Sightlines 2022

Katherine Jemima Hamilton Liz Hafey Liz Ordway Aliya Parashar

Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies / Sightlines2022 / California College of the Arts

Kristen Wawruck

California College of the Arts Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

SIGHTLINES 2022

CCA Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

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

Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) 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 & Critical Studies at CCA, please contact us: Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies, California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street San Francisco, CA 94107-2247 USA Jacqueline Francis, VCS Program Chair, jfrancis@cca.edu Nicholas J. Whittington, VCS Program Manager, njwhittington@cca.edu https://portal.cca.edu/learning/academic-programs/visual-critical-studies-ma/ http://viscrit.cca.edu/ Design by MacFadden & Thorpe Typeset in Bely & Meta Pro by Keston Sieg Hinds Cruz ©2022 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.

Table of Contents 06

Introduction

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I. The Institution

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KRISTEN WAWRUCK MTV as Form: Dara Birnbaum and Corporate Patronage

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KATHERINE JEMIMA HAMILTON Sonic Imaginaries: Sound and Resonance in Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick’s Masks and Candice Hopkins’s Curation at documenta 14

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LIZ HAFEY Booby Traps: Cultural Critique in the Writings of Marcel Duchamp and Karen Finley

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II. The Corporeal

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LIZ ORDWAY The Power of Fat Liberation: Rereading Laura Aguilar’s Nude Self Portraits

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ALIYA PARASHAR Transsexuality, Transition, and Yantras: Metaphysics and Myth in Mystic Diagrams

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Bios

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

Introduction

This essay begins with a grateful acknowledgment of the original inhabitants of the land on which Sightlines 2022 is published. California College of the Arts’ campuses are located in Huichin and Yelamu, also known as Oakland and San Francisco, respectively—cities on the unceded territories of the Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, who have lived upon this land since time immemorial. We recognize the historic discrimination and violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in California and the Americas, including their forced removal from ancestral lands and the deliberate and systematic destruction of their communities and culture. Land acknowledgment by itself is a small gesture. It becomes meaningful when coupled with authentic relationships, informed actions, and unyielding commitment to change that improves people’s lives. CCA honors Indigenous peoples—past, present, and future—here and around the world, and we wish to pay respect to local elders.

The Class of 2022—here at CCA and at other colleges in the United States and beyond—have read, studied, and conducted research in radically changed times.

These artists-curators-scholars-writers did their work during a global pandemic, which is still not over. Although they have since seen the world open up again to greater or lesser degrees, their measure of it is understandably mixed. What does safety mean in the present? Lately we think in terms of not only public health protocols against viruses, but also climate change effects, gun violence, international wars, police brutality, restrictions on health services, sectarian conflict, terrorism, and transphobia. But the status quo is so effectively unbearable for so many, it makes sense that change is under way. Graduating students, wherever they are, especially those who embrace the opportunities of community and world building, should take heart from the transformative actions and projects now in progress. Wondering what life is about and for has extended beyond the coronapause; long thinking is here to stay.

VCS students are cultural producers who “make” writing. The award-winning VCS faculty guide them. We illuminate paths of interdisciplinary inquiry, and then get out of the way so that the students can dive into histories of visual culture and identify intellectual allies whose scholarship will aid their analyses. VCS

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students demonstrate their progress in seminar papers, oral presentations, and short-form articles. The VCS master of arts is a two-year commitment. For students who are interested in earning a second terminal master’s degree in creative writing, fine arts, or curatorial practice at CCA, there is the option to pursue their ambition over three years.

For both the MA and the dual-degree students, the preparation of a Sightlines essay is one of the culminating activities of the VCS program; this piece of writing is drawn from the student’s eight-thousand-word master of arts thesis. Students also deliver formal talks about their theses in the VCS Annual Spring Symposium.

After this preparation, graduating students move on to become arts and college administrators, archivists, critics, curators, editors, educators, grant writers, journalists, and working artists with research-driven practices. Some VCS alumni continue with graduate study, earning doctoral degrees in visual studies, performance studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, art history, anthropology, or other humanities disciplines. The diversity of their routes is a solid measure of their training in visual and critical studies and their desire to use those skills for further inquiry and problem solving.

The Essays in Sightlines 2022 Sightlines essays are about twenty-five hundred words in length and present an aspect of the writer’s MA thesis—either a summarization of the longer document’s main claims or a single chapter’s argument extracted from it. Sightlines essays appeal to the curious reader who may not have the opportunity to read the entire thesis. Sightlines writers may also circulate their essays as writing samples when sharing their research with journal and magazine editors who might publish it, scholarly conference organizers who may invite them to present it, fellowship and residency administrators who fund and otherwise support humanities projects, and admissions committees assessing applications for entry into PhD programs.

There are five essays in this year’s Sightlines volume. As examples of interdisciplinary research and writing, they make clear the students’ individual interests in how art and visual culture are histories, as opposed to mere reflections of them.

These investigations are recognizably historical writings, and they also share the concerns of scholars working in aesthetics, anthropology, literary criticism, media theory, museology, religious studies, and sociology. The essays are organized under two headings: “The Institution” and “The Corporeal.” These key phrases

Introduction

are detectable through-lines and evident themes with which readers can engage.

Three writers in the Class of 2022 scrutinize both institutions and notable counter-institutional strategies designed to undermine or replace elitist frameworks and oppressive ideologies.

In “MTV as Form: Dara Birnbaum and Corporate Patronage,” Kristen Wawruck examines two short videos that Birnbaum created for MTV in its early years. Wawruck situates the self-described feminist-Marxist’s MTV: Artbreak (1987) and TransVoices: Transgression (1992), both commissioned by the ascendant MTV corporation, as creative interventions made inside of an interlocking capitalist, neo-imperialist, and neoliberal system for the clear purpose of critiquing it.

In “Sonic Imaginaries: Sound and Resonance in Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick’s Masks and Candace Hopkins’s Curation at documenta 14,” Katherine Jemima Hamilton articulates the need to expand audiences’ sensory regard of art beyond the visual.

Hamilton focuses on two First Nations practitioners born in Canada: the Kwakiutl sculptor Dick and the Carcorss/Tagish curator Hopkins, who presented an installation of Dick’s art in the prestigious international documenta exhibition in 2007.

Hamilton argues that Hopkins successfully activated Dick’s masks in arrangements that communicated the movement of dancers bearing them, the sounds of the mythological spirits they evoke, and community responses to both.

In “Booby Traps: Cultural Critique in the Writings of Marcel Duchamp and Karen Finley,” Liz Hafey links the provocative practices of two twentieth-century artists who were celebrated for making trouble. Aware that many have written on Duchamp’s readymade objects and photographs of himself in female dress as well as Finley’s erotic and political performances, Hafey hones in on their authorial interventions. Hafey discusses Duchamp’s theory of the creative act as an influential notion that positions the artwork as the outcome of dialogue between the artist and the audience: she reads Finley’s monologues in performance as postmodernist realizations of the Duchampian ideal.

Two writers in the Class of 2022 address artistic interpretations of the human body—one representational, the other schematic.

In “The Power of Fat Liberation: Rereading Laura Aguilar’s Nude Self Portraits,” Liz Ordway provides intersectional readings of the late photographer’s works. Ordway takes note of the de-normalization of fat bodies in the medical literature, which informs the denigration of fat people in mass media and social settings. Ordway also views Aguilar’s deployment of her body in the name of disidentification: she

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writes that the femme-identified lesbian artist pushed against presumptions that her size meant that she was a male-identified butch and that her Spanish surname was a proclamation of her fluency in the language and ease within Mexican communities.

In “Transsexuality, Transition, and Yantras: Metaphysics and Myth in Mystic Diagrams,” Aliya Parashar analyzes the symmetrical diagram that is the yantra.

Parashar explains the yantra’s role as a religious and philosophical symbol, one that advances binarial thinking about the world as a space for cisgendered male and female embodiments. Parashar reorients the yantra and expands the ways that it can be experienced by socially excluded subjects or ones made entirely invisible. In a radical and original turn, Parashar delineates the prospect of the yantra as a safe and empowering transsexual dwelling.

VCS is proud to publish this collection of original writings authored by the Class of 2022. Sightlines showcases the writers’ skills and knowledge, and our program’s values as well. Please share it with other readers who are curious about visual and critical studies scholarship and boldly activist responses to the challenges of our times.

Jacqueline Francis, Chair Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies

Introduction

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I. THE INSTITUTION

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MTV as Form: Dara Birnbaum and Corporate Patronage K R IST EN WAW RUCK

Kristen Wawruck

Art production, and finding the funds to do it, is not morally unambiguous. A belief held in Marxist cultural theory is that radical artworks, once entering into a commercial space, become co-opted.

And commissions often benefit the patron more than the artist, where cultural or social capital is acquired despite transgressive content. But might there be a liminal space outside of this binary? The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers a notion of pericapitalism, or sites of accumulation that are “simultaneously inside and outside capitalism.” 1 This concept can be applied to artmaking when artists accept commissions amid compromised resources and precarious conditions and then challenge the source—thus effectively biting the hand that feeds them within the work. An artist making work in this peripheral register is the groundbreaking video artist Dara Birnbaum, and the site was MTV (“Music Television”) in the 1980s–90s. She made two videos that were commissioned by the then-ascendant cable network, which demonstrate tactics that resist co-optation precisely because she used “television on television,” or in other words, the medium against itself. 2 Birnbaum’s videos insert an affective friction at a moment when screen-based communication, a rise in neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and artwashing—or entities using art to distract from misdeeds—began to take shape as common practice, thus asserting a refusal into what we understand as a given today.

Why might a self-described Marxist-feminist video artist knowingly jump into advertising and produce two works for MTV? And why might MTV, a venture of American Express and Warner Communications Inc., court a downtown video artist known for sharp critique? Birnbaum’s videos for MTV are illustrative of how material conditions led to a markedly different terrain for video production in the 1980s and 1990s when compared to the public access experiments in the 1970s. And while the reaction against the culture wars and changing frameworks for funding are well-tread topics in contemporary art history, scarce attention is 1 2

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 63.

Dara Birnbaum and Cory Arcangel, “Do It 2: A Conversation between Dara Birnbaum and Cory Arcangel,” Artforum 47, no. 7 (March 2009): 192.

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paid to artists’ navigation of corporate patronage in the 1980s and 1990s. At MTV, boundary-pushing art was business—but so was marketing to their target demographic of white, suburban males. Birnbaum’s works complicate this dynamic.

MTV represents a notable difference in how television was consumed via cable and how the architecture of viewership changed, making the network a natural venue for Birnbaum. 3 Her videos serve as distinct models for how art can engage with problematic patronage to undermine the systems in which they are created. The first, MTV: Artbreak (1987, single-channel video, 30 sec., color, sound), is a deconstructive work of institutional critique, while the later work, Trans-Voices: Transgressions (1992, single-channel video, 1 min., color, sound), examines the myriad effects of global capitalism. While Birnbaum’s tactics differ, both videos show how an artist can tip the scales away from corporate accumulation and back into the service of the works’ messages by harnessing the power of the medium. The idea that boundaries could be “slipped” between art and commerce was a mutually beneficial formula at MTV. 4 This essay takes a look at these “slippages.”

Conditions of Production Immaterial art production changed irrevocably in the 1980s through sociopolitical factors and technological changes. The political climate was dominated by deregulation, the systemic dismantling of the welfare state, and the rise of neoconservatism and neoliberalism. Public arts funding was severely compromised, with President Ronald Reagan prioritizing individual or corporate support. 5 Immaterial art, such as film or video, was particularly vulnerable to these changes given their uncollectible nature. So was the underwriting of public television stations, which had become sites of artistic experimentation and exchange over the decade with groups like Videofreex or the Raindance Corporation. And though technology for video production was increasingly more available to artists, postproduction, editing, and distribution remained less readily accessible as major cable networks began to prevail.

In many ways, the advent of MTV filled this vacuum, and it became a place where radical artistic voices mixed with commercial programming. These strategies ultimately helped to benefit the network and serve as an example of the “salvage accumulation” that Tsing has defined as a way that companies “amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.” 6 The precarity of independent immaterial art production met a rapid influx of 3

4 5 6 7

Léa-Catherine Szacka, “MTV: Domesticity, Family and the End of Programming,” in For the Record, ed. Marina Otero Verzier, Katía Truijen, and Delany Boutkan (Rotterdam: Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2021), https://fortherecord.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/video-essays/mtv-domesticity-familyand-end-programming.

Emily Watlington, “Conversations: Women and Media, Then and Now: Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Lynn Hershman Leeson,” Mousse, Summer 2018, http://moussemagazine.it/product/mousse-64/.

Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (New York: Verso, 2002), 48–50.

Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 63.

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Farewell to an Identity,” Artforum 51, no. 4 (December 2012): 252–61.

Kristen Wawruck

advertiser cash during the nascent halcyon days of MTV, and deeply subversive or pericapitalist work was fostered through MTV funding. While Andy Warhol had his “Fifteen Minutes of Fame” show (1985–87), salvage accumulation was being exercised as experimental artists were directing music videos, and many more artists had day jobs in video production, editing, set design, and other departments.

Simultaneously, a new class of Wall Street financiers and neoliberal speculative capitalists began to proliferate and enter into the contemporary art market as collectors.7 As the critic Benjamin H.D. Buchloh reflects, “artistic production sutured itself to the universal reign of spectacularized consumption.” 8 Artists’ collaborations with luxury and fashion brands reinforced, rather than transgressed, a consumptive culture industry. While market-savvy artists like Jeff Koons or Richard Prince packaged their appropriative work in a way that claimed subversion, they instead performed assimilation. As Buchloh contends, Birnbaum and others working with media imagery in immaterial or ephemeral forms picked up where institutional critique artists like Hans Haacke left off in the 1970s and acted as a foil to more collectible works.9 This dialectic is demonstrated in the divergent approach of Birnbaum’s first MTV commission, MTV: Artbreak, which is an anomaly among the videos made by other artists for the same series. Birnbaum notes that at the time MTV approached her, Buchloh—a close friend of Birnbaum’s—was indignant about her participation “in a supermarket of imagery.” 10 It was a challenge to make work that entered into this consumptive sphere as she reflected, “I’d rather try, and fail even, but try.” 11 Girls on Film: MTV: Artbreak (1987) By the time of her MTV commission in the mid-1980s, Dara Birnbaum was known for making video artworks with the idea of using existing media imagery to redirect meanings. She became one of the most well-known video artists of the 1980s, with numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad.

Critique was possible wherever there were screens, preferably not in a gallery.

Remy/Grand Central: Trains and Boats and Planes (1980, 4:19 min., color, sound) was a tongue-in-cheek advertisement for a champagne brand, while the later Rio Videowall (1989, 25 monitors, closed-circuit cameras, satellite receiver, steel) lived in the middle of an Atlanta shopping complex.12 By embracing the inherent constraints and contradictions of working on corporate commissions, Birnbaum saw an opportunity for radical intervention and institutional critique.

8 9 10 11 12

Buchloh, 255.

Buchloh, 254.

Dara Birnbaum, “Lecture for MFA Fine Arts,” School of the Visual Arts, New York, 2015, YouTube video, 1:14:24, https://youtu.be/_oNSitc1CPU. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 223.

“Oral history interview with Dara Birnbaum, interview by Linda Yablonsky, May 30, 2017,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-dara-birnbaum-17472#transcript.

Lori Zippay and Rebecca Cleman, “Works 1975–2009,” in Dara Birnbaum: The Dark Matter of Media Light, ed. Karen Kelly, Barbara Schröder, and Giel Vandecaveye (Munich: Prestel, 2011), 204, 238.

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MTV: Artbreak was another such site—albeit one with an unlimited budget and unprecedented distribution on cable—in a highly constrained format as a thirty-second advertisement.13 Like many of her best-known pieces, this work involved appropriating existing media content from television, which happened to be a 1920s animated short of Koko the Clown. The first shot reveals Koko’s origins, with film footage of his maker, Max Fleischer, the legendary animator and creator of Betty Boop. We see him drawing the mischievous Koko, who in regular programs would always try to take the pen away from Fleischer to draw himself—a subject reclaiming his agency. Birnbaum’s selection of Fleischer is significant since his unknown legacy as the inventor of the rotoscope tells its own story about the corporatization of animation. Birnbaum’s uncompromising choice of the footage also placed her in a position of power in retelling the history of animation, as well as the exploitation of women in media.

Birnbaum’s critique is not subtle in demonstrating this latter point. The animating machine draws a Betty Boop–like flapper who blows a kiss to Koko; his phallic hat wiggles and bounces to indicate his excitement and pleasure. This kiss is animated as a floating heart that morphs into a one-second-long MTV logo placement. Once it appears, the logo also suggests an erection, representing a product of heteronormative male scopic pleasure and an indictment of the network and industry at large. But the machine is malfunctioning, signaled by whirring tape noises. Much to the flapper’s horror, the unwieldy logo crushes Koko [fig.

1]. There is no time to mourn Koko’s demise, as the animation machine starts back up again to offer a trip through the decades in the form of fashionable women.

The female subject is subsumed by a 45 rpm record melting into a sea of ink, which then transitions to clips from music videos in graphic bubbles that replicate the flattened and decentered MTV viewing experience. The deadpan models from Robert Palmer’s #1 single “Addicted to Love” from 1986, Whitney Houston dancing, and other women in music videos bubble by in seconds [fig. 2]. The video then closes with a pan out onto a female animator sketching while observing footage of Fleischer [fig. 3]—a nod to Birnbaum’s appropriative practice.

While Birnbaum’s indictment of MTV’s objectification of women was an impetus for creating the work, 14 what was perhaps not intended by the artist but carries through is that female artists were, in fact, taking up a great deal of space on MTV against a hegemonic male-adolescent discourse in rock music and music

13 14

Birnbaum, “Lecture for MFA Fine Arts.”

“Oral history interview with Dara Birnbaum,” Archives of American Art.

Kristen Wawruck

Figure 1. Dara Birnbaum, MTV: Artbreak, 1987. Single-channel video, color, sound, 30 sec. Still. Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Figure 2. Dara Birnbaum, MTV: Artbreak, 1987. Single-channel video, color, sound, 30 sec. Still. Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Figure 3. Dara Birnbaum, MTV: Artbreak, 1987. Single-channel video, color, sound, 30 sec. Still. Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

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videos.15 But if “success” of the work meant changing our attitudes on the way females were portrayed on television, then MTV: Artbreak can be read as a “failure.” As art historian T.J. Demos has reflected on Birnbaum’s most famous work, Technology/Transformation (1978–79, 5:50 min., color, sound), what if assuming that Birnbaum’s critique becomes a failure is, in itself, a projection? 16 As with viewing Wonder Woman as a woman in a bikini with a tiara, viewing the music video stars as objectified, rather than as occupying a positive and empowered space—even if the former was Birnbaum’s intent—leaves us with a complex work that can, and does, operate in several layers of meaning.17 Thus, we are left with a complicated but ultimately empowered piece. The video produces an emancipatory moment both in its ending but also in its bubbles of music video women, showing stars in their own moments of claiming space and pop-cultural status. The timestamp and failure of the work is in its lack of intersectionality, but if read with the distance and viewpoint of thirty-plus years, the semiotics of the work becomes a provocation on how women can and do occupy space. These contradictions give the piece its longevity.

Birnbaum’s attention to syntax and form sets her video apart from the others in the “Artbreak” series, and she was the only artist working primarily in video.

The other works read as self-commercials as well as for MTV, with the logo tacked on to the beginning or end. The sole exception is Richard Prince’s video, which embeds the logo as a credit card as a spoof on a popular American Express advertisement. As satire, his work reifies the artist as commodity and luxury commodity producer.18 Additionally, none of the other “Artbreak” ads are considered to be collectible artworks. This contrasts with how Birnbaum has treated it as a discrete artwork, which exemplifies Tsing’s definition of pericapitalist production. Birnbaum’s MTV: Artbreak demonstrates how an artist can “talk back” to the media and the entertainment industrial complex from within the system itself.19 Activism for Hire: Transvoices/Transgressions (1992) While MTV: Artbreak offers a possibility for inserting powerful and self-reflexive critique, Birnbaum’s other work for MTV, Trans-Voices: Transgressions (1992, 1 min., color, sound), is perhaps more of an exercise in brand building for the network than “Artbreak” itself. Birnbaum was one of seven American video artists who chose seven French media artists to participate in the series, led by curators at the

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Lisa A. Lewis, Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 222.

T.J. Demos, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, One Work (London: Afterall Books, 2010), 7.

Demos, 7.

Kevin Concannon, Agency: Art and Advertising (Youngstown, OH: McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown State University, n.d.), 18.

Birnbaum and Arcangel, “Do It 2,” 198.

Kristen Wawruck

American Center in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Public Art Fund. Entitled “Trans-Voices,” the program was screened on MTV in the United States and on Canal+ in France as part of a multimedia exhibition that manifested onto subway ads in New York and Paris to celebrate the longstanding relationship between both countries. It also coincided with the 500th year marking Christopher Columbus’s landing and a contentious presidential campaign. Consequently, the project features politically engaged works that confronted issues around identities, hybridity, and conditions of the late twentieth century, including AIDS, xenophobia, and postcolonialism. 20 This project points to a defined shift in MTV programming, which had simultaneously gained power from the scrutiny of the culture wars, exercised its political muscle with “Choose or Lose,” and began to produce, acquire, and co-opt ever-edgier content. In just five years, the terrain had shifted yet again. Technologically, cable was prevalent, and home video recording devices made videos like Birnbaum’s pirated works the products of a bygone era. Consequently, her methods shifted as well. Birnbaum again utilized animation, which by then was a hallmark of the MTV aesthetic. However, the days of expensive video art production were also a thing of the past. This commission was for creating twice the content (a minute) but with a fraction of the budget provided by the nonprofits—salvage accumulation in full effect.

Trans-Voices: Transgressions is a research-dense, fast-moving animated work that overturns the curatorial prompt. Birnbaum provides viewers with a map of the United States that locates Indigenous tribes in their precolonial geographies against borders of future states [fig. 4]. A female voice reads the “Pledge of Allegiance” as we watch the map change, with a more sinister and modulated male voice—that of then president George H.W. Bush—echoing the same words. The effect is a foreboding history of the United States’ colonial expansion in less than twenty seconds. This same visual is repeated against continental Europe, with France at the center. The ebb and flow of influence across the map demonstrates the country’s reach, with war spoils and concessions reflected in changing borderlines. The “Pledge of Allegiance” is spoken in French with Bush’s eerie echoes in the background. It is an affecting and portentous presence on screen.

Birnbaum’s critique expands further, with the map zooming out to a more global view of both nations, and a series of rapid-fire data points are mapped out

20

Howard LaFranchi, “New York and Paris Subways Host Unusual Mass-Media Show,” Christian Science Monitor, September 21, 1992, https://www. csmonitor.com/1992/0921/21111.html.

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Figure 4. Dara Birnbaum, TRANSVOICES: transgressions, 1992. Single-channel video, color, sound, 60 sec.

Still. Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

graphically. Here, she presents areas of conflict and crisis in the United States and within Europe, demonstrating imperialist extensions of power and violence throughout the twentieth century. In a few seconds each, we see where rising sea levels are brought about through global warming; major cases of industrial dumping; poor air quality; endangered wildlife; AIDS-related deaths; war zones; nuclear test sites, plants, mines, and lost weapons; and incidents of drug trafficking. These reflections provide a prescient understanding of the looming global climatological disasters.

Curiously, at the end of Birnbaum’s ominous sequence, she concludes with statistics of media consumption, presumably within France and the United States [fig. 5] through newspapers and television. Is this a means to a positive end, or an indictment of the viewer? By closing with another meta-reflection on the media—in this case, distribution and consumption—Birnbaum is leaving open the potential for critical engagement and holding systems accountable. These

Kristen Wawruck

Figure 5. Dara Birnbaum, TRANSVOICES: transgressions, 1992. Single-channel video, color, sound, 60 sec.

Still. Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

closing self-reflexive notes insert friction, providing a self-awareness of the media’s complicit role in advancing capitalist violence. What remains striking is how MTV wholeheartedly courts and broadcasts critical content into the fold, even if ever so briefly. This last frame gives Birnbaum the upper hand in calling MTV’s savviness to account.

The precarious conditions for immaterial art production in the 1980s and 1990s led to ingenuity in form and content for radically minded artists like Dara Birnbaum. It was a time that presages our current debates of “clean” versus “dirty” money at institutions, the limitlessness of streaming, and a flattened media landscape, where the very notion of “truth” or “facts” are political debate fodder. In Birnbaum’s animated universe, Betty Boop can provoke and punish Koko’s heteropatriarchal sexism, and still walk away smiling. For any artist embracing their constraints to make pericapitalist work, it is not just a matter of biting the hand that feeds you—but how sharp your teeth are.

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Acknowledgements

Becoming an MA candidate, West Coast denizen, home fixer-upper, and mom during a pandemic could not have been possible without significant moral and intellectual support. I am deeply humbled by the close and thoughtful readings of my committee, with Jeanette Roan, Jacqueline Francis, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Việt Lê providing me with generous feedback along the way. A special thanks to Dr. Roan for the extra encouragement and tough questions at each turn. I also thank Helen Klonaris for her warm and rigorous support during the early stages of research.

To my cohort, to whom I have been most grateful to for listening and feedback over these last two busy years: Liz Hafey, Katherine Hamilton, Liz Ordway, and Aliya Parashar.

I am indebted to my close friends whose enthusiasm for my research kept me motivated in times of doubt. An extra note of gratitude should be extended to Léa-Catherine Szacka, whose reading list and parallel research helped kick this project off to an official start. A special thanks to Gary Carrion-Murayari, a dear friend, former colleague, and lunch companion, and Thomas McGrath, a friend and trusted mentor at my alma mater, for helping to launch me on this new path.

In more ways than one, this project could not have happened without my parents, Steve and Nancy Wawruck. Their discovery of cable and MTV’s soporific effects provided the soundtrack to my earliest years and sparked the questions I hope this project unpacks.

Finally, I cannot muster strong enough words to express my gratitude to my husband, James Graham, for his patience, selflessness, and radical kindness throughout my return to student-dom. Thank you for helping to enable my transformation into a researcher and mother to Nico. You two plus a little purring Edie are the best comforts after obsessing on and over screens. Thank you.

Kristen Wawruck

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Sonic Imaginaries: Sound and Resonance in Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick’s Masks and Candice Hopkins’s Curation at documenta 14 K AT H ER I N E J E M I M A H A M I LTON

Katherine Jemima Hamilton

Every place has indigenous sounds; every site has a way of communicating shaped by millennia-long histories of peoples who know the land like a relative.

So, what happens when an outsider, newcomer, or interloper contextualizes a being (a relative) as an object in a forum like a museum? I am tired of seeing regalia alone on a pedestal behind plexiglass, separated from their songs, stories, dances, families, and cultures. When presenting ceremonial regalia formed by languages, cultures, and lands that existed long before colonization, museum curators could use the sounds that shaped these beings to drive a museum presentation’s form.

Curator Simon Sheikh writes, “If we are not happy with the world we are in, both in terms of the art world and in a broader geopolitical sense, we will have to produce other exhibitions: other subjectivities and other imaginaries.” 1 I contend that the sonic is one of these other imaginaries, and that Candice Hopkins built an “other exhibition” at documenta 14. The sonic imaginary presents an alternative way of perceiving and contextualizing the world to the colonial imaginary, which privileges sight—a sense that often severs the physical connection of objects to people. The sonic imaginary rejects the colonial mode of seeing. The sonic imaginary can open cultural institutions and their visitors to a method of knowledge production that embraces the nonvisual lives of the beings in its collections.

Curator Candice Hopkins (Tagish/Carcross) put this methodology into play with Chief Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick by demonstrating how the sonic imaginary can (un)define a space at documenta 14 [fig. 1]. I argue there is something ineffable—embodied—that sound and its properties can teach cultural producers, collections managers, arts professionals, and everything in between. This paper discusses how formline, a style specific to First Nations artists of the Pacific Northwest Coast like Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick, is inherently sonic. I demonstrate how Hopkins’s curatorial intervention at documenta 14 amplifies these masks’ sonic lives, whereas traditional museum displays that place a mask against a wall behind plexiglass silences them. This paper is also about listening and 1

Simon Sheikh, “Constitutive Effects: The Techniques of the Curator,” in Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill (New York: Open Editions, 2007), 181.

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Figure 1. Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick, ‘Twenty-two masks from the series “Atlakim”’ (1990–2012).

Figure 2. Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick, ‘Twenty-two masks from the series “Atlakim”’ (1990–2012).

Katherine Jemima Hamilton

reception. Sonic imaginaries teach us about listening because they can challenge the hegemonic mode of listening that we learn growing up in a colonial state.

When we listen with our whole bodies, our entire being, what can we hear? There are voices, songs, and stories sounding from the margins. 2 We just have to learn to listen.

Formline and the Rhythm Within Chief Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick uses formline design style, the visual lexicon that defines Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations art. Formline has been around on the Northwest Coast for at least three thousand years, possibly longer, and has metamorphized over its long life as artists experiment(ed) with form and color. 3 The various First Nations peoples of the PNWC developed this style through sound, narrative, and a cosmology that defines their specific Nation’s relationship to the land. In a single design, there are typically two formlines: one in black, outlining and defining the shape of the being, and one in red, providing detail to the body parts. 4 Formline swells and sways to create three forms central to Northwest Coast style: ovoids, U-forms, and S-forms. Together, the elements of formline design evoke movement as they dance and flow among each other.

Because formline is a dynamic visual style that evokes movement, the repetitions within a single mask create a rhythm. Dick’s Galukw’amhl’s [fig. 2] black and white beak protrudes beyond her mouth, punctuated with black U-forms, contrasting against the mask’s white base and creating rhythmic movement on the beak alone. Behind the cheek, Dick repeated the U-form in red, like notes in another register. The red U-form behind the cheek is painted on a white surface, repeated in double time above in a split U behind the eye. The forms build off one another, like a percussionist building a beat with full, quarter, and eighth notes.

Their connection to sound, not just rhythm, can be seen in the crescendo and decrescendo-ing forms created by each form’s tail.

Hopkins provides several ways to see how the masks’ rhythms play with each other and the artwork in the rest of the space in documenta 14. For example, in the Atlakim circle, Dick’s cycle of Atlakim dance masks face each other. Tsonoqua’s lips form an “O,” so she “Huuu Huuus” from behind the Atlakim masks, her sound pervading every sightline of the installation. Hopkins approximates where each mask would appear on a potlatch dance floor. It is a simple action but something

2 3 4

Candice Hopkins, “Sounding the Margins: A Choir of Minor Voices,” lecture, Small Projects, Grønnegata 23, Tromsø and the Norwegian Association of Curators, Tromsø, Norway, June 14, 2016). https://vimeo.com/178828368.

Marjorie M. Halpin, “Northwest Coast Indigenous Art,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, February 7, 2006, https:// thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/northwest-coast-aboriginal-art.

Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 38.

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many institutions and curators do not do. Hopkins places the underworld masks near the ground, those of our world at eye level, and those of the supernatural world up high. 5 This positioning situates viewers in the Kwakwaka’wakw worldview instead of the colonial worldview, which frames the masks as objects in a collection with no life beyond their presentation. Hopkins keeps them in dialogue with one another as they share visual space, indicating to visitors that this display is a part of these masks’ lives rather than their whole being.

Hopkins’s placement of the masks away from the walls in the gallery’s center, where a Big House dance floor would be, reminds visitors that these masks move. A dancer defines and redefines the masks’ movements as they play with the lighting and the masks’ other moving elements, such as the cedar strips and the snapping jaws. The loudest jaw of the Hamatsa cluster is Gwakgwakwalanuksiwe, characterized by an impossibly long beak [fig. 3]. During its dance, the jaw snaps shut—CLACK. The cedar strips attached under her cheeks swish and sway as the dancer moves, masking their body, emphasizing their animalistic motions. The open triangles around Gwakgwakwalanuksiwe’s eyes open and close like a crescendo building into the eye’s circle, then fading into a decrescendo. Dick shows formline’s harmonics: it creates complex rhythms and chords through an orchestra of shape and relief. The craftsmanship of these shapes, colors, and forms cannot be fully understood under track lights against a white wall. Hopkins’s rejection of ocular-centric colonial interpretation in the masks’ assembling makes her curatorial intervention progressive.

Visitors also found this true: in her review of the exhibition, Sophie Publig commented on how Western art-historical framing and narratives cannot properly contextualize these masks. By approximating their positions on the dance floor (instead of sticking them behind plexiglass against a wall), Hopkins’s presentation decentered the colonial imaginary, giving these masks space to see and hear each other. 6 Hili Perlson’s review of documenta 14 asserted that the masks’ display completely overpowered the exhibition space, muting the other artworks whose “presence was unexplained.” 7 It is possible that because a sonic curatorial matrix was employed for these masks and not the other visual works, viewers were dizzied by interpreting purely visual artworks on the other walls through the sonic lens. A sonic imaginary can bring a nonvisual interpretation to these masks’ stature that takes stock of its way of being beyond its purely visual qualities—the sonic imaginary also leaks well beyond its designated space, as I will explain later.

5 6 7

Candice Hopkins, “Native Economies: From the Potlatch Ban to the Masks of Beau Dick,” lecture, the Serving Library and Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK, July 26, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nia1eNHlI5Q. Sophie Publig, “Shifting Perspectives: Beau Dick’s Multi-Layer Strategy of Agency at documenta 14,” All-Over: Magazin für Kunst und Ästhetik (Spring/Summer 2019): 26.

Hili Perlson, 2017, “At documenta 14, Everything’s a Strategy-Even Bad Hanging | Artnet News.” Artnet News, April 10, 2017. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/documenta-14-review-bad-hanging-strategy-919811.

Katherine Jemima Hamilton

Figure 3. Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick, ‘Twenty-two masks from the series “Atlakim”’ (1990–2012).

Listening and other Nonvisual Forms of Interpretation in Indigenous Art I propose that the sonic is an extra matrix of cultural understanding built upon scholarship by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers who argue for a nonvisual mode of perceiving non-European art. In the essay “Settler-colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two-Parts,” Damian Skinner puts forward ten propositions for a settler-colonial frame of understanding art history. One of Skinner’s propositions is that “Settler-colonial art history will resist art history’s investment in the visual.” European-based art history sees all objects as images rather than objects that came into being for reasons other than aesthetic or sublime beauty. 8 Where Skinner proposes a settler-colonial framework of art history to frame art practices informed by settler-colonialism, I am additionally arguing for an extrasensorial interpretation of regalia in a museum or gallery space that can simultaneously hold multiple histories of land and people. A purely visual understanding of such things erases the many lives (a family member, contraband, decorative object) they have lived and the various realms (sonic, visual, haptic) in which they have lived those lives.

8

Damian Skinner, “Settler-colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts,” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art Canadien 35, no. 1 (2014): 158-160.

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Figure 4. Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick, ‘Twenty-two masks from the series “Atlakim”’ (1990–2012).

However, creating a space with multiple ways of knowing is not straightforward if one’s preceptories are not attuned and open to listening beyond colonial, hegemonic sound waves. Stó:lō writer and academic Dylan Robinson coined a term for closed, colonial listening: xwélalà:m xwelítem. xwélalà:m (Hungry) xwelítem (Listening) describes the powers and forces at play (in conflict) that silence a mask whose purpose is to sound. “Hungry Listening” names a visual-centric form of perceiving the world. Rejecting it and actively working on listening “wholly” pushes witnessing into an embodied mode of perceiving where multi-sensory interpretations leak meanings from one realm to another. xwélalà:m is a form of witnessing, or “attention in which we are attentive not just to sound but to the fullest range of sensory experience that connects us to a place.” 9 Alone, xwélalà:m might point to the kind of “whole” listening explained above, but Robinson stipulates that xwélalà:m is a form of witnessing specific to Stó:lō positionality, as it developed with their worldview. xwelítem translates to “hungry,” but it also means settler. The first settlers the Stó:lō saw came for the gold rush—they possessed an unquenchable hunger for resource extraction to achieve the settler dream of wealth and riches.10 Together, Hungry Listening points to a form of settler-colonial witnessing where all the senses that attach us to the world are filtered through a need to consume and conquer. When witnessing through this desire to devour, consume, deplete, one is never full. Through Hungry Listening, masks become part of an accumulation of riches that one can never 9 10

Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 71–72.

Dylan Robinson and Cam Scott, “Send and Receive: Dylan Robinson,” Zoom lecture and discussion, Collective Broadcast Co. and McNally Robinson Booksellers, Winnipeg, Manitoba, May 6, 2021.

Katherine Jemima Hamilton

Figure 5. Walas Gwa’yam Beau Dick, ‘Twenty-two masks from the series “Atlakim”’ (1990–2012).

have enough of: they are status symbols in a capitalist system that values infinite growth and wealth. Rejecting hunger as a perceptual mode means moving into a full perceptual mode that allows for true xwélalà:m—attention in which we are attentive to the most comprehensive range of sensory experiences that connect us to a place. We do not consume objects but listen to them. Dances are dances instead of jagged, barbaric movements; music is music instead of mere noise.

Boom Boom Bah: Polyrhythms in the Curatorial When we reject hungry listening, we can witness conversations between the rhythms and expressions on the masks. The Hamatsa birds exchange looks across the gallery [fig. 4]; the Atlakim forest spirits “Hoo” and “hahhh” and “AHHH” in their circle [fig. 5]. As their glances and expressions amplify each mask’s story, visitors cannot interpret these masks non-relationally: each piece sounds off the others, making their presence louder than when alone.

When the masks assemble, the forms’ repetition creates a rhythm between the pieces reminiscent of the drum they dance to on the Big House floor. For example, the long, thick U-forms on the Galukw’amhl’s beak are repeated in light, short white U-forms nearing the back of the Gwaxgwakwalanuksiwe’s head and in an inversed color on a Mugwamł’s large curved beak below him.11 Think of the Galukw’amhl’s beak as “Boom Boom Boom,” the Gwaxgwakwalanuksiwe’s U-forms as “tktktktktktktk,” and the U-forms on the mask with many heads as 11

This mask might be a Mugwamł, though the documenta 14 label does not clarify, listing the masks as “Raven Masks.” However, based on the multiple heads here and in the Mugwamł entry, it is possible. “Living Tradition: The Kwak’waka’wakw potlatch of the North West Coast.” U’mista Cultural Center. https://umistapotlatch.ca/visite_virtuelle-virtual_tour-eng.php#2/0/A3653; Candice Hopkins, “Beau Dick,” documenta 14, accessed April 19, 2022. bhttps://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13689/beau-dick.

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“Buh Buh Buh.” This visual rhythm is an example of Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “sonic image,” where visual elements behave like a sound by leaking into each other’s space. In Hopkins’s curation, these masks play polyrhythms off each other through repeated and altered forms, meaning one’s form leaks into another’s, just as Tsonoqua’s “Huuu Huuu!” drones over the installation.12 Each mask is a player bringing a beat or musical phrase to an ensemble, riffing off the other masks. Hopkins was keenly aware of these masks’ sonic power, working with Dick to arrange them so their rhythms and sonic elements amplified each other.

By positioning the masks together in their dance formations, Hopkins created a chorus of voices and beats that leaked beyond into the other artworks’ spaces, even if visitors heard nothing aurally.

Sonic Feeding and Family Separation This sonic leaking mentioned above became literal during the exhibition’s performance program. Cole Speck, a carver and apprentice of Beau Dick, flew to Athens to perform and contextualize Dick’s work on the artist’s behalf, as Dick had passed away in 2017.13 Images of Speck beating his drum and singing to the masks echo what leaders of the Git Hayetsk dance group, Mike Dangeli (Nisga’a) and Miqe’l Dangeli (Ts’msyen), said during a 2016 gathering at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario: Mique’l Dangeli: I wish we had the opportunity to be fed by and to feed our ancestors—our ceremonial beings—outside of plexiglass. . . like this more often. It is one of the reasons why we sing and dance in museums, regardless of that history, because it is important that they know we acknowledge them and that we still love them. . . it’s just that we’re separated.14 The dancers were not discussing regalia repatriation but how ceremonial beings cannot thrive while permanently on display. Like the masks Dangeli speaks about, Dick’s masks are Kwakwaka’wakw family members—no being can go without nutrients. Dangeli and Dick address the scopophilic mode of observation these masks are under when Indigenous communities concede masks to a collection for any number of reasons.15 Because they are beings, they run out of

12 13 14 15

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “The Sonic Image,” Zoom lecture at Berkeley Center for New Media, Berkeley, CA, April 5, 2021.

Sophie Publig, “Shifting Perspectives,” 26.

Mique’l Dangeli quoted in Robinson, Hungry Listening, 92.

Especially in the early days following the potlatch ban, museums would commission dance masks cycles from an individual family. That family could then use the masks they carved for potlatching when needed, but the masks had to stay at the museum. Considering the risks of floods and fires many dispossessed First Nations communities faced on their reservations, this term didn’t seem sinister. Author interview with John Frisholz, former curator of the Museum at Campbell River, via telephone, June 2020.

Katherine Jemima Hamilton

energy when on view constantly. A sonic matrix of curating alone cannot mend the wrong of separating masks from their families or draining their energy. However, a sonic imaginary can allow curators and collection managers who are not in the masks’ First Nations communities to recognize their agency and desires as beings as they can now hear the masks’ voices. Hopefully, this shift in understanding a mask’s agency motivates curators to let the regalia’s family lead how they are displayed if their home must be a gallery or museum.16 Coda Other writing has hinted at the sonic imaginary as a curatorial model, though it is not necessarily named. In Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s book The Undercommons, queer theorist Jack Halberstam writes, “Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.” 17 An imaginative mode that embraces clashing, cacophonous histories can reveal this wild beyond. We choose how to witness every day: do we decide to silence a being by removing it from its culture or listen to it and provide space for it to tell its story? Embracing the sonic imaginary as a curatorial mode means we can refuse systems that trap and silence a being’s history and ancestors. Through the sonic imaginary, we interlopers can learn to listen so that “Huuuu Huuuu!” is no longer something to own but a story Tsonoqua can tell us about who she is and who she has always been.

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The reasons a collection of masks or regalia would live in a museum are not uniform. For example, in my hometown of Campbell River, BC, several families’ masks live in the Museum at Campbell River. During the museum’s formation in the 1950s, houses in Campbell River burnt down quite frequently, and regalia collections were lost. The museum’s staff commissioned new masks to be made, replacing those lost during the fire, and agreeing to lend them out to the family whenever they need them. The masks are perpetually on display, some even telling their story to an oration told overhead several times a day, but they are safe from fire and pests. Cases like this are far and few between, but they do happen.

Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommon,” introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 7, 9.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisors, Dr. Ren Fiss, Dr. Thomas O. Haakenson, Dr. Việt Lê, and Dr. Jacqueline Francis, for always pushing me to think critically and creatively about my text and research. I’d also like to thank Helen Klonaris for encouraging me to pursue this topic in early drafts, as well as TT Takemoto for supporting a previous paper that led to this thesis and being open to narrative descriptions of people, places, and things in an academic context.

My deepest gratitude goes to Beth Boyce, the curator at the Museum at Campbell River. Thank you for underscoring how important it is that curators of Northwest Coast First Nations collections educate staff and the public about the issues Indigenous communities continue to resist. Your and Parrish Sandra’s work in and out of the Museum is something I aspire to in my own practice, always.

Thank you to John Frishholz, educator and former curator of the Museum at Campbell River, for consulting my very early drafts, and correcting and adding to my preliminary research on anthropological exhibitions of Northwest Coast art.

Your perspective is invaluable.

And though it often felt like I was writing in a vacuum as I typed away in my San Francisco bedroom, I was deeply inspired by more exhibitions, movies, and texts than I can even think to name. Thank you to all those who wrote, thought, resisted, and fought before me. This thesis may have been impossible to write ten years ago, and I am coming to it from a certain time with a specific set of tools, knowledge, and understanding because of who I am and where I live. My work, and that of so many others, is possible because of what you did.

Finally, thank you to my parents, Richard Hamilton and Lori Kobelak, who are perhaps my most dedicated editors and sounding boards. Thank you. I love you.

Katherine Jemima Hamilton

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Booby Traps: Cultural Critique in the Writings of Marcel Duchamp and Karen Finley LI Z H A F E Y

Liz Hafey

Just over a century ago, on April 9, 1917, the most brilliantly absurd and revolutionary art event of the twentieth century was achieved, birthing conceptual art by philosophically reversing the idea of art entirely, and all it took was a manufactured urinal.

The story goes: Marcel Duchamp sent a porcelain urinal on a pedestal to the supposedly non-juried Society of Independent Artists salon in New York, whose organizers had claimed that they would accept any work of art so long as the artist paid the application fee. The urinal was signed and dated “R. Mutt, 1917” and titled Fountain [fig. 1].1 The society’s board, faced with what must have seemed like a practical joke from an anonymous artist, rejected Fountain on the grounds that it was not a true work of art. Duchamp, who was a member of that board himself, immediately resigned in protest, taking Fountain with him. Shortly after its christening, Duchamp arranged to have Fountain photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and then just like that, the original Fountain vanished, leaving only a black-and-white photograph as a record of its existence. 2 Artists and intellectuals surfaced on both sides of the issue, with perhaps the clearest explanation of Fountain’s importance coming from an anonymous editorial (since ascertained to have been written by artist Beatrice Wood) published in the then newly created Dada zine the Blind Man [fig. 2]: Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral; that is absurd, no more than a bathtub being immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumber’s show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for the object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America is given are her plumbing and her bridges. 3 1 2 3

Steven Goldsmith, “The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: The Ambiguities of an Aesthetic Revolution,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 2 (1983): 202.

Paul Franklin, “Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History,” Oxford Art Journal 23, no. 1 (2000): 30.

[Beatrice Wood], “The Richard Mutt Case,” Blind Man no. 2 (May 1917): 4–5.

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Sightlines 2022 Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photograph

by Alfred Stieglitz.

Figure 2. [Beatrice Wood], “The Richard Mutt Case,” Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917): 4–5.

Liz Hafey

This story isn’t about failure or rejection, but rather resistance and emancipation—testing the waters of authority within fixed hegemonic systems of modern art discourse. Like an epic chess match, it wasn’t just a singular piece or gesture, but a series of intentional and peevishly planned, transdisciplinary defensive and offensive moves that creatively deconstructed the bridge between art and life itself.

First and most importantly, until recent decades, most art historians and scholars have declared Duchamp the singular author behind Fountain. But why? It has been conclusively proven that the Dada artist Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven was behind the object choice and overall concept, while Duchamp, being an already iconic male artist as well as a board member, acted as a pawn-performer with the art object itself by submitting it to and withdrawing it from the gallery. 4 Most importantly, what is essential is that this narrative does not take place in a gallery or a museum, but in fact occurs on the page. In other words, the artwork does not solely reside in the art object itself. The artwork comprises the object; Marcel Duchamp’s performance with it; Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of it; Beatrice Wood’s article about it; and Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s conceptualization and orchestration of the entire event.

Duchamp was fond of booby traps and very willing to hang people up on their own worst instincts, especially when those instincts involved ideology or etiquette. 5 One can easily follow Duchamp’s methodologically promiscuous, almost anti-disciplinary approach by tracing his gestures that opposed modern art disciplines and traditions. He used irony, wit, and puns as tools to turn modernist ideology back on itself, exposing the fallacies of the modern gallery context through paradoxical art pranks. This context has been best described by Brian O’Doherty, who uses the metaphor of the white cube and describes the modern gallery space as a traditional device of Platonic convention, which aims to bleach out the past, and subsequent future, leaving no hope for creative anthropomorphism for the spectator within its ideological grasp. By appealing to transcendental ambitions of presence and power disguised as a pure form of aesthetics, creating a hostile environment that forces the art audience to perform specific social roles and become complicit in modernist claims over the autonomy of art, the artist’s identity, and the spectator audience, it is easy to see why Duchamp aimed to challenge such a system. 6

4 5 6

Vanessa Thill, “Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, The Dada Baroness Who Invented the Readymade,” Artsy, September 18, 2018, http://www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven-dada-baroness-invented-readymade.

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 71.

O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 55.

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Sightlines 2022 Figure 3. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–23. Glass, lead foil, fused wire, dust, and oil paint, 109 1/4 × 69 1/4 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Liz Hafey

Figure 4. Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, The Bride Stripped Bare by Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), 1934. Ninety-four facsimiles of manuscript notes, drawings, and photographs, and one original manuscript item, Broyeuse de Chocolat, contained in a cardboard box with punched holes forming the title, attached copper strips on front and back covers, and green flocked interior, 13 1/16 × 11 × 1 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Duchamp, despite being irrevocably tied to his readymades, nonetheless considered his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (nicknamed The Large Glass, 1912–26, fig. 3) the most artistically valued and personally loved work of his career. As he explained, “The Glass was a reaction against the retinal conception of painting, because of the conceptual introduction. This is a literary painting. It is using words.” 7 What does Duchamp mean by this, especially for the untrained spectator? In fact, if it wasn’t for the tall-tale title, and/or a trained eye in reference to his past works, it would be almost impossible to create a narrative for it. Perhaps that was Duchamp’s point? Or perhaps he didn’t have one just yet?

In fact, we wouldn’t know how to approach Duchamp’s The Large Glass until just over a decade later, with the announcement of The Green Box [fig. 4], a compendium containing ninety-four facsimiles of notes, sketches, and studies that Duchamp had created while working on The Large Glass. 8 Duchamp worked with professional printers to achieve the meticulous reproductions; the papers, inks, and even torn edges exactly matched the originals, exposing something of the artist’s conceptual processes while also creating a portable art object that existed (at least then) mostly outside the gallery context.

7 8

“A 1959 Interview with Marcel Duchamp: The Fallacy of Art History and the Death of Art,” ArtSpace, 2018. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/ art_101/qa/a-1959-interview-with-marcel-duchamp-the-fallacy-of-art-history-and-the-death-of-art-55274.

Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 87.

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The project collaboration did not stop there. Duchamp had the help of his alter ego and drag collaborator, Rrose Sélavy [fig. 5], who at the time was the face of Duchamp’s art career.9 Rrose was vital to The Green Box: she was its publisher, held multiple bank accounts in her name for financing the project, presold issues of The Green Box in order to fund it, and oversaw its distribution. Rrose’s involvement turned the capitalization process for The Green Box into a conceptual one by encouraging the development of an artist as a mediumistic archetype and subsequently the sheer performativity of the spectator/audience.10 In fact, these additional conceptual moves did not end with Rrose Sélavy’s involvement. The Green Box is not a traditional publication because the contents are not in any fixed order; readers are expected to performatively sift through the notes and puzzle out their meanings, creating a selective and subjective dialogue with the art object and among themselves.11 Removing the gallery context, making the spectator dialogue an extension of the concept, and creating a life for the artwork all finalize Duchamp’s conceptual master move in a form of theory, the creative act.12 Following this logic, conceptual and interdisciplinary turns in the history of contemporary art have seen artists take up the pen as an integral component of their practices and move entirely into a writer’s space, taking a turn toward the literary.13 This systemic conception of the artist as writer has developed in response to art-making conditions over the course of the last century, ranging from the institutionalization of art to the increasing emphasis on art as a discursive and politically engaged field since the conceptual turn of the 1960s and 1970s, and even the postmodern art practice of the archival turn, characterized by its “linguistic orientation.” 14 Feminist historian Kathleen Canning has described this phenomenon categorically as a linguistic turn, explaining it not only as a turn toward the use of language but also as a cultural phenomenon of human relations, with the connection of the author-artist and reader-spectator being a particular subset of this form of cultural analysis of representation.15 These types of archival events coincide with the linguistic turn, taken by artists as intellectual emancipation in detracting and reorienting themselves, their practices, and their artworks to find alternative forms of knowledge in renewing human intellect as a kind of radical resistance which can therefore be examined as an extension of queer phenomenology.

9 13 14 15

Jones, Postmodernism and The En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 111.

Julian Jason Haladyn, “On ‘The Creative Act,’” Toutfait.com, April 1, 2015, https://www.toutfait.com/on-the-creative-act/.

Jones, Postmodernism and The En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 87.

Haladyn, “On ‘The Creative Act,’” 15.

Liz Hafey

Figure 5. Man Ray, photo of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, 1920–21.

Gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 × 6 13/16 in.

13 14 15

Francis Gosselin, “From Dada to Punk,” Medium, February 25, 2016, https://medium.com/@monsieurgustave/from-dada-to-punk-f2be16d5bc87.

Janneke Wesseling, “Why Write? On Writing as Art Practice,” Analytic Alpha, 2016, https://www.analyticalpha.nl/alphalab-tools/sow-for teachers/ why-write-on-writing-as-art-practice/.

Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994): 368–404.

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Figure 6. Karen Finley, We Keep Our Victims Ready performance still, 1989. https://julietetelandresen.com/ karen-finley-performance-artist/

Liz Hafey

Karen Finley was an early pioneer of interdisciplinary art, starting at the turn of Reaganism and the culture wars of the 1980s.16 For decades Finley’s iconic performance work has been a controversial subject among scholars, art critics, the US judicial system, politicians, and patrons. Most famously, the artist’s fight with the government over censorship began in 1990 when the NEA defunded her and three other artists, prompting the filing of four lawsuits against the NEA. The NEA’s decision was based on a change in federal law and information that appeared in certain conservative newspaper columns regarding Finley’s performance We Keep Our Victims Ready (1989, fig. 6), even though neither journalist actually witnessed Finley’s performance. The US government was trying to control how artists were choosing to express themselves; they argued that Finley’s choice of subject matter, which they had used the so-called Miller Test (1973) to deem “obscenity in its purest form,” was not art.17 Finley argued that revoking her funding was in effect stripping her of her First Amendment rights to freedom of expression.

Finley received help and praise from her supporters, but an even greater measure of backlash from more traditional critics, curators, and the general public; her conceptual choices as an artist, and more specifically as a female artist, completely and hyper-deliberately contradicted and challenged the boundaries of a woman’s own naked body, the way in which a woman speaks, and the societal limitations set on women as artists. Holding her ground as a conceptual artist, Finley has worked in the music industry, graphic texts, sculpture, installation, and poetry, but has been mostly iconized for her controversial performance works. Her performances, all self-authored, contain spoken-word monologues using chaotic verse structure, a form of linguistic anarchy. Finley consistently uses her voice as a rhythmic tool of improvisation that rejects singular, fixed narratives by celebrating spontaneous creativity, and by treating the audience as context. Her raw, uninhibited performance works have stirred artistic and social communities to raise consciousness beyond the artwork to issues such as social activism, consumption, distribution, and censorship.18 Finley sees her conceptual work as a form of emancipation that aims to address and dismantle sociopolitical issues right at the source, which often involved her stripping down to her bare skin as a tit-for-tat art attack.

16 17 18

Marcelle Clements, “Theater; Karen Finley’s Rage, Pain, Hate and Hope,” New York Times, July 22, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/ theater/theater-karen-finley-s-rage-pain-hate-and-hope.html.

Amy M. Adler, “Post-Modern Art and the Death of Obscenity Law,” Yale Law Journal 99, no. 6 (1990): 1369.

Marcelle Clements, “Theater; Karen Finley’s Rage, Pain, Hate and Hope,” New York Times, July 22, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/ theater/theater-karen-finley-s-rage-pain-hate-and-hope.html.

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Finley has provoked controversy by challenging tradition and boundaries of modernity at every turn. Her use of her naked body as content and conceptual context for her spoken-word monologues productively invoked an echoing shock to audiences but also critics and traditionalists. But what was most important for Finley was the free PR stirred up by art critics who held onto the traditional modernist paradigm, ironically aiding her in creating buzz for her work and generating an audience. To her, all press is good press, and she has even been known to challenge those who overly criticized her—criticizing the critic.19 Finley, who has often performed in spaces other than traditional galleries and museums, was adamant about not recording her performances in protest of the postmodern obsession with the conventional archive. By highlighting the importance of live spectators, Finley provoked questions regarding the audience as a conceptual and performative aspect of her work while at the same time creating a paradoxical problem for the missing audience, namely those who for whatever reason are unable to attend. Largely for this reason, Finley turned toward the literary and translated her performance works into a publication titled Shock Treatment (1990), a more accessible book format. 20 Instead of making the audience gather in one place or becoming an “artist machine,” performing the same pieces repeatedly, the text and illustrations generate a level of performativity beyond Finley’s physical capability. For Finley, the book object, her written text, and illustrations, became a catalyst for provoking the spectator-reader to subsequently perform with the object, through themselves and potentially in dialogue with other spectators.

By generating dialogue that is normally subdued by the ideology of the white cube and the scholastic authority of modernity, like Duchamp, Finley turned the audience into an extension of her performance work. 21 Ultimately declaring the spectator audience, the final performative act of the conceptualization of the work and by decree, breaks down the boundaries and disciplines that limit the creative freedom of expression.

As provocatively proven time and time again by Marcel Duchamp, Karen Finley, and countless other artists, promiscuously interdisciplinary methods, including a linguistic turn, can prompt problem solving and communication of thought from personal and eccentric expression to anarchic, revolutionary, and heretical concepts about art and life. 22 All can be interpreted as extensions of Duchamp’s art theory—the creation of art as a performing dialogue between artist and spectator.

19 20 21

22

Karen Finley and Catherine Schuler, “The Constant State of Frustration,” TDR 34, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 10.

Karen Finley, Shock Treatment (1990; repr., San Francisco: City Lights, 2001).

Larissa Holmes, “Progress through Provocations: Analyzing the Work of Karen Finley,” Columbia Undergraduate Journal of Art History 3 (October 18, 2021): 6, available at https://cujahtemp.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/3-progress-through-provocations-analyzing-the-work-of-karen-finleye28093-cujah.pdf.

Kristen Stiles, “‘I’m Ready.’ Thinking about Artists’ Writings in a Global Context Today,” in Not a Day Without a Line: Understanding Artists’ Writings, ed. Helena De Preester (Lebanon, NH: Academia Press, 2013), 180.

Liz Hafey

For Duchamp, both subject positions were necessary to create a work of art, which must be seen to involve the making of the work and its reception. What Duchamp proposed is a dialogic artist-viewer relationship predicated on a psychological and affective transference, an important concept in his description of the interaction between artist and spectator through the material presence of an art object. 23 Within the current of Duchamp’s creative act theory, this conceptual realm beyond what we collectively witness turns translation, reading, writing, and dialogue with the spectator into performative acts. 24 To that end, in consideration of the realm of critical studies using language as a tool for dialogue with and around the visual, I would argue that if an artist’s research methodologies have a conceptual focus, process, or both when translating the visual, they could subsequently and quite possibly be considered performative.

In solidarity with these findings, I’d like to provide an example by performing the first paragraph of Karen Finley’s It’s Only Art [fig.7]: I went into a museum, but they had taken down all the art. Only the empty frames were left. Pieces of masking tape were up with the names of the paintings and the artist stating why they were removed. The guards had nothing to guard. The white walls yellowed. Toilets were locked up in museums because people might think someone peeing is art. Someone might think that pee flushing down that toilet is art. Someone might think that act of peeing is an art. And the government pays for that pee flushing down that toilet. There were many bladder infections among those who inspected the museum making sure that there was no offensive art. They might lose their jobs. It’s a good life when no one thinks that you ever piss or shit. 25 In this passage, Finley is emphasizing such fallacies of the modern gallery context as the censorship of art, the policing of visitors, and the absurd educational fallacies these types of institutions aim to uphold within the visual arts for profitable gain, social control, and self-preservation of authority. By mocking them, Finley proposes a fundamental questioning of the accepted parameters of the artist-art-viewer relationship that emerged from the modern conception and institutionalization of art as means to claim the ultimate authority of art.

23 24

25

Haladyn, “On ‘The Creative Act,’” 4.

Purnima Ruanglertbutr, “Beyond the Artists’ Book-as-Object and Performance: How Has Performativity Transformed the Way We Engage With, Experience, and Comprehend Artistic Practices, and How Can This Be Investigated in the Artists’ Book?” (BA thesis, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, 2009), 12.

Finley, Shock Treatment, 69.

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Sightlines 2022 Figure 7. Karen Finley, It’s Only Art, in Shock Treatment (1990; repr., San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 69.

Ultimately, the effect of Fountain was to transgress and pervert the authoritative disciplines of modernism, linking to the postmodern notion that linguistic categories of art objects do not possess any inherent meaning but only contain meanings assigned to them. For Duchamp, the rejection of Fountain was a “success” because it provided, and proved, the use of the literary as a powerful catalyst in developing the hypothesis of his art theory—the creative act—subsequently turning his conceptual artistic process into the scholarly realm of theoretical development and sociopolitical experimentation.

By using the linguistic turn as a narrative-gestural lens with an aim to deconstruct it, we can begin to understand the linkage between Duchamp’s intention within his theoretical-conceptual process and his artworks as mere by-products, not final products. In consideration of Duchamp’s masterwork The Large Glass, the

Liz Hafey

conception of the Green Box publication, the collaboration with Rrose Sélavy as its publisher, and the performative nature of the participating spectator, creating subjective dialogue outside the gallery context not only finalizes Duchamp’s creative act theory but simultaneously archives it as a conceptual turning point in art history that still echoes to this day.

In consideration of radical reform and pushing boundaries of art and life, Finley’s publication Shock Treatment, in comparison to Duchamp, also pushes the conceptual realm to the spectator in radical interdisciplinary ways. Finley quite literally objectified her authority as an artist-author by translating her performances into a published book object, thereby allowing the participating spectator-reader to activate her voice through their participation, and in doing so, make the spectator-reader, in concept, a collaborative performer.

To conclude that artists’ books and artistic practices in general should not be confined to their representative qualities and function merely as aesthetic objects, I propose that if we open ourselves to visual works as fully embodied sensuous experiences rather than closing them down through reified models of aesthetic judgment and fixing them in a matrix of predetermined values, we will find ourselves in a more productive relationship with visual culture. 26 I further conclude that the de-emphasis of the art object emancipates artists and their viewers from the work being situated solely in a reductively modernist context, where it falls under the commercial contract of profitable value that separates art from life, and instead asserts that it is able to participate in everyday reality. Writing as an artist practice that establishes a direct interaction between the work and the viewer as an active agent with a role to play in the construction of experience produces texts as touchable, tangible anti-museum objects.

26

Ruanglertbutr, “Beyond the Artists’ Book-as-Object and Performance,” 62.

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Acknowledgements

Kal Spelletich, John DeFazio, Cristóbal Martínez, Jeannene Pryblyski, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Mark Thompson, Brooke Hessler, Helen Klonaris, Cindy Bello, Việt Lê, Anthea Black, Thomas O. Haakenson, Jacqueline Francis, and the VCS cohort.

A very special thanks to my colleagues Liz Ordway, Kristen Wawruck, Katherine Hamilton, and Aliya Parashar for the generous feedback, love, and support throughout the last few years.

Liz Hafey

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II. THE CORPOREAL

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The Power of Fat Liberation: Rereading Laura Aguilar’s Nude Self Portraits LI Z OR DWAY

Liz Ordway

Fat is not a bad word. Being fat is not a death sentence. In fact, it is perfectly normal to be fat.

Our society shames visible fatness, or for that matter, any flaws that stray from the thin, cis, white, heterosexual body ideal. Yet there is still much to consider regarding how fat individuals view themselves. One way to harness the power of representation is through self-portrait photography, in which the pictured person is not the subject of someone else’s vision but the center of their own. I learned this lesson by spending time with the work of Laura Aguilar and noticing how she engaged with documenting her own fat body. Aguilar passed in 2018 and left behind a remarkable body of work that has been critically commented upon but certainly merits further consideration.

Recent interventions in fat studies have critiqued the field’s over-concern with white individuals, and lack of intersectionality. The discrimination a fat person experiences is exacerbated when their identity overlaps with other marginalized identities—in other words, when that person also strays from the white cis norm. Thus, an intersectional intervention is essential to an understanding of the visual works of Laura Aguilar. Here I will analyze three of Aguilar’s self-portraits, offering introductory themes from the fat studies field and its recent intersectional interventions to sincerely consider Aguilar’s queer, fat, Latinx identity as expressed in her work.

One of Aguilar’s earliest engagements with self-portraits was her 1990 work Clothed/Unclothed #1 [fig. 1]. This work consists of two twenty-by-sixteen-inch gelatin silver prints of herself, one clothed and one naked. In the left image, she wears a short-sleeved collared shirt with dark repeating floral patterns whose slightly open white buttons reveal her neck and upper chest. The shirt does not cling to the contours of her body but instead creates a boxy shape, disguising the abundant curves of her figure. It might be tempting to read the masculine shirt as an expression of Aguilar’s queerness, but another approach involves considering the limited access to clothing for fat women, also known as plus sizes. In the United States, plus size generally refers to women’s sizes between 16 and 28, and as of 2018, plus

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Figure 1. Laura Aguilar, Clothed/Unclothed #1, 1990.

Two gelatin silver prints, 20 × 16 in. each.

size individuals have just 2.3% of clothing options compared to their thin counterparts, whereas men’s clothing in various “big and tall” sizes is widely accessible.1 Though there are select women’s stores like Torrid and Lane Bryant dedicated to plus size individuals, they are relatively new to the mainstream market, having emerged only in the last few decades. Furthermore, there is still extremely limited sizing for “infinifat” people, or those that exceed a 6XL or US 34. 2 Fat scholar Ash Nischuk from the Fat Lip podcast offers a fat spectrum to better understand those that do not occupy thin, also known as straight-size, bodies. “Small fat” is a size 1X–2X, US 18, and such individuals typically have no difficulties finding clothes in brick-and-mortar shops. “Medium fat” denotes a size 2X–3X, or a US 20–24, and these individuals can find some clothes in person but typically shop online.

“Superfat” is a size 4X–5X, or a US 26–32, and these people may find clothes at plus-size retailers but typically are limited to shopping online. “Infinifat” is a 6X or higher, or US 34 or higher, and makes for an extremely difficult time finding clothes; custom fittings are often necessary. 3 This spectrum provides us with

1 2 3

Aubrey Gordon, What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 11.

Michelle V. Scott, “Fat Privilege: Revelations of a Medium Fat Regarding the Fat Spectrum,” Medium, Aug 14, 2019, https://medium.com/@ michellevscott/fat-privilege-revelations-of-a-medium-fat-regarding-the-fat-spectrum-ec70dc908336.

Ibid.

Liz Ordway

vocabulary to discuss the privileges and layers of systematic oppression for those with marginalized figures. To me, it seems safe to assume that Aguilar’s clothing choices were limited due to her size, and that her choices were at least partly based on access to clothing rather than gender expression.

The removal of the shirt in the right-hand image can therefore symbolize a shift toward liberation, as the artist is no longer constrained to clothes that limit the expression of her identity. The pose and facial expression of the left-hand image are repeated here, except that the artist is naked. The soft contours of Aguilar’s shoulders and arms become visible, along with her collarbone and chest. Her large, bell-shaped breasts meet the insides of her elbows where her waist begins.

The curves of her stomach become visible as our eyes move down her body. Her abdomen is abundant as it peeks behind her arms and gently rounds down her legs.

The shape of her hanging belly comes into focus near the center of this portrait.

Of this work, Aguilar stated, “I’m trying to allow the softness of myself to be out and represented in these photographs. I believe that the viewer is as vulnerable as the nude person in the clothed/unclothed series because as they view the images, they are hopefully seeing images of themselves.” 4 She notes her artistic intentions of vulnerability in sharing her nude figure with the viewer. Art historian Amelia Jones elevates this claim and argues that this work’s power of naked vulnerability is heightened by Aguilar’s unapologetic expression. 5 As she maintains eye contact with the viewer, her vulnerability is strengthened through self-assurance. And I would argue that this vulnerability is heightened by her self-identified queer Latinx identity. Body theorist Caleb Luna argues that colonial constructions of beauty led to labels fat, brown, and/or queer femmes as ugly and undesirable. 6 Aguilar’s choice to center her multidimensional identity translated into a radical act of vulnerability in a politically charged world that rejects bodies like hers. The naked vulnerability she engages in forces viewers to confront the potential discrimination instigated by body shame, homophobia, and racism.

Body liberationist Sonya Renee Taylor furthers this claim and calls for a collective radical self-acceptance practice that considers the structural discrimination at the core of body shame. Confronting body terrorism requires de-indoctrination, which requires us to “evict the voice of judgment, hierarchy, and shame.”

Confronting the internal voices that harbor shame and judgment toward ourselves and others opens space for emerging beliefs of acceptance and understanding.

4 5 6

Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective directed by Michael Stone (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2009).

Amelia Jones, “Clothed/Unclothed: Laura Aguilar’s Radical Vulnerability,” in Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, ed. Rebecca Epstein (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2017), 44.

Caleb Luna, “The Natural History of the World,” Canadian Art, February 27, 2019, https://canadianart.ca/features/the-natural-history-of-the-world/.

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Taylor states that collective compassion “bridges the socially transformative powers of radical self-love.” 7 This work requires all individuals to consider how internalized forms of body terrorism, a term which encapsulates the pervasive overlap of fat phobia, homophobia, and racial discrimination. And self-compassion does not end with ourselves, but rather is the first step in unlearning the oppressive structures that impact our ability to engage with body compassion for others.

Fat scholar Aubrey Gordon states that “fat hatred and anti-fatness are umbrella terms that describe the attitude, behaviors, and social systems that marginalize, exclude, underserve, and oppress fat bodies. They refer to the individual bigotry and institutional policies designed to marginalize fat people.” 8 And fat scholar Virgie Tovar notes that fatphobia makes fat people “scapegoat[s] [for] anxieties about excess, immorality, and an uncontained relationship to desire and consumption.” 9 Society’s general treatment of fat people is a way to control the body sizes of all people. Visible hostile treatment toward fat people encourages our society to fear fatness and engage in violent and unjust treatment. Aguilar offers the image of her naked figure to the viewer, making herself vulnerable to judgment and discrimination. We do not have full access to Aguilar’s clothed or unclothed self; instead, the trope of unclothing, paired with her unapologetic eye contact, makes us aware of her overall empowerment and strength.

To expand upon Aguilar’s engagement with self-expression, Self Portrait #14 (1996) [fig. 2] conjures the previous themes of vulnerability, and is amplified as the artist poses in a public setting. This twenty-by-sixteen-inch gelatin silver print shows her gazing and reaching toward her reflection near a body of water. At the center, Aguilar’s hanging belly and abundant rolls shine brightly in the sun. Her body and the pool of water offer an oasis amid the otherwise dry, rough terrain.

The small dark pond consumes the entire foreground, where Aguilar’s bright reflection beams back toward her. The reflection mimics the rolling shape of her contours and appears to ripple upon the water’s surface. About this work, Aguilar stated: “In these images, I feel beautiful. I feel very safe and comfortable. I have that sense of myself that I never had most of my life. And I am much aware that I am a large person and that I am not necessarily beautiful in the way people think of beauty. But I can see my own beauty.” 10 Nature Self-Portrait #14 asks its viewers to reconsider their internalized fatphobia and assumptions about fat individuals by seeing this figure as being as natural as the landscape it rests in. Indeed, these

7 8 9 10 11 12

Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology (Oakland: Berrett-Koehlr, 2018), 71, 79.

Gordon, What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat, 17.

Virgie Tovar, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2018), 22.

Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, dir. Michael Stone (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2009).

Association for Size Diversity and Health, “About Health at Every Size® (HAES®),” April 24, 2022, https://asdah.org/health-at-every-size-haesapproach/;Paul A. McAuley and Steven N. Blair, “Obesity Paradoxes,” Journal of Sports Sciences 29, no. 8 (2011): 773.

Tracy L. Tylka et al., “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss,” Journal of Obesity 2014 (2015): https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/.

Liz Ordway

Figure 2. Laura Aguilar, Self Portrait #14, 1996.

Gelatin silver print, 20 × 16 in.

considerations require the viewer to question stereotypes about fat bodies that claim they are unnatural.

Resistance to this belief is encouraged by what the medical industry fails to understand about body size. Its weight bias has labeled fat bodies like Aguilar’s “non-normative” and places blame on the individual. These labels attempt to indicate the “unnatural” character of fatness or “obesity.” Weight bias research such as Health at Every Size and “obesity paradox literature” aims to explain how many variables affect our weight and size.11 Many of these, such as genetics, predispositions, and socioeconomic factors such as access to fresh food and health care, are often out of our control. Furthermore, research shows that fat individuals have relatively higher survival rates and similar metabolic health levels than thin individuals. Fatness does not explicitly correlate with disease. In other words, it is possible to be both fit and fat or unfit and thin.12 Accepting that fatness is not a death sentence or something that needs eradication leads us to accept imperfect bodies. Understanding that weight and size are not entirely under our control makes more space for accepting what we cannot change. That all bodies are valuable and deserve equal rights is a belief that should be normalized.

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Aguilar’s work gives us an opportunity to examine the self-representation of fat figures, especially subjects who are queer people of color. In Aguilar’s triptych Three Eagles Flying (1996) [fig. 3], her nude figure is tightly wrapped in a US flag and a Mexican flag: her face is covered by a large eagle devouring a snake atop a cactus, while her lower half is taut with stars and stripes. A thick, fibrous rope coils around her entirety and loops into a noose around her neck. Two additional flags hang in the background, pointing to her Mexican American upbringing.

The inspiration for this work came from an experience Aguilar had with a queer fundraising group planning a meeting in Mexico. She was hesitant to travel, as she did not speak Spanish and was challenged by auditory dyslexia.

After much convincing, she attended the conference and indeed was disappointed by her experience. It was impossible to communicate, and she felt like an outcast as a fat person. She also felt extreme frustration at how the community assumed she was “butch” because of her fatness and failed to recognize the femininity she noticeably felt from her photographs. In her own words: “I’m not butch.

I might look it because I’m big, and I always took butch with being more big or masculine. And I didn’t think I was masculine at all. And that’s why it was a big

Figure 3. Laura Aguilar, Three Eagles Flying, 1990.

Three gelatin silver prints, 24 × 20 in. each.

Liz Ordway

thing when I did Three Eagles Flying. . . . It was like the first time I saw my body. I saw the shapes of the shadows from the light on my breasts. . . . It really changed how I saw my body.” 13 Here Aguilar expresses dissonance between internal and external perceptions of her fat body. This emotional tension wrapped up in her queer and Latinx identity mirrors the tension of the flags wrapped around her.

But to completely understand the inherent tension of fabric, we need to dwell for a moment on the process of cloth making.

All cloth comes from fibrous materials that are harvested, dried, shredded, and spun. These fibers are then woven into the fabric, creating tension among the threads.14 Furthermore, cloth is a primary signifier that distinguishes nature from culture and thereby “remains forever liminal in its cultural significance.” 15 The human touch is embedded in the fiber-making process, always returning to a geographic and cultural location. Thus, the roots of Aguilar’s Latinx and American identity are embedded in the flags that restrain her.

The art historian Deborah Cullen argues that the fact that Aguilar’s face is literally beneath the “crucifixion” of the eagle’s talons on the Mexican flag presents a symbolic expression of the effects of US colonization.16 On the other hand, Mexican historian Ricardo Cañas Montalvo notes that “the eagle is one of the few animals that, no matter how injured, will never crawl. . . . It continues to fly no matter what, a situation that resonates to all Mexicans who, despite their circumstances, always persevere.” 17 Aguilar may be experiencing what Cullen calls a “crucifixion,” yet her face is covered in a symbol of triumph. She is engaging in an act of resistance toward a group of peers who could not perceive her sexuality as a feminine lesbian due to her fat status.

Additionally, the US flag wrapped around her body carries unique tension that is inherent to our relationship with fatness and race. Scholar and educator Sabrina Strings has uncovered an archive of race-centered studies to produce a historical examination of the origin of the thin ideal and the development of fat hatred as rooted in anti-blackness. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia (2019), Strings argues that the roots of present-day fatphobia stem from religious and scientific shifts in the Enlightenment period as impacted by the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of Protestantism. Racial and religious fears of “excess” considered blackness as excess with respect to the “ideal” US racial identity. Fatphobia became a tool to reinforce the racial hierarchy of Black women and

13 14 15 16 17

Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective.

Lois Martin, “How Did Cloth Mean? Ancient Peruvian Plain Cloth and Cloth Planes,” Surface Design Journal 20, no. 2 (1996): 8.

Claire Pajaczkowsk, “On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth,” Textile Journal, 3 no. 3 (2005): 229.

Deborah Cullen, “Beyond Face Value: Reconsidering Laura Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying,” in Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, 35.

Vanessa Sam and Carlos Ramírez, “The Eagle Has Landed: The Symbol Personifies the Spirit of Mexico,” Zenger, February 20, 2021, https://www. zenger.news/2021/02/20/the-eagle-has-landed-the-symbol-personifies-the-spirit-of-mexico/.

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control over white women while simultaneously creating thinness as an essential trait of whiteness, white beauty standards, and white identity. Strings’s text outlines the key formations and the sociocultural and political factors that defended the tethering of racism to the body and contributed to current size biases. 18 The US flag restraining Aguilar’s body symbolizes the destructive aftermath of colonization, active discrimination toward people of color, and the racial beginnings of fatphobia. Three Eagles Flying displays a rich and complex expression where fatness weaves into queer and Latinx identity.

Studying Aguilar’s nude self-portraits through the lens of intersectional fat studies allows us to consider how her work values the unique qualities of the fat identity beyond the over-studied heterosexual white figure. Body liberationists such as Caleb Luna, Virgie Tovar, and Sabrina Strings have made critical interventions in the field to deeply consider the variety of identities that should fall under the purview of fat studies. Here, the goal is not to speak on behalf of Aguilar, but instead to inform how her work contributes to the visual field of intersectional fat studies.

18

Sabrina Strings, Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 5–6.

Liz Ordway

Acknowledgements

My journey as an MA and MFA candidate is deeply impacted by the desire to contribute to the visual and academic field of fat studies. I am honored to offer my knowledge of this discipline and advocate for its presence in the CCA academic community. I am grateful for the generous feedback from my advisors and confidantes throughout this triumphant experience. A special thanks to Gia Stark for her year’s continuous support and unconditional care during this adventure.

Thank you to my colleagues Aliya Parashar, Katherine Hamilton, Kristen Wawruck, and Liz Hafey for the generous feedback throughout the last few years.

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Transsexuality, Transition, and Yantras: Metaphysics and Myth in Mystic Diagrams A LI YA PA R A SH A R

Aliya Parashar

Yantras are a familiar and significant genre of Indian art and of particular importance to visual aesthetics and metaphysics.

In my definitions of metaphysics and aesthetics the focus is on Tantric visual culture and their associations with divinity, myth, and spiritual phenomenology.

Traditional interpretations of the Yantra emphasize binary embodiment, most closely associated with the cisgender male and female being.1 The Yantra allows for a transsexual dwelling both phenomenologically and visually. The inherent logic of the yantra’s structure—as found throughout Tantric scholarship and art— is based on embodiment. Nevertheless, Yantras are created and interpreted within a (cis)gendered male and female symbolism binary. A call for the reading of the transsexual body allows for transsexual people to see a reflection of themselves in Hindu mythology. In the following thesis, through an analysis of two historic Yantras—Śrī Yantra and Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala—and one contemporary Yantra— my work titled Khilata Hua Yantra (Blooming Yantra)—I argue for an expanded reading of the Yantra that emphasizes the heretofore excluded transsexual body.

To advance this argument, I will concentrate on the following features of the Yantra: the orientation of objects; multiplicities; and the structural logic of the form.

The transsexual body is inherently involved in this historical and contemporary Yantra’s reading. Through Tantric philosophy studies and trans(gender) theory, the body justifies itself. There is a trans mythos that dwells in the structure and logic of the Yantra—the transsexual body existing through orientations, transition, and self-reference in a visual rendition. In my argument, I bridge the gap between the Yantra and the transsexual body through metaphysics and myth.

Before beginning our analysis of the Yantra structure presented in this reading, it is integral to review the definitions of the Yantra structure and what they represent. Madhu Khanna, an Indian scholar who focuses on the phenomenology of the Yantra in Tantric culture, explores and defines this complex structure in her seminal text Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity (1979). First, she begins to define the structural concept of the Yantra as “any kind of mechanical contrivance 1

Wendy Doniger, “God’s Body, or, the Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 485–508. As Doniger’s essay makes clear, the ritual worship of Śiva and Śakti is through Śiva’s metaphorical lingam (phallus) and Śakti’s yoni (vagina). There is an implication of cisness applied to the Hindu gods in such readings. This canon of cisgender worship associated with Śiva and Śakti is explained by Doniger. It is the basis for the argument of the theory of creation and birthing of the cosmos as it is related to Hindu and Tantric mythology and metaphysics.

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which is harnessed to aid in an enterprise. A yantra in this sense, therefore, is any sort of machine or instrument used in architecture, astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, warfare or recreation.” 2 The justification of Yantra’s mechanical method uses Khanna’s terms “machine” or “instrument.” Its diagrammatic structure is similar to the visual representations and concept of a machine: many small parts make a whole to produce the desired effect or function.

Even more salient for my analysis is Khanna’s definition of the Mystic Yantras as “aids to and the chief instruments of meditative discipline.

Basically, a yantra used in this context and for this purpose is an abstract geometrical design intended as a ‘tool’ for meditation and increased awareness.” 3 Its inclusion in its mythology is associated with keeping the body in mind, as meditation happens within the body. The two-dimensional form has metaphysical qualities because it exists as a multiplicity within and outside the body.

The Subject Position of Transsexuality: Transition of Body/State Transsexuality, in my definition, applies to bodies that have been biologically affected through a medical transition. Eva Hayward, a trans scholar focusing on trans phenomenology, speaks of transition in her research and specifically in her paper “Spiderwomen” (2017): “By transitioning, I do not mean a monolithic movement between states, rather I mean simply an emergence of a material, physical, sensual, and social self through corporeal, spatial, and temporal processes that transfigure the lived body.” 4 Here we see the linking of transition to the transsexual body outside of the transgender umbrella. My research applies to this subject position. Transsexuality as trans phenomenology is prioritized in this definition.

While Hayward makes the case that not all transexuals transition, I believe that there is a possibility for redefining the term to include transition within transsexual women experimenting with hormones. There is an insistence on including and focusing on bodies that fall into the scope of hormonal change, which I think is integral to solidifying and fortifying this argument. In my definition of a transsexual woman, I would rephrase this argument to say that I explicitly speak about trans women who have experienced medically aided transitions. While Hayward

2 3 4

Madhu Khanna, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol for Cosmic Unity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 11.

Khanna, Yantra, 12.

Eva Hayward, “Spiderwomen,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. Reina Gossett et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 258.

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defines this as her interest in her essay, I would go so far as to use that definition solely to describe transsexual women. 5 This is primarily because of the metaphor, meaning, being, and embodied nature of transitioning hormonally, surgically, and physically. 6 The importance of transition is integral here, as it mirrors the mythic power of the transmutation of states when meditating upon the Yantra. While transposition offers a colonial presentation of gender change, transmutation allows us to find that change is a change of states rather than a transgression as a shift toward femininity. Can this now be shifted into a mythological place where we can find divinity in falling into ourselves? Can transness, now, be incorporated into mythological practice to find divinity? In a sense, it was there all along. This mythos asked us to fall into ourselves so that it could reveal itself. A mythos that could honor where we come from and allow us to fall inward without outside influence equally. To transition toward gender is inherently colonial, as there is still a binary system in place, and a transgression is performed: there is a movement from one gender to another. Inherently, the transgression is one in which a sense of embodiment is being left behind and erased rather than contextualized. Constructed mythos allows trans women to fall into themselves rather than transition towards an extremity on a “spectrum” with only two sides. Śrī Yantra: Considering the Embodied (Trans)gendered Dwelling The Śrī Yantra [fig.1] represents the union between Śiva and Śakti; it is a visual geometric rendition of the birthing of the cosmos. The cisgender unity of Śiva and Śakti is the result of their union “birthing” the cosmos and rests on the reproductive implication that cis people implicitly have conquered nativity as it relies on metaphysics and concept. This is because of Śiva and Śakti’s proximity to and close relationships with reproductivity in a cishet7 ideal. This supports the argument that the theory of creation and birthing of the cosmos as it is related to Hindu and Tantric mythology and metaphysics is related to the cisness of both Śiva and Śakti.

The Bindu is the dot in the center of the mystic yantra or the mystic diagram. It is seen as the point of divinity because of associations with the birthing of the cosmos as it relates to Śakti and Śiva. Orientations of the body here are in context to cisgender embodiment and their visual representation—triangles

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6 7

Julia Serrano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Feminity (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2016), 30. See Serrano in her definition of transition as it links to transsexuality. She links transsexuality to the change of primary and secondary sexual characteristics that shift due to medically aided transition. In response to her sentiment, I argue that the term transition as related to transgender women should belong in the term transsexuality.

Serrano, Whipping Girl, 31. . . for Serrano’s definition of primary and secondary sex characteristics and their involvement and change in hormone replacement therapy and transsexuality.

By “cishet,” I mean cigender and heteronormative ideals.

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Figure 1. Drawing of Śri Yantra., n.d. https://jstor.org/ stable/community.11677118.

dictate cisgender and heterosexual orientations, that is, Śakti and Śiva. 8 Divinity and its link to the Bindu also brings up lingering ideas about disorientation, the metaphysical object, and its relationship to the body. This disorientation near the Bindu disorients the viewer in the intersections and overlaps of the triangle: the reading presents an opening for a queer and trans perspective. This is taking into account Sara Ahmed’s definitions of disorientation and the body, or as the body moving within states: “Disorientation can be a bodily feeling of losing one’s place and an effect of the loss of a place: it can be a violent feeling and a feeling that is affected by violence or shaped by violence directed toward the body.” 9 In the reading of this diagram, we notice a lack of direction. These triangles are inverted and complicated because of their orientation, or lack thereof. One may lose their place in the diagram yet return the Bindu to locate the body and mind, restarting the reading process. This Bindu is a point of reorientation visually.10 Śakti and Śiva’s union produces a visual disorientation: it produces itself

8 9 10

Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946), 147.

Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology : Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2006), 160.

Khanna, Yantra, 31.

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as trans phenomenology in the image. Disorientation exists as the transsexual dwelling in this Yantra, and its proximity to the orientations associated with their cisgendered embodiment. The disorientations allow for a trans dwelling as disorientations manifest as the inability to easily recognize and count all configurations of triangles. If disorientation lies near the beginning point of the cosmos, can we not say that the inherent being of the metaphysical nature of the yantra is transsexual?

Transsexual Phenomenology in the Indian Image: Metaphysics in Object, Shape, and “Likeness” In “Representation in India’s Sacred Images: Objective vs. Metaphysical Reference” (2002), V. K. Chari journeys through understanding the meaning and metaphysics behind Hindu mythological imagery. Chari communicates the idea of the “metaphysical school” by naming and explaining the definitions Ananda Coomaraswamy established for comprehending Indian art. Coomaraswamy’s definitions of the “metaphysical school” are below, representing the link between Indian art and metaphysical tradition.11 Point number two, as emphasized by Coomaraswamy via Chari, is that “the Indian image . . . is not the likeness of any earthly model but an ‘ideal representation’ or symbolization of a mental image, having for its referent a divine or metaphysical order of being.” 12 I argue that this reading would be in the extension of Tantrism intersecting with trans studies and phenomenology as a means of the implication of transness onto a Yantra. As it is concerned with Indian art, representation in the context of the Yantra is the correspondence between shapes and imagery that acclimates itself to Tantric philosophy and Hindu mythology. This acclimation is to say that the metaphysical nature of the Yantra cannot be removed from its reading. Phenomenology is inherently present in the Indian mode of viewing artwork. Notice that the word “being” is relevant here—“being” as its link to existence, experience, and embodiment. In the Indian image, a transsexual body can be read and interpreted based on the phenomenology of transness existing in the image, whether with its associations with shape and image, or its link to “being” as associated with trans representation and identity. Trans phenomenology can be an extension of queer phenomenology in that they share similarities within the rejection of cis-hetero patriarchal structures of gender and sexual orientation. The use of trans studies in

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Chari paraphrases Coomaraswamy who explains the first point in the metaphysical school as being that: “Indian art cannot be dissociated from its metaphysical tradition. In order to understand the actual content and raison d’etre of Indian iconography it is necessary to return to its philosophical sources–the Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanisads, and the Buddhist canonical texts–to appropriate the Indian mentality and ‘the specifically Indian modes of comprehending. Indian art cannot be appreciated without a recognition of the ‘metaphysical principles’ to which it is related.”V. K. Chari, “Representation in India’s Sacred Images: Objective vs. Metaphysical Reference,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 65, no. 1 (2002): 52.

Chari, “Representation in India’s Sacred Images,” 53.

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this context will be an extension of Ahmed’s text “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology” (2006), in which she speaks of orientations and objects as they appear in phenomenology and image. Tantric studies and trans studies intersect across their shared overlap in phenomenology. Ahmed uses Edmund Husserl’s definition of the “living body” to link queer studies with phenomenology: [Queer and/or trans] phenomenology emphasizes the lived experience of inhabiting a body, or what Edmund Husserl calls “the living body.” Phenomeno ogy can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as phenomenology emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready to hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds.13 Here we can see a link between Coomaraswamy and Ahmed in that both argue for the importance of context, experience, and tradition. Similar to the inclusion of Hayward’s own experience with transness and transition to provide clarity for those terms, Ahmed prioritizes the importance of lived experience when speaking of phenomenology, especially as it relates to queerness and transness.

Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala: A History and Path of the Body within the Grid The body is rooted in the Śrī Yantra and references it in its meaning and making; the Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala is a yantra structure gridded around the body.14 The Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala (fig. 2) is a prime example of the maṇḍala structure translated into an architectural diagram used as a blueprint for Indian structures; the temple, home, or physical planning often follows this as a guideline but not a strict requirement.15 The Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala itself dates back to the Vedic era16 (ca. 1750–500 BCE), and moreover, one of its uses is to develop the theory of the Yantra as it intersects with architectural tradition. Maṇḍala and Yantra can be interchanged here, as traditions of structures radiating outward in hierarchical ideology; moreover, both rely on a central point from whence to move outward. 17 This particular iteration of the Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala follows the Vāstupuruṣa laid upon the maṇḍala itself. The Vāstupuruṣa is the body shape in the center of the Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala. Also known as the spirit of the site, it is the graft of a mythological being into the yantra structure.

13 14 15 16 17

Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 544.

Sonit Bafna, “On the Idea of the Mandala as a Governing Device in Indian Architectural Tradition,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59, no. 1 (2000): 28.

Bafna, “On the Idea of the Mandala as a Governing Device in Indian Architectural Tradition,” 49 Ibid., 28.

Ibid., 29. The Vāstupuruṣa here is firmly placed onto the ground by the deities holding it.

Aliya Parashar Figure 2. Vibhuti Chakrabarti, Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala, 1998.

From Indian Architectural Theory (Richmond, Surrey, 1998).

Before beginning the analysis of the structure, let us break down the exact meaning of the Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala. We will be turning to Khanna’s definition of the word: Vāstu = bodily existence or site; Purusha = Supreme Principal or source of the cosmos; Maṇḍala = closed polygonal figure. 18 The Vāstupuruṣa is oriented in a particular direction diagonally, with its head belonging to the northwest, the feet in the southeast, and the legs pointing northeast and southwest. The torso is in the center of the diagram, taking up space in boxes one, two, four, and five (read from left to right and top to bottom). It is crucial to note that the diagram has specific rules that dictate the structure’s division and use in architectural planning.19 While the rules dictate a methodology to build a guide upon a body, it is essential to keep in mind that the body always comes back to being the central concept of the image—both visually and even through the making of the structure conceptually. This body is one that the grid places itself around so as to make sense of the object. 20 Here we notice that the grid as we see it functions as a straightening device, as it works to make sense of the object

18 19 20

Khanna, Yantra, 143.

Bafna, “On the Idea of the Mandala as a Governing Device in Indian Architectural Tradition,” 29.

Ibid., 28.

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placed into it or around it. We can use Ahmed’s understanding of the “normative dimension” to refer to straight bodies. The grid here is something that I place as the normative in that it works to make sense of and create a means to approach the body. 21 It is the factor that makes the body “diagonal” in its orientation and compartmentalized straight lines. The goal of the Vāstu being gridded into space is to not leave or lack longevity. This, in turn, makes it the transgender subject.

Longevity here is the rendition of the Vāstu being forced into place through the “normative dimension” or gridded structure. The body’s orientation is the crucial element in the trans phenomenological reading. Ahmed speaks about “straightness.” However, straightness extends into longevity, as what appears inline is only doing so because of its stability: The straight body redescribes the normative dimension, which appears inline. . . . things seem straight (on the vertical axis) when they are in line, which means they align with other lines. Rather than presuming the vertical line is simply given, we would see the vertical line as an effect of this alignment process. Think of tracing paper. Its lines disappear when they are aligned with the paper lines that have been traced: you simply see one set of lines. 22 When the grid encapsulates the body of the Vāstu, the orientation of the body slants against the X and Y axes; the alignment process here refers to the vertical lines aligning the deities to the body of the Vāstu through the normative dimension. They are placed through this hegemonic gridded structure, emphasizing the concept of binary in gender, direction, and orientation. The Vāstu is not in line, regardless of the attempts to make it so. It exists on the slant, and the deities begrudgingly try to keep it in place. It would rather be that the Vāstu is forced into longevity than allowed to flee because of forcing it into the straight orientation via the normative dimension.

Khilata Hua Yantra and the Possibility for a Transsexual Dwelling My work Khilata Hua Yantra (Blooming Yantra) (2019, fig. 3) is a collage of layered black-and-white Xerox copies of my body intersecting with a preexisting yantra.

21 22

Bafna, “On the Idea of the Mandala as a Governing Device in Indian Architectural Tradition,” 28.

Ahmed, “Orientations,” 562.

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Figure 3. Aliya Parashar, Khilata Hua Yantra (Blooming Yantra), 2019. Collage and Xerox prints, 25 x 21 inches.

The ink markings of the original drawings are placed onto the photocopied prints, which have been expanded, rotated, cut into, and collaged to create a landscape of layered curvilinear imagery. Khilata Hua Yantra implicitly references the problematic cishet orientations and gendering earlier mentioned. Hindu and Tantric ritualistic methods speak of the body as a root for self-divination. Like the images consistently appearing in traditional yantras, for instance lotus leaves, bindus, circles, and triangle shapes, my body embeds into the diagram of the Yantra. In this sense, I am likewise using the logic of the Vāstupuruṣamaṇḍala as the point of divergence for this particular work. Layers do not just appear at the forefront of this diagram; they create a different composition behind the current presentation.

The skewed Bindu from the central point in the image toward the right displaces the concrete structure of the Yantra and complicates it. This gesture turns

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it from an image that radiates outward from the center into an image with two radiation points, specifically two Bindus. The theory of creation is located around the Bindu; additionally, the proximity of disorientation to the Bindu in the Śrī Yantra calls for a transsexual dwelling. With the multiplicity of the transsexual being and dwelling, longevity is not guaranteed, and reproduction is linked to the theory of creation within yantra studies. The trans body becomes the site of (re) production, directly opposing the cishet hegemony. To self-divinize the transsexual subject in my work—that is, my own body—I aim to make the physical image consider my body when approaching the divine, both physically and metaphorically. The universal dwelling of transsexuality in the Yantra structure combined with images of my physical body pushes past the anthropomorphic vessel of my body into the spiritual content of the transsexual dwelling. I made the rendition of the Yantra using my abstracted and segmented body. The recontextualization of the figure onto a trans body introduces the divine into transness. Using the example earlier in the essay, we can see that the body also serves as a point of the generative divine related to the production of Yantras. The body is a ground onto which the Yantra projects itself; conversely, the body projects itself onto the Yantra. The connection of the body to the Yantra does not solely rely on forming those facets as two different entities.

I make this work at a moment of heightened awareness of trans bodies occupying spaces in our social ecologies. With that increased awareness, we see a coupling of violence and visibility. 23 We deem transsexual people as bodies living on the fringes of society; in doing so, they are inherently disrespected, cast aside, and not allowed entrance into discourse about respect, space, and time. As my creative work and my scholarly analyses of Yantra studies make clear, there exists an opportunity to show the divine inherently imbued onto transsexual bodies. The Yantra’s ethos becomes a generating tool for the divine to imbue the transsexual woman’s body with this divinity. The transsexual body is the body-yantra used to connect to the divine, as its existence carves out spaces in cis-reality. Her body is consistently reflecting and noticing its lack of stasis. Movement is the inherent state of divinity and transformation and evolution that exists as divine. Her body is the live rendition of her home, made by and of herself. Her existence as the

23

Lexi Adsit, Sydney Freeland, Robert Hamblin, and Geo Wyeth, moderated by Tavia Nyong’o, “Representation and Its Limits,” in Trap Door, 191–200.

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Bindu and the Yantra radiating outward from her. She becomes the point where space begins to be, as the spaces’ responses to her are to change or reject. There is no liminal response to her existing as the radiating force, which is mythos. When trans women cannot see our divinity, there is a fervent loss of identity and meaning. When her mythos has been removed from her environment, is it not up to us to restore it?

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Acknowledgements

I acknowledge my found family, mentors and advisors for their help during my research and writing process. I appreciate their love, support, and encouragement during this intensive period of my academic career. However, I would also like to acknowledge myself as the only transsexual woman of color across both the MA and MFA programs. Power to all those who come after me; I hope to see more of us here.

Lastly, a thanks to my cohort: Liz Ordway, Liz Hafey, Katherine Hamilton, and Kristen Wawruck.

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Bios Kristen Wawruck is an arts worker and cultural producer who has worked in both nonprofit and commercial gallery art spaces on the East Coast. Her interests include media infrastructures, counter-histories, and moments where music and art intersect. Since her arrival to the Bay Area in 2020, she has been pursuing interdisciplinary research, curatorial, and writing projects, and works as an independent consultant for nonprofit organizations. Past work in the cultural arena has ranged from designing education programs to overseeing major construction and art production projects and creating new organizational structures.

Thesis Committee: Jeanette Roan, Jacqueline Francis, and Thomas O. Haakenson.

Katherine Jemima Hamilton are three names given to one person who does a few things professionally: curating, writing, editing, and educating. Born and raised on unceded Ligwilda’xw territory, they moved to Treaty 13 territory in 2014 to pursue a BA in Art History at the University of Toronto. In 2019 they moved to unceded Ohlone territory, known by settlers as the Bay Area, to learn more about contemporary art and curating in their dual-degree MA in Curatorial Practice + Visual & Critical Studies at CCA. Their research interests include feminism and technology, craft and ritual, and exploring sound as a framework for working, living, and unsettling.

Thesis Committee: Ren Fiss, Việt Lê, Jacqueline Francis, and Thomas O. Haakenson.

Liz Hafey is a transdisciplinary conceptual artist, writer, and social activist located in Oakland, and serves on the board of the Community Building Asso ciation. Hafey holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is currently a dual degree candidate at California College of the Arts for an MFA and a master’s in Visual & Critical Studies. In her artistic practice, Hafey makes absurdly humorous sculptures and performances and uses a playful Duchamp -ian process of readymade-found objects, inside jokes, and sexual innuendoes.

Hafey’s concepts reference issues derived from the impacts of globalism, with a

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means of cultural critique. Hafey’s research and scholarly interests are located at the intersection between visual culture, contemporary art, the capitalist system, and the archive as an intervention to challenge contemporary ideological conventions and encourage alternative ways of thinking in true punk fashion. “The more I read, write, research and create, the more I untangle my subconscious and understand myself. Probably the most punk rock thing you can do is to find out what makes you consciously tick in reaction to the world around you.”

Thesis Committee: Anthea Black, Jacqueline Francis, and Thomas O. Haakenson.

Liz Ordway is a body liberation artist and writer located in Oakland. She holds a BS in Visual Communication and Design from San Francisco State University and is currently a dual degree candidate at California College of the Arts for an MFA and a master’s in Visual & Critical Studies. Her work focuses on contributing to the visual field of fat studies with a blended analog and digital practice of photography, illustration, fiber sculptures, and experimental printing.

Thesis Committee: Mia Feuer, Jacqueline Francis, and Thomas O. Haakenson.

Aliya Parashar is an interdisciplinary artist focused within textiles and installation concentrating on gender identity and its intersection to anti-colonial theory.

Aliya strives to strike a balance between celebrating femininity and honoring bodies while creating a vision of resistance through garments and fiber production. She works to create a vision of trans beauty and strength that reclaims luxury as a tool for resistance; in doing so sharing stories of ancestry, trauma, and resilience. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Aliya is currently an MA/MFA candidate at California College of the Arts.

Thesis Committee: Meghana Bisineer, Jacqueline Francis, and Thomas O. Haakenson.

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Visual & Critical Studies Graduate Program Chair Jacqueline Francis, PhD, is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011).

Francis is co–Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and she serves on the boards of Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture and the National Committee for the History of Art. She is the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco. Francis is also curator, most recently, of A Matter of Time: New Work by Adia Millett (Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong, 2020). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective of San Francisco, she is a writer who was awarded an Individual Artist Commission grant by the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2017. From 1987 to 1989, she was a US Peace Corps volunteer teacher and teacher trainer in Nepal.

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Visual & Critical Studies 2022 Master’s Project Thesis Directors Dr. Thomas O. Haakenson is a writer, presenter, and editor. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota, with minors in German as well as in the History of Science and Technology. Haakenson’s monograph, Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada, has just been published in the series New Directions in German Studies. He continues to serve as co-editor of the book series Visual Cultures and German Contexts, and has collaborated on several anthologies, including Representations of German Identity; Becoming TransGerman: Cultural Identity beyond Geography; and the forthcoming How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment. He has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism and Memorialization in Germany since 1945. He is often in Germany conducting research and visiting family. But while at home in Rancho Cordova he spends his free time with his dogs, enjoying his garden and California’s natural beauty.

Việt Lê is an academic, artist, writer, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr.Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021). The art book White Gaze is a collaboration with Latipa (Sming Sming Books, 2019). Lê has presented his work at the Banff Centre, the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, the Shanghai Biennale, the Rio Gay Film Festival, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among other venues. Lê curated the exhibitions Charlie Don’t Surf! (Centre A, Vancouver, 2005); transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix with Yong Soon Min (ARKO, Seoul; Galerie Quynh, Sài Gòn; UC Irvine Gallery; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2008–09); and the 2012 Kuandu Biennale (Taipei). He is also a board member of Art Matters and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco.

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Visual & Critical Studies 2022 Thesis Faculty Advisors Meghana Bisineer is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in London and Oakland. Her analogous, site-specific, meditative, and process-driven practice draws out an embodied investigation into the nature of time and personal memory in relation to place and landscape. She animated on the feature film Finding Altamira (2016, dir. Hugh Hudson). She is the recipient of the Judge’s Prize for Animation/ Film at the East West Arts Awards (2014), the David Gluck Memorial Bursary/The Discerning Eye Drawing Prize (2012), and the Man Drawing Prize (2006). Selected exhibitions include the solo show Shifting Ground: Films, Prints and Drawings (gallery fivefortyfive, Bangalore, India, 2013), and group shows at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt, 2012), the Southbank Centre (London, 2011), and the London Artists’ Book Fair (2011). In 2016, she joined California College of the Arts, where she is Assistant Professor and Associate Chair of the Animation Program.

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer, and art publisher based in San Francisco and Toronto. Her practice addresses feminist and queer history, collaboration, materiality, and labor. She has recently exhibited at Kala Art Institute, Embassy Cultural House, and the Independent Curators International touring exhibition Publishing Against the Grain, and her curatorial project The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artist Book will tour through 2023. Her writing has been published by Art Journal, Border Crossings, FUSE Magazine, Kadist, RACAR: Canadian Art Review, Bloomsbury, and Duke University Press. Black is co-editor of two books, The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (2020) and HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education (2018), and designer/ co-publisher of the artists’ newspaper The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism with Jessica Whitbread (2018–present). She is an Assistant Professor of Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Mia Feuer is an artist who was born to a working-class Jewish family on Cree, Ojibwe, and Métis land, colonially known as Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba (2004) and MFA from the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University (2009). Her work examines connections between landscapes, spirits, objects, histories, origins, futures, mines, synthetic materials, landfills, internalized anti-Semitism, internalized fatphobia, and unknown ancestral lineages. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at FLUXspace in Philadelphia; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa; the

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Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Locust Projects in Miami; the Esker Foundation in Calgary; and Dream Farm Commons in Oakland. She will be presenting a new outdoor sculptural project in June 2022 in Québec City with the EXMURO Public Arts Initiative. She is currently paying rent in East Oakland, and is Mama to six-year-old Galileo.

Ren (Karen) Fiss’s historical research examines the roles of nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism in shaping social, artistic, and built environments.

They also write on contemporary art and global politics for various publications.

Fiss is author of Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and co-author of World’s Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology and Modernity 1937–1942 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015; with Robert Kargon, et al.). Fiss’s curatorial projects include Necessary Force: Art in a Police State (University of New Mexico, 2015; with Kym Pinder) and El cine de 1930. Flores azules en un paisaje catastrófico (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2012). Fiss received their PhD from Yale University and BA from Brown University. Fiss’s writing and research have been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation, the Getty Foundation, NEH, DAAD, and CASVA. Fiss is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Jeanette Roan is an Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts. Her first book was Envisioning Asia: On Location, Travel, and the Cinematic Geography of U.S. Orientalism (2010). Her current book project is a study of comics using visual studies theories and methodologies, with an emphasis on Asian American comics creators and representations of racial identity. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Tasting is Knowing: The Aesthetics and Politics of Disgust in John Layman’s and Rob Guillory’s Chew” in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2019); a co-authored essay with Dr. Monica Chiu, “Asian American Graphic Narratives,” commissioned by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (2018); interviews with the cartoonists Jason Shiga and GB Tran in the Comics Journal (2017, 2021); “Bitch Planet’s Meiko Maki is Down for Justice!” forthcoming in Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (2022), edited by Eleanor Ty; and “What Is an Image? Art History, Visual Culture Studies, and Comics Studies,” forthcoming in Comics and Art History (2022) edited by Maggie Gray and Ian Horton. She was also recently appointed Associate Editor of INKS, the journal of the Comics Studies Society.

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Sightlines 2022

Acknowledgements The Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) would like to acknowledge all who helped bring this year’s thesis projects and the Sightlines journal to fruition.

Thomas O. Haakenson and Việt Lê were the Master’s Thesis Project Directors for the 2021–22 academic year. Haakenson supervised the students’ thesis writing in the fall 2021 semester. Lê prepared students for the 2022 Spring Symposium and assumed responsibility for the production of their Sightlines essays and thesis exhibition posters.

Our colleagues housed in CCA’s dynamic academic programs provided invaluable guidance and critique to our students as Faculty Advisors: Meghana Bisineer (Animation), Anthea Black (Printmedia), Mia Feuer (Sculpture), Ren Fiss (History of Art and Visual Culture), and Jeanette Roan (History of Art and Visual Culture).

Yeqi Liu, a candidate in CCA’s Graduate Design, collaborated with the students to design their thesis exhibition posters.

MacFadden & Thorpe designed this year’s VCS Annual Spring Symposium program and the poster and banner that advertise this event. It was a pleasure to work with Brett MacFadden, who teaches in CCA’s MFA in Design Program, and Keston Sieg Hinds Cruz, who earned a BFA in Graphic Design at CCA in 2021. We also thank MacFadden & Thorpe Project Manager Maggie Wallace who kept us all on track.

Rachel Walther was our 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 until Nick Whittington took over as VCS Program Manager in the spring semester.

We are grateful for all of our H&S colleagues, and we offer special appreciation to Dean TT Takemoto and Director of Academic Administration Mike Rothfeld for their unwavering support.

On behalf of H&S, we express our appreciation for the leadership of CCA’s Provost Tammy Rae Carland and President Stephen Beal.

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