established the “wild” landscape as a symbol of the nation’s potential and history.1 Within this logic, there is a tendency towards a gendered nature, relating the feminine body to the landscape and the masculine settler to rational discoverer of this landscape— tropes that are reproduced within popular culture. 2 Although this ideology has been written about thoroughly, my essay challenges the legacy of this trope through the intervention of sound, specifically the utterance “uh” in the multimedia installation Uh Landscape (2014) by contemporary conceptual artist Nikita Gale. Gale subverts the American mythology of landscape as well as its gendered associations in Uh Landscape. As writer Wyatt Williams notes in his review of the work , “Gale is a conceptual artist working with ideas about advertising, technology, and language . . . her photographs draw attention to what isn’t visible rather than what is.” 3 Gale’s relationship to her name is one example of this notion, as recounted by arts writer Jennifer S. Li: “ My name is Nikita Gale D— ,” she said, her voice abruptly cut off by a loud buzz, creating a dramatic vacuum where her name would have been spoken. She continued: “ The people who know my legal last name are . . . government off icials, administrators of capital and management . . . the same system that authorized colonizers to conflate mechanisms of ownership with mechanisms of genealogy.” 4 1

Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Amy Ellis, and Maureen Miesmer, Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 6.

Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins, “Introduction,” in Gendering Landscape Art, eds. Steven Adams, Anna Gruetzner Robins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3.

Wyatt Williams, “Cover Story - Conceptual artist Nikita Gale explores the language of advertising, one photograph at a time,” Creative Loafing, October 20, 2011, 18.

Jennifer S. Li, “Nikita Gale,” Art in America, December 1, 2018, https://www.artnews.com/ art-in-america/aia-reviews/nikita-gale-62595/.

Ava Morton

Gale puts an emphasis on one’s voice and the action of speaking as a political and radical act, resisting the systems of authority steeped in colonial and patriarchal practices. Her legal last name is paternal in origin, and she is further estranged from her father. The adoption of “gale” as her chosen name underscores the vitality of language within Gale’s practice: gale, for example, is a word with dual meanings— both a strong wind and a loud sonic outburst. 5 This tex t seeks to explore ideas around voice by looking at how Gale uses the utterance “uh” in the installation Uh Landscape to interfere with the other components of the installation that reproduce landscapes. It is a tripartite exploration of how sonic, video, and sculptural components of Uh Landscape challenge dominant patriarchal narratives of American mythology. The artist’s use of “uh” stands as a feminist critique of patriarchal American national identity. “ Uh” is an aural interruption and linguistic signifier that marks a speaker’s audible moment of hesitation and doubt. Within the installation, black paint about waist high on three walls marks the boundaries of the sculptural space, where electronic devices blink and vibrate on a bed of sand. An amplifier emits the sound “uh” and vibrates underneath the sand; movements of the sand particles are activated by the physicality of sound waves. The installation is a material exploration into the power that “uh” has to reshape a landscape, whether physical or psychic. “ Uh” can be used to question and revise patriarchal narratives rooted in the inequitable ideology of landscape. A tex t-based video is projected above the black paint, connecting the content of the video to the content of the sculptural space both physically and conceptually (fig. 1). Another video, on a monitor mounted on the black wall, plays disorienting and apocalyptic found footage of American landscapes (fig. 3 and fig. 5). As “uh” rhythmically erupts from beneath the sand-covered amplifier (fig. 2), it intervenes in the installation’s video, sonic, and sculptural landscapes. Gale signals the need for the disruption and destruction of hegemonic ideologies embedded in depictions of landscapes. “ Uh” is this disruptive force. Uh Landscape reverberates and jolts viewers out of the passive and awed viewing of art, like one might engage in a Hudson River School 5

Ibid.

The Unkempt "Uh"

Figure 1 (top) and Figure 2 (bot tom). Nikita Gale, Uh Landscape, 2014. Sound and video installation, video, sound, sand, flashlight amplifier, speakers, and clamp light. Courtesy of the Artist.

Ava Morton

Figure 3. Nikita Gale, Uh Landscape, 2014. Digital video. Courtesy of the Artist.

Figure 4. Thomas Hill, View of the Yosemite Valley, 1865. Oil on canvas. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

The Unkempt "Uh"

painting: sublime and under a dominant complacency. Gale, in contrast, does not seduce the viewer but instead shakes them, as she describes, to “ [consider] the role of audience as a social arena and [examine] the ways in which silence and noise function as political positions and conditions.” 6 In Uh Landscape, “uh” vibrantly urges the viewer to challenge embedded ideologies of patriarchy that impose gendered inequalities onto the landscape of the American West. This sonic intervention signals towards the possibility of autonomous self-determination. By understanding the utterance “uh” as a sonic marker of doubt and hesitation, Gale frames the possibility for “uh” to alter the material history of the “ground” of the installation— a gesture towards the destruction of mythology imposed upon landscape. Nationalist discourses often use the female body as a contrast to promote masculinist and colonialist ideals, mining identity binaries from conquest of land. Dr. Awino Okech, contemporary scholar of gender, sexuality, and nationhood, writes that because nationalism and the state are founded upon a gendered “naturalization,” “ the control of women’s sexuality and bodily integrity and the violent management of gender non-conforming people is an important arch in nationalist state building projects.” 7 The “patriarchal states,” Okech continues, “require gender inequalities to survive.” 8 These conservative state formations naturalize gender roles to constrict power within biological terms— a binary that maps the dynamics of settler colonialism and indigeneity within ideologies of manifest destiny. The legacy of the Hudson River School, for example, romanticizes the American landscape as a feminized natural wonder, dominated and civilized through the masculinized settler-colonial gaze. These representations of feminized landscape demonstrate that the patriarchal national identity is ingrained in the “natural” landscape, rooting its structure in nature. This naturalistic fallacy further underscores the patriarchal nationalistic structure that operates through inequality by justifying its “ownership” of the land. These depictions of early American landscapes locate the origin story of American national identity. Gale’s work beckons the viewer to disentangle these dormant histories that attempt to hide beneath 6

Nikita Gale, “About,” Nikita Gale, accessed January 5, 2020, https://www.nikitagale.com/ statement.

Awino Okech, “On Feminist Futures and Movement Imperatives,” Development 60 (2017), 13.

Ibid., 13.

Ava Morton Figure 5. Nikita Gale, Uh Landscape, 2014. Sound and video installation, video, sound, sand, flashlight amplifier, speakers, and clamp light, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist.

the ground of the landscape. Paintings of this movement form an idealization of American landscape as an exotic space to be captured and controlled— a wild untamed nature to be reined in. 9 This logic has been similarly applied to women throughout Western history, ascribing nature to motherhood and logic and science to fatherhood as a means for national identity. 10 Gale disrupts this ideology and asks viewers to question the visual culture and underlying mythos of American landscape. The God’s-eye-view perspective present in Gale’s found-footage video and Thomas Hill’s View from Yosemite (1865), found in figures 3 and 4 for example, reduces the landscape to a mental image, as a mysterious place of escape— a place to be explored and conquered in totality. As a disruptive force, “uh” inserts doubt into this gendered and nationalist construction. Gale pushes against this narrative through Uh Landscape by shifting the material history of the “ground” in the sculptural space, breaking down the image of the landscape of popular media, disorienting the vision of the God’s eye view, producing a sense of doubt and confusion, and giving autonomy to the viewer. “ Uh” is not only aurally disruptive; the sound waves erupting from the amplifier move the sand particle in small increments, slowly altering 9

Kornhauser, Ellis, and Miesmer, Hudson River School, 6.

10 Adams and Robins, Gendering Landscape Art, 3.

The Unkempt "Uh"

the material history of the sand particles themselves as well as shifting the configuration of the “ground” of the installation. Sand covers the concrete floor of Uh Landscape, forming the ground of the sculptural space, which resembles a diorama of a natural landscape. The surface of each individual sand particle is a record of physical and geological changes in the environment. Although classified under a singular term, sand is made up of unconsolidated fragments of inorganic and organic matter (e.g., weathered rocks, decomposing biological material, shell fragments, mineral pieces, and sediment). The physical appearance of sand particle— the tex ture, color, size, and shape— indicates the relative health of the ecosystem in which sand resides as well as its geologic history. As the sound waves jostle the sand particles, the sand particles’ physical surface is altered. This can be ex tended to the way voice has a physical presence— one that can gain momentum through its accumulative presences, reshaping the sonic landscape. “ Uh” emanates in bursts from a recording device within this sculptural space. Traveling through the speakers and amplifier, “uh” causes sonic vibrations. This physical momentum of sound tosses the sand particles. “ Uh” creates an impact on the surface of the sand particles, etching a moment of intervention into its material history. Through this small gesture, the material histories and relationships within the sand are shifted. As the amplifier vibrates with “uh,” the sand particles knock into one another, break down, and fall off the edge, where they crash into other particles in the piles of sand. The interaction between the vibrations and the sand transforms the ground of the sculptural space in small increments. This interaction within the installation ex tends to the ways in which micro-interruptions to the status quo can revise histories of gendered nature. English scholar Michelle M. Wright discusses the potential for entropy to be more than just a breakdown of matter in her essay “ The Physics of Black Art”: The present is a point on a time line; now is a dispersed field of events. And we know, of course, that space-time does not move forward. If any thing, it moves outward: The universe is expanding. Entropy is not just destruction and collapse; it is a tree

Ava Morton

growing, a woman aging, a piece of coal becoming a diamond, and the particles that comprise all matter growing less tightly bound, looser, more chaotic. And entropy may well be the best conceptual prism through which to understand time’s passage. 11

Wright’s understanding of generative entropy can be ascribed to the way in which Gale creatively unmakes the ground of the sculptural space, as it forges a new mark on the sand particles. 12 “ Uh,” as a disruption, can unmake narratives of hegemonic power by triggering doubt and indeterminacy. The sand shifts and is eroded by the sonic vibrations of “uh,” as the foundation of patriarchal histories erode when they are questioned. Dominant ideologies can be continuously revised, redacted, and reedited. Gale uses sand in this installation to show how the once-stable ground of her constructed landscape can be altered through the aural intervention of “uh.” While this sculptural landscape revises ideologies through a material intervention, Gale simultaneously interweaves clips of destruction with found footage of American landscapes from popular media. In Uh Landscape, Gale forms a narrative by switching between scenes of onset destruction with that of found drone footage recorded from God’s-eye-view perspectives. Gale’s decision to combine and interrupt these clips relates to the implication of “uh” and its latent power. The found footage resembles the idylls depicted in the paintings of the Hudson River School, as seen in figures 3 and 4. The resemblance between the still from Gale’s video and Hill’s View of the Yosemite Valley is uncanny: both compositions look downward into Yosemite Valley, which shows how the trope of the Gods-eye-view perspective leaks into popular media from the wellspring of hegemonic imaginary in order to rationalize conquest in the past and inequality in the present. However, Gale immediately cuts this shot with an “uh” sound and a dark frame; seconds before, a clip of a fireball approaches another landscape (fig. 5). The clip of the approaching fireball preceding this familiar landscape builds suspense for an implied total destruction of 11

Michelle M. Wright, “The Physics of Black Art,” Artforum International 53, no. 10 (Summer 2015), https://www.artforum.com/print/201506/the-physics-of-black-art-52255.

12 The notion of “unmaking” is taken loosely from Édouard Glissant. Édouard Glissant, “Poetics,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 23-35.

The Unkempt "Uh"

this my thology— an entropic shift to the once-ordered image. Like the sculptural component of the installation, Gale’s found-footage video uses the logic of generative entropy as framed by Wright, and relies on the breakdown of material in order to grow into a diff erent form. In this instance, Gale breaks down the image of the landscape while leaving room for it to expand outward growing into something that is not yet known. When the sonic and visual void of “uh” intervenes throughout the found-footage video, it cues the destruction of the clips of landscapes. Towards the end of the video, the frequency of the fireball clips increases; the video cuts to an overturned car engulfed in fire. The camera perspective approaches this scene, closer and closer while being interrupted by “uh” and cuts to black . The frequency of “uh” increases like the clips of the fireball, building a suspenseful tension; the video ends in darkness and a rapid slew of “uh.” The interspersal of destruction sublimated with darkness shows how sensorial disruptions, like “uh,” can be employed as a tactic to interrupt the patriarchal imaginary imbedded in the mythology of the American landscape. Gale uses “uh” in chorus with the dark frames in the found-footage video to disorient the vision of the camera and therefore, the God’s eye view perspective, unmaking the pervasive idealization of landscape in contemporary popular media. In the found-footage video, the (camera) gaze is obscured in the presence of “uh.” The video stutters into a blank frame, and begins to play again when the sound fades. In that moment of blindness, the camera’s gaze can no longer picture the imagery of the landscape, and the viewer is able to fill the void (of the black frame) with their own perspective anew. Through disorientation in the video, Gale beckons questions about what is surveilled, by whom, for whom, and for what purpose. Okech notes that these methods of “ [l]ooking back to a past in which conservative interpretations of women and men thrive and ‘progressives’ are seeking to do away with the past is typically resolved by figuring the contradiction as a ‘natural’ division of gender.” 13 If gendered divisions are related to the natural landscape, as envisioned through a patriarchal gaze, then the 13 Okech, “On Feminist Futures and Movement Imperatives,” 13.

Ava Morton

disruption of this imagery can be seen as a political movement away from naturalized gendered roles and patriarchal dominance. The “uh” interrupts the progression of both Gale’s tex t-based projection and her found-footage video, a friction against their passive consumption. This sensorial experience of disrupted sound and image forces the viewer to literally fill in the gaps with their own imagination. The sound “uh” appears to act upon the video from the outside the frame, as it emanates from the amplifier below. “ Uh” operates in both the sculptural installation and videos, but is not confined to either. “ Uh” enters the frame of the videos sonically as well as visually; the video momentarily flashes black when the sound is heard. Gale makes speech ineff icient and unintelligible, throwing a wrench in the progressive mantra of direct eff iciency and speed by interrupting the progression of her videos with “uh” as the sonic marker of hesitation. Filmmaker and scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about the value of indirectness, stating: [T]here is a tendency with mainstream media to emphasize speed as a goal of inventive people, or rather, of smart consumers. To save time and energy, one is told to “go at it” and devise shortcuts so as to take hold of the desired object as quickly as possible. So, anyone who makes a detour, opts for indirectness, and takes time to move on his or her own can neither gratify the reader or viewer right away, nor expect any immediate gratification in return. But for me, to be able to maintain a certain independence and to pace one’s movement accordingly is always a necessity... 14

Trinh suggests autonomy comes with indirectness. One can maintain their own “pace” and therefore gain a sense of independence from an imposed culture of optimization. The aural interruption of “uh” in the videos similarly slows the viewer’s intake of the content. If slowing down allows us to take back our time for our own squandering, then slowness, indirectness, and disruptive ineff iciency can be seen as a 14 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Undone Interval” interview by Annamaria Morelli, Cinema-Interval, (London: Routledge, 1999), 33.

The Unkempt "Uh" Figure 6. My transcription of the text-based video. I use _/ notation to represent a dark frame and / to represent the division between each word, which appears on the screen individually. Nikita Gale, Uh Landscape, 2014. Digital video.

radical act against the grain of contemporary defaults. In Gale’s video, the addition of dark frames that appear in sync with “uh” allow the viewer to pause, activating their role in the consumption of the video’s content. The video beckons feeling and thought in a state of progress without a known end state. “ Uh” embodies these qualities and allows a speaker to access the power and autonomy latent in indirect thinking and questioning. The tex t-based video includes the phrase: “/USED /TO /DISRUPT / THE /SONIC /LANDSCAPE _/.” 15 This more explicitly marks one of the meanings of “uh” as a disruptive force. The sonic intervention of “uh” is present in the tex t-based video and the found-footage video as a dark frame (fig. 6). The sound literally disrupts these videos. By visually representing “uh” as a dark blank frame, the content of these videos is also marked by hesitation, doubt, and unknowing. This doubt is precisely 15 See figure 6 for notation usage.

Ava Morton

what the installation begs of the viewer. To doubt is to undermine what one believes to be solid, true, and whole. In doubt, one utters “uh” and hesitates. To hesitate is to waste time within the logic of rational discourse that values speed and eff iciency. “ Uh” disrupts the logic of late neo-capitalism that values speed and eff iciency through a refusal towards the indeterminate. Indeterminacy— the act of being neither here nor there or the act of refusing to choose— has the conceptual force to occupy a space between the binaries of patriarchal gender roles. This is evident in Gale’s tex t-based video because “uh” occupies a variety of positions, which holds the unlimited potential for change. Figure 6 shows my transcription of the tex t-based video, denoting instances in which “uh” is uttered. One word at a time appears, forming the phrases above in bold, capitalized, light-blue lettering on a black background. These phrases show the dynamism of “uh;” this single sound has a variety of mutable meanings and uses. Trinh encourages a play with language, stating that, “ I’d rather make of writing a site where opposites lose their essential difference and are restored to the void by their own interchangeability.” 16 Interchangeability allows one to continually change the pieces that construct the self and avoid being told what one should be or how one should act. Each phrase in the tex t-based video begins in the middle of a thought, providing the viewer with a fragmented experience of phrases that evade binary logic. Trinh describes the middle as neither beginning nor end— “so as to work with new relations of speed and slowness, thereby enabling new possibilities of assemblages.” 17 Understood through Trinh’s writings on the middle, Gale’s use of “uh” as interruptions in the tex t-based video shows how individuals can employ this utterance as a tool to interfere in the logic of neo-capitalism and give themselves time and space for self-determination. When one hesitates 16 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Reign of Worn Codes,” in Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 48. 17 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Night Passage,” interview by Alison Rowley, Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image (New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts), eds. Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 113.

The Unkempt "Uh"

and utters “uh,” they are radically slowing down and palpably lingering in a moment of confusion. To occupy a space of uncertainty is to refrain from a desire to completely know or be known or chosen within the options given by a state that seeks to falsely divide gender based on “nature.” In Uh Landscape, the components of the installation together reverberate and jolt the viewer out of passively being in awe of a work of art like that of the Hudson River School, which is meant to reflect the sublime and dominate the body. Gales work in contrast, does not seduce the viewer into complacency, but instead shakes them, with the vibrant gesture of “uh” urging the viewer to see how the representation of landscapes often associated with the feminine body can be used to naturalize patriarchal agendas, which functions on inequality and a false, gendered logic. In this way, the sonic intervention of “uh” can be seen as a political action retaking autonomy for how one wants to define oneself. The components in the installation form various landscapes, which are conducted by the sound “uh.” “ Uh” disrupts gendered narratives of interrelated femininity and nature found within the visual representation of landscapes. “ Uh” also signals hesitation, questioning larger systems of being embedded in the self and dissecting the fabric of visual culture that is a product of the legacies of landscape painting and American mythologies of wilderness. Simultaneously, “uh” as a marker of hesitation, disrupts binary logic and builds a potential for a “middle” in which refusals of essentialized categorizations can thrive. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S American Indian Graduate Center, Teresa Ferguson, Karen Fiss, Jacqueline Francis, Nikita Gale, Jamie Knight, Lukas Kuczynski, Suzanne Longley, Ranu Mukherjee, my VCS cohort, Osage Nation, Tamara Porras, Frances Richard, and Kathy Zarur.

Object(ing)/ (Em)bodying/ Revising

Alicia McDaniel

Racial Impersonation: Emma Hallberg's Perpetuation of the Blackface Minstrel

Skin color and hair are among the most recognizable indicators of ethnicity, referred to as racial or ethnic signifiers by scholars such as Kobena Mercer.1 Mercer states that hair stylization is a cultural activity and practice specific to each ethnic community. Emma Hallberg, an Instagram influencer, often styles her curly tex tured hair into French braids, crowns, and other hairstyles specific to contemporary African-American women’s beauty culture. 2 Indeed, her profile photo, a selfie (fig. 1), suggests she is a person of color. 3 Hallberg’s light, caramel-brown skin is illuminated by a glimmering spot upon her right cheek . Her skin color and hair stylization have led many to be under the impression that Hallberg is Black or mixed-race. She has received financial compensation from Black-owned businesses to sell their products, and Black beauty pages such as Ali Grace Hair (@aligracehair_1 on Instagram) have featured her selfies. 4 Hallberg’s influence is wide; she currently has over 318,000 followers and receives financial endorsements from companies such as Fashion Nova to wear their clothing products and market to online users. 5 In 2018, about a year after Hallberg gained popularity, one of her followers asked her if she was Black . Hallberg responded with: “ I’m white and I’ve never claimed to be anything else… I’m NOT ‘posing’ as a colored person as you claim, I’ve never tried to be or look black , I was born with naturally curly hair and my skin gets very easily tanned in the sun!!” (fig. 2). The follower snapped a screenshot of Hallberg’s response and shared it with Twitter user Deja (@yeahboutella), who subsequently posted Hallberg’s statement on Twitter. Deja created a Twitter 1

Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 171-219.

Born on September 12, 1999, Hallberg identifies herself as a twenty-year-old “SWEDE” model on her Instagram, @eemmahallberg, and has gained a significant following over the course of two years as an Instagram beauty influencer and model. An Instagram influencer is an online content creator who photographs themselves utilizing products from companies that compensate them. Hallberg is a beauty influencer who is endorsed by makeup, fashion, and beauty brands.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a selfie is “an image that includes oneself (often with another person or as part of a group) and is taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.”

Ali Grace Hair is a wig company in China whose target market is Black women.

Fashion Nova, an online, American-based fashion retailer, is one the companies that endorses Hallberg.

Alicia McDaniel

Figure 1. Screenshot of Emma Hallberg’s Instagram profile (@eemmahallberg), 2019.

feed specifically to expose Hallberg and other white and white-passing Instagram influencers who were applying dark makeup, wearing traditionally Black hairstyles, choosing selective body enhancements, or exercising some combination of these styling choices, resulting in an appearance that suggests Black identity. 6 The feed went viral, becoming subject material for news channels such as BBC and talk shows such as the Wendy Williams Show. Hallberg and others were accused of Blackfishing— a play on the term catfishing— to suggest that they have used their appearance to deceive others. 7 After Hallberg was exposed, many online users began to question: “ Is this Black face?” Black face minstrelsy is an American tradition of racial impersonation and part of a long history of Black exploitation. The practice of 6

Amira Rasool, “White Influencers Are Being Accused of ‘Blackfishing,’ or Using Makeup to Appear Black.” Teen Vogue, November 16, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/ blackfish-niggerfish-white-influencers-using-makeup-to-appear-black.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, catfishing is “to deceive (someone) by creating a false personal profile online.”

Racial Impersonation: Figure 2. Screenshot of a conversation between Emma Hallberg and a follower. Photo: Twitter user Deja (@ yeahboutella), 2018.

Black face has raised questions about what race is, why it matters, and the assumptions people make on the basis of skin difference. Alisha Gaines, author of Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy, and Shannon Steen, an American Studies, Race Theory, and Performance Studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley, define racial impersonation as an act in which an individual or a collective adopts the mannerisms and aesthetics of a racial group that is not their own. Preconceived notions of particular racial identities provide the basis for racial impersonation. In this essay, I argue that Black fishing is a contemporary form of Black face minstrelsy. Demonstrating the connections between Hallberg’s persona and the Black face minstrel will provide further insight regarding the consequences of these racial impersonations. Hallberg exemplifies the case of a white woman who

Alicia McDaniel

perpetuates the circulation of Black stereotypes and caricatures in order to financially benefit through corporate sponsorships. Her impersonation detrimentally impacts Black women, who face ostracism and social resistance for their hairstyles, culture, and general existence due to colonial skin-privilege hierarchies. In other words, white women have the freedom to dress in styles that are an appropriation of other cultures, whereas those from the appropriated cultures are penalized for styles associated with their race or ethnicity. While social media may enable unchecked racial impersonations, the recent emergence of the #Black fishing movement to call these instances out suggests that social media is also a space in which Black communities and allies can challenge such acts. Today, many people are equipped with language formulated from a collective consciousness to critically fight against performances of racial impersonation. In his book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, American cultural historian Eric Lott defines Black face minstrelsy as the practice of white stage actors who perform characters based on exaggerated representations of Blackness. 8 This theatrical impersonation reached a peak in popularity in the early nineteenth century and was achieved through the application of greasepaint, burnt cork , shoe polish, or paint upon the actor’s skin. According to art historian and curator Cherise Smith, the Black face minstrel “depended on and perpetuated an exaggerated blackness that was, at turns, debased, threatening, humble, and virile.” 9 White minstrel performers dehumanized and commodified Black bodies and culture for entertainment. Blackness was exploited to aff irm white aff luence and fallacious racial superiority through this mode of oppression. Intriguingly, Smith makes the provocative argument in Enacting Others that the Black face minstrels are “reinscriptions of power differentials and domination” through her discussion of cross-dressing as performance. She states, “ In this understanding, drag and minstrel performers dress as their ‘opposite’ to dramatize their difference from, and power over, those they find threatening.” 10 Smith references American feminist scholar 8

Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6.

Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 14.

10 Ibid., 16.

Racial Impersonation

Peggy Phelan, who asserts that the crossdressing man mimics an image of a woman to reaff irm that he possesses her ex ternally and hyperbolically. Smith concurs, in her argument that performers of Black face attempt to possess the racialized individuals that they both “love and hate.” 11 Hallberg’s racial impersonation suggests that this cycle persists today. Black fishers and Black face minstrel performers employ Blackness to act upon their desires to become the fetishized, commodified, and sexualized Other. The Black minstrel, enacted by Black performers, emerged after the Black face minstrel was popularized by their white counterparts within the mid-nineteenth century. Likewise, these Black actors also darkened their appearance and reenacted caricatures as a means to thrive within a white male-centric paradigm. Both white and Black minstrel performers established a long-lasting legacy of the trade in and consumption of Black bodies and Black culture. Lott asserts that the minstrel shows performed two functions. First, they provided a venue in which middle-class performers were able to assume a version of Black masculinity as a vicarious means of temporarily transcending middle-class pretensions. Second, these shows enabled white working-class audiences to distinguish themselves apart from Black individuals, with whom they competed for work and respect. 12 It is worth noting that the primary objective of white minstrel performers’ impersonations was not to pass as Black individuals through their hyperbolic impersonations. Instead, “ they relished their unlikeliness from their characters” just as Hallberg takes pleasure in showcasing her Instagram persona. 13 It is crucial to understand that viewers experience Hallberg’s images online, where she can reach a wide range of audiences through her easily-accessible, influential, and interactive interface. In Enacting Others, Smith points to the importance of the relationship between performers and their audience. Hallberg’s actions “are learned from, and, in turn, performed for, various audiences,” or in this case, for her followers. 14 Online users and followers feed social ideologies such as 11

Ibid.

12 Ibid., 57. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 19.

Alicia McDaniel

constructions of beauty, popularity, and stereotypical expectations. Essentially, Hallberg stylizes and presents herself in a persona that has been constructed through social media and the tradition of Blackface minstrelsy. Because the influencer passes as a Black or mixedrace woman, she was expected to be one, supported by a significant number of followers who praise her appearance. According to gender theorist Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, identity is a “set of socially mandated behaviors and actions that individuals perform in order to take on and maintain a particular identity.” 15 While Hallberg’s racial impersonation is enabled through rewards of praise and monetary profit, she also maintains her temporary identity through a means of stereotypical actions and stylization. For instance, the influencer incorporates music from hip-hop and rap artists like Drake and Chris Brown into her beauty tutorials, Instagram stories, posts, and YouTube channel. 16 She stylizes herself with hoop earrings, hair ex tensions, wigs, braids, headwraps, and do-rags. She uses Ebonic language in her posts— phrases like “ too much sauce,” “hustle,” and, “came through drippin’”— to suggest a Black identity. 17 Prior to being exposed as white, Hallberg was complacent; she never denied or acknowledged that she was not a person of color on any public platform until she was publicly confronted. Upon the revelation of Hallberg’s white identity, before-and-after photos of the Instagrammer circulated across social media. A comparison of these photos jux taposes Hallberg’s natural skin tone to her applied one. In the “before” photo (fig. 3), a young, cheerful Hallberg faces the viewer with a wide smile and visible laughing lines. Her eyebrows are drawn on fully, and her hair is straight. Hallberg wears a black , open jacket and a white, scoop-neck T-shirt. Most notably, her skin is white. In the “after” photo (fig. 4), Hallberg photographs herself, from the top half of her midriff up, standing in a doorway leaning against a white door. Her skin is a deep shade of brown, and she wears her hair in a top bun from which tight curls emerge. Hallberg’s gaze 15 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988), 519-31. 16 Emma Hallberg (@eemmahallberg), YouTube, accessed March 14, 2020, https://www. youtube.com/channel/UCroSgo4dCHyPeGbMaYmbPGg. 17 According to John R. Rickford of the Linguistic Society of America, the term Ebonics is a blend of the words ebony (black) and phonics (sounds). The term was created by a group of Black scholars in 1973 who rejected negative terms such as Nonstandard Negro English. Ebonics is also referred to as African American Vernacular English in academia.

Racial Impersonation

Figure 3. Screenshot from Emma Hallberg’s Instagram account (@eemmahallberg), originally posted ca. summer 2016, 2019.

Figure 4. Screenshot from Emma Hallberg’s Instagram account (@eemmahallberg), originally posted ca. fall 2018, 2019.

locks onto the viewer with a seductive gleam in her eyes, an alluring arch in her brow, and a slight pout on her lips. The Instagrammer’s head is tilted down and towards her right shoulder. Her left shoulder is raised and exposed through a yellow, off-shoulder sweater, which is tied in the front to accentuate her cleavage and the top of her midriff. Hallberg’s right arm is raised into a loose fist resting close to her face and parallel to the bottom of her chin. These contrasting differences in her appearance led to significant backlash from other online users, which included a spectrum of insults ranging from “culture vulture” commentary to death threats. Communities of color were infuriated with Hallberg’s perpetuation of Black face, cultural appropriation, and the exploitation of hypersexualized women of color as well as her

Alicia McDaniel Figure 5. Screenshot from Emma Hallberg’s Instagram account (@eemmahallberg), 2019.

deceitfulness overall. In response to public scrutiny, Hallberg insists that she is not posing as a Black woman. Additionally, she also makes provocative explanations for her deceitful appearance. In her Instagram highlights, Hallberg attempts to provide genealogical and biological evidence as she maintains that her appearance is natural. Included among these items are photos of her family members, her hair routine, and herself as a child. The first photo is a black image with the white tex t stating, “ LET ME EXPLAIN.” Nex t, Hallberg displays the same before-and-after picture that had been circulating the web and states that she has been falsely accused of frequent spray tans, taking melatonin injections, getting hair perms,

Racial Impersonation: Figure 6. Screenshot from Emma Hallberg’s Instagram account (@eemmahallberg), 2019.

and having lip injections (fig. 5). According to Hallberg’s claims, these photos were taken between the summers of 2016 and 2018. The influencer further asserts that her skin tone is natural. Insisting that her appearance is hereditary, she provides photos of her father and brother who appear to be markedly tan and a video showcasing her mother’s hair to challenge people that believe “white people can’t have naturally curly hair” (fig. 6). Hallberg also posts four pictures of herself as a child and claims that they provide evidence of her curly hair; however, each face has been covered by drawn-on pink hearts, which obscures these images from serving as proof for her argument. She moves onto other arguments in attempt to justify herself to her base. Hallberg responds

Alicia McDaniel Figure 7. Screenshot from Emma Hallberg’s Instagram account (@eemmahallberg), 2019.

to two screenshots taken and circulated from one of her beauty tutorials on YouTube, where Hallberg applies a foundation that is several shades darker than her skin tone to her face. She states that she had to match her face to the rest of her body that had tanned (fig. 7). Even if one were to believe Hallberg’s claims that her hair and skin are indeed natural, it is disturbing that she is attempting to justify appropriation and commodification of a particular Black aesthetic that is enshrouded in hypersexualized stereotypes. She benefits from a capitalist system that enforces skin stratification, racism, and consumption of Blackness, while remaining complacent and silent about Black exploitation. As mentioned previously, Lott asserts that Black face minstrel performers were not actually trying to emulate Black individuals. Instead,

Racial Impersonation

they emulated an ideological caricature that was formulated through a desire to assert power and control over the Other through a means of dehumanization, homogenization, and essentialization of Blackness. Hallberg operates similarly as she emulates stereotypes of Black individuals that are enacted by those who have eminence in celebrity culture. 18 For instance, the Kylie Jenner effect refers to the reality star and founder of Kylie Cosmetics. According to content creator and blogger Stephanie Yeboah, the Kylie Jenner effect is when non-Black social media users decide to emulate the Kardashians as a means of “exocitizing their look .” 19 There has been much controversy and debate about the Kardashian family’s appropriation of Black hairstyles and culture despite their assertions that they are not doing so. Actress Amandla Stenberg is one such critic who confronted Kylie Jenner for appropriating Black hairstyles on Instagram. Under a photo of Jenner with her hair styled in cornrows, Stenberg commented, “u appropriate black features and culture but fail to use ur power to help black Americans by directing attention towards ur wigs instead of police brutality or racism.” 20 Stenberg brings attention to how Blackness is consumed within white culture, and yet there is no desire for these non-Black individuals to address issues that impact Black communities. Hallberg’s case demonstrates how the legacy of Black minstrelsy continues to perpetuate harmful stereotypes that oppress Black communities. While Hallberg has the platform to voice her concerns and empathy for Black women, she instead exploits them for personal benefit. If there is anything true about Hallberg’s claims, it is that she does indeed profit off of how she stylizes herself (fig. 8). As of the time of this writing, the influencer receives sponsorships from rising companies like Fashion Nova and has been featured in well-renowned publications such as Teen Vogue. 21 Hallberg and other Black fishers enact performances that fail to acknowledge structural inequality. They fail to 18 Celebrity culture is the consumption of the personal lives of celebrities perpetuated through mass media. 19 Dorothy Musariri, “White Women are Posing as Black on Instagram: Are the Kardashians to Blame?,” New Statesman America, November 12, 2018, https://www.newstatesman.com/ science-tech/social-media/2018/11/white-women-are-posing-black-Instagram-arekardashians-blame. 20 Lily Workneh, “Amandla Stenberg Calls Out Kylie Jenner For Cultural Appropriation” HuffPost, July 12, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amandla-stenberg-kyliejenner_n_55a28697e4b0ecec71bc5141. 21 Emma Hallberg (@eemmahallberg), “@fashionnova top fashionnovapartner,” Instagram photo, February 26, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Cd1W5hOAb/.

Alicia McDaniel Figure 8 . Screenshot from Emma Hallberg’s Instagram account (@eemmahallberg), 2019.

address the racist history of the Black face minstrel; they fail to respond to contemporary notions of racism; and they fail to confront issues of cultural appropriation and colorism. 22 Importantly, Hallberg’s continued followers fail to acknowledge the experiences of Black individuals and remain complicit. Despite this bleak perspective, there are avenues of hope. There is discourse around skin privilege, race, and collective social consciousness occurring among online and off line users. Most significantly, Black communities are able to come together under the common cause of making Hallberg’s deception known. 22 According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, colorism is the “prejudice or discrimination especially within a racial or ethnic group favoring people with lighter skin over those with darker skin.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines cultural appropriation as “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.”

Racial Impersonation

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Aggregate Space Gallery, Bianka Bell, Spencer Douglas, Sam Johnson, Darrell McDaniel, Melissa McDaniel, Rachel McDaniel, Katelyn Rosenbauer, Root Division, Ruth’s Table, and the VCS class of 2020.

Justin R. Nagle

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine Note: This essay presents sexually explicit language and images.

It is an affective force that is active, intelligible, and has genuine efficacy: it is both moved and moving. It is a force that generates sensory and emotional gratification. It is a force that produces shared capacity and commonality. It is a force that, though cross-cut by all kinds of impulses, has its own intrinsic value. 1 — Nigel Thrift

The image depicted in figure 1 is of two pages of an erotica magazine, stuck together and held open by my hand; it touches and is touched. It excited me as I thumbed through these effected and affecting pages in the archive. The flow of time’s touch implicates this magazine of bodies into becoming a body in and of itself. It is seen through the seepage from outside the heterotopia of “Carlos,” naked in a rock y landscape, within the collection of Bulk Male magazine found in the GLBT Historical Society’s archive in San Francisco. Even though my encounter with Bulk Male is “cross-cut” by my desire, this magazine has an allure— an affective pull— that imbues this published object with “intrinsic value” when understood as a body stimulating response in contemporary bodies and artistic practices. Bulk Male acts as a classified ad in the literal and figurative sense. The magazine operated in the 1990s to create community for fat-and-gay men as well as other subcultures of gay men not conforming to gay bodily ideals. 2 Embracing the negative affects of shame and trauma of historical contingency helps to understand how this magazine operates as an archival body producing subjective embodiment through embrace and refusal of discursively produced shame. 3 Bulk Male magazine becomes a classified ad and acts as an affected body through the display of fat male bodies as objects of gay/queer desire, in its presence in both the GLBT Historical 1

Nigel Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 292.

Here, I want to clarify my use of the term fat-and-gay. I use it as shorthand for the men within the magazine to maintain clarity and as a means of separation from the bear, those who may be fat and gay but identify as bears and distance themselves from the fat-and-gay man. The magazine, however, does not assume or proscribe the sexuality of the men depicted; Jason Whitesel, Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

For understandings of these negative affects in relation to queer history and its “losers,” see Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Justin R. Nagle Figure 1. A spread featuring Carlos is stuck together in Bulk Male 4, no. 3. Photo by author, taken in San Francisco GLBT Historical Society’s archive.

Society’s archive and in the work of James Unsworth’s Girth and Mirth series from 2015. Bulk Male magazine is at the center of this project because it is a groundbreaking gay male erotica publication from the 1990s. First published in 1991, just prior to the height of the worldwide AIDS epidemic, Bulk Male displays fat-and-gay men in homoerotic and community-oriented ways that brush up against the hairy masculinity of the bear. 4 It is a heterotopian space, understood through Michel 4

Lisa Cisneros, “Thirty years of AIDS: A Timeline of the Epidemic,” University of California San Francisco, last modified March 23, 2012, https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2011/06/104134/ thirty-years-aids-timeline-epidemic. It is often assumed that the 1980s was the height of the AIDS epidemic; however, statistics show that rates of infection and death were higher during the early to mid-1990s. In 1992 complications from HIV and AIDS were the number one killer of men between ages 25 and 44 in the United States.

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine

Foucault, which operates as a physical space removed from the everyday that is produced in relation to and negation of that very same everyday. 5 This magazine depicts subjects as objects that play on a desire of consuming reflexively, and becomes what Foucault describes as “a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality” to bear down to produce a “counteraction on the position that I occupy.” 6 Reading this publication as affecting reaction and refusal is a reflexive act because Bulk Male is a reaction to its cultural contex ts. It is a means of understanding subjectivity through the projection of a scopophilic desire as a similar subject and object to understand how refusal and failure function to fail and refuse respectively. Bulk Male is seen in fat studies discourse as proffering space for the unrestrained desire of fat-and-gay men and is conflated with the gay subcultural identity of the bear and hegemonic masculinity within that same discourse. 7 These interventions into the heterotopian space of Bulk Male affect the magazine as a classified ad in our present moment through archival touch. Turning back , the two affectively stuck together pages of Carlos naked in front of a rock y landscape in figure 1 creates this magazine as a body. His build is average and is considered a chaser in this subcultural community. 8 A chaser has a slim or average build, while a chubby is just that: fat or larger than the chaser or average/normative standards— the fat-and-gay man. Carlos is not a typical subject of this magazine. As anthropologist Matti Bunzl notes, “chubbies and chasers are rarely confused” because they are “characterized by their different physiques as well as different behavior.” 9 The chaser/chubby dynamic relies on binaries of top/bottom, male/female, and active/passive. In 5

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 330-336.

Ibid., 4.

The gay bear is a subcultural identity, now seemingly monocultural, that is meant to signify a gay male who resists femininity by embracing and embodying masculinity through extra weight and body hair. The fat-and-gay man depicted in Bulk Male is entangled with the bear and his embrace of masculinity as a rejection of trauma and the effete mascots of Gay Liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. For more on these men and hegemonic masculinity, see Les Wright, ed., The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997); Les Wright, ed., The Bear Book II: Further Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture (New York: Haworth Press Inc., 2001); Peter Hennen, Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).

This is not to say that he is a chaser because, as mentioned earlier, the sexualities of these men are not decided by the magazine but by the men themselves.

Matti Bunzl, “Chasers,” in Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession,” eds. Don Kulick and Anne Meneley (New York: Penguin, 2005), 207.

Justin R. Nagle

the images we see of Carlos, he asserts a more aggressive and dominant behavior ascribed to the chaser as subject. He signals a desire of and for a hegemonic masculinity that embraces the masculine as a rejection of the feminine through a lack of camp and play. 10 The content of these images then, is seen as pointing to embodied refusal of femininity and passivity through his stance and expression. The images of Carlos are important because they signal hegemonic masculinity through his posturing. Yet, the pages signal the importance and presence of the body in the archive by being stuck together. Conjecturing on the substance, one could surmise it to be off-white, diaphanous bodily viscous that trickled onto these pages; most likely, it is water damage obscuring Carlos and making him differently legible. The magazine has a presence as a body. It is produced as such by the leak that has seeped onto these pages to reveal the tension of the archive as container. Effected through its nature as an objective tool of discursive functioning around fat-and-gay male subjectivity— as a magazine— Bulk Male becomes about bodies both present and absent within the archive. This physical trace of the body in the archive draws attention to the presence of bodies through their absence. Archival and digital studies scholar Marika Cifor in “ Presence, Absence, and Victoria’s Hair,” finds a physical trace in the archive of trans activist Victoria Schneider at the GLBT Historical Society. Cifor finds a hair follicle on lipstick that embodies the metaphor of synecdoche. For Cifor, the hair represents the absence of Schneider through a follicular body being present in Schneider’s absence. The assumed hair of Schneider’s has an affective pull for Cifor, who understands “it as a token of emotional intimacy, a tangible and animate signifier creating intimacy between” Schneider and Cifor. 11 This explicates the importance of desire present in a researcher’s aims of haptic and embodied understanding of one’s self through another. Cifor desired to touch the archive. In brushing up against this hair follicle, Cifor transforms it into a body through metaphor, absence, and touch. Hair represents the absent body and 10 Camp and play are vital strategies that fat-and-gay men use to build community, as well as a means to refuse the shame inscribed onto fat and gay bodies through pathological narratives of worth. For more on this, see Jason Whitesel, Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 11

Marika Cifor, “Presence, Absence, and Victoria’s Hair: Examining Affect and Embodiment in Trans Archives,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 4 (2015), 645-649.

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine

shows us how this caress, whether by the researcher or by time, affects the bodies/objects contained therein through the seepage and thus, demonstrates corruption from an ex ternal world. Photographer and theorist Allan Sekula’s discussion of the archive as container furthers Cifor’s affective synecdoche as it relates to the presence of the affected body of Bulk Male. Sekula opens up the potential of the archival body as a constructed taxonomy of difference. He exemplifies this through criminological photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that the archive creates the subjected body through analysis of visual representation to create hierarchies of worth. Sekula proffers that “ the general, all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female and all other embodiments of the unworthy.” 12 For Sekula this is the shadow archive, understood as an archive that creates an absence through the symbolic and indexical bodies present therein. Conjunctly, Bulk Male and the construction of identity it appears to purport (embraced masculinity refusing the feminine) operates “ to establish and delimit the terrain of the other” and, in turn, “define both the generalized look— the typology— and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology” of the fat-and-gay man and, subsequently, the bear. 13 I see what is present, a typology and hierarchy of worth that reveals what is absent: diff erently gendered and racialized bodies. In this elision, Bulk Male becomes a shadow archive within an already considered shadow archive. Bulk Male creates a shadow archive through the absence of bodies as well as through the presence of classified ads and the men depicted therein. These ads make the taxonomical function of the archive and the grid imperative in implicating the reach Bulk Male had, however limited, in affecting community through collapsing the limits of physical space. The classified ads explicate tangibly the reach of this magazine as a discursive inciter through its collapse of physical distance. 12 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986), 10. 13 Ibid., 6-7.

Justin R. Nagle

Figure 2. Classified ads from Bulk Male 4, no. 6 (1994), [Bulk Male #334]. Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine

Figure 2 is an image of classifieds from an earlier issue of Bulk Male. These classifieds have an intriguing organizational structure: the tex t for the advertisement is placed in the center with images on the periphery— in this issue, the left or right side respectively; in later ones, on the top or bottom; and at the end, in the middle. The ads are broken up into a gridded structure of columns and rows, organized alphabetically by state then countries outside of the US, in turn collapsing topographic space onto these pages. The classified ads show a breadth and variety of men from across the globe who actively participated in this community of desire for fatand-gay men through a compression in distance. Collapse takes place in the classified ads through a taxonomical ordering of linguistic and pictorial bodies corresponding to embodied individuals in real geographical space. The images have a numbered caption, for example, “ Photo #000123,” which corresponds to an ad with the same descriptor. These indicators allow the reader to identify the linguistic body to the corresponding pictorial body of the grainy landscape, headless torso, or genitals. Often times the photo and corresponding ad are not on the same page, as evinced in figure 2. Such instances disorient topographic space through a gridded collapse. Through this, a broader and more nuanced community of fat-and-gay men comes to flourish, even to this day. The classified ad offers a space for creating community that disrupts the shame and stigma felt by fat-and-gay men. Psychologist Michael I. Loewy and sociologist Nathaniel C. Pyle illuminate the classified ads’ importance for the fat-and-gay man in community-building. They note that these classifieds were the primary means by which fat-and-gay men found partners and created friendships in spite of the limitations of technology and geographical distance. 14 For Loewy and Pyle, topographic distance and the need for community were central to the creation of these publications. 15 Not only arising from this need, these magazines flourished from the desire for recognition found in the classified ad. 14 Michael I. Loewy and Nathaniel C. Pyle, “Double Stigma: Fat Men and Their Male Admirers,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 146. 15 Ibid., 145.

Justin R. Nagle

Due to the limited number of corporate advertisers willing to place ads in such niche publications, the classified ads were a major financial support. 16 Bulk Male traces this trajectory through the growth of the classified ad section, which comprised one-fifth of the magazine’s content before it shifted to a digital platform in the early 2000s. In the shift to digital form, the potential for community expanded. This is best seen in digital dating or “hook-up” applications used today, that further a geographic and temporal collapse. The move to the digital realm affects a temporal collapse in the immediacy of response and interaction. However, it leaves a lingering question: how does a response to a Bulk Male classified ad look? Unfortunately, the responses of Bulk Male classified ads are not published, nor should they be, leading this researcher’s desire to lead elsewhere. In lieu of Bulk Male readers’ responses to these classified ads, I examine a work from artist James Unsworth’s 2015 series Girth and Mirth, which uses images from Bulk Male. Unsworth responds to this magazine as archival object and discursive inscriber through collage. The image in figure 3 is one such instance. It is a collage that uses a color page from a later issue of Bulk Male. The work depicts two men engaged primarily in oral sex on a diamond-patterned couch. The two men, “ Daddy G” and “ Me” have starkly contrasting physical builds. “ Daddy G” is a white, husk y man and the appearing top, while “ Me” is a thin, Black man. The scenes suggest that “ Me” is there to please and appease “ Daddy G” through oral gratification and other stimulating touch. Yet, Unsworth interrupts this scene that placates and further reifies the white male ga(y)ze. He obfuscates this gridded image with roses, pansies, marigolds, and other vegetative sex organs. These interruptions ask us to focus on what Unsworth sees as important to show, and as it turns out, it is not genitals. Instead, he draws attention to the problematic function of conscripting desire in service to a primacy of white male desire. 17 Unsworth’s additions focus primarily on the white chub “ Daddy G” and his pleasure from the Black male chaser “ Me” and his orifices. 16 Ibid., 146. 17 Bunzl, “Chasers,” 204-205.

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine

Figure 3. James Unsworth, Untitled, 2015, from the series Girth and Mirth. The work features a photospread, “ Me and Daddy G,” from Bulk Male 6, no. 4 (1997). Courtesy of the Artist.

Justin R. Nagle

In this way, the additions act as erasures and make present a problematic racial hierarchy by drawing attention to what is covered and uncovered. By covering genitals, Unsworth highlights deeper structural issues regarding the visual consumption of bodies. Following Bunzl, I understand these feminine signifiers as drawing attention to what he describes as a desire ascribed to a “straight male logic” embedded with a “ triangulated attraction between the objects of one’s desire” prioritizing a fantasy of the viewer as the real object of desire. 18 This is apparent because most of the scenes depict “ Me” as the passive or bottom partner in service to a white-passing male. With additions by Unsworth, this problematic aspect of scopophilic image-production is rendered visible through the pansies that cover “ Daddy G’s” genitals as “ Me” fellates him, for instance. This covering-of by Unsworth castrates white male desire and logic to critically respond to Bulk Male as a classified ad across temporal distances. In conclusion, the affective pull of this magazine as a classified ad calling forth from the archive has been illuminated through its objected nature as well as its subjective nature in the work of Unsworth. These objects of allure and desire are affective insofar as there is outward motion in the form of a response— a response that is haptic like thumbing through Bulk Male’s pages, or perhaps, simultaneously additive and subtractive as in Unsworth’s Girth and Mirth series. Either way, the classified ad elicits motion to broaden the reach of community for fatand-gay men. Bulk Male was, and is, a space for unrestrained fat desire and for community to come together through an affective impetus in refusal of shame. 19 In this collapsed heterotopian space of Bulk Male as classified ad, the past affectively calls forth a response in our present, asking us to question why these men embraced hegemonic masculinity in favor of refusing the shame and stigma of being both fat and gay. Touching Bulk Male in this way bears newer understandings of identity 18 Ibid., 205. 19 Jerry Mosher, “Setting Free the Bears: Refiguring Fat Men on Television,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 166-193.

Affective Touch in the Archive of Bulk Male Magazine

as both refusal and embrace of the abjection inherent to subjectivities, creating a broader community across both time and space. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Dad and Mom, Donovan, Jesus, San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, and the VCS cohort of 2020.

Yomna Osman

Orthostates: A Ghost Resisting Erasure

A series of large framed charcoal rubbings sits on a winding wall in one of seven galleries in the Ancient Near Eastern Art wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (fig. 1). The thirty-two framed rubbings are part of one artwork , Orthostates (2017-ongoing), by contemporary Lebanese sculptor Rayyane Tabet. Hung a few inches above the ground, hovering over a two-inch white platform, Orthostates occupies the entire gallery. Because the built wall takes up more than half the space of the gallery, there is nowhere left to back up and see the work together; rather, viewers must walk alongside the installation in order to see each one. The frames nearly touch, their shadows melting, creating a running stream of framed charcoal impressions. While most of the frames are vertically oriented, some are horizontal, and they are all the same size (42 x 30 inches). Some more legible than others, each rubbing consists of a set of intertwined thick scribbles that conceal an image. The images depict several scenes, including animals, plants, deities, beasts, and daily activities, to name a few. Stepping into this gallery and facing the rubbings is like being in a room of ghosts. The ghostly feeling is a result of the rubbing technique and charcoal material used in the work . Tabet considers Orthostates as one work of sculpture. 1 Adopting this framing, the complexity of the work begins to reveal itself, much like the images found within each rubbing. Orthostates is a conceptual project that references a set of displaced ancient artifacts. The artifacts were excavated in the early twentieth century by German archeologist Baron Max von Oppenheim. The work ’s rubbing technique is merely a tracing of the relief surface of these objects. On the wall, each frame includes an impression in exactly the center of a large white paper. Orthostates points to the artifacts’ absence through its presentation of a series of ghosts. In this essay, I assert that Orthostates deploys its technique 1

Rayyane Tabet, discussion with the author, September 2019.

Yomna Osman

Figure 1. Rayyane Tabet, installation view of Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property, 2019-21, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rayyane Tabet, Orthostates, 2017-ongoing. Thirty-two framed charcoal rubbings on paper. 42 × 30 inches each. Photo by the author. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Orthostates

and materials to critique the troubling history of colonial archeology in the region known today as the Middle East. 2 Orthostates has appeared ex tensively in contemporary art exhibitions since its creation in 2017. Those include at the daadgalerie in Berlin, Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, Louvre Museum in Paris, and most recently at the Met in New York City. At the Met, Orthostates is part of the exhibition Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property (2019-2020). It is installed on a zigzagging wall, which differs from its usual presentation as one long, straight line in prior iterations. While Orthostates has previously been shown in relation to a number of curatorial themes, it is exclusively framed within the story of its creation. This essay will primarily focus on the presentation at the Met. Orthostates is an example of the artist ’s trust in his curiosity. Tabet ’s work is often times motivated by his own limitless intuition. For example, while driving to the beach in Lebanon one day, he noticed huge metal pipes which led him to stop his car in the middle of the road and ask someone about the pipes’ story. This interaction eventually materialized into his 2013 project The Shortest Distance Between Two Points (2013). Similarly, Orthostates began with an observation, a curiosity for a framed picture of a German man in his grandfather’s apartment. Tabet found out that his great-grandfather Faek Borkhoche assisted Oppenheim (whose picture remained framed in his grandparents’ apartment) in the early twentieth century excavation of Tell Halaf, a city that sits on the border between Turkey and Syria today. Tabet was told that in reality, Borkhoche was sent to spy on Oppenheim. Orthostates thus emerged out of a complicated and fascinating story concerning colonial archeology. Orthostates traces the stones with low reliefs, or orthostats, excavated in Tell Halaf. Orthostats are large architectural upright slab-like stones. They adorned the walls of Neo-Hittite palaces and shrines built in the first millennium BCE. 3 In the early 1900s archeologists unearthed an entire city that belonged to the Arameans, one of confederacy of 2

It is important to note that the term Middle East is imposed on the region through the colonial times. This term didn’t exist before the nineteenth century. The British mainly used this term to govern their empire. The term essentially refers to the region east of London. While this term is problematic, it remains the most recognizable way to refer to this region today.

“A Guide to the Exhibition,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed on January 3, 2020, https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/rayyane-tabet-alien-property/ exhibition-guide.

Yomna Osman

tribes that spoke Aramaic (a North Semitic language) and occupied Aram, a large region in northern Syria, between the eleventh and eighth century BCE. 4 The Arameans had their own political and power structures— five of which were major polities in northern Syria alone. 5 The Aramaeans engaged in intermittent war with Assyria, a kingdom of northern Mesopotamia. Their end was marked in 720 when Assyrian king, Sargan II destroyed the Arameans’ capital city of Hamath, located on the banks of the Orontes River in West Syria. 6 The historical violence and destruction eventually led to the abandonment of the city and the burial of its beautiful monuments. To ensure objectivity, the field of archaeology is not meant to sympathize with violence. In fact, archeologists “consider these destructions as a stroke of luck because they left remains in situ providing a snapshot into the lives of ancient people.” 7 This lack of sympathy, while essential for the field, normalizes violence and transforms ferocity into an aesthetic (prized objects in a museum collection). Further, colonial archeology doesn’t consider these objects to be linked to the space of their excavation. While objects excavated during colonial times remain mostly well-kept in Western museums, archeologists were happy and quick to displace them from their original locations. Colonial archeology essentially deals with these finds as objects dividable among different constituents, as collected tokens of human and historical heritage to be “safely” kept in the West. Orthostates is created from stones unearthed as a frieze of an ancient castle. In the early 1900s, one of the most important finds in the Tell Halaf dig was a Neo-Hittite castle. This castle was unearthed with a frieze of 194 orthostat reliefs (fig. 2). Their aura lived within their totality. The aura here refers to the integral definitive quality of the artifact, the stones. On the back frieze, the stones alternate between red limestone and black basalt. 8 They form a narrative strip featuring imagery of 4

Aramaean Encyclopædia Britannica Inc, 2019, accessed on February 11, 2020, https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Aramaean/9188.

K. Lawson Younger, Jr., “A Political History of the Arameans: From Their Origins to the End of Their Polities.” (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 886.

Ibid.

Hélène Sader, “Between Looters, Collectors, and Warlords: Does Archaeology Stand a Chance?” ASOR Annual Meeting, 2018, YouTube, accessed on February 11, 2020, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCx56KgQsY0.

Rayyane Tabet and Bettina Steinbruegge, Fragments / Bruchstücke, ed. Rayyane Tabet (Paris: Les presses du reel, 2018).

Orthostates

Figure 2. Orthostat reliefs excavated in Tell Halaf, Syria, ca. 1912. Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art) Fall 2019, figure 5: 11. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

plants, magical animals, and hunting scenes. Their union and narrative purpose were, however, destroyed when Oppenheim removed them and began their transportation to the West. In 1914, during World War I, a British naval ship seized a German cruiser while shipping some of these objects from Alexandria to Berlin. 9 All the artifacts on this cruiser, including fifteen of the stone reliefs, entered the collection of the British Museum. Because of the ongoing war and other factors, some of the stones were dispersed to other museum collections, while others were

Ibid., 175.

Yomna Osman

never found. 10 Looking to make some money, Oppenheim traveled to New York to try and sell eight of the stone reliefs. Due to an economic crisis at that time, he was unsuccessful. 11 The baron left the stones in a storage facility in the city and returned to Berlin hoping to one day return to New York and sell the artifacts. 12 The exhibition, in which Orthostates appears, takes its name Alien Property as a critique of an act. In a twist of fate, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1942 establishing the Off ice of Alien Property Custodian. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act 1917, the off ice mediated the seizure of objects belonging to enemies of the United States that were currently on US soil. The act explains that its raison d’être is “ to permit, under careful safeguards and restrictions, certain kinds of business to be carried on,” among warring nations and to “provide for the care and administration of the property and property rights of enemies and their allies in this country pending the war.” 13 The office remained active throughout the first and second world wars until its eventual dissolution by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, twenty-four years after its establishment. 14 Following the Alien Property Custodian Act, the stones were auctioned, and the Met was the highest bidder. The museum acquired eight of the stones for $4,000 and proceeded to resell four to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. 15 Because of the nature of the dig, the Alien Property Act, and colonialism, the stones were scattered all over the world. Tabet ’s process to create the rubbings becomes unnecessarily laborious. To conceive of Orthostates, Tabet began by identifying all the various stones from the castle that were held in many museum collections. Some of the stones ended up in museum collections in Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor in Syria, 10 Wall text from Rayyane Tabet, Orthostates, 2017-ongoing, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. 11

For more information about the stock market crash in New York City in 1930, see episode five “Cosmopolis” in the documentary series New York: A Documentary Film, directed by Ric Burns (Steeplechase Films, WGBH Boston, Thirteen/WNET, and the New-York Historical Society, 1999).

12 Tabet and Steinbruegge, Fragments / Bruchstücke, 190. 13 Markham v. Cabell, 326 U.S. 404, 414, n. 1 (1945) (Burton, J., concurring). See also S. Rep. No. 113, 65th Cong., 1st Sess. (1917), 1. 14 The Alien Property Custodian: A Legislative Chronological History and Bibliography of the Trading with the Enemy Act (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1953). 15 “Recommendation of purchase,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 18, 1943, accessed on March 16, 2020, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/827928?&exhibitionId=%7b10143e6e-be5f-4a0a-81cc-d423be312244%7d& oid=827928&pkgids=597&pg=0&rpp=20&pos=13&ft=*&offset=20.

Orthostates

Figure 3. Rayyane Tabet, installation view of Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property, 2019-21, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rayyane Tabet, Orthostates, 2017-ongoing. Thirty-two framed charcoal-on-paper rubbings. 42 × 30 inches each. Photo: Kim Benzel. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yomna Osman

Baltimore, Berlin, London, New York , and Paris. 16 He then set out to create charcoal rubbings from as many of the stone reliefs as he could. All institutions except the British Museum granted him access to the stones. He was given fifteen to twenty minutes with each stone to create a charcoal rubbing. 17 With the devastating, ongoing civil war in Syria, Tabet was unable to visit the museum in Aleppo. Tabet dates the work “ 2017-ongoing” because he hopes to eventually complete the work . Orthostates reveals Tabet ’s chase after the stones. Looking directly above the framed rubbings, one barely sees a horizontal list of subtle script (fig. 3). Each column of this list consists of four rows separated horizontally by a thin line. The list ascends from left to right on the winding wall. Each column begins with a number from 1 to 194, then a name of an animal or an activity, followed by material (either limestone or basalt), and finally, a status or a place— for example, “(116, Bear, Limestone, Lost)” or “(115, Palm Tree, Basalt, Aleppo).” Using a sans serif font, the writing is subtle but crystal clear. This list looks like a form of notetaking. It exposes the work needed to make sense of where each stone is located. By revealing his process, Tabet shows the viewer the amount of diligent work he has to do to comprehend the ex tent of colonial damage. Looking at this massive list solidifies the theoretical carelessness of colonial archeology. Trace plays a central role in Orthostates. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes of trace and aura: “ The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the things; in the aura it takes possession of us.” 18 Here, Benjamin relates the trace immediately to the aura. The aura reveals itself in the object in the “here and now,” while the trace travels through time and space while remaining conceptually close to the object. When the Aramaeans created the set of stones, 16 Tabet, Fragments / Bruchstücke, 190. 17 Rayyane Tabet, discussion with the author, February 2020. 18 I, of course, recognize the tension of using a Western theorist’s words to discuss a non-Western/post-colonial project. Benjamin was a German Jewish writer living under Nazi Germany. While his theories were hopeful, Benjamin was living under extremely hopeless regimes. He didn’t finish writing The Arcades Project as he sadly ended up taking his own life before finishing it. As an Egyptian writer who is trying to maintain a hopeful outlook on scholarship living in Trump’s America and leaving behind the most oppressive regime that ruled modern day Egypt, I find Benjamin’s words and outlook relatable; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 104.

Orthostates

Figure 4. Rayyane Tabet, installation view of Rayyane Tabet: Alien Property, 2019-21, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Orthostat reliefs, Neo-Hittite, ca. 10th-9th century B.C., from Tell Halaf (ancient Guzana), Syria. Limestone and basalt. Photo by the author. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

they created them as a series. The work was supposed to live in the world as one set. Their aura resides in their togetherness, their totality. When Oppenheim removed and scattered them, their aura became fragmented. While each one of the stones is magnificent, it only contains a piece of its aura. By traveling and chasing after each one of the stones, Tabet manages to create a trace from a once existent aura. This trace is however incomplete; Orthostates evokes a ghost of the aura. The work reveals the impossibility of transferring the entire aura of the objects from the Aramaeans to us. The carelessness and violence of colonial archeology lays bare in the gallery. It faces the viewer as a fragmented trace shown under a list of carefully jotted notes. Powerful and empowering as this trace is, it does not give Tabet real possession over the stones. Tabet operates under immense institutional power in the shadow of colonial violence. Instead of being

Yomna Osman

Figure 5. Left: Detail of Rayyane Tabet, Orthostat #054, from Orthostates, 2017-ongoing. Framed charcoal rubbing on paper. Right: Orthostat relief: seated figure holding a lotus flower, ca. 10th-9th century B.C., from Tell Halaf (ancient Guzana), Syria. Basalt. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Rogers Fund, 1943.

defeated by authority and a history of domination, Tabet works with and exposes these systems. However, Tabet ’s confrontation with and appropriation of the archeological narrative and its authority reaches a certain limit. As mentioned, the British Museum did not grant the artist access to the stones. They may allow him access one day, but they also may never. Some of the stones are lost or destroyed as well, which means Tabet will never be able to create a rubbing of every stone that once existed. The violence of colonialism is not only immense, it is irreversible. Even if the museums that hold these stones decide to repatriate tomorrow and return the stones back to Aleppo, because of the civil war, the artist would not have access to them. The four stones acquired by the Met are installed in two galleries

Orthostates

before Orthostates. Four large stone blocks of varying sizes are placed in a corner (fig. 4). On the left-hand wall are three vertical stones, and on the right-hand wall of the corner sits one horizontal stone (the largest). The stone blocks are made of basalt and limestone. Basalt is smooth, making the carvings more legible. The largest stone demands careful attention. It shows a lateral image of a man sitting on a chair smelling a lotus flower. With minimal details in his attire, the man is facing two human-headed lions (lamassus) on his left. Facing each other, each lamassu holds onto one foot of a bird flying over them with its wings spread wide. A comparison of the largest stone and its respective rubbing reveals the significant of Tabet ’s use of charcoal (fig. 5). When transferred, the clarity of the basalt carving transforms into smudges of charcoal. Although the works are not physically displayed together, figure 5 shows a jux taposition between the charcoal rubbing and its corresponding stone relief. While the composition is legible on the charcoal rubbing, the detailing is gone. The man turns into a figure of thick scribbles with defined contours. He sits on two pillows piled on top of each other instead of the original chair. The two lamassus resemble standing animals; they could be dogs or tigers. The bird they hold is recognizable as a bird, but all the details of the body fades into thick charcoal squiggles. The overall look of the rubbing is credited in part to its predominant material, charcoal. Charcoal is a biproduct of combustion. It originates from burning organic material in the absence of ox ygen. Much like a diamond, charcoal mostly consists of carbon. When pressed down, the material breaks down such that it smudges, creating the discussed ghostly effect. It is also largely ephemeral. This ephemerality contrasts with the permanence of main material of the corresponding stone, basalt. Basalt is the most abundant volcanic stone. 19 It makes up most of the ocean beds and underlies a great portion of Earth’s surface. The history of the planet lies within the rock formation of this stone. The blue planet is not the only one that contains basalt— it also exists on Mars, the moon, and Venus. The Arameans took an already magnificent stone, one that exists plentifully in Syria, and made 19 Rayyane Tabet, “Rayyane Tabet on Robert Smithson,” Dia’s Artist on Artist Lecture, Emily Harvey Foundation, digital recording, October 29, 2019, https://www.diaart.org/media/ watch-listen/video-rayyane-tabet-on-robert-smithson.

Yomna Osman

it into architecture that later became monuments. Tabet ’s route is a little different. The artist chooses charcoal, perhaps mostly for its convenience, but Tabet works with its ephemerality and creates a resilient, long-lasting work . The trace that Orthostates creates reverberates such that it is shown, seen, documented, and studied. It has been acquired as the first co-accession between the Met ’s Ancient Near Eastern and Modern and Contemporary Art Departments. 20 The institutional care will undeniably ex tend its lifespan. Tabet recognizes and works with the formal quality of his materials— in this case, charcoal. The artist deftly capitalizes on the thick , unclear lines intrinsic to charcoal. No other material would lead us into this ghostly aesthetic that is powerful and integral to the work . However, Tabet does not surrender to the ephemerality of the charcoal. Orthostates refuses to be erased. The referred ghostly effect is most effective when considering and reflecting on the present moment in the Middle East. The running stream of framed charcoal impressions occupy the gallery and face the viewer. The history they refer to does not seem so distant. The room of ghosts is a reminder of all of the ghosts in the Middle East: of objects and people. Writer and critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes that Tabet’s work at the Met “is complex , polyvocal, and deeply striated, like history itself.” 21 The region referred to as the Middle East is also complex , polyvocal, and deeply striated, which makes it diff icult to have a conversation about the region broadly. As we have seen, colonialism has displaced, misplaced, and destroyed artifacts and with it, transnational collective memories. Objects remain locked in museums pending approval for access. Museums remain locked in Western countries, pending visa approval for entry. Moreover, due to wars, revolutions, failed revolutions, and general political unrest in the region, people are disappearing— either losing their lives or being displaced by totalitarian 20 Kim Benzel (curator of Rayyanne Tabet: Alien Property), discussion with the author, November 2019. 21 Kaelen Wilson Goldie, “Let the Record Show: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Rayyane Tabet,” Artforum International 58, no. 6 (2020).

Orthostates

regimes. Oppositional forces are being pushed into silence and disappearance. Much like Tabet ’s use of charcoal, oppositional voices are using ephemeral, temporary methods for historicism, like storytelling. These methods are used mostly to imprint memories of resistance from one generation to the nex t, hoping to one day see their eventual permanence into historical narratives. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Kim Benzel, Clare Davies, Lara El Gibaly, Manal El-Shabouri, Jacqueline Francis, Florian Grosser, Gamal Osman, J. Myers-Szupinska, Ray yane Tabet, Kathy Zarur, VCS cohort, and my friends in Cairo, California, and New York .

Yomna Osman

Institutional Critique

Lucy Ashton

Rogue Pixels: The Tactics of Invisibility in Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen

On June 9, 2019, an estimated one million protesters took to the streets of Hong Kong, marching to the Legislative Council in Admiralty to oppose and delay the passing of the Extradition Law.1 If passed, this bill would limit the civil liberties of Hong Kong citizens and put dissidents and activists in precarious legal situations. It would allow suspects to be ex tradited to mainland China and prosecuted under Chinese governmental laws. Civil disobedience and anti-governmental actions have become more controlled and punished due to the rise of sophisticated surveillance technologies. The protesters, banding together in decentralized and leaderless actions, responded to the reality of a changing surveillance state. These protests were successful in getting Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, to suspend the bill in September 2019. The success of this movement was due to the tactics deployed by protesters and has become a very successful example of how collective invisibility towards political change could look . In How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File (2013), German filmmaker, theorist, and visual artist, Hito Steyerl offers five lessons on becoming invisible in the parodic fashion of educational or instructional films. 2 Steyerl’s video proposes invisibility as a political and social method to escape how visible individuals have become due to surveillance technologies. While her video is not specifically about Hong Kong, their protest strategies reflect the concerns and aims of her video, which include the dangers of advanced and sophisticated electronic surveillance. While scholars of Steyerl’s work have focused on the risks of surveillance and invisibility, in this essay, I focus on invisibility as a strategy against the surveillance state. Here I focus on 1

The Extradition Law is the shortened name for the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019.

The title of Steyerl’s video is taken from the 1970s Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit, also titled “How Not to Be Seen,” which is presented as a parody on public informational films made by the British government. In this short, the narrator, voiced by John Cleese, demonstrates the power of not being seen, where hidden individuals get blown up once the disembodied narrator locates them in the landscape. Steyerl’s video plays with this same sort of didacticism and moves Monty Python’s demonstrations on camouflage into the digital age. Monty Python, “How Not to be Seen,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1970, YouTube video, accessed March 11, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-M2hs3sXGo.

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the concepts of resolution and pixelation as tactics in which to achieve invisibility. Steyerl’s video proposes invisibility as a political strategy. These lessons in invisibility constitute a new form of infiltration and intervention within the systems of electronic surveillance. They become a model of political action that is necessary to combat the ever-changing conditions of surveillance. One of the most significant disadvantages individuals have against governmental power structures is the increasingly unequal use of image collection practices. Invisibility can work against the power asymmetries present in digital surveillance technologies. These asymmetries target precarious lives, more specifically racialized, immigrant, refugee, queer, trans, houseless, and dissident bodies, and leads to the disproportionate consequence of control and policing. Adopting methods of invisibility as a political tactic against the constant morphing of surveillance technology can be a means in which to gain back political power, as enacted in Hong Kong. Learning tactics of invisibility can benefit global anti-government protests and equip any individual with the means to combat the control of surveillance technologies. The opening scene of Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen begins with a 1951 United States Air Force (USAF) resolution test chart propped up on a camera tripod, foregrounded by a green screen (fig. 1). These resolution targets were created by the USAF to calibrate the resolution of aerial photography for surveillance aircraft and satellites. Steyerl’s decision to open the video with this resolution target signals the relationship between surveillance, technology, and war. The resolution target takes on a figurative presence as it looks back at the viewer as if in a moment of pause. Its flat black surface resembles a head balanced upon a thin neck , with many unblinking white eyes staring out. The video’s narration is dictated by interchanging male-and female-voiced, tex t-to-speech avatars. The narrator explains that there are four ways to make something invisible for a camera: “ to hide, to remove, to go offscreen, to disappear.” 3 Steyerl’s own body joins the resolution target on the screen. She covers the target with her hand, picks it up, removes it, leaves it off-screen, and walks towards the camera with the target 3

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013, single-screen video, 0:19, https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-beseen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651.

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until the screen goes black and out of focus. The narrator states, “ This is a resolution target. It measures the visibility of a picture. It measures the visibility of the world as a picture. Resolution determines visibility. Whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible.” 4 Steyerl’s interaction with the resolution target performs the different ways to make something invisible, demonstrating how by altering resolution, invisibility can be achieved. Steyerl proposes a specific kind of invisibility, in which becoming invisible to the camera and image-capture technologies emerges through the potentialities of low-resolution. Surveillance apparatuses track individuals through image-capture technologies and their digital data, and rely on resolution to make potential threats visible. Today, it is almost impossible to escape a camera’s lens, whether it be a smartphone, computer, or surveillance camera. Steyerl offers the concept of resolution as a way to think about becoming undetectable to image-capture technologies. Steyerl has theorized on the capabilities of low-resolution images, which she calls poor images. She articulates that the hierarchy existing in the contemporary image economy relies on resolution, and images which are of poorer quality lose their value as an image. Low-resolution images are defined by their dematerialization and ability to be spread at fast speeds through the internet. Steyerl asserts that: by losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it…it is no longer anchored within a classical public sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation-state or corporation, but floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools. 5

Through low resolution, one can remain undetectable to cameras and can use that towards a political power that refuses the control of digital technology. Resolution targets are a recurring motif throughout the video. The use of the word target to describe the resolution chart, such as the one in figure 1, connotes the threat of visibility. The body and image, as read 4

Ibid., 0:54-1:54.

Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” in The Wretched of the Screen, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 33.

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Lucy Ashton Figure 1. A resolution target featured in a still from Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013. Single-screen video.

by the resolution target, become the focus of the aim of the attack of visibility. Bodies become the target of the mechanisms that attempt to render them visible through resolution. Similarly, writer and scholar Irving Goh states that “ the figure of the citizen today, less than being a figure of the future or of future freedom of the human, is more a figure of citizen-as-target.” 6 By target, Goh refers to how governments surveil the actions of their citizens to watch for behavior that could pose a threat to the security of the state in the twenty-first century— rendering all individuals as potential targets. Whether the image is of low or high resolution determines the ex tent of their invisibility. If that image is of you, you too become invisible to the camera and are able to evade becoming a target of surveillance. Steyerl herself converts into image material in Lesson III, “ How to Become Invisible by Becoming a Picture.” The lesson begins with Steyerl standing with her eyes closed in front of a green screen that is depicting the resolution target. She humorously smears paint on her cheeks as the narrator says “ to camouflage” (fig. 2). 7 In this instance, pieces of Steyerl’s body quite literally become the image that is projected behind her, successfully camouflaging herself by becoming the image. She highlights that through making the body into a medium of 6

Irving Goh, “Prolegomenon to a Right to Disappear,” Cultural Politics 2, no. 1 (2006), 98.

Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen, 4:46.

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Rogue Pixels Figure 2. Still from Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013. Single-screen video. The screen behind Steyerl becomes a part of her face as she smears paint on her cheeks, demonstrating how through the act of camouflaging, one can sink into their surroundings and remain unidentifiable to image capture technologies.

transmission (i.e., a part of a screen or digital image), one can disappear by becoming a picture. Steyerl becomes a medium of transmission by camouflaging her identity. The camera cannot register her body as a body; instead, Steyerl becomes a part of the screen’s materiality, and the camera records the screen that she has become enmeshed in. Surveillance technologies turn humans into transmitted content when their facial features are detected and transformed into data. But, becoming a medium of transmission activates the body and repositions the individual to function effectively against systems of surveillance. Media theorist Toni Pape focuses on Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen as one of his examples of stealth aesthetics. Pape rearticulates the artist ’s explanation, stating that “a skillful activation of this lived relation with media can allow the body to become itself a medium of transmission, rather than a transmitted content.” 8 As Steyerl smears paint on her face to become the image behind her, she becomes both the medium of transmission and transmitted content. Pieces of her face become the green screen projecting colorful images; she sinks into the image, becoming a part of its materiality. Her face and body become part of the picture the viewer is watching. Camouflaging, in this way, throws off any form of representational identity, which media theorists Eugene 8

Toni Pape, “Aesthetics of Stealth: Towards an Activist Philosophy of Becoming-Imperceptible in Contemporary Media,” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 4 (2017), 632. Pape takes Steyerl’s notion of participating with an image from: Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” The Wretched of the Screen, (Berlin: Sternberg Press), 2012, 51.

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Thacker and Alexander R. Galloway argue, is a “ tactic of nonexistence.” 9 They define nonexistence as a strategy to avoid control, specifically within systems of data and technology. Thacker and Galloway suggest that in becoming a medium of transmission, an individual is given temporary autonomy from the structures that control. They state that “with this type of cloaking, one is not hiding, simply nonexistent to that node. The subject has full presence but is simply not there on the screen.” 10 With that in mind, Steyerl remains physically present while standing in her studio to record this scene. But, she becomes partially and momentarily invisible to the viewer as she becomes a part of the screen itself. Further, when individuals use techniques of camouflage as a tactic of low-resolution invisibility, they disable recognition by surveillance technologies. For example, making a face undetectable to facial recognition cameras affects how a machine reads a face. If this software is unable to read the face as a face, it does not exist as a face to that software. Thus, the individual’s identity remains invisible. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown in their study that using anti-recognition techniques, such as covering the face, either with an object or paint, can stymie current facial recognition software used by many surveillance technologies. 11 Computer systems currently do not understand faces the way that humans do. These systems, trained to identify a subject through assigned values based on proportions of the subject ’s face, perceive faces through pixels and patterns. The number of pixels present in an image determines its resolution: the fewer the pixels, the lower the resolution. Protesters use tactics of anti-facial recognition to combat facial recognition software and evade identification by police and military. These tactics take on many forms, from very sophisticated methods to everyday practices of concealment, but all with the focus of covering the face. Thus, figures in a low-resolution image can obtain invisibility because if the machine cannot determine a face within the image, the subject remains unidentifiable. 9

Eugene Thacker and Alexander R. Galloway, “Edges: Tactics of Nonexistence,” in The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 136.

10 Ibid., 135. 11

Mahmood Sharif, Sruti Bhagavatula, Lujo Bauer, and Michael K. Reiter, “Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition,” Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2016), 3.

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Rogue Pixels Figure 3. Still from Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013. Single-screen video. These figures perform how being a pixel can be visualized. The cubes they wear on their head mask their face, allowing them to become unidentifiable, and therefore invisible, to surveillance cameras and facial recognition software.

Steyerl uses humor as a device to expose the political urgency at play within the development of surveillance technologies. In Lesson III of How Not to Be Seen, Steyerl introduces the pixel-based resolution chart, which consists of three black and white squares that form a 90-degree angle. 12 The new design is an example of increasingly sophisticated capture technologies that can detect smaller and smaller details. The narrator continues: “ To become invisible, one has to become smaller or equal to one pixel.” 13 The image of the pixel-based resolution chart fades to the background, as three figures dressed in black , and wearing gray, white, and black cubes on their heads, emerge (fig. 3). These figures personify the pixel-based resolution chart; they dance around the screen as electronic-beeping music chaotically plays. These cube-headed figures visually demonstrate what it could look like if one were to become “smaller or equal to one pixel.” They playfully spin, hop, bump into each other, and walk across the screen, interacting with one another to form shapes. To become a pixel, in a way, also means to become an image because pixels compose digital images. Performance meets representation through Steyerl’s tactic of becoming a pixel. Surveillance scholars Chris Ingraham and Allison 12 This new standard of resolution was introduced around the year 2000. The narrator of Steyerl’s video states: “In 1996, photographic resolution in the area is about twelve meters per pixel. Today it is one foot. To become invisible, one has to become smaller or equal to one pixel.” (Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen, 5:36-:6:10) 13 Ibid.

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Rowland coin the term “performing imperceptibility” to define the notion of making oneself “seen, but to be seen going unseen, that is, to resist being perceived as a fixed and discrete subject.” 14 I use this understanding of performing imperceptibility to contex tualize how becoming a pixel could operate in society. Pixelation signals towards a political strategy that shakes off the constraints of representation that society uses to confine and categorize individuals. In a tonguein-cheek manner, we could practice becoming a pixel and wear cubes on our heads in public to mask our faces as the figures do in Steyerl’s video. It would probably attract unwanted attention, but would ultimately be successful in evading identification by image-capture technologies— individuals would be seen going unseen. In this sense, individuals could perform on the streets as cube-headed pixels to avoid and protest the image collection of surveillance technologies. By becoming pixels or unidentifiable beings, one can use invisibility towards becoming acutely political to the issues that surround surveillance in society. Individuals, in some sense, already exist as pixels when they interact and become embedded in digital technologies. Pixelation, as a form of invisibility, can constitute a different form of agency within the new conditions of electronic surveillance. Becoming pixelated as an act of disappearance can begin to work against the political asymmetries present in digital technology and surveillance. All of Steyerl’s lessons collapse onto each other in the final lesson, “ How to Be Invisible by Merging into a World Made of Images,” and unfold outwards into the video’s final proposition on disappearance. In figure 4, the camera roves over the resolution target paved on the desert floor. The desert, while ecologically abundant, now also houses a graveyard of resolution. This graveyard, with its cracked and broken pavement, resembles a body as it decays from disuse. The narrator states: “ Rogue pixels hide in the cracks of old standards of resolution. They throw off the cloak of representation.” 15 Dead pixels live here, as Steyerl states, no longer perceived and captured by the new standards

14 Chris Ingraham and Allison Rowland, “Performing Imperceptibility: Google Street View and the Tableau Vivant,” Surveillance & Society 14, no. 2 (2016), 212. 15 Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen, 12:02-12:15.

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Figure 4. Still from Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013. Single-screen video. This is a resolution target paved onto ground of the Californian desert. It cracks demonstrate its disuse, as this type of image resolution calibration is no longer in use.

of resolution. 16 Thus, the graveyard of resolution allows for new visibilities to emerge. These are invisible visibilities that will enable one to go undetected, remerging ghostly from the cracks. Dead or rogue pixels embody invisibility and camouflage, preventing capture by new standards of resolution. Steyerl does not suggest invisibility as a tactic to blend in, but rather to infiltrate and intervene within the systems of image-capture technologies. Hiding within the cracks, one can not only evade detection but also make those cracks bigger. The hidden can emerge as a collective group of “invisible” subjects joined together under a common political goal. In this instance, those that have “disappeared” and become 16 A dead pixel is a defective pixel that omits no light and appears as a black spot on a digital screen. A stuck pixel, or a rogue pixel, on the other hand, are not permanently defective, and appear as colored squares on a digital screen.

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Lucy Ashton Figure 5. “A part of the 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests, the Kwong Tong March took place on August 24, 2019.” Photo: Studio Incendo. Protesters are seen adopting the black bloc method to protest their identities from identification.

“rogue pixels” can gain political eff icacy. During street demonstrations, protesters in Hong Kong adopted the black bloc method. Defined by the collective use of wearing black , face-concealing, and protective gear, black bloc can protect identities from and resist police surveillance and brutality (fig. 5). Protesters disabled surveillance cameras by pointing lasers at them and spray painted the camera lens to prevent facial recognition and photos to be captured. In large groups, protesters used open umbrellas to act as a shield from police teargas canisters and to protect their identity further. The collective invisibility deployed by the protesters in Hong Kong demonstrates the power of invisibility as a political strategy. Their protest tactics and identity protection methods mark them as “rogue pixels.” The government of Hong Kong placed a ban on mask-wearing and other forms of identity concealment because it was interfering with police activity and arrests.

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Figure 6. Still from Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, 2013. Single-screen video.

The ban highlights how the state uses faces and facial recognition as a weapon to track and control individuals who have been identified by the state as a threat. Surveillance cameras cannot identify a masked face, rendering it invisible. The Hong Kong protesters become unidentifiable along these lines. Thus, becoming unidentifiable through acts of invisibility creates a new menace to the state because if you cannot be identified, you cannot be controlled and punished as quickly. Invisibility provides new opportunities in political protests that have successful outcomes, such as what took place in Hong Kong. Scholars Gloria González Fuster, Rocco Bellanova, and Raphaël Gellert argue that invisible subjects can remain politically productive through disappearances. 17 Invisibility can be a political tactic that allows one to disentangle themselves from the power asymmetries of a surveillance society. Through becoming invisible, one regains subjective agency 17 Gloria González Fuster, Rocco Bellanova, and Raphaël Gellert, “Nurturing Ob-Scene Politics: Surveillance Between In/Visibilities and Dis-Appearance,” Surveillance & Society 13, no. 3 and 4 (2015), 515-517.

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that is otherwise taken away when one becomes interpolated into the grasping hands of surveillance technologies. Invisibility allows one to evade and deflect how image-capture technologies read one’s identity, allowing for new opportunities to emerge that are stripped of the threat of visibility. The threat of visibility resides in resolution and pixelation. Steyerl makes this clear through the video’s finale, which ends with two figures in green morphsuits fighting a propped-up resolution target in the desert emerge (fig. 6). This target-cum-body becomes the victim to these green figures’ punches and karate kicks, revealing that like the camera, resolution is also the enemy of invisibility. One must render resolution low and fight its image-reading and image-capture abilities to step into the realm of the invisible. Rather than leaving the viewer with a clear resolution of the issues of visibility and invisibility, Steyerl uses the fighting figures to demonstrate that these struggles are ongoing and continuous. Electronic surveillance technologies will continue to develop and become more deeply integrated into daily life. The tactics of invisibility become a model of political action that is necessary to stay with the struggle. Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV. File demonstrates in humorous, yet serious fashion tactics on disappearing in the age of powerful digital technologies of surveillance. Through disappearing and subverting one’s image, potentialities emerge that allow individuals to use invisibility as a political act against capture technologies. In recognizing that one’s image and virtual identity are continuously tracked and surveilled, Steyerl provides material for one to consider the importance of disappearance. As the conditions of electronic surveillance continue to metamorphize into more elusive and harder to distinguish forms, invisibility becomes a political strategy in which to respond and protect oneself. Becoming invisible means manipulating visibility through strategies of resolution, pixelation, camouflage, and disguise, altering how image-capture technologies read an image. This form of invisibility allows for infiltrating and subverting

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the systems of surveillance and is a model of political action that is necessary to combat the ever-changing conditions of digital surveillance. Through learning acts of invisibility, an individual can become accustomed to a new form of power that allows one to adapt and persist in the face of the threat of visibility. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Vanessa Chang, Jacqueline Francis, my friends: Crystal, Madison, Russ, and Yves, Thomas O. Haakenson, Tirza True Latimer, my mom and dad, Vivian Sming, Kathy Zarur, and the 2020 VCS Cohort.

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Becca Imrich

Pricing and Specification: Corcraft* and 91020000

Cameron Rowland’s 2016 exhibition 91020000 at Artists Space in New York contains twelve objects in total: a metal desk, cast aluminum rings for manhole openings, and a set of wooden courtroom benches (purchased from Corcraft); two fire suits (purchased from California Prison Industry Authority or CALPIA); three pairs of lashing bars (purchased from Lloyd’s Register); two framed badges from the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty & Pension Association (purchased from Civil War memorabilia dealers); framed documents from Aetna that function as a receipt of shares Rowland purchased of the corporation; and one hundred bootlegged copies of the 2015 National Correctional Industries Association annual report. These objects are accompanied by Rowland’s own tex t that contex tualizes the items in the exhibition. The layout of the exhibition is sparse, and the ample space between objects emphasizes both the literal architecture and the underlying institutional structure of Artists Space’s gallery (fig. 1). However, the seemingly straightforward quality of the items in the show is deceptive. The exhibition presents an assemblage of objects that begin to unravel the complex interactions between people, corporations, and property that comprise systems of prison labor in the United States, also known as correctional industries. By putting objects from various contex ts in dialogue and derailing their intended uses, Rowland’s research-based practice reveals that the prison industrial complex in the United States has roots that stretch as far back in time as chattel slavery’s abolition. Rowland offers a methodology of seeing complicated and abstract systems— in this case prison labor and its reverberations— through objects that I am still thinking about today, three years later and three thousand miles away in California. I read Rowland’s presentation of 91020000 in Artists Space as a form of commodity demystification that conceptually lays out the timeline linking slavery and correctional industries, using recontex tualized

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Becca Imrich Figure 1. Cameron Rowland, installation view of 91020000 at Artists Space, New York, 2016. Courtesy of Artists Space.

objects as anchors. This analysis follows Rowland’s lead, looking closely at Attica Series Desk (2016) as well as Corcraft ’s corresponding advertising to consider how seemingly innocuous material goods carry latent histories and have the capacity to simultaneously reveal and occlude underlying power structures. Through the jux taposition of tex t, objects, and complex rental agreements, Rowland’s practice acknowledges the pitfalls of institutional critique (cooption and recuperation) by implicating himself, the institutions that exhibit his work , and viewers as they navigate their ties to the prison industrial complex . Almost all fifty states have “correctional industries.” These programs are essentially prison factories, where inmates work for $0 to $5.15 per hour. 1 Hundreds of American companies such as JanSport, Victoria’s Secret, and Starbucks use contract prison labor to dramatically cut costs, but most state correctional systems also have their own brand name goods that are sold to public institutions such as government off ices, courtrooms, and schools. 2 The printed materials and websites of each state’s correctional industries program often justify this system 1

Please see Prison Policy Initiative’s regularly-updated appendix of prison wages for different states in the US: “Prison Wages: Appendix,” Prison Policy Initiative, last modified April 10, 2017, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/wage_policies.html.

Caroline Winter, “What Do Prisoners Make for Victoria’s Secret?” Mother Jones, July/August 2008, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoners-makevictorias-secret/

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under the euphemistic pretense of providing prisoners job opportunities and saving taxpayers’ money by having prisoners’ unpaid labor “subsidize the cost of their own incarceration.” 3 States each have their own system and brand names, but in all cases, inmates are significantly underpaid. The correctional industries model becomes even more disturbing when one considers the history of enslavement and the unjust racial politics of incarceration in the United States. Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white Americans, even though they make up less than 14% of the population in the United States. 4 Research has shown that US incarceration rates by race are disproportionate to the number of crimes being committed, and many historians have pointed out connections between the United States’ carceral system and slavery. 5 In The New Jim Crow, lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that rights supposedly gained by African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement were quickly taken away via the expansion of the carceral system, which currently denies basic civil rights such as voting to a large percentage of African Americans in the US. Furthermore, Alexander notes that the label of “criminality” often provides legal and social permission to continue the same violation of civil rights, under a different name. 6 Therefore, as Alexander states, “ the arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same.” 7 While the US carceral system imprisons people of all races, Alexander argues that the system still functions as an “interracial racial caste system” where the incorporation of some white people into the carceral system is crucial to maintaining the illusion that the justice system is “colorblind” and unprejudiced. 8 Alexander’s research provides a substrate for this analysis into Corcraft and Cameron Rowland’s work . If the carceral system itself already functions as 3

Similar language can be found throughout the Corcraft catalogs and website.

4 “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” NAACP, accessed November 25, 2019, https://www.naacp.org/ criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ 5

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 2.

Ibid., 1.

Ibid.

Ibid., 204–205.

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a structure of control biased against Black people in the United States, how do correctional industries further enforce this system by exploiting the uncompensated labor of predominantly Black prisoners? And what are we to make of the bureaucratic occlusion and societal denial of this situation? As a sculptor, Rowland solidifies this point by attending to the unspoken histories and significance of physical objects, including items in the exhibition produced by Corcraft (the brand name for New York State’s correctional industries program) and CALPIA (California’s correctional industries’ moniker). I argue that Rowland’s intervention is a form of what Black visual studies scholar Christina Sharpe calls “ Black annotation” in her book In the Wake: a form of visual and tex tual annotation or redaction that urges a rereading of history and seeing beyond the frame, creating new possibilities to counter the pernicious blind spots within discourse around race. 9 Reading Rowland’s work through Sharpe, we see that he is performing exactly this form of annotation on this compiled inventory of products directly and indirectly related to correctional industries. In 91020000 as installed at Artists Space, a large L-shaped desk is placed near the entryway, slightly off set from the wall— it could almost be mistaken for a gallery sitter’s desk (fig. 2). The desk has a laminate particle board surface with a pseudo-walnut wood finish and a powdercoated black metal undercarriage, complete with filing cabinets and a slim locked drawer. No chair accompanies the desk , thwarting the object ’s intended use and inviting a reconsideration of the item within the contex t of the gallery. The desk Rowland presents has no major signs of wear— it is showcased as a new product. This is Attica Series Desk, exhibited matter-of-factly as if it were on a furniture showroom floor. But as art critic and historian Alex Kitnick astutely notes in his review of Rowland’s exhibition for Artforum, it is not the fact that the desk is out of place; it is precisely that it could belong in Artists Space that is unsettling. 10 The Attica desk fits right into the scene, just as it does in hundreds of government off ices where the desk is currently supporting administrative work throughout New York . 9

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), chap. 4, iBooks.

10 Alex Kitnick, “Openings: Cameron Rowland,” Artforum International 54, no. 7 (March 2016), https://www.artforum.com/print/201603/openings-cameron-rowland-58116.

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Figure 2 . Cameron Rowland, Attica Series Desk, 2016. Steel, powder coating, and laminated particleboard, distributed by Corcraft. Courtesy of Artists Space

The Attica desk is not just like any other desk , as it was produced for Corcraft. Despite its generic-sounding name, Corcraft is not just any corporation: the “brand” is a portmanteau of correctional and craft, and their products are constructed entirely by current inmates laboring in facilities within New York prisons. 11 Although the fourteen Corcraft factories spread across various prisons in New York state made $48 million in profits in 2017, the average wage of a worker at Corcraft is 65 cents an hour. 12 11

The word correctional, when used to describe prisons as in correctional facility, is already a euphemism. This renders Corcraft’s name one step further removed or obfuscated from its association as a prison factory.

12 JB Nicholas, “How NY Prison ‘Slave Labor’ Powers a $50 Million Manufacturing Enterprise,” Gothamist, November 2, 2017. https://gothamist.com/news/how-ny-prison-slave-laborpowers-a-50-million-manufacturing-enterprise. $48 million in profits refers to their product sales and doesn’t even include the “savings” of unpaid labor. The article cites that the statistic is from the New York 2015-2016 Department of Corrections and Community Supervision report.

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Rowland’s title for the desk repeats the Corcraft product name verbatim, but an accompanying exhibition tex t by the artist, available as a printout at the exhibition, also includes the following description: The Attica Series Desk is manufactured by prisoners in Attica Correctional Facility. Prisoners seized control of the D-Yard in Attica from September 9th to 13th 1971. Following the inmates’ immediate demands for amnesty, the first in their list of practical proposals was to ex tend the enforcement “ the New York State minimum wage law to prison industries.” Inmates working in New York State prisons are currently paid $0.16 to $1.25 an hour. Inmates in Attica produce furniture for government off ices throughout the state. This component of government administration depends on inmate labor. 13

Rowland presents this mundane item in plain terms, but his tex t, while ex tremely restrained, complicates an initial perception of banality by mapping out how the Attica desk functions as a concrete symbol of inmate labor that produces the scaffolding for governmental administration through the fabrication of furniture. The artist ’s description also emphasizes Attica’s historical significance as a site of the fight for remunerations for inmate labor. The desk is not only named after a town or a correctional facility, but the location of the most important prisoner uprising in recent United States history. Through its naming of the desk , Corcraft acknowledges the facility where the product was made, but also attempts to alter associations with the name “Attica,” turning attention away from the uprising and towards commonplace off ice furniture. The loaded history of the Attica uprising functions as a cornerstone for Rowland’s demystification of the Attica desk . As Rowland references in his caption, the uprising began when inmates took over the prison yard in 1971, requesting basic human rights such as access to additional food, space, and pay for their labor in prison correctional industries. 14 Several guards were taken hostage, in order to gain 13 Cameron Rowland, 91020000, (New York: Artists Space, 2016), 6, accessed March 11, 2020, https://texts.artistsspace.org/uwcc1tpk. 14 Jennifer Schuessler, “Prying Loose the Long-Kept Secrets of Attica,” New York Times, August 23, 2016, accessed November 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/books/ prying-loose-the-long-kept-secrets-of-attica.html

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Figure 3. Inmates in Attica prison yard nonviolently protesting conditions at Attica Correctional Facility in New York, 1971. Courtesy of Associated Press.

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leverage for the activists’ demands, who sought to bring the governor of New York at the time, Nelson A . Rockefeller, to Attica in order to resolve the human rights abuses at the prison. This initial uprising was largely non-violent, and inmates took over leadership roles to keep the peace and push forward negotiations (fig. 3). Discussions lasted for several days, but Rockefeller refused to come to Attica, instead remotely ordering a retaking of the prison by force. Police off icers, including former Attica prison guards, threw tear gas canisters into Attica’s yard and then shot indiscriminately into the smoke, resulting in the deaths of 43 people, including both prisoners and guards. 15 The significance of Attica not only stems from the scale of the massacre, but the attempt by Rockefeller and the Nixon administration to control the narrative surrounding it in its aftermath. Even though the vast majority of the deaths related to the uprising were the result of the forceful retaking of the prison and not the initial protest, the police response was initially presented as an unavoidable precaution against violence by inmates. Guard deaths were wrongfully attributed to prisoners. 16 Tapes of conversations between Nixon and Rockefeller discussing Attica recently became publicly available, and serve as proof that a violent takeover was not required to deescalate the situation, but rather a deliberate political decision. 17 NIXON: “…The courage you showed and the judgement in not granting amnesty— it was right, and I don’t care what the hell the papers or anybody else says. I don’t care what they say, I think that you had to do it that way because if you would have granted amnesty in this case, it would have meant that you would have had prisons in an uproar all over this country.” 18

Rockefeller and Nixon believed that a capitulation to the requests by prisoners for basic rights would establish a precedent for other prisoners to demand humane treatment. In Frames of War, Judith Butler 15 Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), Kindle. 16 James Forman Jr., “Attica, Attica: The Story of the Legendary Prison Uprising,” New York Times, August 30, 2016, accessed November 25, 2019. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/09/04/books/review/blood-in-the-water-attica-heather-ann-thompson.html 17 Schuessler, “Prying Loose the Long-Kept Secrets of Attica,” New York Times. 18 Author’s transcription of Nixon’s phone call to Rockefeller after Attica. “Attica Uprising: The Rockefeller-Nixon Tapes,” recorded in 1971, Internet Archive, last modified November 9, 2011.

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theorizes about what makes a life grievable, noting how “specific lives cannot be injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living.” 19 The tapes reveal Rockefeller’s disturbing calculation that a certain number of lives were dispensable in order to protect the status quo of labor and power relations in the carceral system that continues today. Although many misstated facts have been cleared up by witnesses and historians such as Heather Ann Thompson, misinformation about Attica still lingers. Sensationalist accounts of the takeover, often misattributing the cause of deaths to the inmates rather than the weaponized off icers, remain ingrained in cultural memory and rarely foreground the inmates’ humble demands or the inhumane conditions that spurred their requests in the first place. As noted by Thompson, who wrote a book about the Attica uprising called Blood in the Water, many conditions that were protested at Attica, such as lack of space and food, are actually worse now than they were in 1971. 20 This reframing is articulated succinctly by Thompson in an interview with the New York Times: When you tell the nation that hippies are violent, the antiwar protesters are violent, prisoners are violent, civil rights is really about thuggery instead of genuine rights, then, all of a sudden, you look at Kent State, you look at the Chicago convention of ’68, you look at Attica and you completely miss the fact that all the violence was state violence. 21

Thompson states how the narrative following many protests in US history has been crafted to deemphasize state violence and shift blame towards those demanding civil rights. Nixon and Rockefeller’s framing of the Attica massacre as a justified response to an uncontainable outbreak of prison violence, rather than a disproportionately violent response by the state, contributed to a “ tough-on-crime” mentality that has been used to support discriminatory crime bills ever since. 22 19 Judith P. Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016), 1. 20 Heather Ann Thompson, “Attica: It’s Worse than We Thought,” New York Times, November 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/attica-prison-torture.html. 21 Ana Marie Cox, “Heather Ann Thompson Thinks That the Justice System is Unfair,” New York Times, May 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/magazine/heather-ann-thompsonthinks-the-justice-system-is-unfair.html. 22 Thompson, Blood in the Water, Kindle.

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On a much subtler level, the naming of the Attica desk is also an attempt to control and reframe the narrative surrounding Attica. The Nixon administration’s bait-and-switch in response to the Attica uprising is perpetuated in the Corcraft catalog and their insistence on emphasizing “quality,” “affordability,” and “inmate job creation” through their copy and imagery. The Attica desk is a staple of Corcraft ’s inventory and has its own full-color, three-page catalog, featuring various configurations, filing cabinet options, and finishing possibilities, separate from the pricing and specifications guide. The material qualities of the Attica desk reflect this bait-and-switch: a 20-gauge steel structure with a walnut-print façade, disguising a shoddy particle-board work surface (fig. 4). Following Rowland’s lead to look underneath what may seem uninteresting on the surface, I read the Corcraft catalogs’ outdated and lackluster graphic design not just as dull, but as a type of ideological hideout that carries significant weight. The beige, marble-esque tex tured background of the Attica pages in the Corcraft catalog are reminiscent of a cheap mimicry of prestige found on corporate awards and diplomas. Each image of Attica desks depicted in the Corcraft catalog show all their empty drawers pulled open simultaneously, like the filing-cabinet version of a player piano. The function of these standard filing drawers is so painfully obvious that the images read as over-the-top showmanship for something incredibly banal, even going so far as to suggest: “ there’s nothing to see here.” There are no documents in the drawers in the catalog depictions of the Attica desk , nor in Rowland’s Attica Series Desk at Artists Space— at least that we know of. All the drawers are shut in the desk presented at the exhibition. Rowland actively addresses the opacity of information surrounding correctional industries within the presentation of his work . The Attica desks are produced in the metal furniture manufacturing shops at Attica correctional facility in New York , but little information is made available on the Department of Correctional Services website about those fabricating the desks aside from the job titles of the inmates working in the shop such as: Arc Welder, CNC Programmer, and Electrostatic Paint Sprayer. 23 Rowland’s caption reveals none of this 23 “Metal Furniture Manufacturing,” Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, accessed March 11, 2020, https://doccs.ny.gov/metal-furniture-manufacturing.

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Figure 4. Page from Corcraft catalog advertising the Attica Series desks. Courtesy of Corcraft.

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information, likely because he sees Corcraft ’s listing of job titles as a tiny concession of specificity to counteract a much larger system of dehumanization and alienation. His accompanying tex t demonstrates how the Attica desk signifies much more than just a desk , becoming a talisman for the weight of unspoken histories, but also fades back into mundanity just as easily. In 91020000, Rowland starts his own archive of missing data on the prison industrial complex and its ideological and material connections to slavery. 24 Through his recontex tualization of this Corcraft product, Rowland re-presents material reality to us in a manner that transmits its actual signification. The objects in the exhibition build off one another; the gravity of each item is reinscribed by its dialogue with the other objects in the room and with Rowland’s written and collected documents, such as the hundred bootleg copies of the 2015 National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) annual report. The reports contain statistics about prison-industry programs throughout New York state— information which is only made accessible to NCIA members and is not typically available to the general public. Where the Corcraft catalog attempts to nuance the narrative surrounding Attica by connecting the name with a piece of mundane off ice furniture and touting a program which “gives inmates work experience,” Rowland reminds us of the historical significance of Attica and suggests that this desk contains a latent history. Revisiting the documentation of the exhibition, I noticed that there are fingerprints clouding the shiny black metal base on the back side of the desk (fig. 5). Noting the pristine, minimal display of the rest of the works in the show and Rowland’s attention to detail, I posit that these marks were left on the desk intentionally. It is unclear whether the prints are from incarcerated workers at Attica who assembled the desk for cents on the dollar, art handlers, or planted by Rowland himself, but the smudges create a subtle index of human presence and a reminder of those that are marginalized through the carceral system. 24 The use of metaphor of “missing data” in this analysis of Rowland’s work was spurred by viewing Mimi Ọnụọh’s work The Library of Missed Datasets (2018), steel filing cabinet, 16 x 19.5 x 22.5 inches, which was shown in the exhibition A Recounting: Data, Disinformation, and the Black Experience (2018) at Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco.

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Figure 5. View of Cameron Rowland, Attica Series Desk, 2016 from behind showing fingerprints on the undercarriage of the desk. Courtesy of Artists Space.

Most people sitting down to work at an Attica desk have no idea of its origin nor significance. Similarly, if a viewer walked around the gallery without picking up Rowland’s accompanying tex t for 91020000 and reading his captions for the work , they would likely have an entirely different experience of the exhibition. Rowland’s pamphlet reads like a history tex tbook and is packed with academic citations that gesture toward the narrative embedded in these objects. The document begins with a verbatim transcription of the 13th Amendment:

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13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The 13th Amendment explicitly states that slavery and involuntary servitude can continue “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” that is, in prison. Even in the declaration abolishing slavery, exceptions have been carved out to facilitate its continuation. 25 Rowland calls attention to the traces of power structures hiding in plain sight, deploying products from correctional industries against themselves to critique the prison-industrial complex and its ties to chattel slavery. He further implicates the institutions showing his work as well as himself by purchasing the products via the institution’s nonprofit status. In New York , Corcraft is a “legally mandated” preferred supplier to the state, which means that institutions (such as courtrooms, government off ices, and the SUNY school system) are required to source furniture and supplies from the company, as long as their prices are cost-competitive. Rowland’s strategy of recontex tualizing commercial objects as art has precedent in the readymade, and his work thrusts forward a lineage of institutional critique, initiated by Hans Haake, Marcel Broodthaers, and their contemporaries, and continued by a later generation of artists like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson. As with all forms of criticism, instances of institutional critique have been subject to forms of cooptation and recuperation. As Andrea 25 Rowland, 91020000, 1.

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Fraser writes in her 2005 essay, “ From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique”: Just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. … So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a ‘ totally administered society,’ or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves. 26

What does institutional critique mean in an environment where art institutions are actively requesting these interventions from artists, while doing little to divest themselves from capital entangled with structural injustices? These interventions often function to smooth over larger injustices with small conceits. These issues are certainly worthy of continued consideration and a healthy dose of skepticism. However, there is an important distinction to be made between recognizing the limitations of critique within the contex t of art institutions and giving up on critical analysis of institutions and structural inequality altogether. While flagging Rowland’s conceptual lineage is necessary, reducing his work solely to the genre of institutional critique risks flattening its depth. Embedded in Rowland’s work is critique, certainly, but also reflexivity. Furthermore, this critical engagement does not end with the deinstallation of the exhibition: potential buyers of Rowland’s work are only allowed to “rent” the Corcraft items on five-year terms, rather than purchase them outright, forcing collectors to continually engage with the unjust structures of indebtedness and ownership. 27 Curator Eric Golo Stone wrote an entire essay in October journal detailing the legal implications of the structure of Rowland’s rental contracts, which is recommended as further reading on the subject. 28 The title of the exhibition itself, 91020000, comes from the contract number that Corcraft gives to Artist Space for their purchase orders. 26 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique,” Artforum International 44, no. 1 (September 2005), 278-286. 27 Eric Golo Stone, “Legal Implications: Cameron Rowland’s Legal Contract,” October 164 (Spring 2018), 89-112. 28 Ibid.

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Everyone, from the viewer to the hosting institution to the artist, is implicated, highlighting how all of us are entangled with these problematic and oppressive systems. Two works in 91020000 have been exhibited at California College of the Arts (CCA) Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts: 1st Defense NFPA 1977, 2011 (2016), firefighting jackets, and Disgorgement (2016), which consists of framed shares of Aetna Inc. accruing interest for a reparations trust. 29 Aetna is a prime example of the type of corporation that Rowland critiques because of its history of profiting off of the “insurance” of Black people as property during slavery. Yet, CCA , a supporter and exhibitor of Rowland’s work , currently requires all enrolled students to purchase health insurance from Aetna. The complex relationships between allegedly “progressive” institutions and immoral systems of exploitation reflect the grim reality of contemporary capitalism overall. 30 However, Rowland’s rendering of the material evidence of racial capitalism in the prison industry is particularly ominous. Sharpe argues that slavery enabled “ the making of bodies into flesh and then into fungible commodities,” and its afterlives reverberate ideologically as well as materially. 31 The exhibition exposes chattel slavery as a horrifying foundation for continued injustices, at times embedded in the most commonplace objects— in this case, in the form of a cold, institutional desk . In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault theorizes that systems of power and control occur not only within the contex t of prisons, but develop within and structure other institutions such as schools, hospitals, and the army. 32 In this vein, it is impossible to dismantle the prison-industrial complex without dismantling modes of thought that pervade society and institutions as a whole. 33 In Rowland’s presentation of Attica Series Desk, one begins to see how seemingly disparate institutions— the government off ices that utilize the furniture, art 29 The 1st Defense jackets were purchased by Rowland using CCA’s non-profit status in 2015 as part of their year-long programming about the work of Andrea Fraser. Disgorgement was shown at the Wattis as part of its 2017 exhibition, Mechanisms. 30 Recent notable examples of this entanglement include Warren Kanders, former board member of the Whitney Museum of American Art and owner of Safariland, a manufacturer of military-grade law enforcement supplies; the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma; and major donors to art museums all over the world, including the Guggenheim. 31 Sharpe, In the Wake, chap. 1, iBooks. 32 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 231-256. 33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 231-256.

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galleries which display Rowland’s work , and correctional industries themselves— are in fact interrelated. The significance of looking at Rowland’s work as it relates to systemic injustice is that the objects function as anchors, allowing one to grapple with the web of forces that contribute to the persistence of correctional industries, rather than solely focusing on the culpability of individuals. 34 This is precisely how institutional racism functions. Rowland offers a methodology to reconsider the assumed neutrality of the objects and institutions we interact with on a daily basis, awakening their dormant histories and ties to the prison industrial complex . AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S My family: Mom, Dad, Jenny, and Krishna, Jacqueline Francis, Thomas O. Haakenson, Evan O’Neal Kirkman, Tirza True Latimer, Frances Richard, Olivia Rutter, my VCS cohort, and Kathy Zarur.

34 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), chap. 2, iBooks.

Sightlines Contributor Biographies

LUCY ASHTON is a writer and a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include contemporary art practices after 1980, the intersections of visual culture, politics and activism, feminist and queer studies, new media, critical theory, and curatorial practice. Her writing and research focus on surveillance and visual culture and considers invisibility as a political tool. Thesis commit tee: Vanessa Chang, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Tirza True Latimer. BECCA IMRICH is an artist, writer, and educator. She is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies and the Master in Fine Arts degree. Her interdisciplinary practice includes drawing, photography, and sculptural components which are often exhibited together. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Sociology from George Washington University. She has worked in education departments at the Phillips Collection as well as Aperture Foundation where she helped to develop Aperture On Sight, a visual literacy curriculum. Thesis commit tee: Frances Richard, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Tirza True Latimer.

ALICIA McDANIEL is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator. Her image-making practice is multifaceted and experimental as she works within the realms of installation, painting, sculpture, bookmaking, and video. Her work originates within her family’s experiences with racial profiling, skin privilege, and assimilation. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Mills College and a Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts (CCA), where she is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies. McDaniel is a CCA Connects Art Studio Assistant Fellow at Ruth’s Table and an Exhibitions Fellow at Root Division, where she is also a Studio Artist. Thesis commit tee: Kim Anno, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Jacqueline Francis. AVA MORTON is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Houston, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morton’s writing and artistic practices are entwined and often focus on (re)contex tualization, subversion, and affect. Her most recent research takes a particular interest in linguistics, sound, and the boundaries of the body. Her studio practice employs the tactics of drawing in space to build loosely figurative sculptures and videos. Morton is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies and the Master in Fine Arts degree. Thesis commit tee: Frances Richard, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Tirza True Latimer. JUSTIN R. NAGLE creates works of art and critical writing. His work sits at the intersection of post-structuralism, performance studies, fat studies, and psychoanalysis and its critique to critically and analytically unpack our current affective state in relation to identity and the structures which create it. Nagle’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at DFBRL8R (Chicago), PLAySPACE Gallery (San Francisco), as

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well as at Minnesota Street Projects (San Francisco). He has procured a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nagle is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies and the Master in Fine Arts degree. Thesis commit tee: Anthea Black , Thomas O. Haakenson, and Jacqueline Francis. YOMNA OSMAN is a curator and writer from Cairo, Egypt. She is a candidate for the Master of Arts degrees in Visual & Critical Studies and in Curatorial Practice. For Osman, research, writing, and curating are inseparable. She has held various positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco), ArteEast (New York), CLUSTER (Cairo), and the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (Cairo). Osman has organized and curated exhibitions, performances, and events in a number of institutions including CCA Wattis Institute, CTRL+SHF T Collective (Oakland), and Falaki Theatre (Cairo), among others. She is currently working on an exhibition at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito), due to open in May 2020. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a concentration in Public and International Law and a minor in History from the American University in Cairo. Thesis commit tee: Florian Grosser, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Tirza True Latimer. BARBARA PRIOLO is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and social animator with a background in legal practice and fine arts studies. Her research interest is the intersection between visual culture, contemporary art, and the capitalist system, with a focus on the impact of capitalism on oppressed and marginalized communities. She is the founder of the non-profit cultural organization Fuori Posto, whose principal aim is to support and promote local artists within underdeveloped cultural contex ts in Southern Italy. In her artistic practice, she alternates

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ink drawings with mixed media installations of readymade and found objects, often referencing her Calabrian origins. Priolo is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies. Thesis commit tee: Florian Grosser, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Tirza True Latimer. AMANDA RUSH is a visual and performing artist, arts educator, and writer. At the core of her practice are societal concerns that emphasize cultural and gender issues. She draws creative stimulus and ethical consternation from examining female sickness, the feminine ideal, violence against women, and the intersection of contemporary politics, law, and feminist theory. Her studio practice exists within the realms of photography, performance, installation, oral history, and archives. Rush is a candidate for the Master of Arts degree in Visual & Critical Studies. She holds a Master in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, as well as Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography with a minor in Art History from Columbia College Chicago. Thesis commit tee: Leslie Townsend, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Tirza True Latimer.

Acknowledgments

The Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) would like to acknowledge all who helped bring this year’s thesis projects and the Sightlines journal to fruition. The Class of 2020 is indebted to Tirza True Latimer, VCS’s Interim Chair in the fall of 2019, when Jacqueline Francis was on sabbatical. At the end of this academic year, Latimer is retiring from California College of the Arts. A renowned art historian, award-winning writer, and respected curator, she is a beloved figure on the CCA campuses. We all will miss her dearly. Thomas O. Haakenson and Kathy Zarur were the Master’s Thesis Project Directors for the 2019-2020 academic year. Haakenson supervised the students’ thesis writing in the fall 2019 semester. Zarur prepared students for the 2020 Spring Symposium and assumed responsibility for the production of their Sightlines essays and thesis exhibition posters. Our colleagues housed in CCA’s programs provided invaluable guidance and critique to our students as Faculty Advisors: Kim Anno (Painting and Drawing), Anthea Black (Printmedia), Vanessa Chang (Critical Studies), Florian Grosser (Visual Studies), Frances Richard (Graduate Fine Arts), and Leslie Townsend (Writing and Literature). Yang Liu, MFA Candidate in Design, collaborated with the students to design their thesis exhibition posters.

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MacFadden & Thorpe designed the Spring Symposium program, and the poster and mailer that advertises this event. It was a pleasure to work with Brett MacFadden who teaches in CCA’s Graduate Design Program. We also thank MacFadden & Thorpe Project Manager Maggie Wallace who kept us all on track and updated. Vivian Sming was our peerless copy editor and proofreader. ShawnJ West, Senior Manager of Academic Programs in the Humanities and Sciences Division (H&S) at CCA , handled the business side of VCS and tended to our hearts and minds, too. We are grateful for all of our H&S colleagues, and we offer special appreciation to Dean Tina Takemoto and Director of Academic Administration Mike Rothfeld for their unwavering support.