X-TRA Summer 2018 20.4 by X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly

X-TRA CONTEMPORARY ART QUARTERLY

VOLUME 20 NUMBER 4 www.x-traonline.org DISPLAY UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2018 $10.00 U.S . / CAN

X-TRA Volume 20, Number 4 Summer 2018

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VIA Art Fund is a producing sponsor for X-TRA Volume 20, Number 4. Cover: Teddy Sandoval, Las Locas (detail), c. 1980. Acrylic and mixed-media on unstretched canvas, 39 × 52 ½ in. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Errata: In X-TRA Volume 20, Number 3, in Martine Syms’s “Incense Sweaters & Ice: Video Description Script,” the image caption and photo credit were missing: Martine Syms, Incense Sweaters & Ice, 2017. Production still, The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, New York. Photo: Mick Bello. The editors apologize for the error.

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Carolina Cayedo, Sustainable My Ass/A la mierda la sustentabilidad, 2017. Collage, 12 ½ × 10 × 1 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.

CONTENTS

ARTIST WRITES, No. 4 The Cypress Pope.L

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center and ONE Gallery, West Hollywood Review by Lucas Hilderbrand

Licking the Wound: Three Works from Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA Review by Candice Lin

Utensils: Working Small Carmen Argote Introduction by Neha Choksi

36, 63

Andrea Zittel Regen Projects, Los Angeles Review by Zach Rottman

How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles and Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University, Los Angeles Review by Glenn Harcourt

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History Review by Anthony Carfello

114

Realized Sketches in Two Dimensions Collected by Travis Diehl and Brica Wilcox

129

ARTIST WRITES, No. 4

In this fourth installment of Artist Writes, we present Pope.L’s text “The Cypress.” Part of X-TRA’s Twentieth Anniversary Programming, Artist Writes is a series of commissioned essays and public programs by four contemporary artists who write: A.L. Steiner, Andrea Fraser, Martine Syms, and Pope.L. X-TRA has published their texts serially in Volume 20, with each author presenting a corresponding public event in Los Angeles. Artist Writes embodies X-TRA’s mission to provide a platform for artists to define their own terms of engagement and to make meaningful contributions to the fields of criticism and theory. Support for this series has been generously provided by the Michael Asher Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Isambard Kingdom Brunel Society of North America, and Pasadena Art Alliance.

The Cypress Pope.L

I am sitting in my 2002 limited edition Eldorado, last of its kind, available in only two colors: red and white, moving glacial through a car wash soap suds obscure the way ahead. I am driving home to see my family. — I am not the kind of character who thinks about himself. I let others do that for me. I prefer one thing after another. People are too oniony. They want the core. Or think they do or think they do. They want the original. The semi-simulac-crumb. I prefer to outsource my reflection, my adoration. That’s how I get through the alphabet of the journey. My wife she knew what I was up to. All along she knew. She had to know. She knew what I was doing. All those little conversations. Not that I could have told her. Not that I could have formed the words. I would see her I would see her in the kitchen in her apron and jodhpurs. Honey yellow-orange light pouring through the mullions and I would want to go up to her place my hands around her small waist of plastic and aluminum. But but but then I did not have to. Why? Why? Because she already knew. Right? Later she said that she did not know what was I talking about that there was something I needed to know to do to say to be how could she have known how could she have known? But early on long before everything became itself just after one of our little conversations I installed cameras in the garage and closed-circuit monitors throughout the duplex. Access 24/7. Like a gas station. Like an ATM. Like the courtyard of a penitentiary… — Yes I am finally driving home to see my family. I have not seen them in a long while. How long has it been? Too long. Too long. I have a heart and I am using it. I have a heart and I have a heart and I am using it. I have not used it in a very long time. Too be sure I am not sure I am using it right now. Best practices. I have a wife. I have a son. How long has it been? A while. A while. A bit of a while of a flake of a scent of a while it has been. Maybe a moment. Hope it is a moment maybe a hope probably twelve years probably probably not counting the dust packet in my chordea tendineae it’s been quite a while of a while. It is as if I was on my way as soon as they left me no no no on my way could not have existed back then but if not then when when only a viscous darkness at first during which they absconded with my future furtive and sick oily between the waters my family slid into the aftermath without me and at 5

first I could not I have seen it I could not I have seen it and it was not supposed to be reticent it was all around me pumiced like teeth the decay the only ray I could not I have seen it why did I not see it… It is like that that that so I sit here in my sudsing El Dorado last of its kind 2002 moving glacial through the coin-operated Echo-Wash long after my family has absconded suitcase in hand 5-year old boy mitt in tow hand mommy solo. I sit here at this moment bound and awake on my way still in the distance… Cause cause there must have been something. There must have been something cause cause there must have there must have been something to allay there must have been there must I must have done something to deserve this against against my own love my own sound of of of of of of of of my voice grates self-hatred for which I cannot ferret an answer not then nor the next nor the next nor nor the the the next nor the next day nor the next nor the next nor the next until I said to myself I I I said I said I said: “My name is Mr. Brown-Guy and I am driving home to see my family. I have not seen them in a long while. A long while a long while and I am at this very moment sitting moving glacial through a coin-operated car wash with adjacent 7-Eleven on my way on my way but but but for some reason for some reason I have stopped outside of their immediate physical vicinity and and have been sitting here for several days now my bladder full to almost bursting.” — It all began when it began meaning I have no idea. Meaning the idea of an original this or that is too too oniony. All I know is I had recently married and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I sat around all day on the sofa twisting little pieces of plastic into figure-eights. My wife supported us. My wife supported us. She worked in the cafeteria at the local community college. Every night she came home smelling like the cafeteria. On top of that she would bring the food home. The cast-off food. She would bring it home with her. She would say to me: “They were going to throw it out anyway.” I would get in a mood. I would get in a mood. I was probably in a mood before she walked in the door. I did not know why I did not know why but but but I would get in a mood in those days I was always getting in a mood. I ate the food but I’d be in a mood while I ate it. Eventually I got a part-time job as a yoga instructor. Two days a week. It was an ok job but I had no feeling for the chakras. Most times I would turn on the boom box extra extra loud walk out into the hallway and stand next to the water cooler. The yoga studio had a large glass wall that looked out onto the hallway where I was standing. The students could see me out in the hallway standing next to the water cooler. Very soon out of nowhere I had to get another job. Somehow my wife had gotten herself pregnant. It was a miracle. In those days it seemed I spent most of my time standing next to the water cooler. Now I had to find something else that paid better. So I stumbled onto this full-time job selling art supplies. I hated the idea hated it hated it but the next thing I knew I had 6

Pope.L, Heidigger and his Clod, 2018. Five pieces, ink on paper, 3 Ă&#x2014; 3 in. each. ÂŠ Pope.L. Courtesy of the artist, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York and Susanne Veilmetter Projects, Los Angeles.

discovered something: the job brought the me out of me in me. I was actually good at it. People were drawn to me. Naturally drawn to me. Naturally. Naturally I never thought such a thing was impossible. Not the not the part about me being good at it not that not that but but that that there could be something inside me somewhere deep inside which was totally unknown to me. I always saw myself as a book without a cover so I chalked the whole thing up to a fluke and went about my business. And business was good. All the products were in units. Success was a matter of volumes and quotas. A magical language I understood intuitively. I was like a child. I was continually amused that everything came in a tube or a package or a box. I kept telling myself I should I should I should be more interested in what was inside the boxes and tubes. I mean my job was to sell what was inside the boxes and tubes I mean I mean I should have had even the merest merest interest in what was inside the boxes and tubes but but but I was not I definitely truly was not. I tried I tried to be interested. I did. I did. I did but but but— — Truth be told the exterior has always been my real romance. Still still I should have known I should have known right then and there I should have known the detumescence in my enthusiasm was a sign of a greater deeper lack. Eventually, gradually, after a few years, I completely lost interest in the sea of boxes rolling off countless tractor trailers pulling up to endless loading docks… I started showing up late. To work. Shirt tail dragging. Hang-dog attitude in the break-room. I was late to meetings. I was late going home. I was late to my head. I was always somewhere somewhere. Else. It did not matter where. Sometimes I did not go to work at all. Instead I prowled the park. Napped at movies. Strolled industrial parks. Measured various malls with the breadth of my ass on the many uncomfortable polycarbonate benches busying myself reading cheaply printed sales circulars. Front to back. Back to front. Front to back again. The company began to notice. My wife began to notice. I did not I did not. I could not stop. Yet I could not quit. One day I left work early. In fact I left right after I arrived. I slipped out through the Sorting Room. That is where they dumped the defective paint. In the middle of the room slightly off-center was a mountain of paint tubes almost to the ceiling. Some were cracked. The liquid dribbled out. Red. Green. Black. I moved swiftly behind the mountain of paint and crawled through a small door and out into the company parking deck next door. Suddenly the air was cool and perfumed with gasoline. — Down the ramp toward my car I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. I ignored it and kept walking. Then I was right upon it. There was a guy standing there in his pajamas being entertained by some client on his knees face pressed like a gasket securely in the pajama-guy’s crotch. 8

The pajama-guy looked at me. I looked back. He continued to look at me. He said: “Aren’t you even going to stop?” “What?” Then, “Huh? What?” Pause. The client still on his knees continued to work. “So—you sell art supplies?” “Like a dozen other guys. In that building.” “Maybe. Maybe. But they don’t have your look.” “What’s your deal, mister?” “The name is Pretty-Girl. Mr. Pretty-Girl to you.” “Well, I got to be somewhere.” “No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You’re right where you should be. So—how they treating you over there, in there?” “Alright.” “Alright or blight? I’m thinking blight.” “Biz is good but—“ “But you’re flatlining?” Then he laughed answering his own question. “Less or more.” “Makes sense. Makes sense. A fellow like you requires a journey, a challenge, an opportunity...” “I’m all for the opportunities...” “Okeydoke then. Here’s my digits. I’ll be in touch.” He handed me his card, threw back his head and showed his teeth. The client’s face was deep in the folds of the pajamas. I continued down the ramp. — I didn’t hear from Mr. Pretty-Girl for about two months. When I did it was by email. All caps. I don’t know why. It was like reading through a shimmering pane of glass. I had to squint to glean its sense. Like looking at a painting. Eventually I riddled it out and therefore the plan. I was to steal defective paint from the Sort Room and re-package it. Mr. Pretty-Girl would then sell it on the black market. There were risks at both ends of the bargain so the 9

split was 50/50. I wrote back saying yes and by the time I looked up from my computer we had been in business for two months. Business was brisk. And I should have been happy. I should have been happy I should have been been something at least more than I was. The company had no idea what I was up to. I was getting away with it. I should have been happy. I was spending more time at home. My wife was whistling in her jodhpurs. I was a provider. I was a provider. I was a provider. Still still the only something I could feel was an awkward flatness the whole thing a disappointment… So I upped the ante and without discussing it with Mr. Pretty-Girl, I started making my own product. I continued to use the stolen defective paint from the Sort Room as the base but restricted the colors to white and red. By then I’d re-packaged so much product it was abundantly clear to me that these two colors had a singular elasticity and pigment count far exceeding any of the others. Via my growing contacts, I found a paint forger who helped me hack the base structure and recalibrate the liquid. We rebuilt the paint so it would self-select its environment therefore decreasing the need for base material and increasing the amount of product available for sale. It was the same paint but not the same paint. Even the forger could not tell the difference. The new product was a huge hit. Especially among the Monochromists. It single-handedly spawned a new art sub-genre. Of course eventually Mr. Pretty-Girl found out and we had a few words. A few because I refused to talk to him. My reasoning: he was getting reparationed same as always in fact tons better so what did he care? His reasoning: I was going rogue the product was too too successful and before long it would land us both in jail. — Success wasn’t the only aspect of my life that changed. I who had always claimed a loyal unflinching dedication to one-thing-after-another and therefore rejected anything oniony began to experience a new interiority. For example I began to withhold my urine while processing the new paint formula. I believed withholding sharpened my mind. Everything had a certain caustic glow. One day I woke up on the floor of the garage in a pool of urine with my wife glaring down at me. But even so I continued the ritual. — Several days later, after dinner, right out of the blue and only minutes before the garden supply store closed I drove out and bought a cypress tree sapling. The cypress tree has never been very attractive. Expressivity has been forced upon it. I saw my first cypress tree in a stuttering black-andwhite movie made by Spanish artists in Paris in the early twentieth century. For the longest time I thought the filmmakers had constructed the tree by hand. However on a business trip to Asia for the art supply company I saw one cypress after another after another after another after another lining the side of the road to the airport and it confirmed something for me about how things alphabetized the world.

Later that night I planted the sapling I bought at the garden supply store in the postage-stamp-sized yard fronting our house. The next morning my wife saw the tree. She stood there in her bathrobe of plastic and rubber shaking her head then walked back toward the house stopped and with her back to me said: “Why are you behaving this way? It’s been going on now—” “My whole life it’s been going on. I just did not know it.” I paused pointing to the sapling as if I had just discovered it and said: “Widdrigtonia Cupressaceae.” She turned and corrected me saying: “No, actually Chamaecyparis Cupressaceae.” “How do you figure?” “It is the loop that squares it. Look at the leaves.” “If you are so smart how come you keep asking me questions?” “Do you love me?” “Of course, of course, but not as much as you love me.” “What is that supposed to mean?” I tried to explain my reasoning which surprised both of us but no matter what I said it sounded ridiculous still still I could not disavow my enigma and since I could now put a little language to my lostness I kept talking. I figured I figured perhaps perhaps perhaps mistakenly that it would make it would make some kind of sense in some universe somewhere but it did not… — It was happening all around me inside me but I had only the barest inkling. It was much later during the long period of my incarceration that I gandered the origins of my change. The culprit was the new paint formula. But more so it was my stubborn ignorant refusal to wear any gear when processing the batches. At the time, I was very fond of saying: “I want nothing between my skin and the process.” Toward the end, I was processing in nothing but my shoes and socks. — Inadvertently I had discovered a new sensitivity, a new confidence. Whereas before I procrastinated worried panged now I had realized a new consciousness. I did not have to think of others. They would do that for me. I was my own center and fulcrum my own surface paradoxically the Venn diagram of all others. Fact: People simply adored me. It was natural and fated both. People simply adored me. I was a fool not to have seen it sooner. It began with the unexpected success of my art supply job but but somehow 12

somehow somehow I lost my way—but now now now now but now it had returned with a whole new vengeance transparent and true in its only form. — My wife witnessed my transformation from the sidelines. She tried she tried to convince me that my change was not natural. She criticized berated and pleaded with me to quit the business. She claimed she was losing me that she did not understand what I was doing. Why was I destroying myself and our family? It did not make any sense. Her words pulled at my chordae tendineae but I filtered them through my newfound sensitivities and replied: “So the cameras and monitors are not enough for you? Of course you know what I am doing.” “Explain to me what you are doing. What’s the point?” “I am the point. I am the point. And you as my family have the unique perspective of sharing me with me.” “What if I don’t want to share?” “Well, that that—that would be impossible.” — It was not impossible. I do not know how it was not impossible. I was a provider was I not? Had I not provided the essentials: food, clothes, shelter—myself? In those days I was home almost all the time. Almost all the time. Yes yes true true admittedly my work took me away to the the garage most of the time but still still still I was but a pixel away. The only explanation was that her love for me was so great so deep so tragic she had no choice but to abandon me. She left a few hours after the cypress tree argument. Suitcase in hand child in mitt. I was outside kneeling watering the sapling. I barely noticed them though they must have walked right by me. I only looked up after the car was already disappearing down the block and around a corner. A week later, I was arrested and jailed eventually tried and imprisoned and that is how I came to the conclusion that it was she it was she who ratted me out to the authorities. — I learned a lot in prison. The first thing I learned was to wait to turn myself into a wafer a sieve for the fist of incarceration. I learned: “Be uncomfortable stay uncomfortable.” I learned I liked uncomfortable. Every day another beating another rape another stabbing another humiliation. They my perpetrators they thought they were breaking me. They would say to me: “We are breaking you. We are breaking you.” 13

They were deluding themselves. And I told them so. Over and over again I told them: “The greatest adoration is in violence and absence.” While I waited I redoubled my withholding distending my bladder to tumorlike proportions. During the violence yellow liquid gushed from my body onto my perpetrators anointing them celebrating them running them off braying and cursing. Still. Still. Too much of anything can easily become contrived. So after breaking my record: six visits to the infirmary in six months I was a little tiny happy to see him step off the ooze-grey prison bus and onto the courtyard asphalt. Mr. Pretty-Girl Mr. Pretty-Girl Mr. PrettyGirl strolled across the courtyard asphalt like a prophet returning from the desert. He wore bright pink pajamas bear-claw slippers and a New England Patriots’ baseball cap with an impossibly long brim. Every inmate was a-aa-a-agog. He looked like some kind of extinction. It had been five years since we last saw each other. We renewed acquaintances as if nothing had transpired. A new business arrangement evolved. While in prison he would grant me protection. No charge. I replied: “No, I have a better idea.” So I told him. And he gave me that look that look then continued. “I see I see. So you’ll only accept my protection if you can pay me twice the going rate plus interest? Then he laughed and said: “What’s the catch, Brown-Guy?” “There are two. First you get paid only if I get out. The second, the second— I’ll tell you later.” “Why wait? I know what you want.” Pause. Then he continued: “She was the one gave up on you not me.” I said: “Why is that important?” Then I walked away. He said: “OK, fine fine fine by me.” As I walked away he said: “So where you keeping the cash Brown-Guy? I know it’s cash. I know it’s cash. You were too paranoid to do anything else—” I did not look back. He did not like it. But he protected me anyway. Everything went back to normal. I continued seeing clients. On my own terms whatever that means. And over the next few years every once in a while Mr. Pretty-Girl would ask about the money where was it was it hidden how much was there always always asking as if it didn’t matter as if it was the farthest merest thing from his idea. He would offer me a repast from the commissary: a single broken yellow cracker smeared with blue gel. He loved it. Conversations with Mr. Pretty-Girl were a lot like those I used to have with my wife. They were relentless and pointless. There was always something in the “ands” or “buts” that could never be articulated. The conversations were priceless. I could see that even then. However, conversations with my wife despite the 14

depth of inarticulateness were far far more painful and endearing. Maybe cause my wife actually meant what she was saying. Ignorance makes all the difference. Mr. Pretty-Girl just wanted a payday. I did not blame him. That was his alphabet. He was entertaining in his own way so so so I let it play out… Yes I did. I did. I did. I let it play out broken yellow cracker blue gel and all until one day I got a letter. By then I had been in prison eight years and never once received a letter. Chuckling holding the letter by his fingertips Mr. Pretty-Girl brought it to our cell. He could not keep his eyes off of it so I opened the letter in front of him. However it was not a letter. It was a photo. A photo of part of a tree. A close-up of part of a tree and through its branches part of a street. Looking at it for the first time recognition escaped me. I smashed a gob of chewing gum on its back and stuck it to the wall at the foot of my bunk. Every night before falling asleep I looked at it to no avail. It took a year or so before I recognized it. The tell-tale clue was the view of the street between the branches. I finally realized I was looking at the electric power station across the street from our house. The green prickly shape was the cypress now fully grown. Proportioning out the growth per year over the last nine years I figured it must have been fifty or sixty feet tall. Curiously I did not think who sent me the photo. There was no address on the envelope. Nor did I gander the amount of attention the photo received from Mr. Pretty-Girl. However in retrospect I should have thought of those thoughts or at least been aware but based on what happened next those thoughts were not to be mine because the next phase of my prison sojourn was almost over. I did not know this at the time but it was true. — Part of letting things play out was tasking Mr. Pretty–Girl each morning before breakfast. We would haggle about the price. Back and forth. Forth and back. Back and forth. However once he accepted he had to do it. That was the deal. The assignments ranged from fairly small and innocent, for example, research anything you can find on the last Cadillac Eldorado ever made; to the cruel: destroy all the yellow crackers in the commissary; to the useful: hunt down my family and tell me where they live. The cypress tree photo had flipped a switch in me. Suddenly suddenly I missed my family. It was a strange feeling. Difficult to describe. I know not where it was located. Was it inside me? Where was that? Impossible. Impossible. Impossible. Somehow it was a feeling an actual feeling in some story somewhere out there somewhere in the universe the only possibility a packet of dust and vacuum. Some story some story incredibly linear and unfazed by things oniony just one thing after another after another such as life and love and planning which was the second thing I learned in prison. I planned the rest of my life as if I saw it seated alongside me right next to me as if I was its passenger. I saw the narrative of things and the spaces between things. I knew exactly what would happen once I left prison. I would allow I would allow my heart strings my chordae tendineae to unfurl unfettered which enabled me to speak this line without hesitation or embarrassment: 16

“I am on the way to see my family. I have not seen them in a long time.” — A month later Mr. Pretty-Girl was released from prison. It was odd him being released before me but that was just as well it suited him perfectly. He always liked to do things first. I watched the ooze grey bus slink out of the penitentiary courtyard and returned to what once was our cell and discovered Mr. Pretty-Girl had taken the photo of the cypress tree and left me a note containing an address. — A month later I too left prison. The ooze grey bus dropped me off right in front of my house. First thing I noticed upon my arrival was the cypress tree ripped out of the ground by its roots which tore at the air as if drowning. A large gaping hole was left in the postage-stamp yard. The trunk and crown of the tree had landed awkwardly on top of the family house. Perched on the now slightly angled tree trunk was my nemesis Mr. Pretty-Girl. He wore lime green pajamas with fur collar, sneakers skinned in armadillo with fat laces and a Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap. I said without preamble: “I see. You found the cash.” “Yes, yes I did. It took some figuring but—did you find the address?” “I did.” And then. “Now why don’t you give me the real one?” “That’s like asking me if I am cheating you.” “There was ten times more cash under that tree than what I owed you.” “But you owe me everything whereas I only owed you loyalty.” “Give me the real address and half the money and we’ll call it even.” “No, I don’t think so. Tell you what tell you what—I’ll give you this— He threw a hefty bundle of green bills into the yawning hole where the cypress once stood. “We’ll call that our new beginning.” He told me he’d gotten me my job back at the art supply company. We were going to start making the new formula again only now under his tutelage. I was not shocked to hear his proposal or the threat that followed. “If you don’t play ball you’ll never see your family again.” Then he laughed. I said: “So you’re going to kill them?” He laughed again even harder. “I don’t have to kill them to stop you from seeing them. Here’s the address—as I promised.” He dropped a small piece of paper on the ground between us. Then said: 18

“Brown-Guy, when it comes to your family you are our own nemesis.” “I do it I do it because—” “Because you love them. Of course. And I am doing this because I love you. So—see you back here in a few weeks?” “I can go?” “Why not? You’ll be back. And to make your sojourn into the desert a bit more pleasant…” He waved his arm like a game-show host and a blood-red 2002 Cadillac Eldorado the last of its kind rolled up to the curb. One of his clients was driving. The client exited the vehicle held open the driver-side door and beckoned me to enter. — I step out of the Eldorado while it is still moving and face in the direction of the entrance to the coin-operated car wash. The neighborhood is a rough stiff poke-eyed masculinity of a place strewn with junkyards donuts car repair shops empty blots lots slots gray metal telephone poles studded with scarab-like black transformers… I stroll through a connecting tunnel and emerge inside the 7-Eleven to relieve myself. Because of the urine bloating my bladder my stroll is more of a waddle. I am distracted from my goal by the variety the noise the color the mechanical shudder of the commercial interior of the 7-Eleven its complexity of surface upon surface upon surface the store’s ambience. I grab I grab a Champion’s cup meant for the frozen infamous sludge treat flashing bright flavored metallic sugar amethyst but nix the Slurpee only to fill my cup to the brim overflowing with rich caramel-brown super-liquid just hours brewed melts my skin back black I add flavored creamer to flavored coffee to yellow sweetener to blue sweetener to red to green to brown susu-su-su-su-su-su-sucrose. My cup my cup properly burdened with the right proper heroic true chemicals I take a sip then another then another and and and my brain toggles turning my eyes up up up to the fluorescents… — I spy a tiny wood-paneled room containing an exhibition of local talent a painting showcase. Primarily landscapes in plastic paint and tempera. Most created with the fingers and mouth. Crude. Lively. Each application of paint an event. Chunks of time. Sculpture even. Dense and obdurate as a stela near a path through a field I find myself walking looking back looking back looking back out if you will out of the painting into the makeshift tiny local gallery the wood-paneled room lit in flat florescent dim… I continue on the path cross a large field then a ditch filled part-way with soapy water. I pass through a line of trees. I see a white 2002 Eldorado last of its kind idling on the side of the road. I climb in and drive away. 19

I am driving home to see my family. And and and the breath leaves my body like a ghost because I have stopped outside their apartment building. And I sit. And I sit. And I sit. And after several days I see my wife and son exit onto the sidewalk. Suddenly I am standing outside the car calling after them but but but for some reason nothing for some reason nothing is coming out of my mouth. They do not hear me. They cannot hear me. So I call again. And again. I call again they do not hear me so I begin to run. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know why I just do it I begin to run I run toward them. And as I run I urinate simultaneously a stinging flood of warmth the smell of cypress and coffee waft in its weepage. My wife and son stop. Turn and stare. My wife is a ghost. My son my son my son looses his grip from her mitt and comes toward me like a wraith. I stop and he continues toward me. Pope.L is a visual artist and educator who uses contraries to create artworks in various formats: writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. The goals for his work are several: joy, money, and uncertaintyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not necessarily in that order. Some of his most recent projects are Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot, University of Chicago (2017); Flint Water, What Pipeline, Detroit, Michigan (2017); Whisper Campaign, Documenta 14, Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany (2017); and Claim, Whitney Biennial, New York City, for which he was awarded the Bucksbaum Prize (2017).

Lucas Hilderbrand

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.

The Worlds Los Angeles Maricóns and Malfloras Made

Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center and ONE Gallery, West Hollywood September 9– December 31, 2017

The largest image in the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. at the MOCA Pacific Design Center greets visitors with an inviting smile as they scale the stairs to the second floor. A youthful Joey Terrill, circa 1975, models one of his maricón (Spanish slang for faggot) t-shirts as he lies supine, his eyes softly returning our gaze. Terrill, who is one of the artists in the exhibition, also fabricated malflora (bad flower, slang for dyke) shirts; both versions featured hand-painted text on soft yellow cotton and the words role model on the back. He self-presents as at once macho (that mustache) and soft (his posture and expression). The image suggests ambiguous intimacy with the person behind the camera—Teddy Sandoval, another artist in the show. The image has the feel of a private snapshot, yet also functions as documentation of an artwork (the t-shirt) and as publicity to build interest for more potential wearers (as seen in the catalog’s cover photograph of a line of men and women wearing these shirts at the 1976 Christopher Street West pride parade). The image appears not as an original print but as a blown-up wall adhesive, significantly larger than life size. I open with this image not only because it’s crush-worthy but also because it scales in and out of so many of the show’s themes: social networks, selffashioning and performance, language, publicity, and genre ambiguity. Featuring 50 artists and collectives, Axis Mundo incorporates a range of mediums that reflect the resourcefulness and eclecticism of queer Chicana/o art practices of the 1970s to early 1990s: painting, photography, drawing, video, conceptual art, mail art, zines, punk music and flyers, apparel, mixed media, and more. This was a dynamic scene, with some artists exploring and evolving through a range of mediums and others moving away from art practices. Axis Mundo was co-curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, and the exhibition occupies two venues (MOCA Pacific Design Center and the ONE Gallery).1 The installations share artists, and a mixture of media appears at both sites, with the ONE space more oriented toward smallerscale works, presented salon style and in vitrines. Although the exhibition 1. The exhibition will travel to Hunter College Art Galleries in New York City, June 22–August

19, 2018. Additional tour sites and dates to be announced.

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., installation view, MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, September 9â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 31, 2017. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Zak Kelley.

CONTEMPORARY CONTEMPORARY ART ART QUARTERLY QUARTERLY

CONTEMPORARY ART QUARTERLY

does present thematic clusters of works with discrete wall text, the open plan of each of the spaces produces an effect wherein the eye mingles them. Works on paper in vitrines visually reverberate with paintings, fashion, and video across the room, giving the installations an effect of hyperstimulation that facilitates connections and undoes distinctions.

17 17 — — 1 1

VOLUME VOLUME 17 NUMBER 17 NUMBER 1 www.x-traonline.org 1 www.x-traonline.org DISPLAY DISPLAY UNTIL UNTIL DECEMBER DECEMBER 2014 2014 $10.00 $10.00 U.S . / CU.S AN. / C AN

The exhibition at once expands outward from figures and practices in Chavoya’s essential 2011 Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 exhibition Asco: Elite of the Obscure, which he co-curated with Rita Gonzalez for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and has brought more artists’ papers and works into ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archive’s collections.2 Reflecting its archival affiliation, the exhibition entailed a process of searching through personal connections and collections. Much of the work in the show has not been publicly exhibited since it was first made—if ever at all. The curators looked through the apartments, garages, and storage spaces of the lovers, friends, and families of artists who have passed and through the papers of artists at archives. The research also involved looking through the collections of non-Chicana/o artists at museums in order to find works—particularly mail art and print media—that circulated beyond Los Angeles. Part of what makes the exhibition and the creative milieus it represents queer—in terms of refusing reductive identity categories—is that the artists and their affinities are neither homogenously gay and lesbian, nor all Chicana/o, thereby complicating the very categories of identity that undergird its organizing framework. This exhibition enacts the core investments Karen Mary Davalos identifies in her recent scholarly book Chicana/o Remix: its curators excavate unseen works and take an anti-binaristic approach to identity and genre. In addition to the exhibition’s panoply of mediums and identity positions, its constitution rejects divisions between strictly policed ethnic identities and claims toward “universality”—the latter a common and pandering codeword taken up by critics who do not identify with representations yet want to explain why they find them resonant. The use of the gendered Chicano in the exhibition title—rather than the gender-inclusive Chicana/o and Chican@ or non-binary Chicanx—reflects the fact that the work is majority gay male, though the exhibition has brought attention to debates about the gendering of the Chicana/o/x terms (most notably in an article in The New York Times).3 The term Chicanx would be anachronistic for the works in this show. The curators have, nonetheless, highlighted collaborations between these men and women—such as Patssi Valdez’s work with and beyond Asco, as well as the band Nervous Gender—and important contemporaneous work by queer Chicanas Judith F. Baca and Laura Aguilar. This exhibition likewise presents no cleavage between political art that offers a militant critique and cultural art that reflects experience; for these queers, politics and 2. ONE also presented a small exhibition of Joey Terrill’s work in 2013. Full disclosure, I co-curated the 2016 exhibition Cock, Paper, Scissors with Frantz and Kayleigh Perkov, for ONE. As a research collection,

ONE Archives is now part of USC Libraries; ONE has presented art exhibitions at the archive location and at offsite venues in West Hollywood since 2011. 3. Jori Finkel, “In the Art

World, ‘Latinx’ Marks a Gender-Free Spot,” The New York Times, September 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/09/11/arts/design/ pacific-standard-time-gettylatino.html.

culture are inextricable—and even more so with the expansion of the AIDS epidemic. Finally, the PST: LA/LA endeavor as a whole demonstrates the continued and necessary work of representation.4 The Chicano movement and gay liberation blossomed concurrently, influencing and involving a number of these figures as early as high school. A group of queer Chicano students at Cathedral High School in Los Angeles even took up the name Las Escandalosas (the scandalous girls). A series of 1970s exhibitions of Chicana/o art began to articulate this generation of artists as sharing a project or even a movement. The exhibition and its catalog’s essays foreground the role of institutions, such as schools (Otis Art Institute, Cal State University-Long Beach, Immaculate Heart College, East Los Angeles College), artists’ spaces (LACE), grassroots organizations (Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos and VIVA), bars and parties (Gay Funky Dances, Circus disco, and the Butch Gardens, Score, One Way, and Plush Pony gay bars), and the postal service. Queer Chicana/o art was realized through shared social spaces, student groups, institutional critique, and invented publications, collectives, and imaginary institutions (such as Teddy Sandoval’s Butch Gardens School of Art and Jack Vargas’s Le Club for Boys). These latter projects reflect the logics of Jerry Dreva’s Les Petites Bonbons, a conceptual glam rock band that produced publicity but not music, and Asco’s famed No Movies, stylized publicity stills for films that did not exist. Postcards of the No Movie stills (effectively dime store photo prints) in turn circulated as both mail art and as publicity materials—and both iterations figure in the exhibition. Such voracious conceptual and social practices not only reflect the structural need for Chicana/o artists to be resourceful and collaborative when the white art institutions offered little recognition or support for them but also illustrate these young artists’ own questioning and reimagining of what forms art might take and where it might live. Axis Mundo takes its name from the social and artistic networks that proliferated from the artist Mundo Meza, whose striking Self-portrait (1983) appears in the first room of the installation at MOCA Pacific Design Center. The vibrant painting contrasts with his monochromatic paintings—which are alternately more fantastical and abstract—also on display. His colorful self-figuration appears to be pushed to the left edge of the frame, exceeding its borders, and exists in tension with the literal whiteness that occupies much of the image. Rather than suggesting an unfinished quality, the broad streaks of white paint envelop the figure, so that he begins to disappear. He impassively looks just beyond us. Brushstrokes (one black, one white) obscure his irises, and streaks of black paint to his left (our right) suggest an unresolved abstraction or a figure who has not yet taken form. One might project metaphors of race or AIDS wasting onto the whitewashing or disappearance, respectively, of his body.

4. Karen Mary Davalos, Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata Since the Sixties (New York: NYU Press, 2017).

Mundo Meza, Self-portrait, 1983. Acrylic on board, 48 Ă&#x2014; 48 in. Gift of Gera Korte. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Courtesy of Pat Meza. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Laura Aguilar, Judy, 1990. From the Latina Lesbians series, 1985â&#x20AC;&#x201C;91. Gelatin silver print, 11 Ă&#x2014; 14 in. Courtesy of Laura Aguilar.

Although the title Axis Mundo references Meza, the Spanish word mundo translates into English as world. Decentralized networks do not operate from a single originary node or in a linear trajectory, and Meza’s work, though recovered through this exhibition, does not present its only axis. Gronk, notably, connects numerous artists here: as an early friend and performance collaborator with Meza and Cyclona (Robert Legorreta); as a lover and mail art collaborator with Jerry Dreva of Les Petites Bonbons; as a founding member of Asco, with Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie F. Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez; as a founding member of LACE; as a friend and mail art correspondent with Teddy Sandoval; and as a backdrop painter for Nervous Gender. Beyond the generation and scenes that form the show’s core network, Laura Aguilar studied with Judy Miranda, participated in VIVA, and has been exhibited alongside a number of these artists elsewhere. Her two included photo series, the Latina Lesbians series (1985–91) and the Plush Pony series (1992), both at MOCA Pacific Design Center, present powerful images and stories of self-definition and affectional community.5 In the Latina Lesbians series, Aguilar presents black-andwhite portraits of individual women above the women’s own hand-written statements of self-definition; the Plush Pony series presents women, mostly in poses of embrace, taken at the titular East Los Angeles Chicana lesbian bar. The AIDS epidemic, which has disproportionately impacted men who have sex with men, communities of color, and the intersections thereof, haunts the exhibition—as it must: a number of the artists in the show died young or continue to live with HIV. For me, two of the most moving works in the exhibition reflect the queer kinship between gay men and the women who became their caretakers, fellow activists, collaborators, and friends. A Southern California native raised by a Chicana activist, Ray Navarro was active as an art student in Los Angeles during the 1980s. In 1988, he moved to New York, and he has become known for his participation in ACT UP/ New York. He seroconverted soon thereafter and conceived Equipped (1990) to ironically eroticize his sick body. By this time, Navarro had gone blind, so he enlisted his friend Zoe Leonard to photograph his mobility devices and fabricate the work. Equipped appears in MOCA Pacific Design Center as a triptych with three framed black-and-white photographs, in Leonard’s characteristically affectless style, of Navarro’s overturned wheelchair, his toppled walker, and his inverted cane. Below the photographs hang institutional-style faux woodgrain placards engraved with “HOT BUTT,” “STUD WALK,” and “THIRD LEG,” respectively. The photographs appear devoid of people, so that the double entendres of the signage fetishize these technologies of disability as sex toys. The absence of Navarro’s figure also has a ghostly effect: these objects would remain after he had passed. He died at age 26, in the same year the work was conceived but before it was exhibited publicly. But I like to imagine him and Leonard cackling as they came up with an obscene list of potential phrases to use in the work. 5. James Estrella’s essay on the Plush Pony photo series for the Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell catalog complicates our understanding of the apparently affirming

images of joy and community by reading Aguilar’s letters and diary entries detailing her discomfort at the bar and broader sense of depression living in Los Angeles at the

time. Significantly, Aguilar produced the series the same month as the uprisings against the verdict in the trial of the LAPD officers who assaulted Rodney King. James Estrella,

“The Plush Pony Series: An Untold Story of Hope and Despair,” Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, ed. Rebecca Epstein (Los Angeles: Vincent Price Art Museum, 2017); 57–65.

Ray Navarro (fabricated by Zoe Leonard), Equipped, 1990. Three gelatin silver prints with plaques; photographs: 12 ⅜ × 18 ⅝ in., 12 ¼ × 18 ½ in. and 18 ⅝ × 12 ⅜ in.; frames: 20 × 24 in. each. Collection of Patricia Navarro. Courtesy of Patricia Navarro. Photo: Zak Kelley.

Installed near Equipped, Judy Miranda’s Mother (1983) dates from early in the epidemic. A close friend—nicknamed “mother” by friends for his maternal personality—enlisted Miranda to photograph his erogenous zones as a gift for his lover. Six framed photographs—four in a vertical column, one on either side—form a cross. Each frame presents a small square black-andwhite photograph of a body part: nipple, belly button, armpit, penis, etc. The work evokes dual intimacies, including the trust he felt in Miranda and the body he offered to his lover. The work, like many others in the show, questions the distinctions between art for public view and private communication. The last time Mother was displayed was at the subject’s funeral. Another artist who queered conceptual art by foregrounded desire, Jack Vargas worked primarily with language as his medium. He produced lists and prose; professionally he was a librarian. His major work in Axis Mundo, The New Bourgeois ‘I Want’ with Gay Male Suggestiveness (c. 1976–79), presents a list of desires—for real estate (Vargas was from Orange County), men, and status, such as: I I I I I

want want want want want

to have intelligent people over. them to notice. them to be impressed. to be impressive. to make an impression.

Later, he states, “I want a ‘Chic’-ano.” Vargas was friends with Terrill and Sandoval, among other artists in the show, but came to this scene with a more privileged background. His work pushed back at the class and progressive political assumptions of what Chicana/o art should celebrate by offering contradictory pleas for being taken seriously and for shallow material gains. The lengthy piece at times circles in on itself, reflecting the complexity and illogics of desire, while, as an open-ended work that spanned several years, suggests that desire can never ultimately be satisfied. Teddy Sandoval’s Las Locas (c. 1980) has appeared as one of the primary publicity images for the exhibition. The work, acrylic and mixed media on unstretched canvas, presents a trio of male figures sporting gay clone mustaches and chest hair, seemingly at a disco. The central figure—the only one with facial features—sports Divine-style eye make-up and a flaming, teased blow-out. Multicolored crayon squiggles evoke the lights of a dancefloor and date the work with an early 1980s aesthetic. The title—translating as “the crazy women”—suggests gender-inverted camp identifications and solidarities with a flair for histrionics. Thus, the image’s play with gender performance, communal spaces, and medium hybridity reflect the larger modes of the exhibition. This painting presents the nightclub as a space of fantastical self-invention and solidarity, as well as illustrates the kinds of imaginary institutions—Sandoval’s Butch Gardens School of Art and Vargas’s Le Club for Boys—that these artists conceived.6

6. Among the artists in the show, Sandoval’s work hews closest to a commercial art aesthetic, most conspicuously

with his mock-up album cover for Moby Dick records (a San Francisco gay disco label). His faceless gay clones take up

the iconography of the broader visual culture and self-styling of gay male culture in the 1970s to the early 1980s and

infuse a bit of breezy eroticism into conceptual art, which was largely semantic, non-figurative, or “difficult.”

Print publications, mail art, and show flyers—works that circulated internationally—importantly comprise much of the show. This printed matter, which made its way to art and punk figures in Canada and the United Kingdom and to artists in Latin America, connects Axis Mundo to the world beyond the United States. These materials are arguably better served by their generous reproduction in the catalog, which allows the kind of sustained engagement not afforded by its presentation in plexiglass vitrines. The catalog also reprints primary documents, such as Vargas’s complete New Bourgeois, which also was available as a printed takeaway in the gallery; Nervous Gender concert flyers; Gerardo Velásquez’s poetry; Ray Navarro’s essay “Eso, me está pasando” (1990); and a retrospective afterword by Meza’s lover and collaborator, Simon Doonan. ONE has emerged as an important and prolific venue for exhibitions and publications since its inaugural show Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, co-curated by Frantz and Mia Locks during the first iteration of the Pacific Standard Time initiative, in 2011. The hefty Axis Mundo catalog makes a substantial contribution to the art historical scholarship, and it provides a rich resource. Beyond the curators’ own well-researched essays, the lavishly illustrated book features seven original scholarly essays. Iván Ramos’s essay examines the psychedelic tendencies in some of Meza’s, Robert Gil de Montes’s, and Carlos Almarez’s work, paying particular attention to the embrace of indigenous, Mexican, and non-Western forms of spirituality in complex and at times appropriative ways. Leticia Alvarado offers a study of the femme performances of Judith F. Baca and Patssi Valdez. Baca, legendary for her community-based mural work, also wittily explored pachuca self-stylization and gender roles in the 1970s. In contrast, Richard T. Rodríguez reads Joey Terrill’s exploration of the macho-presenting homo homeboy figure. The catalog reprints selections from the two issues of Terrill’s Homeboy Beautiful, including the staged “H.B. Exposé” of a homeboy party. Julia Bryan-Wilson surveys the range of conceptual art practices by a number of the artists and collectives in the show, with a focus on Jack Vargas. Colin Gunkel revisits the queer and Chicana/o intersections with the Los Angeles punk scene, with attention to the Bags, Nervous Gender, and Tomata du Plenty of the Screamers. Joshua Javier Guzmán looks at artists’ turns toward abstraction, education, and activism in responses to the AIDS crisis. Macarena Gómez-Barris reads Laura Aguilar’s Plush Pony series as opening up an alternative view of queer and immigrant life that is rooted in trust rather than state surveillance. An alternate title for the catalog might have been Axis Muñoz. The late performance theorist José Estéban Muñoz appears as the most frequently cited scholar in the catalog’s essays; he was foundational to the queer-ofcolor critique and popularized the concept of world-making as a strategy of survival and life-giving for queers of color. Muñoz wrote, “The concept of worldmaking delineates the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—have the ability to establish alternate views of the world. …Such performances transport the performer and the spectator to a vantage point where transformation and politics are imaginable.” 7 The Axis Mundo exhibition and catalog present these individual artists and 32

Teddy Sandoval, Las Locas, c. 1980. Acrylic and mixed-media on unstretched canvas, 39 x 52 Â½ in. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., installation view, ONE Gallery, West Hollywood, September 9â&#x20AC;&#x201C; December 31, 2017. Courtesy of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Zak Kelley.

their broader cultural tactics as inventing their own alternative worlds (or mundos)—developing their own actual and imaginary institutions, hybridizing mediums, creating fantastical images, collaborating and partying, and sending their work out into the world by mail. The worlds and networks of Axis Mundo were far from hermetic, and works by artists in the show also appear in a number of other PST: LA/ LA exhibitions, including Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, at the Hammer Museum; The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judith F. Baca’s Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete, at California State University Northridge Art Galleries; Playing with Fire: Paintings by Carlos Almaraz, at LACMA; Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, at the Vincent Price Art Museum; and Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez: One Path Two Journeys, at the Millard Sheets Art Center, as well as the affiliated installation of Harry Gamboa, Jr.’s Chicano Male Unbonded, at the Autry Museum of the American West. This apparent redundancy demonstrates that queer practices permeate virtually any account of Los Angeles-based Chicana/o contemporary art. Axis Mundo purports to be the first historical exhibition of queer Chicana/o or Latina/o artists. Thus, this exhibition presents recognition of a historically marginalized creative community. As the show demonstrates, these artists collaborated and conversed in wide-ranging ways that often exceeded, refused, or simply ignored essentialist categories. The sheer range of creative practices in this show attests that these artists exemplify contemporary art at large. To say that institutional recognition of these artists is overdue is not enough. This exhibition affirms that curators, scholars, and art viewers—straight and gay—must recognize that artists who have been excluded from the white art establishment have made and continue to make work that grapples with concepts and media in ways as significant as their more canonized white peers.8 Axis Mundo offers an opportunity to reckon with the alternative ways of seeing the world they make possible. Lucas Hilderbrand is associate professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright and Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic.

7. José Estéban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 195–96. 8. Extending beyond Axis Mundo’s approximate periodization from the 1970s to the early 1990s, two additional independent exhibitions have presented more contemporary group shows of queer Latinx art: Queer Califas: LA Latinx Art, in Plummer Park (curated by

Ruben Esparza and sponsored by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs) and ¡Mírame! Expressions of Queer Latinx Art, at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes. Works by Axis Mundo artists Aguilar and Terrill also appear in both Queer Califas and ¡Mírame!. Additional artists represented in these shows include, for Queer Califas: Marcel Alcalá, Maritza Amezcua, Enrique Castrejon, Rick Castro, Ben Cuevas, Gregorio Davila, Diego Eduardo, Cleonette Harris,

Carolina Hicks aka SBTL CLNG, Rigo Maldonado, Roy Martinez aka Lambe Culo, Miguel Angel Reyes, Angelo Alessandro Rodarte, Manuel Rodrigues aka Sad Boy, Daniel “Chino” Rodriguez, Rommy Torrico, and a performance by El Sancha y Las Sirenas; for ¡Mírame!: Ben Cuevas, Xandra Ibarra, Alma Lopez, Dalila Mendez, Jessica Gudiel, Benni Quintero, Yosimar Reyes and Walter Thompson Hernandez, Julio Salgado, and Hector Silva.

Candice Lin Licking the Wound: Three Works from Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

Tamar Guimarães and Kaspar Akhøj

Maria Sibylla Merian

Studies for a Minor History of Trembling Matter, in Universal History of Infamy

Metamorphosis, in Visual Voyages

El Hambre Como Maestra/Hunger as Teacher

Boone Gallery, The Huntington, San Marino, CA

Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles

September 16, 2017–January 8, 2018

September 9– October 21, 2017

Los Angeles County Museum of Art August 20, 2017– February 19, 2018

Carolina Caycedo

Tamar Guimarães and Kaspar Akhøj’s film Studies for a Minor History of Trembling Matter (2017) ends with a close-up of an insect grooming itself on an infamous plant, Caesalpinia pulcherrima. German entomologist and scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian delicately painted this same plant in her 1705 book Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam. Of this plant, commonly known as the peacock flower, Merian notes: The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. Indeed they even kill themselves on account of the usual harsh treatment meted out to them; for they consider that they will be born again with their friends in a free state in their own country, they told me this themselves.1 In the film, we see a man beheaded by shadow sitting beneath this plant. The image is repeated twice, at the beginning and in the middle, with two different men sitting in this dappled light and fragmented by the camera frame. Both subjects live in Palmelo, Brazil, the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, in 1888. I learned about Palmelo from Captain Gervasio’s Family (2013/2014), an earlier film by Guimarães and Akhøj. Palmelo was founded in 1929 by a man named Captain Gervasio. A group of eighteen people, including Gervasio’s descendants, created a Spiritist study group,

1. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647– 1717), Over de Voortteeling en Wonderbaerlyke Veranderingen der Surinaamsche Insecten (Metamorphosis of the Insects

of Surinam) (Amsterdam: Jean Frederic Bernard MDCCXXX, 1730), 34. Huntington Library, Rare Book Collection, call number 145365.

Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, Studies for a Minor History of Trembling Matter, 2017. Video still. Digital video, color, three-channel sound, 30:28 min. Edition of 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artists and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.

Luz da Verdade, that later became a Spiritist center with an accompanying sanatorium that healed its patients through energy work known as the Magnetic Chain.2 Most of the inhabitants of Palmelo are practicing Spiritist mediums, and many of them are employed in civil service. Through linking hands, a group of mediums strengthens and heals each other, through channeling the flow of a vital spiritual fluid that washes through them, cleansing blockages, and attempting to settle karmic debt.3 Though the sanatorium was later closed by the Brazilian government, which objected to treatment solely through psychic, energetic forces, the inhabitants of Palmelo continue to heal and nourish each other by magnetic passes. Captain Gervasio’s Family is comprised of counterposed shots of mediums in trance describing “vast spiritual colonies” with images of modern Brazilian cities and architectural details. While Captain Gervasio’s Family focuses on the spirit architecture and Kafkaesque hierarchies of governmental offices, tedious procedures, statistical collections, and data analysis, Studies for a Minor History of Trembling Matter locates itself within the provincial, queer, and domestic. There are some final scenes of communal gatherings of mediums holding hands and channeling spirits, but most of the film is comprised of the domestic and private lives of two mediums in particular, Divino and Lázaro. One of the opening scenes shows Divino, the first of the shadowed men that we see in Studies, repairing a torn chromolith of Saint Lazarus. This act of healing echoes the significance of St. Lazarus as the representation of illness and recovery; his body is depicted scarred by leprosy, and he is known as the one Jesus raised from the dead. As Divino works with careful fingers, he speaks of how this saint had the power to cure him of childhood sickness. The film cuts to a similar print of St. Lazarus hanging on a wall, but this image is whole, and a different man—Lázaro, who shares the saint’s name—is making coffee. The body is broken here, cut by light, by the fragility of paper, by the frame’s composition. Sunlight filters through the plant’s leaves, marking the sitter’s limbs with golden coins and dark scars like the ulcers of leprosy dotting the body of St. Lazarus. Tamar Guimarães wrote the book A Man Called Love: Reading Xavier about a Spiritist leader, Francisco Cándido Xavier. Speculating on Xavier’s femininity and queer sexuality, Guimarães writes, “Here I sketch out an argument—a hesitant and half suggested question: Could the notion of a porous body be a remainder of what is not reconciled in the subject’s negotiations with modernity?—An open body rather than the hermetically sealed, autonomous body of the Enlightenment?” 4 Divino and Lázaro are 2. Spiritism is a specific spiritual philosophy and practice codified by Allan Kardec (and channeled in the 19th century through the French educator Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail). It draws upon Spiritualist beliefs in spirits and the use of mediumship to communicate with them, but follows Kardec’s stricter doctrine about how the two realms interact. 3. Guimarães describes the Magnetic Chain more precisely:

“According to St. Lázaro, an energy strip or band forms behind the mediums, and that band attracts and gathers spirits that are lost and/or unwell—spirits that usually hang around someone who is present in the room, who is also being treated in the process. The treatment to the spirits (both embodied and disembodied) involves then an attempt for the settlement of karmic debt. In this sense, the process is more about

relationships and less about the individual. Also there are more mediums in the chain besides the mediums that sit holding hands. It’s a complex choreography involving the mediums holding hands, the mediums that come and give ‘magnetic passes’ (the analogy is to the work of a nurse that comes to cleanse and prepare a patient), and the ones that come after and do more complex ‘surgery’ (known as physical effect

mediums). A fourth group of mediums comes to provide protection and reinforcement to the physical effect mediums.” Email correspondence between Tamar Guimarães and Candice Lin, February 13, 2018. 4. Tamar Guimarães, A Man Called Love: Reading Xavier (London: Aldgate Press and Capacete Produções and Forlaget * [asterisk], 2010), 107.

porous bodies, open to the shadows of plants and history that flicker across their flesh and the spirits who pass through them, fleetingly palpable as groans, sharp intakes of breath, clucking and brrr-ing of the lips, and descriptions of visions. Both Divino and Lázaro are connected through spiritual tissue and through their shared occupation of space; we see them toward the end of the film together at the Sanatorium, engaged in a communal activation of the Magnetic Chain. There they exchange a long, meaningful glance. They are also mysteriously connected in their affinity for St. Lazarus and are shadowed by the same canopy of peacock flower trees. In many images of St. Lazarus, he is accompanied by a dog or several dogs, who lovingly lick his open wounds. Lázaro, whose voice narrates Guimarães and Akhøj’s film, says, “I wanted a dog like that, my father kept going to the neighbors until he managed to get a puppy like that. He was my companion.” This intimacy punctuates the suffering and alienation Lázaro describes feeling because the human community could not accept the spirit voices he heard and instead saw him as “sick.” Guimarães writes that Xavier was forced to lick the open wound of his godmother’s favorite child. Noted by Guimarães as a moment of childhood abuse, it echoes in the film in a different way. Looking closely at the chromolith of St. Lazarus, we see the dog’s soft tongue licking the wounds of St. Lazarus in a moment of interspecies love and intimate care,5 a sensual probing of the porous body not unlike the saints who eagerly lap pus from wounds of the sick or the ecstatic visions of mystics who insert their tongues, fingers, and even whole arms inside the vaginal chest wound of Jesus Christ. This dog of St. Lazarus reappears in the film in the city of Palmelo, trotting alone down an empty street, Avenida Allan Kardec (named after the founder of Spiritism). The scene forms a non-human bridge between the only physical encounter between the two characters, Lázaro and Divino. Solitude permeates the desolate city of Palmelo, populated by awkward outcasts whose most intimate interactions are mediated by other species or spirits. The opening scene shows Divino regarding a praying mantis that walks upon the hairy prairie of his arm with gentle curiosity. This companion, the praying mantis, speaks to the enmeshment of life through the physicality of its form, a mimetic insectoid interpretation of a tree branch. In Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble, she describes a cartoon, xkcd, by Randall Munroe, that shows two people discussing an orchid that evolved to lure and mate with a male bee that is now extinct. “The flower collects up the presence of the bee aslant, in desire and mortality. The shape of the flower is ‘an idea of what the female bee looked like to the male bee…as interpreted by a plant.’” 6 Such interpretations abound in our contemporary, digital world, where humans must prove to machines that they are humans in order to detect fraud, and where

5. Dog saliva contains the antibacterial enzyme lysozyme, which stimulates healing of the skin around a wound. 6. Donna Haraway, Staying

with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 69–70.

machines create fake news stories with real news effects. One method of authenticating one’s humanity is the transcription of CAPTCHA codes— those blurry, distorted pictures of numbers and letters.7 Dr. Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and a team of researchers created reCAPTCHA, a startup company he sold to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2009. ReCAPTCHA harnesses the unwitting free labor of millions of people for Google Books or Google Maps when these people, intent on proving their fleshy status, transcribe blurry photos of words and numbers sourced from digitized old books or address numbers. This labor is usually an intensive and expensive three-stage process involving bitmap photography of the text, encoding into optical character recognition (OCR), and human correction of mistakes. “By filling out a captcha, [humans] were providing unpaid, involuntary and ‘fundamentally mindless’ labour. They had to become robots—which translates as workers—in order to prove they were human.” 8 Donna Haraway uses the word sympoiesis, which was coined by M. Beth Dempster in 1998, to describe generative acts of becoming-with. Sympoiesis replaces the auto in self-making, recognizing that all of the partners making up holobionts (etymologically, “entire beings” or “safe and sound beings”) are symbionts to one another. There is no hierarchy in which one, usually because of scale or egocentricity, is considered the host and the other the dependent. Instead, scientist Lynn Margulis forwarded a theory of symbiogenesis where new bodies come to exist not through competition and survival of the fittest, but rather through uneasy, long-lasting intimacies, interspecies-interkingdom mergers where one organism partially digests, partially assimilates, and partially transforms with other organisms, forming new multicellular forms. In the event that became known as Pizzagate, narrative and reality were intertwined in sympoietic relation. Fake news of Hilary Clinton’s involvement in child pornography (aka Cheese Pizza) was generated by Twitter bots—automated accounts that are programmed to retweet, repost, or even police and report accounts based on recognition of specific keywords and hashtags—along with real people who found and reposted the tweets, and other real people (based mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe) who consciously controlled “shepherd” and “sheepdog” accounts that amplified these automated tweets. It is astounding that such a ridiculous story could take on enough believability to “become real,” but if reality is measured by physical effects, then Pizzagate indeed was “real.” Real enough for Edgar Welch to visit Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle intent on liberating exploited children; real enough to spark an episode of PTSD in an ex-student of mine, leading him to wield a piece of glass in a supermarket in Sylmar, California, whereupon he was shot dead by a security

7. CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart 8. Hito Steyerl, “Why Games,” Manipulating the World: Connecting Öyvind Fahlström (London: Moderna Museet and

Koenig Books, 2017), 41–42. Details of this anecdote come from The New York Times article Steyerl cites: Guy Gugliotta, “Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time,” The New York Times, March 28, 2011.

guard; and real enough to aid Donald Trump’s election to US president. Strangely enough, the visual arts’ strength in narrative was harnessed to authenticate right-wing claims: Marina Abromović’s invitation to John Podesta’s brother Tony to attend a “Spirit Cooking dinner” became proof that he was a Satanic occultist, and Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture The Arch of Hysteria (1993) in Tony Podesta’s art collection was used as proof linking the Podesta brothers to Jeffrey Dahmer, who posed the body of one of his murder victims in a similar composition. The strategy of drawing associative connections between formal similarities has a long history in art, perhaps most notably in Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29), which places similar gestures and formal compositions next to each other, irrespective of the time periods and contexts in which these images originally appeared. Indeed, it is the organizing principle for this essay and for my artistic method of thinking and research. So it is with great unease that I notice the use of this strategy to fuel conspiracy theories and fake news generated by the right-wing. Yet the recognition of visual similarities also has its histories of resistance within colonization. As peoples dislocated from their homelands and coerced to convert to Christianity, African slaves syncretically associated their local gods with Catholic saints who shared specific visual attributes. The leprosy-scarred St. Lazarus is syncretically aligned in Africandiasporic religions such as Umbanda, which is also practiced in the city of Palmelo, with Obaluaiye (also known as Babalú-Ayé), the god associated with infectious disease and healing.9 Obaluayie has roots in the Yoruba god of smallpox, Shakpana or Shopona, a god of contamination covered in red infective sores, shielded from gaze by a raffia cloak that makes the god seem, when whirling around or standing perfectly still, part vegetal and part whirlwind, mystical and inhuman. Obaluaiye is a porous body, riddled with open sores, a figure that rose to power during the European colonization of Africa and its diaspora. In Santería, the ritual altar presents different vessels—in the form of soup tureens (soperas), ceramic water storage jars (tinajas), terra cotta or iron pots, roof tiles (teja), basins (palangana), platters ( fuente), wooden vessels (bateas), metal boxes or cans, and calabashes. Each represents a specific god and is distinguished by distinct colors and aesthetics associated with each god. These vessels house the sacred stones or other objects—physical manifestations of the spirit. Many of the vessels, such as the soperas, are made of porcelain or white earthenware china and harken back to Cuba’s colonial past and its European aristocracy’s collections of china as status tokens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 But the bisque-fired terracotta pot that houses Babalú-Ayé is unglazed and perforated with holes; these holes mirror the holes in the flesh and symbolize the difficulty of containing illness. The permeability of the raffia

9. There are many spellings of Obaluaiye. I use this spelling for consistency with the Robert Farris Thompson quote, on page 47. 10. David Brown writes, “White Cubans remember the sopera as a cherished object of

Cuban middle-and upper-class domestic life. The sopera… [was] saturated with the meanings of domestic well-being and social class status. …With the increasing diversity and reach of transatlantic commercial nineteenth-century trade,

imitations, often of less elaborate materials and design, were disseminated widely across class lines.” David Brown, Santería Enthroned (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 253.

cloak punctuates this reminder. During the “scramble for Africa,” Shakpana, previously a lesser-known deity, rose to major significance as smallpox spread along with the disease’s visibility in public health campaigns and the establishment of “tropical medicine” as a field. Robert Farris Thompson writes, “British colonial authorities banned the cult in Nigeria in 1917 when Obaluaiye priests were accused of deliberately spreading smallpox. But members of the cult… refused to be intimidated. They took their worship underground. They worshipped Obaluaiye under different names… The strength of his lore in modern Nigeria is illustrated by the continuity of the old belief that it was dangerous to call him by his name, for one would thereby spread his dread disease, shoponnon (smallpox).”11 Obaluaiye is sometimes represented by a thorn. This could be seen as the typical colonialist fear of contamination, or it could be the opposite, a natural, plant-formed inoculation device. In 1774, during a smallpox epidemic in England, physicians noted that milkmaids were among the few who did not bear the ravages and scars that marked the faces and bodies of other smallpox survivors. “Folk knowledge held that if a milkmaid milked a cow blistered with cowpox and developed some blisters on her hands, she would not contract smallpox even while nursing victims of an epidemic.” 12 From this practical knowledge, laypeople experimented: one farmer used a darning needle to drive pus from a sick cow into his wife and children. Known as variolation, this evolved to become what we now know as modern vaccination. Inoculation does not come from professionalized medical experimentation but rather from observation, interspecies relations, and a chain of shared immunity, not unlike the Spiritist Magnetic Chain of Palmelo.13 Obaluaiye’s raffia-covered body is formally echoed in Carolina Caycedo’s sculpture, Big Woman/Mujer grande (2017), a witchlike, folk female figure with a painted wooden mask for a face. She is suspended within a permeable cloak of fishing net and dry cattails, plantain fibers, and vines that trail in a tangled excess onto the wooden floor. The voluminous fabric of her body is rotund and basket-like; she seems to hover protectively, omen-like, promising plentitude yet, perhaps, righteous retribution if one transgresses upon the bounty of her body. Big Woman/Mujer grande is one of several sculptures in Caycedo’s exhibition El hambre como maestro/Hunger as Teacher, at Commonwealth and Council. The works in the exhibition are part of Caycedo’s ongoing project, Be Dammed, which addresses socio-environmental impacts of dams

11. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 61. 12. Eula Biss, On Immunity (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 51. 13. In Moises VelasquezManoff’s An Epidemic of

Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases (New York: Scribner, 2012), he makes the case that the rise in autoimmune diseases in Western nations could be cured by an inoculation of hookworms.

Claiming that our immune systems have co-evolved with parasites and viruses, our obsession with hygiene has created a diversity-lacking void of boredom where the body starts to attack itself. By swallowing hookworms

or allowing them to burrow into the soft skin of one’s arm, Velasquez-Manoff makes a selftested case that we could cure diseases like MS, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Carolina Caycedo, Big Woman/Mujer grande, 2017. Wooden mask, handmade fishing net, handmade wool hammock, nylon fishing net, fabric, dry cattails, dry plantain stem fibers, vine, rope, 85 Ă&#x2014; 26 Ă&#x2014; 62 in. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.

in collaboration with various riverside communities affected by dams. The project also honors several environmental activists working for water rights and protections (including many who have been murdered for their activism14). Many of Caycedo’s other works also involve fishing nets as their primary material and form. These cast-off nets are gathered from the riverine communities Caycedo works with, and their materiality represents a porous way of thinking about bodies and boundaries as a membrane, a malleable structure that allows liquid to flow through it. According to Caycedo, the fishing net stands as a symbol for “food sovereignty and autonomous economies… To throw a fishing net affirms the river as a common good.” 15 But I encounter this fishing net within another web of symbolism. Taken out of use, it has moved from its original context and relation to food sovereignty into the realm of aesthetics. Here, the fishing net lends its physicality to the structure of a sculpture. It materially speaks the content of the work, and the history of its origins has immaterial cultural capital in its declaration of a leftist, community-affirming politics that the art market values, even when these leftist politics are in contradiction with its own funding. Caycedo’s haunting sculptures play with the shiftiness of materials, creating visual traps of meaning that challenge the very economies that make the lives of those it represents precarious, while still being enmeshed within that same economy. What does it mean for such materials to move from being used as a tool of survival to playing a pedagogical role in raising art viewers’ awareness of political water-rights issues, activating an emotional and aesthetic stake in the issue through its materiality, and being an object collected by private collectors and museums? To be clear, I raise these questions of economics not to take Caycedo to task, for I deeply respect her ethics, political motivations, and admire the aesthetic strength of her work. Rather, these are questions relevant to all cultural production, for none of it takes place outside of the systems and history of its making, and the question of how to negotiate such creative, critical artistic production is an ongoing one. Yet it is an “impossibility” we must persist in and insist upon imagining if we are to create, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, a “critical fabulation” of what was and is possible, weighted in the awareness that our “own narrative does not operate outside the economy of statements that it subjects to critique.” 16 Caycedo’s work does this by moving between the material and immaterial, and by playing in the in-between realm through the signifier of the net, a malleable and porous membrane. Her work’s engagement with the economics and politics of water-rights contestation is echoed in how she traces the movement of meaning and value in material to immaterial forms.17 Interestingly, these movements also mirror value production in the world of finance. 14. The Guardian reports that environmental defenders are being killed at a rate of about four a week. Jonathan Watts and John Vidal, “Environmental Defenders Being Killed in Record Numbers Globally, New Research Reveals,” The Guardian, July 13, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/

environment/2017/jul/13/ environmental-defenders-being-killed-in-record-numbersglobally-new-research-reveals. 15. Carolina Caycedo, “Cosmotarrayas/Comotarrafas/ Cosmonets series,” artist’s statement, 2016, http:// carolinacaycedo.com/ cosmotarrayas-comotarrafasseries-2016

16. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008), 13. 17. Another Caycedo work, The Binding/El amarre, Vocabulary and Infrastructure/ Vocabulario e infrastructura (after The Distance Plan) (2017), uses a similar strategy as the fishing nets. The Binding changes the original value of

paper currency from a variety of countries by first recontextualizing them as artworks and then by “defacing” them in marker with words and graffiti that reimagine their imagery outside of nationalistic ideologies.

From The Reverse Side of a Painting (1670) by Cornelius Gijsbrechts to René Magritte’s La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (The Treachery of Images [This is not a pipe], 1928) to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), the visual arts highlight how meaning production is tied to visual and linguistic representation through undercutting what usually appears neutral to us. By generating confusion between three-dimensional and two-dimensional representations of reality, or through introducing text as an alternate form of representation, these artworks question how realities and meanings are constructed, pointing to the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of arbitrariness in the relation between the signifier and the signified. Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes this tearing apart of the signifier and the referent as dereferentialization, a gesture he observes in both twentieth-century experimental poetry and in neoliberal economic changes within the last three decades of the century. In financial markets, liquidity measures the trade-off between time and value. Cash, in countries with stable currency value, is considered the ultimate liquid asset, because it can be exchanged for goods and services with no loss of value. A house, on the other hand, traditionally represents less liquidity—it can be sold, possibly for an increased value, but the funds are not as readily available. In 1971, under President Richard Nixon, the U.S. dollar abandoned the gold standard, and the value of U.S. currency, no longer tethered to a physical referent, fluctuates according to debt and speculation. During the 2007 to 2010 subprime mortgage crisis, properties became illiquid because they were bundled into stacks that obscured the actual value of material assets tied to them. Their value increased beyond their materiality through speculation, and their illiquid status was exacerbated by computerized technologies that increased the complexity and obscurity of how their value was determined. Berardi writes: “Because of the technological revolution produced by information technology, the relation between time and value has been deregulated. Simultaneously, the relation between the sign and the thing has blurred, as the ontological guarantee of meaning based on the referential status of the signifier has broken apart.” 18 Water is sometimes spoken of as the last resource to be privatized, and its value comes from holding the right to choose who moves through it or what bodies—human, geographical, or corporate—it passes through.19 Water’s power comes from its potential movement and the restriction of that movement. In the physical world, a dam takes a material resource—a river—and abstracts it into immaterial (or less material) electricity that can be moved and displaced from its location, divorced from its origin and the community

18. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 27. 19. The Big Short (2015) dramatizes the financial crisis through three main characters: hedge fund managers Michael Burry and Mark Baum and Deutsche Bank salesman

Jared Vennett. At the end of the movie, intertitles describe that Michael Burry, one of the first to predict the sub-prime mortgage crisis, “contacted the government several times to see if anyone wanted to interview him to find out how he knew the system would collapse years before anyone

else. No one ever returned his calls. But he was audited by the Internal Revenue Service four times and questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The small amount of investing he does today is all focused on one commodity: water.”

Carolina Caycedo, To Drive Away Whiteness/Para alejar la blancura, 2017. Hand-dyed fishing net, lead weights, hand-dyed jute cord, plastic and glass bottles, liquor, banknotes, seeds, chili peppers, achiote, sand, dried kelp seeds, water (Pacific Ocean, Colorado River, and Los Angeles River), hibiscus, black beans, human hair, ginseng, paper, 89 Ă&#x2014; 136 Ă&#x2014; 107 in. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Carolina Caycedo, Damn Knot Anus/Nudo represa ano, 2016. Pencil on paper, 15 ½ × 20 × 1½ in. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

it sustains. But a river is a body that cannot be rerouted and controlled without a chain of effects. In their essay “Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds,” Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Cole use Eva Hayward’s transgender theorizing to rethink bodies as riverine ecologies and vice versa. They discuss Hayward’s consideration of “the body variously as a body of water—a river, which draws together all of the above and underground water in a watershed.” 20 The body is more than what is visible on the surface, it is the vapor in the air, the subterranean wetness below; the body is not fixed any more than a body of water could be defined by the landmasses that surround it. In Hayward’s words, “The body, trans or not, is not a clear, coherent and positive integrity. The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between wrong body and right body, or between fragmentation and wholeness. It is rather a question of discerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be defined indifferently as coherent transformation, decentered certainty, or limited possibility.” 21 According to Woelfle-Erskine and Cole, “In river terms, rejecting a binary between fragmentation and wholeness refuses the dewatered, fragmented river that holds no salmon and leaves some farmers without irrigation water in dry years.” 22 In the Magnetic Chain, illnesses are addressed in part through magnetic passes which remove the obstructions in the flow of vital fluid; these obstructions are what cause sickness. In a series of letters edited by John Pearson, in 1790, the purpose of treatment using animal magnetism (lebensmagnetismus) is to induce “crisis” through shocking the body into convulsion, “to remove obstructions in the humoral system that were causing sickness.” 23 In Caycedo’s El hambre como maestro/Hunger as Teacher, the riverine movement of water through the land is likened to the human body, in its fluids and orifices. In Damn Knot Anus/Nudo represa ano (2016), a graphite drawing of a portal-like wrinkled or hairy anus graphically shouts, in Spanish and English, the words: “Una represa es como un nudo en el ano / A Dam is like a knot in your anus.” Taken from Caycedo’s interview with Kogui indigenous spiritual leader Mamo Pedro Juan, who passed away June 2017, this memorable phrase speaks to the pressure that a dam creates in cutting off water from the communities that depend upon it. In Undammed/ Desbloqueada (2017), Caycedo’s own body—its fluids and reproductive potential—is referenced in the copper intrauterine device that hangs suspended like a totem within one of her fishing net sculptures above a metal pan used for mining gold. The pan is empty of gold and the wealth contained within this pan is the land: “a chunk of Navajo sand-stone.” 24

20. Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Cole, “Transfiguring the Anthropocene: Stochastic Reimaginings of Human-Beaver Worlds,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (May 2015), 304. 21. Eva Hayward, “Lessons from a Starfish,” Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird

(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 256. Quoted in Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and July Cole, “Transfiguring the Anthropocene,” TSQ, 304–5. 22. Woelfle-Erskine and Cole, “Transfiguring the Anthropocene,” TSQ, 305. 23. John Pearson, “A plain and rational account of the nature and effects of animal

magnetism: in a series of letters. With notes and an appendix,” Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Project Gutenberg, (Originally published in London, 1790), http:// self.gutenberg.org/articles/ Animal_Magnetism. 24. Caycedo, “Cosmotarrayas/Comotarrafas/ Cosmonets series.”

Carolina Caycedo, Undammed/Desbloqueada, 2017. Hand-dyed fishing net, lead weights, metal gold pan, Navajo sandstone, copper T IUD, thread, rope, 64 Ă&#x2014; 19 Ă&#x2014; 19 in. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Carolina Caycedo, Undammed/Desbloqueada (detail), 2017. Hand-dyed fishing net, lead weights, metal gold pan, Navajo sandstone, copper T IUD, thread, rope, 64 Ă&#x2014; 19 Ă&#x2014; 19 in. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Control over water, land, and reproductive rights are ways that sovereignty has historically expressed its power, and this is the rhetoric used both by the indigenous communities and the Brazilian businesses and government they are fighting against, who claim that the power harnessed by dam-controlled waterways will finance and power their nation in a way that does not rely on foreign imports of oil or coal. Much of the energy generated by dams actually goes to power the mining industries converting raw materials into metals. These are often foreign companies, such as the American company Alcoa, which has a heavy presence in Brazil and Suriname. Bauxite ore, used to make aluminum, is mined at La Providence. In the eighteenth century, La Providence was the last Labadist outpost in Suriname; it was this communal, anti-materialistic religious community that awoke Merian’s curiosity, as its members returned from the colony with specimens of exotic flora and fauna and descriptions of the environment there.25 “In the 1960s Alcoa dammed the river just past the site of La Providence to create energy to process the bauxite, flooding [what was once] maroon territory and creating a vast lake where, when the water level sinks, the dead trees rise.” 26 This reanimation of the dead trees that lie latent under the beguilingly calm surface of the dammed water brings to mind Christina Sharpe’s writing on oceanic memory. Thinking about those who died during transatlantic voyages—in which slaves were thrown or jumped overboard from ships— Sharpe reveals a haunting method of keeping time in the sea: There have been studies done on whales that have died and have sunk to the seafloor. These studies show that within a few days the whales’ bodies are picked almost clean by benthic organisms— those organisms that live on the seafloor. My colleague Anne Gardulski tells me it is most likely that a human body would not make it to the sea floor intact. What happened to the bodies? By which I mean, what happened to the components of their bodies in salt water? Anne Gardulski tells me that because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Around 90–95 percent of the tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. As Anne told me, “Nobody dies of old age in the ocean.” The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium…

25. The Labadists were a religious community movement founded by Jean de Labadie on principles of communal ownership of property and a rejection of materialism. Maria Sibylla Merian moved from Germany to the Wiuwert province of

Friesland, the Netherlands, to join their religious community, from 1685 to 1691. 26. Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 279.

has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time.27 The shadows in Guimarães and Akhøj’s film serve to remind us of residence time, of this atomized presence of the death and life that came before us. In the canopy of trees and plants that were used by African and Indigenous slave women to abort their children so they would not be born enslaved, these sylvan shadows could be the souls of the past, reminding us of histories that remain sublimated but present. In the fairytale The Fisherman and his Soul, by Oscar Wilde, a fisherman falls in love with a mermaid, whom he catches in his fishing nets and wants to join. But he is burdened by his human soul. He meets a red-haired witch who gives him a knife with a handle of green viper skin and says, “What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul. Stand on the sea-shore with thy back to the moon, and cut away from around thy feet thy shadow, which is thy soul’s body, and bid thy soul leave thee, and it will do so.” The tale goes on to tell of the devastation caused by foolishly thinking one could separate oneself from one’s shadow, conscience, soul, or past. The story of the 2007–10 financial crisis is a similar tale of an ill-fated separation between the material and immaterial worlds. In the eighteenth century, when Maria Sibylla Merian journeyed to La Providence and Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, she saw a very different pre-flooded geography, proximate in space to both Palmelo, Brazil, and the South American locations of the riverine communities Caycedo has worked with.28 In 1699, Merian encountered a Dutch colony obsessed with sugar production. When Merian heard about Suriname from her Labadist religious comrades, she sold her paintings and drawings to raise the funds to join the Dutch colonial expedition, so that she could travel and study the metamorphosis of bodies in a new environment. Merian’s scientific illustrations were path breaking because they studied organisms in their contexts, rather than as isolated specimens. This style of visual representation, showing the insect or animal and the environment that sheltered and fed it, became the scientific status quo a century after her death. It is an anachronism to describe her representations as ecological, since that concept was only articulated much later. In 1866, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel used the term “oecologie” in his book Generelle Morphologie. “Oecologie” or “ecology” comes from Greek “oikos,” meaning “household organization,” and describes the interaction of creatures and their surroundings. Though complicit with colonialism as part of the Dutch colonial expedition, Merian’s drawings and notes reflect more than a capitalistic eye toward an insect or plant’s possible profitable exploitation. Her careful, invested interest described the effects, dependence, and co-constitution of

27. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 40–41. 28. Caycedo is involved, through activism and the incorporation of artistic materials and subject matter,

in publicizing riverine communities protesting the building of these specific dams: the Fundao Mine Tailing dam on Doce River, Minas Gerais, Brazil; El Quimbo hydroelectric dam on Magdalena River in Huila, Southern Colombia;

the Hidroituango hydroelectric dam on Cauca River in Antioquia, Northern Colombia; and the Belomonte Dam in Pará. Caycedo also works with the Caiçara artisanal fishing community of Ilha do Cardoso on the Rio Ribeira in State of

Sao Paulo. This community has successfully resisted the buildings of dams on this river, the only medium-sized river in the state of Sao Paulo that is not dammed.

Maria Sibylla Merian, Peacock flower plant and insects, Amsterdam, 1719. Published in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam). Counterproof etching with watercolor (hand coloring), 20 ¼ × 13 ¾ in. © John Carter Brown Library, Box 1894, Brown University, Providence, R.I. 02912.

organisms in a shared ecology, of which humans, and their plantation economies, were inextricable parts. The meshed ecology that Merian painted was perhaps a visual depiction of what feminist physicist Karen Barad calls “intra-action,” a mutual constitution of entangled agencies.29 Instead of seeing organisms as separate, pre-existing beings, Merian, like other female scientists—Barad, Haraway, and Margulis—observed how the physical forms of life were co-constituted by their relations to each other, relations where lines between sexuality, survival, and mimicry become blurred. Though an ecological view of intermeshed, sympoetic life has its political ideals in theories like Gaia and a recognition of how one’s own responsibility and livelihood is interconnected in a web of cause and effects, the financial crisis of 2007–8 is another example of intra-action. In a 2016 Fortune article, Geoffrey Smith writes of Deutsche Bank, Too Big to Fail was always a bit of a misnomer. What really makes a bank a risk to the financial system as a whole is the degree to which it is interconnected with other institutions, i.e., its ability to spark chain reactions of non-payment if it should ever default. By this measure, Deutsche is frighteningly indispensable. It’s a counterparty to virtually every major bank in the world, in virtually all asset classes. [An] illustration from an IMF report in June gives you some idea. This is why I argued yesterday that the German government, which together with the European Central Bank is responsible for supervising Deutsche, would be highly unlikely to let it fail in a disorderly manner à la Lehman Brothers.30 In Spiritism, this enmeshment of life is seen as a form of animal magnetism, the invisible natural force that flows through all animate beings. Guimarães and Akhøj’s Studies for a Minor History of Trembling Matter shows a Spiritist session where members clasp each other’s fluttering hands, their bodies racked with spasms and shudders of the energetic ripples that flow through the linked chains of their bodies. As the session comes to a close and people sit in peaceful clusters, a rain shower pours down outside, a physical manifestation of the spiritual fluid that flows through them. Perhaps the vital fluid that connects all living beings could be seen in contemporary terms as debt. Debt, a promise of our future labor, our future time, interconnects us as individuals, as networks, as countries. The institution that gathers the most future time of other countries, therefore, has, by virtue of its interconnection and the intra-active devastation it would wreak if it were forced to go bankrupt or pay its debt, the right to insolvency, the right to refuse to pay its debts, the right defy time. “German banks have stored Greek time, Portuguese time, Italian time and Irish time, and now the German banks are asking for their money back… 29. Adam Kleinman, “Intra-actions: An interview with Karen Barad,” Mousse Magazine 34, 76-81. 30. Geoffrey Smith, “5 Things You Should Know About the

Deutsche Bank Train Wreck,” Fortune Online (September 27, 2016), http://fortune. com/2016/09/27/deutschebank/.

Is the money that is stored in the banks my past time (the time that I have spent in the past) or is it the money that ensures the possibility of my buying a future?” 31 This debt, made up of our past and future time, is the vital fluid, the invisible liquid that we are submerged in; it defines our relations. I first encountered Maria Sibylla Merian’s book Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam at the Huntington’s Visual Voyages exhibition. Curator Daniela Bleichmar writes that this copy of Merian’s book used a unique method of printmaking, called counterproofing: “The printer would take a freshly printed page just off the press, put it on top of a blank sheet of paper, and run both together through the press to produce a print from another print rather than from a copperplate. The resulting counterproof had a much lighter impression than a regular print and, when colored by hand, looked much more like an original drawing than a regular copper plate did.” 32 This mirrored, softer copy has a third unintentional impression created by the acidic burn of the pigments reacting to the paper over two centuries of time. What we are left with on the backside of the paper is a partial shadow of the original. This ghostly silhouette reminds me of a similar specter I saw in the Smithsonian archives in 2009, when looking at John Stedman’s The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), illustrated by William Blake. The image that haunted my mind was the burned shadow of Blake’s engraving, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack. The print shows two slaves; one is outstretched on the ground, while the other bends over him, arrested in the labor of bludgeoning his bones with a stick. The original image is as grotesque in its violence as Stedman’s descriptions. But it’s the burn that haunts me, for its possibilities, what Hartman describes as the “impossible goal”—listening for the unsaid, looking for what is beneath the submerged surface of water, the imagined lives outside of their limited appearances and disappearances in the official histories of those in power.33 In this imprint, the figure standing over the one outstretched on the ground could be running to his assistance, hands thrown up in horror, or, enlisted in the brutality of torture, the standing figure could be theatricalizing the gesture of breaking, trying instead to find ways of minimizing the pain. Merian’s book makes tangible the impressions each generation of imagemaking leaves upon another. Softer, blurred lines or pigment reacting with paper, foxed with age, the content of these histories are incomplete but can neither be disappeared nor fully imagined into being. Immaterial histories and the violent legacies that live on into the present erupt into the physical in liminal forms: the molecules of sodium in the water we drink, epigenetic illnesses, and, of course, the societal institutions, such as prisons, that continue the same inequities of power and slavery from which they spring. This is the “history of present” that Saidiya Hartman writes about:

31. Berardi, The Uprising, 84. 32. Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 116. 33. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2–3.

Counterproof burn of Maria Sibylla Merianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Caesalpinia pulcherrima (Peacock flower plant) in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam). The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Photo: Candice Lin.

As a writer committed to telling stories, I have endeavored to represent the lives of the nameless and the forgotten, to reckon with loss, and to respect the limits of what cannot be known. For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the exslave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence. As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.34 Caycedo’s sculptures and Guimarães and Akhøj’s films endeavor to visualize an intimacy of our present interwoven with the dead—the water rights activists who died or were killed for their actions and beliefs and the mediums who channel the voices of a Brazilian past grappling with its modernity. Though embroiled within the same systems of finance, the same “grammar of violence,” there is a material and haunting “terrible beauty” in both Caycedo’s and Guimarães and Akhøj’s works, which use shadows and nets to point to what is not present, to strive, against impossibility, pessimism and hopelessness, to imagine a future that is not already owed to a German or U.S. bank. Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt; Bétonsalon, Paris; and Gasworks, London.

34. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4.

Carmen Argote Utensils: Working Small

Carmen Argote works large. Her projects start from concrete things in the world, always gesturing toward big ideas, engaging full-sized spaces, immense labor, and detailed planning. In X-TRA’s pages, we see her mother’s collection of miniature items placed atop pages of a cookbook and printed to scale. I think of Carmen as downshifting to go up a hill, working small to climb the pinnacle. Utensils is, in no small part, devoted to Carmen’s mother and builds on her own familial memories and cultural experiences. Utensils in the title leads us from the kitchen to the small tools the artist’s mother sourced from the craft store Michaels, when they still sold tools to create tiny objects for dollhouses. As a child, the word utensil was difficult for Carmen to remember and spell. She recalls writing utensil on her shoe, a tactile haptic action that allowed her to carry the word with her. The work contains several layers of personal recuperations of space, from the anonymous makers of the cake templates and miniature items through her mother to Carmen herself. Utensils: Working Small thus realigns feminist self-power by carving out spaces within spaces. The miniatures and the cookbook pages are both extracted from their respective environments. Carmen started this project from those two sites, to talk about

the creation of self and space. The first is a 1977 Mexican cookbook devoted to sculpted sugar cakes. Printed alongside the baked confections are simple abstract templates for shaping molded sugar. The second space is her mother’s room within her partner Gary’s suburban home in Long Beach, California, wherein she has replicated Carmen’s childhood home in compact form, carving out her bedroom as a sanctuary. The mother’s collection of miniatures, shown isolated here, away from its original context within her bedroom, is still completely engaged with family. As the mother watched Carmen arrange them to make these images, she offered corresponding memories: “This was a party favor to commemorate your sister Alex’s baptism. I added another baby so that it could be you and your sister.” “I tried to make them as small as I could. The silver tiny cranes are from your wedding party. That long ago, imagine!” “I made a grouping of them, this was the smallest. I made it originally for a mini altar for Dia De Los Muertos honoring my father.” “This was my first attempt at making jewelry. I wanted to make a collage with small objects.” Carmen remembers her mom making that piece of jewelry, her hands working with small tools, the hands laboring to craft. Your thumbs have a place in the very first spread (pages 36–37) to hold these pages of X-TRA. Experience your body in relation to the cakes, to the bedroom, to the miniatures, to all that is crammed into and allowed air in this project. —Neha Choksi

Carmen Argote is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on the exploration of personal history through architecture and the spaces that she inhabits. Argote received her MFA from UCLA in 2007 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Argote has exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Denver Art Museum (2017); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2017); National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago (2015); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2015); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2013). Argote has shown at artist-run galleries and experimental spaces such as Panel LA (2017), Adjunct Positions (2015), and Human Resources (2014), and she was the Artist Lab Residency artist at 18th Street Art Center from Januaryâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; March, 2018. She is currently participating in the 2018 Made in L.A. exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Argote is represented by Commonwealth and Council and Instituto de Vision. Neha Choksi is an artist and a member of the editorial board of X-TRA.

Zach Rottman

Andrea Zittel

Home on the Planes: Andrea Zittel and the Use-Value of Abstraction

Regen Projects, Los Angeles June 8–August 12, 2017

Little about Andrea Zittel’s latest body of work evokes conventional furniture. On the contrary, the nine imposing metal Planar Configurations that form the core of the artist’s recent show at Regen Projects call to mind an assortment of the last century’s sculptural and painterly forays into geometric abstraction. The amber-accented Planar Configuration Four (2017), for example, hardly screams “bed.” No more does the cobalt interior of Planar Configuration Two (2017) resemble a chaise lounge. But we are nevertheless helped to such conclusions by the presence of props in and on the otherwise abstract sculptures: a simple mattress smartly made up with pillow and linens, a cushion with a stack of folded newspapers, a woven textile positioned like a welcome mat. These are useful things, we surmise. Useable, anyway. The Planar Configurations share a palette of black, white, and gray, with muted versions of the primary colors helping to visually differentiate the three compositional types on view. They sport sleek powder-coated finishes, which, like their thick steel frames and aluminum cladding, speak of vaguely industrial origins. Apparently held together by regularly spaced hex socket bolts, which are visible at their joints, the fabricated structures also seem as if they could be assembled by hand with the help of little more than an Allen wrench and a capable friend. Indeed, styled with plush accessories and arranged in attractive rows, the Configurations all but transform Regen Projects into an austere, deserted, and utterly alien IKEA-like emporium showcasing futuristic wares scaled for beings of our proportions. And yet, despite their utilitarian overtures, the Configurations also retain their privileged status as art. After all, Zittel’s show sustains the usual gallery decorum, which means that any touching of the works is strictly forbidden. Cushions or no, if these abstractions have any use-value, it is destined to be provisional and speculative—at least for those of us not looking to buy. It is here that Zittel’s work unfolds—between the categories of sculpture and furniture, between abstract form and everyday utility. The Planar Configurations persist simultaneously in two incompatible states, with Zittel’s homey props and textiles operating like fulcrums facilitating each sculpture’s categorical shift into furniture and back again. And so, confronted by each Configuration as if by an inscrutable but tantalizing window display, we imagine: what would it be like to sleep on the artwork, to nestle into its sterile confines, to read about the day’s relentlessly bleak news from within its cool shell? What would it be like to live in or with or upon these sculptures, to be at home on these planes? 75

Andrea Zittel, installation view, Regen Projects, Los Angeles June 8â&#x20AC;&#x201C;August 12, 2017. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

— Some fifty years ago, a version of this art-furniture problematic played itself out as artists associated with minimalism found themselves in surprising proximity to the world of everyday things. By 1967, art critic Michael Fried understood that the uninflected minimalist box and its non-compositional seriality posed a serious threat to the category of art.1 He famously excoriated the work of artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris for its theatricality: in refusing pictorial composition, in refusing the meaningful relation of parts into a grammatically coherent whole, Fried argued that minimalist art became irrevocably literal and object-like. Minimalism also worried Clement Greenberg, who could only see it as fashionable boundary-pushing, as a pursuit of the “far-out” and “shocking” look of non-art for its own sake.2 More damning still, Greenberg likened minimalism to Good Design, referring to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1950s initiative to shape modern taste and promote its vision of modern living by exhibiting and merchandizing exemplars of midcentury design. For art to capitulate to the commodity form, Greenberg thought, meant a forfeiture of its autonomy, of the very separateness from mass culture on which its criticality was staked.3 When he then argued, “Minimal works are readable as art, as almost anything is today—including a door, a table, or a blank sheet of paper,” 4 he registered not only their ostensible status as non-art but also their perilous closeness to the sleek and functional kitsch barbarously pushed by MoMA. Whether or not we share in such paranoia, it would be difficult to argue that Greenberg’s and Fried’s fears were wholly unfounded, for it would not be long before Judd himself was making objects—chairs and tables, beds and shelves. He dabbled in such pursuits in his New York City loft in the 1960s. Upon relocating to Marfa, Texas, in the early 1970s, his DIY production of furniture increased, as he built a fully customized domestic world. And by the 1980s, he was overseeing the fabrication of metal furniture explicitly to be sold. Judd would always maintain that the two pursuits, art and furniture, had absolutely nothing to do with one another, that they could not be further apart, as if he understood the stakes all too well. “The furniture is furniture and is only art in that architecture, ceramics, textiles and many things are art,” he argued. “We try to keep the furniture out of art galleries to avoid this confusion, which is far from my thinking.” 5 Nevertheless

1. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood" (1967), in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 116–47. 2. Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture” (1967), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), 180–86. 3. In his excellent survey of minimalism, James Meyer analyzes in detail the connection of Greenberg’s “Recentness of Sculpture” to MoMA’s

Good Design program before exploring its ramifications for minimalism. Provocatively, Meyer reads Greenberg’s essay as a recapitulation of the early, political Greenberg of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” arguing that it revives the idea that art’s autonomy (vis-à-vis the commodity) is precisely what guarantees its criticality. James Meyer, “‘Recentness of Sculpture’: Minimalism and ‘Good Design,’” in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 211–21. For an

introduction to MoMA’s Good Design program, overseen by Edgar Kaufmann Jr. from 1949 to 1955, see Terence Riley and Edward Eigen, “Between the Museum and the Marketplace: Selling Good Design,” in The Museum of Modern Art at MidCentury: At Home and Abroad (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994). 4. Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 183. 5. Donald Judd, “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp” (1993), in A Good Chair Is a Good Chair, ed. Nigel Prince (Birmington,

UK: Ikon Gallery, 2011), 45. Originally published in Donald Judd Furniture: Retrospective (Rotterdam: Museum Boymansvan Beuningen, 1993). For an earlier iteration of Judd’s views on design and its connection to his art practice, see Donald Judd, “On Furniture” (1985), Complete Writings, 1975–1986 (Eindhoven, Netherlands: Van Abbemuseum, 1987), 107–9. Originally published in Donald Judd, Möbel: Furniture (Zürich: Arche, 1985).

Donald Judd, Corner Bench 6, designed in 1984. Painted aluminum in Black red/RAL 3007, 29 ½ × 39 ⅜ × 19 ¾ in. Donald Judd Furniture © Judd Foundation. Courtesy Galería Elvira González. Photo: Cuauhtli Gutiérrez.

Andrea Zittel, Parallel Planar Panel #3 (grey, black, off-white, pink), 2017. Powder-coated aluminum and steel and woven wool textile, 94 ⅛ × 59 ½ × 33 ¼ in. © Andrea Zittel. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Judd’s furniture did look uncannily like his sculpture: industrial, boxy, simple and pared down, geometrically precise, even proliferating in various permutations reminiscent of his serialized works.6 And in the end no discursive scaffolding could prevent minimalism’s lapsarian collapse into everyday life and commerce. By the 1990s, Calvin Klein’s flagship New York City store featured shelving and seating designed by Judd, while the boutique Miu Miu invented its own Juddian, sculpture-like units repurposed to display designer clothing.7 If Judd labored to preserve the boundary between art and non-art, if he made certain never to “confuse” his furniture with his sculpture, in Zittel’s Planar Configurations, such confusion is all we get. Short of full-blown minimalism, the artist revives elements of its formal, procedural, and material logic—its industrial components, its machined impersonality, its glossy finish, all installed, as Judd might have said, “one thing after another” 8 —in order to deliver sculpture that is also furniture, sculpture that explores the ramifications of minimalist objecthood in giving itself over to use. The two woven Parallel Planar Panels (2017), also installed in the main gallery, operate with a similar categorical indeterminacy: one hangs on the wall like a tapestry, its abstract design offering the Planar Configurations a matching ornamental accessory, if in the diverging aesthetic of pre-industrial handicraft; the other juts perpendicularly into the space, where it materializes as a fibrous, room-dividing partition. Judd once claimed that minimalist work was “neither painting nor sculpture,” but still it remained art.9 Here that logic is extended: neither painting nor sculpture nor ornament nor furniture nor architecture, and so on. And in really being none of these things at all, the Planar Configurations become in potentia all of them simultaneously. Such constitutes the distinct openness of Zittel’s Configurations, their excess and perpetual incompletion in the face of a beholder positioned not only as a potential consumer but also as an agent in deciding their categorical fate. Indeed, perhaps these positions are not so far apart in Zittel’s thinking. “Authorship starts with the person who designs it,” she has explained, “but then the owner or user creates another layer of authorship.” 10 Sure enough, catalogs of her work portray it in both the white-walled environs of the gallery and in the less pristine domestic interiors where it accumulates

6. I am not the first to make this observation. In the chapter cited above, James Meyer wrote, “Judd’s later practice unwittingly confirmed Greenberg’s judgment of minimalism as an art of fashionable Novelty and middlebrow Good Design.” (Meyer, “‘Recentness of Sculpture’: Minimalism and ‘Good Design,’” 221.) Alex Coles has also been an important commentator on the proximity of Judd’s identities as artist and designer. “Though they were eminently close in tone to the

sculptures he had been producing since the early-1960s,” Coles writes, “Judd endeavored to keep the two forms of his output distinct. So anxious was he about this divide and what it meant that he took great care to protect his double life. While hours were spent scheming away behind the scenes, Don the designer was rarely seen in public with Judd the artist because he foresaw that this could lead to all his output being exclusively contextualized within the design world.” Alex

Coles, “On Art’s Romance with Design,” Design Issues 21, no. 3 (2005), 19. 7. David Rimanelli, “The Judds,” Interior Design 67, no. 15 (1996). 8. Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), Complete Writings: 1959–1975, 184. 9. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 181. 10. Andrea Zittel, Andrea Zittel: Lay of My Land (New York: Prestel Verlag, 2011), 99. Many of Zittel’s works are not only optionally useable but

also customizable, even more explicitly endowing the owner with partial responsibilities of authorship. For example, Zittel has explained of customizable works such as A-Z Living Units (1993, 1994) and A-Z Escape Vehicles (1996): “By far the most interesting thing about them is what people do with them once they get them and what that reveals about them and what they value.” Arty Nelson, “Be Your Own Guinea Pig,” LA Weekly 29, no. 21 (April 13, 2007): 56–57.

these additional layers of authorship. Reproduced in both locales, we also find Zittel’s work regularly supplemented by the human figure—not in the conventional guise of contemplative beholder but instead (and not entirely unlike IKEA catalogs, perhaps) as surrogate owner and user. Zittel’s Carpet Furniture works of the early 1990s exemplify this shift: at first resembling decorative rugs, the addition of human proxies—who dine from table-sized squares or snooze on bed-sized rectangles—instructs us that their abstract designs can and should be used. Needless to say, precious few will have the opportunity to actually engage Zittel’s work in this way, to co- or re-author it. The Planar Configurations at Regen Projects may beckon, but they remain undeniably art-like in their scarcity, their price tag, their retreat from human contact. Still, to the extent that we long for them or even sustain a passing curiosity about them, the Configurations undergo a transformative declension by way of their props. Like relics of previous users or enticing lures for future ones, these props encourage us to experience the Planar Configurations in the subjunctive mood—what life with one might be like. Or as Zittel herself has put it, “I like cooking up scenarios for ways the world could exist.” 11 — In its forward-looking optimism and the expansiveness of its yearning, Zittel’s turn of phrase—“ways the world could exist”—has the unmistakable ring of utopianism. First coined in Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book of the same name, Utopia identified a fictional island whose rational governance and humanist values posited an egalitarian social alternative to the author’s native England. It was an ideal place (or so at first it seemed) that was also physically inaccessible, subsisting ultimately in the realm of thought and discourse. More’s very neologism captured this tension lexically: its prefix u- deriving from both the Greek eu (good) and ou (not), Utopia was a “good place” that was also “no place” at all.12 Insofar as utopia designates such an impossible wish-place borne of the real but transcendent of it, a future notyet and never-to-be realized, the term anticipates our own frustrated terms of engagement with Zittel’s works at Regen Projects. The Configurations may envision use-value, but they never really expend it. Those familiar with Zittel’s practice might shudder at my invocation of utopia, might find it something of a cruel joke in the context of a body of work that, for some, verges on the tyrannical and sadistic: a piece of fold-out furniture that consolidates the body’s input and output functions, to put it politely, into a single columnar device (A-Z Body Processing Unit, 1993); the prescribed use of minimal chamber pots for a year (A-Z Chamber Pots, 1993); the reduction of an entire wardrobe to a single garment to be worn daily (A-Z Uniforms, an ongoing project initiated in 1991). Yet remarkably,

11. Andrea Zittel and Allan McCollum, “Talking with Allan McCollum,” Andrea Zittel Diary #01 (Milan, Italy: Tema Celeste Editions, 2002), 120. 12. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 2001), 142, fn. 5. Utopia’s suspension between the good and the nonexistent, the real and the imaginary, is a larger motif of the book itself. More, for instance, writes himself into the memoir-like work. But, as many have pointed out, tales

of Utopia are delivered to his autobiographical proxy by a character called Raphael Hythloday, whose surname is derived from Hythlodaeus, “peddler of nonsense.”

Andrea Zittel, Planar Configuration Four [#1], 2017. Powder-coated steel and aluminum, cushion, blanket, pillow, 71⅝ × 66 × 134 in. © Andrea Zittel. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Andrea Zittel, Study for Planar Configuration #5, 2017. Wood and paint, 38 ½ × 26 × 5 ½ in. © Andrea Zittel. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

at stake in such works is freedom, for the crucial gambit in Zittel’s binding of daily routine by strict rules or perverse devices is that simplicity and austerity, voluntarily adopted, can be personally liberating. “What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom,” she has written, “but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves.” 13 Of A-Z Uniforms, for instance, Zittel explained, “Having a uniform would be much more liberating than having constant variety,” 14 a sentiment with which anyone who has ever panicked about what to wear will readily identify. Surely the wares on view at Regen Projects elicit a similar ambivalence. Are they inviting cubbies that facilitate naps and reading, loafing and leisure? Or unforgiving and confining cubicles breeding anti-sociality? The very same ambivalence underpins More’s imagined social alternative, too, whose enlightened populace tolerates some rather draconian policies indeed.15 Zittel’s Configurations may thus envision new and even alluring ways that our domestic world could exist, but, particularly given their uncompromising size and immobility, at what cost to our existing values, habits, and routines, to say nothing of our furnishings? Even before encountering the Planar Configurations and the woven Parallel Planar Panels, references to the utopian emerge rather forcefully in a trio of watercolor and gouache works on paper that hang in the gallery’s foyer. Titled Studies for Planar Panels (2017), these works unambiguously invoke Piet Mondrian and others associated with De Stijl in their gridded rectilinear compositions, their heavy black horizontals and verticals, their splotchy washes of off-white, gray, and time-worn red, yellow, and blue—“colour,” Mondrian once said, “in its most basic aspect.” 16 Mondrian’s aesthetic system, Neoplasticism, evolved out of an imperative to express the universal, to touch in pure and abstract terms nothing short of the absolute, as if he could distill the visible world to its irreducible, atomic components: horizontals and verticals, lines and planes, primary colors. He said that Neoplasticism was “the manifestation of the purely aesthetic idea”; it was “cosmic harmony”; it was “the style of the future.” 17 And it wouldn’t end with painting, either: characteristic of his utopianism, Mondrian aspired for Neoplasticism’s revelation of the universal to one day be integrated fully into life, as if it could remake a world devastated by the First World War according to principles that could truly be said to be international. Like a model or a roadmap leading to a world to come, Neoplasticism, Mondrian claimed, “shows clearly the universally valid laws on which the new reality is to be built.” 18 Of course, this internationalist utopia never came about. But we do have a sense of how such a synthesis

13. Zittel reiterates this sentiment throughout her interviews and writings. This particular articulation comes from a 2005 iteration of her ongoing list “These things I know for sure.” Paolo Morsiani and Trevor Smith, eds., Andrea Zittel: Critical Space (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005), 14. 14. Andrea Zittel, Beatriz Colomina, and Mark Wigley,

“A-Z Drive-Thru Conversation,” in Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, 54. 15. Such examples abound in More’s Utopia. Repeat adulterers, for instance, are mercilessly punished with death. We also learn that the island’s peace is premised on a violent colonialism: Utopia was not founded so much as it was conquered, its indigenous

population vanquished and its culture remade according to values deemed rational by its benevolent ruler. 16. Piet Mondrian, “Neoplasticism in Painting” (1917–18), in De Stijl: Extracts from the Magazine, ed. Hans K. C. Jaffé, trans. R. R. Symonds and Mary Whitall (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 55. 17. These quotes are all bor-

rowed from an extended series of essays on Neoplasticism published in De Stijl during its inaugural year. See Mondrian, “Neoplasticism in Painting,” 50, 52, 57. 18. Piet Mondrian, “The Realization of Neoplasticism in the Distant Future and in Architecture Today,” in De Stijl: Extracts from the Magazine, 167. Emphasis original.

of art and life would have looked: Gerrit Rietveld’s Red-Blue Chair (1918) and his Schröder House (1924), the redesign of Café Aubette (1926–28) overseen by Theo van Doesburg, even Mondrian’s Paris atelier of the late 1920s. Compositionally dynamic and holistic, as if the color and twodimensional planarity belonging to painting were suddenly concretized as walls and partitions, such projects are in retrospect strikingly conventional, too, at least in terms of how they imagined function. Amidst the excessive Neoplastic adornment engulfing his studio, for example, Mondrian still sat in an ordinary wicker chair, worked at an ordinary desk, and slept in an ordinary bed.19 Next to the Planar Configurations, however, Zittel’s Studies for Planar Panels also look like floor plans—as if the Planar Configurations could have been conjured directly from their Neoplastic geometries; as if Zittel’s showroomlike space, however improbably, might belong to the “new reality” Mondrian awaited. And yet unlike the furniture and environments associated with Neoplasticism and De Stijl, Zittel’s “new reality” is somewhat less straightforward in terms of how it ought to be used. Judd once wrote tautologically that “a good chair is a good chair.” 20 A chair is for sitting, in other words: you know one when you see one. Little wonder that he admired Rietveld’s Red-Blue Chair so much, with its articulated structure and functional clarity.21 But at Regen Projects, a good chair may of course also be a good sculpture, a good bed, a good—well, try it, the work advertises, and find out. This insistence that we try out the work is part of its provocation—even, or perhaps precisely, when we cannot. In the end, I am more interested in how the work reimagines modernism’s utopian strivings than whether it actually accomplishes them. — To the extent that the Configurations’ indeterminate use-value solicits some form of active engagement, be it theoretical or actual, it is telling to discover the specter of El Lissitzky in the show’s final side gallery, a space devoted to schematic works on paper and wooden reliefs that explicitly invoke the procedural and formal language of architecture. These six Studies for Planar Configurations (2016–17) correlate recognizably with the realized Planar Configurations in the manner we expect of preliminary architectural sketches—elevations, perspective drawings, renderings, and three-dimensional maquettes where spatial ideas are tried out before entering production. Their planes zooming out at us from a white void, the works on paper in particular bring to mind Lissitzky’s Prouns. Similarly schematic, architectural, and exact in rhetoric, the Prouns’ geometric forms are

19. For a first-hand account of Mondrian’s atelier, see Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian, Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1957), 158. While a discussion of Zittel’s domestic spaces unfortunately lies beyond the purview of the present essay, I should acknowledge here that she,

like Mondrian, lives with her work. Indeed, A-Z West, Zittel’s live-work compound in Joshua Tree, California, functions as a kind of perpetually transforming laboratory of art-into-life experimentation, where Zittel herself is often positioned as something of a test subject. In her words, “I’m sort of a sample

citizen of culture at large.” Zittel and McCollum, “Talking with Allan McCollum,” 118. 20. Judd, “It’s Hard to Find a Good Lamp,” 41. 21. Rietveld’s Red-Blue Chair was among the furniture that Judd collected, and it remains on view in his domestic spaces in Marfa, Texas.

Andre Kertesz, Studio of Piet Mondrian with Composition, 1926. ÂŠ Estate of Andre Kertesz/Higher Pictures.

unmoored and dynamic, subsisting pictorially without so much as a vanishing point. Moreover, this room’s palette has been decisively reduced, so that we are largely left with black, red, and white, as if in full compliance with Lissitzky’s call for “colour which is aimed at a direct physiological effect[:] the fullblooded red; the colour of hygiene and space—white; the black that blots out volume.” 22 Lissitzky’s agit-language bespeaks the utopian ambitions underlying his project. Deploying axonometric projection, where parallel planes never illusionistically converge as they do in perspective, Lissitzky came to understand his Prouns not as paintings of objects but as objects themselves, objects that, in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, possessed an expressly social function. “The artist is turning from an imitator into a constructor of the new world of objects,” he wrote. “Proun begins as a level surface, turns into a model of three-dimensional space, and goes on to construct all the objects of everyday life.” 23 What was three-dimensional and object-like about the Prouns was their very inscrutability. For in denying a vanishing point, Lissitzky’s axonometry also destroyed illusionistic space and eliminated any sense of the viewer’s stable point of view, replacing it with spatial ambiguity and dynamic planar forms that receded and projected simultaneously, compositions that refused to settle into any single orientation. Such was the crux of Lissitzky’s distinct brand of art-into-life utopianism: the promise that his Prouns would do away with a passive mode of contemplative viewing and activate a beholder now tasked with inspecting them from all sides like a map or diagram.24 This consumerturned-producer of knowledge, this agent in the work’s very becoming—this was the revolutionary subject of a Socialist future in which Lissitzky saw himself as having a role. Zittel, for her part, relinquishes the axonometric projection. The spaces described in her three watercolor and gouache studies hardly produce the same kind of spatial ambiguity; her zooming planes are grounded (if only just) by a vanishing point. And if architectural models, like maps or diagrams, are ordinarily seen horizontally, encouraging us to approach them from all sides as objects, Zittel has tilted hers up into the vertical axis, as if reasserting the fixed and undeniably pictorial orientation that Lissitzky sought to destroy. By virtue of that verticality, however, Zittel’s wooden models newly erupt into objecthood of another kind, accumulating a new life, possibly as quirky shelving for knick-knacks and tchotchkes.25 And while Zittel’s paper studies anchor their beholder with a vanishing point,

22. El Lissitzky, “Element and Invention” (1924), in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 350. 23. El Lissitzky, “PROUN: Not World Visions, BUT—World Reality” (1920/1923), in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 347, 348. 24. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois famously characterized

this key operation of Lissitzky’s Prouns as “radical reversibility,” arguing that the device was Brechtian, aimed at facilitating active spectatorship and destroying illustionistic space and the passive viewing it encourages: “In his Prouns,” Bois writes, “Lissitzky wanted to invent a space in which orientation is deliberately abolished: the viewer should no longer have a base of operations, but must be

made continually to choose the coordinates of his or her visual field, which thereby become variable.” Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 161–80. 25. Earlier Zittel works, for example her Aggregated Stacks (2010), enacted precisely such a sculpture-shelving split.

El Lissitzky, Proun, 1923. Gouache, ink, and graphite on tan wove paper, 14 ⅛ × 10 13⁄16 in. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, The Fredric Wertham Collection, Gift of his wife Hesketh, 1987.61. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

the hulking metal Planar Configurations conjured from them float free of functional determination, loosing themselves from the imperative mood that dominates Judd’s or Rietveld’s chairs, objects whose use-value is dictated more than discovered. No ordinary furniture, to live in or with or upon Zittel’s planes is to continually learn how. — The kind of art-into-life utopianism I have attributed to Mondrian and Lissitzky has always endeared modernism to Zittel. “It was the last era of great faith,” she has said. “People still really believed.” 26 An incurable believer myself, I want to see Zittel as reanimating their hopeful convictions and embracing minimalism’s design-y objecthood, so repressed by Judd and reviled by Fried and Greenberg, as a strategy for reimagining the earlier avant-garde moment. For the early Greenberg, modern art’s increasingly formal concern as it turned in upon itself was what secured its autonomy from hegemonic culture: unlike commercial kitsch, which only served ruling class ideology, avant-garde abstraction, he believed, was critically independent. Zittel returns to exemplars of such autonomous form (recall Mondrian’s pursuit of the universal) but as literal blueprint for an object-world that, once scaled to the human body, emerges as functionally autonomous, too. If ordinary furniture can, like kitsch, be said to reify cultural values as it dumbly services predefined needs and cultural convention, Zittel’s functionally weird Planar Configurations constitute a defamiliarized material culture that stages Lissitzky-like confrontations with its users. And they do this, finally, according to Judd’s unwitting model—art lapsed into the commodity—as if it were not painting or sculpture that might somehow transform life but a category of thing that knowingly appeals to consumer desire, that wants not only to be owned and installed in one’s life but also contended with through use.27 Alas, if Zittel’s commodity-like works are commodities, it is only in the sense that all art objects are: they are not for us, in the end; we will not be the beneficiaries of their activating ambiguity. If anything, the Planar Configurations are closer in status to the prototype, itself a recurring motif in Zittel’s oeuvre. For what is a prototype if not an object instantiated here and now in order to have a future, artisanal and one-of-a-kind in order to be mass-produced, tested privately in order to have a public? Suspended, like More’s Utopia, between our present and an imagined alternative, the work’s use-value remains perpetually deferred, finally belonging to its discursive content more so than its actuality.

26. Zittel and McCollum, “Talking with Allan McCollum,” 119. 27. The strategic adoption of the commodity form as a vehicle for disseminating politicized avant-gardism to a mass audience was, in the post-revolutionary Soviet context, a Productivist strategy

par excellence. In aspiring to destroy art and enter production, artists like Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Vladimir Tatlin created “comradely objects” that desired not to serve their owner-users passively but rather to collaborate with them actively. Christina

Kiaer’s book on the coats, stoves, textiles, and product packaging that these figures designed is an indispensable resource here. Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Perhaps Zittel is not herself a “believer” then, so much as her work reflects upon utopian strivings of the last century, conceiving an alternative trajectory by which abstract form might have entered life. To that end, the show ultimately strikes a poignant note. The folded, day-old newspapers, the Platonic ordinariness of the beds, the sober cushions—it seems that the only way to exist in this unfamiliar and functionally ambiguous object-world borne directly of abstract form is to force it into recognizability by accessorizing it with the ho-hum accoutrements of a world we already know. Of the attempt to realize utopian dreams, Theodor Adorno once said, “The fulfillment of the wishes takes something away from the substance of the wishes…. One could say in general that the fulfillment of utopia consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same ‘today.’” 28 How easy it is indeed for these things to be made familiar once again. Zach Rottman is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

28. Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1, 2.

Glenn Harcourt

How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney

Cultura Wars

MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood, and the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University, Los Angeles September 9, 2017– January 14, 2018

He’s Coming to Trademark Your Cultura Like, I suspect, just about every American child in my generation who grew up with access to a television, I came of age with Walt Disney, and the fictive Disney world came as near as possible to being “naturalized” as part of my own cultural experience. I never thought of the wonderful world of Disney as an instrument of an insidious cultural imperialism yoked to a neo-colonialist American foreign policy or as a graphic exemplar of capitalism’s necessary self-replication and its systematic attempts to co-opt and eviscerate an urban proletariat capable of confronting it with a socialist alternative. In the early 1970s, I visited the Magic Kingdom of Disneyland for the first time. During that same period, Salvador Allende’s short-lived Popular Unity government provided a brief but shining example of just such a revolutionary alternative. At the same time, the world Uncle Walt conjured into being starting in the late 1920s had become an increasingly central aspect of a much more global engagement with the endlessly expansive universe of American popular culture. I was thus primed for the experience of Jesse Lerner and Rubén Ortiz-Torres’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA exhibition How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney, which arrived in Los Angeles just in time to serve as a background gloss for Disney’s latest “Latin American adventure,” the Dayof-the-Dead-themed animated feature Coco (2017). The exhibition, which sprawled across two venues—the MAK Center at the Schindler House and the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at California State University, Los Angeles—was diffuse and to a certain extent disarticulated. Both the layout of the exhibition and the lack of a clear didactic support structure (such as wall labels) provided numerous interpretive puzzles for someone not privy to the expansive context provided by the essays in the accompanying exhibition catalog. In fairness, Disney’s absolute refusal to cooperate through the lending of archival and other materials clearly had a negative impact on the exhibition, placing Lerner and Ortiz-Torres in an almost untenable position, and it also impinged on the visual effectiveness 92

of the catalog. Though not entirely successful, I commend Lerner and Ortiz-Torres for undertaking to present a rich and very complex artistic, political, and ideological picture. One thing the exhibition makes absolutely clear is the facility with which Latin American artists working over the past several decades have seized an ever-expanding array of appropriative and other identifiably postmodern visual strategies (most importantly, perhaps, ironic inversion and re-contextualization) to repurpose the dominant culture to their own critical, revolutionary, and (increasingly) commercial ends, even as the digital revolution has driven an inexorable globalization of an increasingly heterogeneous cultural landscape. To take one apparently straightforward example: Lalo Alcaraz’s marker on paper panel Migra Mouse (border patrol Mickey) (1994), where a jauntily posed Mickey practically fills the whole frame of what might almost be an old-fashioned Disney comic book.1 With twinkling eyes, trademark smile, and white-gloved hand on hip, Mickey (dressed à la Disney as a US Immigration and Naturalization Service agent) directs an assumed crowd of unseen migrantes toward a path marked “Mexico,” as if to say: “Hey, kids, the border is a door that only works in one direction.” It is resolutely closed to migrantes heading north, but swings easily the other way to facilitate the flow of all things Disney to the south. And, mirabile dictu, it is Disney “himself” (or at least his corporate avatar) who controls the operating mechanism. At the time that Migra Mickey was originally produced, its ironic meaning was pretty straightforward; but the subsequent history of Alcaraz and Disney provides the image with an interesting and complicating subtext. When Disney was in the preliminary stages of preparations for Coco, the corporation, always alive to the maximization of merchandising possibilities, attempted to trademark the phrase “Day of the Dead.” The strategy backfired badly, in a controversy fueled least in part by Alcaraz’s sharply critical poster for the imaginary Disney film Muerto Mouse: It’s Coming to Trademark Your Cultura. In an interesting twist Pixar, the Disney subsidiary producing Coco, hired Alcaraz to serve as a kind of cultural sensitivity advisor on the film. Among the most iconic of all Disney themes is the princess in peril, saved from a terrible fate at the last moment by her dashing and handsome Prince Charming. To be fair, the idea of a “prince charming” (which must have roots as far back as medieval tales of chivalric love) is hardly Disney’s own invention. But the precise term does not originally appear in the canonical fairy tales with which Disney has made it forever associated (“Snow

1. It could never actually be mistaken for such a cover since it lacks the ubiquitous identifier of “Disney” or “Walt Disney.” Disney always claims its characters as unambiguously its own. This panel also served as the cover art for Alcaraz’s collection of cartoons (many of which originally ran

in the LA Weekly). Lalo Alcaraz, Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons on Immigration (New York: EDV Books, 2004). Alcaraz broke historic ground when his strip La Cucaracha became America’s “first [nationally] syndicated Latino and politically themed daily comic strip.” Gustavo “Gus” Arriola’s (d. 2008) long-running

Gordo (which I can remember fondly reading as a kid) was much praised for its introduction of Mexican culture to ignorant gringos (like me), but it can hardly be called political, and some activists might say today that it was “part of the problem.” For Alcaraz and Arriola’s own reflections on their relationship,

see Mandalit del Barco’s profile of Alcaraz, “‘La Cucaracha’ Goes Nationwide: Politically Charged Latino Comic Strip Gains Wider Audience,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, January 1, 2003, https:// www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=882141.

How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney, installation view, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, California State University, Los Angeles, September 9, 2017–January 14, 2018. Courtesy of MAK Center. Photo: Michael Underwood.

White” and “Sleeping Beauty,” for example). The theme of the imperiled princess and her heroic prince, which stretches from the animated Snow White (1937, still arguably the greatest Disney animation) to the live-action Cinderella (2015, starring Lily James), has virtually sparked a culture war all on its own. The feminist critique of the princess ideal should be so obvious as to need no recapitulation, likewise the status of the classic Disney princesses as icons of white European perfection. In How to Read El Pato Pascual, José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros’s vividly colored canvas Black Dove (2014) neatly inverts the flow of cultural power, literally under the sign of el corazón (the heart pierced by the deadly arrow of love). In the painting, Frida Kahlo, herself a cultural paragon of considerable standing, drinks a trio of iconic Disney princesses (Snow White, Belle of Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella) under the proverbial table. The irony here is especially sharp since it has a political dimension. Although both Kahlo and her longtime partner Diego Rivera were staunch leftists and champions of indigenous Mexican culture, Rivera was also much taken with Disney animation. In 1931, probably under the influence of the Russian Revolutionary director Sergei Eisenstein, Rivera opined that, after the success of world revolution had swept away the need for a genuinely revolutionary art (presumably including his own heroic murals), “the aesthetics of that day will find that MICKEY MOUSE was one of the genuine heroes of American Art in the first half of the 20th century.” 2 As it happens, of course, world revolution has yet to take place, and Rivera’s embrace of “the [ubiquitous] Mouse,” both as a cartoon character and as a cultural icon, has been bitterly vilified, while the work of his wife, Frida Kahlo, has attained venerated status. Kahlo herself has come to be revered as a disabled woman speaking on behalf of La Raza, feminism, anti-colonialism, liberation politics, emancipatory art, and a general “queering” of normative or canonical culture.

Para Leer al Pato Donald At least in a theoretical sense, ground zero of Lerner and Ortiz-Torres’s undertaking is the republication within the exhibition catalog of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s short book, Para Leer al Pato Donald. Originally published in Chile in 1971, the book was reprinted in 1973 in a superb English translation by UCLA’s David Kunzle as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Dogma in the Disney Comic. Both versions were long suppressed and/or out of print.3 In and of itself, this republication of Kunzle’s translation, which appears along with some further authorial reflections by Ariel Dorfman and a brilliant introduction written by Kunzle in 1991, is worth the price of the catalog. It is a major piece of detailed and carefully 2. Diego Rivera, quoted in Jesse Lerner, “Of Mice and Men, Women and Ducks,” in Jesse Lerner and Rubén Ortiz-Torres, How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney (London:

black dog publishing, 2017) 40. All caps in the original. 3. For a sketch of the publishing history of Para Leer al Pato Donald, see Lerner and OrtizTorres, How to Read El Pato Pascual, 192. The introduc-

tion by David Kunzle (Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 194–207) provides essential background information on the ins-and-outs of Disney’s comic-book publication and also an essential supplement to Dorfman and

Mattelart’s argument. Indeed, it is a most valuable piece of historical criticism in its own right, and can usefully inform reflection on any aspect of the How to Read El Pato Pascual exhibition.

José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, Black Dove, 2014. Oil on canvas board, 16 × 20 in. © José Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros. Courtesy of Karen Hernandez and Brian Hill.

Enrique Chagoya, The Governor’s Nightmare, 1994. Acrylic and water-based oil on Amate paper, 48 × 72 in. Courtesy of MAK Center.

articulated Marxist criticism of popular culture, published in the midst of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary upheaval. It belongs in your library. Both Dorfman and Mattelart developed their critique while working to seize and remold the means of cultural production (“the words with which we were speaking reality, the dreams with which we were dreaming reality”) from within the revolutionary Chilean regime.4 Thus, their text can usefully be seen in relation to other, and earlier, Marxist evaluations of Disney, which often derive from a theoretical rather than a practical position.5 Walter Benjamin, for example, was much taken with Disney’s early freewheeling “Steamboat Willy” style of animation, which he saw as anarchic and emancipatory: the work is simple (but not simplistic), direct, and a transparent celebration of an emergent mass technology. This seems also to have been the case with Sergei Eisenstein, who brought Disney’s animated short “Three Little Pigs” (1933) to the first post-Revolutionary film festival, but whose unfinished theoretical writings on Disney remained uncollected and unpublished in English until the late 1980s.6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (Marxist philosophers and critics, and founding figures of the so-called Frankfurt School of cultural studies), writing rather later during the elaboration of the “classic” style of Disney animation and after the entire Disney enterprise had become a full-fledged addition to “the culture industry,” saw the animated shorts and features as exemplary of Enlightenment’s tendency (per their Dialectic of Enlightenment) toward the “mass deception” that marked their function as strictly ideological. Although Dorfman and Mattelart’s argument is motivated by the prevalence of Disney-themed comics in the Chilean children’s literature market of the early 1970s, it is hardly a simple rant against the strong-arm marketing tactics that flooded the world with Mouse and Duck merchandise.7 Nor is their argument primarily a critique of the racial and ethnic stereotyping that has been an ongoing problem for Disney—and American popular culture as a whole. This latter line of criticism is pursued by Darlene J. Sadlier in her meticulous essay in the exhibition catalog, which also describes a long entanglement between Disney’s entertainment enterprise and American foreign policy. This collaboration stretches from Disney’s work as a propagandist during World War II through the government’s implementation of the hemispheric postwar “good neighbor” policy, in which the studio actively colluded. While Mickey and Donald were definitely anti-fascists (and in fact, despised by

4. Dorfman served as a cultural advisor to President Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973; Mattelart was a professor at the University of Chile and head of mass communications at Chile’s Empresa Editora Nacional Quimantú. 5. Their work thus has a sense of fine-grained concreteness often lacking in works of “high theory.”

6. Eisenstein’s fragmentary material is now available in a number of editions. Although his comparative material is drawn from a diverse collection of sources, he seems to have seen Disney’s anthropomorphic animals as connected in some way to the deep totemic roots of human ritual consciousness, and to have explained their appearance within the

technologically advanced culture of the United States as a “natural [emancipatory] reaction” against the standardized logic of industrial capitalism. Sergei Eisenstein, quoted in Lerner, “Of Mice and Men, Women and Ducks,” in Lerner and OrtizTorres, 39. 7. In 1970, Disney published and distributed, or licensed the publication and distribution

of, comics in more than 30 languages and in 100 countries. Dorfman and Mattelart, “How to Read Donald Duck” in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 211. Compare the 1962 statistical breakdown given by Kunzle in his “Introduction,” in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 197, n.5. In either case, the numbers are staggering.

the Nazis) during World War II,8 their cultural politics veered rightward as the Cold War unfolded. And while they worked to implement American foreign policy, their animation and live-action efforts promulgated exactly the stereotypical and neo-colonial vision of Latin America that eventually made that policy so ineffective.9 In Para Leer al Pato Donald, by contrast, Dorfman and Mattelart attempt to show how the relations of production characteristic of globalized industrial and financial capitalism (personified by the almost impossibly wealthy Disney character Scrooge McDuck) are reproduced in the Duckburg tales, from, inter alia, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories (an ongoing series that has been published since 1940). Indeed, the authors attempt to lay out exactly how those relations function to structure everything we see and read. In an interesting crypto-Freudian twist, Dorfman and Mattelart’s analysis of this structure includes even the curiously asexual genealogical connections characteristic of nearly all the characters. Donald and Daisy, as well as the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie (not to mention Mickey and Minnie, the villainous Beagle Boys, etc.) live in a world of eternal courtship never consummated in marriage and/or procreative sex, where (with a single paramount exception) there are only uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces, and sets of brothers and sets of sisters. In a complex and provocative argument, Dorfman and Mattelart lay out a “dialectic of paternal power” in a world literally bereft of fathers and mothers.10 But the authors subject not just the bizarre particulars of Duckburg family life to scrutiny and critique. Plot, characterization, political and human geography, the replacement of “labor” with “adventure,” the effacement of any trace of the means or processes of production, the absolute fetishization of money as gold: all of these and more are dissected under the Marxist lens of Dorfman and Mattelart’s microscope. They note, for example, that Donald Duck is always both dead broke and well supplied with money (as the story’s circumstances demand), and never has a “productive” job of any sort. When he works at all, it is mostly as a low-paid gofer for his Uncle Scrooge McDuck. More frequently, he and his nephews are off on adventures to places like “Faroffistan” and “Outer Congolia” where, at their uncle’s behest, their mission usually involves obtaining some relic or artifact, the value of which almost without exception derives from the fact that it is made of gold, Scrooge’s “gold standard” for measuring value.11 There is never a factory, nor any other actually “productive” enterprise to be seen in Duckburg. As if by magic (or by Communism!), characters just seem to have whatever it is that they need. Dorfman and Mattelart’s extraordinarily close and careful Marxist reading of one hundred of Disney’s hugely popular Duckburg comics is contextualized with respect to a very specific time and place: revolutionary Chile—a “fat little [interpretive] worm” or a “tasty

8. Perhaps the most wellknown of Disney’s anti-Nazi propaganda efforts is the terrifying Donald Duck short, “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (1943). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bn20oXFrxxg. 9. Darlene J. Sadlier, “The

Good Neighbor Films of Walt Disney,” in Lerner and OrtizTorres, 22–35. 10. See Dorfman and Mattelart, “How to Read Donald Duck,” in Lerner and OrtizTorres, 217. As the authors note, the single anomalous instance

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involves the father-son team of Big Bad Wolf and Li’l Bad Wolf. 11. One notable exception is the Zero Diamond, the driver behind the canonical Duck Tales Vietnam story.

[hermeneutic] morsel,” as the wicked vultures Marx and Hegel exclaim in an exciting sequence found in one of the illustrations to the original English edition of How to Read Donald Duck that is reprinted in the catalog.12 Dorfman and Mattelart’s analysis can be mobilized to serve a number of complementary functions. It can serve as a template for the analysis of other examples of pop-cultural production. It also can provide a historical pivot around which to organize a more expansive look at both Disney’s well-nigh universally hegemonic cultural machinery and the response of Marxist artists and cultural critics to that machinery, especially as regards the technical and ideological evolution of animation. Brilliantly incisive as Dorfman and Mattelart’s dissection of the Duck Tales stories is, it does not account for the complex case of the series’ author, Carl Barks (1901–2000). Barks was one of the most eccentric creators in the stable of talent at Disney, at least while Walt Disney was still alive.13 As was the case with another of America’s greatest twentieth-century cartoonists, Walt Kelly (the creator of Pogo Possum and the other animal denizens of the Okefenokee Swamp), Barks honed the skills essential to his later career at Disney’s animation studio in Burbank. He survived the divisive strike of animators and “in-betweeners” 14 that roiled the studio in 1941 (and served to reinforce Disney’s own right-wing political views).15 In the wake of the labor unrest, he left Disney, only to come back later to work off the studio lot as a comic book writer and illustrator, creating the notoriously predatory capitalist Scrooge McDuck and (eventually) the entire Duckburg saga.16 Despite Barks’s own conservative politics and cultural preferences, the humor in his Duckburg stories often seems to undercut those same values, social and cultural institutions, and hidden modes and processes of production that Dorfman and Mattelart argue they embody. They fairly reek of satire and thus function simultaneously as affirmation and critique.17 As invoked by the republication of Para Leer al Pato Donald in the exhibition catalog, the Barks conundrum is essentially an historical one. However, much of the art in the exhibition serves not simply to illustrate history, at least not straightforwardly, but rather to illuminate Ariel Dorfman’s one 12. Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 207. 13. Barks first went to work at the Disney Animation Studio in 1935. 14. An “in-betweener” is a junior animator who fills in the space in between the beginning and the end of a significant action. An animator produces two frames of a character, for example, swinging a baseball bat: the moment when the character starts the swing and the moment when bat impacts ball. The “in-betweener” is then responsible for taking the character through all the frames that connect these two moments.

15. Working conditions at Disney have been repeatedly criticized across the decades, indeed are still criticized today. (For an overview of the last 20 years, see Philip Mattera, “Walt Disney: Corporate Rap Sheet,” Corporate Research Project, www.corp-research.org/disney). Uncle Walt himself seems to have been more of a malignant Uncle Scrooge than a benignly incompetent Uncle Donald. In 1941, Barks, an employee of the story department, “wasn’t affected” (his words) by the strike, which directly concerned employees in the animation department. Barks has described

the 1941 strikers as “shirkers and complainers,” and his later work generally reflects his antiunion sentiments. Whatever else he may have been, he was a confirmed “loner,” uninterested in unions or in solidarity with his fellow workers. Thomas Andrae, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006), 211–12. 16. Andrae’s book provides the standard [fan] biography, as well as a brilliant (if contested) analysis of the social context and cultural importance of Barks’s work.

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17. On the problem of Karl Barks, see Kunzle, “Introduction,” in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 200–201. The undercurrent of pasquinade is something to which I can also testify on the basis of my own reading of one of the volumes of Barks’s collected works. Barks’s Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: “Terror of the Beagle Boys” includes, among other treats, the hilarious Cold War parody “Dangerous Disguise” (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books, 2016), 11–38.

Above: Meyer Vaisman, Untitled, 1981. Embroidery and paint on reproduction of French antique tapestry, 55 × 67 in. Courtesy of MAK Center. Previous spread: How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney, installation view, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood, September 9, 2017–January 14, 2018. Courtesy of MAK Center. Photo: Joshua White Photography.

explicitly expressed regret in reconsidering the meaning and importance of his critique of El Pato Donald: “I think I exaggerated how much it [the Disney cultural juggernaut] conquered Chile… [Para Leer al Pato Donald ] doesn’t give enough credit to the capacity of the people to reinvent Donald Duck for themselves.” 18

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Revisionist History When Dorfman and Mattelart were writing, the Disney Empire may have seemed insurmountably imposing. Now that Disney has acquired Pixar Animation (at one time a serious rival spun off from Lucasfilm Ltd. and funded by Apple), as well as Lucasfilm itself and most recently (if all goes in their favor) the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, it surely has morphed into an entertainment Leviathan of almost incomprehensible power and reach. Relentless and insidious, Disney’s cultural hegemony spreads outward across an ever-expanding terrain, even as it seeps into the ground of history, adumbrating its eventual triumph. In How to Read el Pato Pascual, Meyer Vaisman’s alterations in paint and embroidery to a reproduction of a French Renaissance tapestry (Untitled, 1981), exemplify the corporation’s march across the globe. A “well-armed” Mickey and friends stride and crawl bravely alongside an anonymous military company comprising a mounted swordsman, a harquebusier, and a standard bearer. The work is large, roughly five by six feet, and rather imposing. But the figures in the original tapestry are awkwardly conceived and the setting, except for some lovely foreground flowers, is minimal and difficult to interpret. Thus, the inserted figures (especially Mickey brandishing his umbrella) are curiously more naturalistic and (as projections onto the screen of the tapestry) appear more alive than the depictions of the humans whose world they have infiltrated. It is as if contemporary animated culture has shown itself superior to the handcrafted culture of the past. It is certainly more familiar. In several other works on view, a ghostly army of sinister Disney specters infiltrates the nineteenth century, spreading like a transmogrifying virus through scenes “commemorating” key events from America’s War with Mexico (1846–48), a war that itself defines a deeply contested historical moment in America’s Manifest(ly) (imperialist) Destiny. Works by Demián Flores, for example The Storming of Chapultepec or The Capture of Monterrey (2011), render the Disney presence especially malignant and frightening. Each of the five works by Flores (which I assume constitute a series) illustrated in the catalog is described as “intervened Facsimile, collage, gouache, and watercolor.” The artist has inserted collaged figures retouched with gouache and watercolor, which sometimes loom over the battle fields and sometimes insinuate themselves into the heart of the action. These interventions are not precisely subtle, but they are so well integrated into the original “facsimiles” that the results are chillingly effective.19 18. Dorfman, “Reflections,” in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 287. 19. For a typical Disney commentary on the same war from which these images are drawn, see https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=AuI2gmbBR80, which features the climax of Disney’s television “hymn” to the “heroic defense” of the Alamo by Davy Crockett, and the rest of his doomed band of dissatisfied

Yankee rebels. This episode of Disney’s long-running (54 years) and protean television series first aired on February 23, 1955, and was aired five more times until its final bow

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in 1984. I almost certainly saw the episode (which I remember quite vividly) on September 22, 1963.

Almost equally unsettling are two of Enrique Chagoya’s insertions of Disney characters into copies of Francisco Goya’s notoriously dark print series Los Caprichos (1797–98) and Los Disastres de la Guerra (Disasters of war, 1810–20). In Liberty (2006), from the Los Caprichos series, the lovable yet aptly named Dopey, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), vacuously regards the body of a man hanged from a branch on a war-shattered tree. In Homage to Goya, Disaster of War #9 (1983–90), from Disastres de la Guerra, Mickey is an interior observer in a refiguration of Goya’s famous Grande hazaña! Con muertos! (A great feat! With dead men!). Here, the mouse cheerfully urges us to regard three naked corpses, all castrated and bound up to a similar stump, one having suffered the added indignity of decapitation and further mutilation. This association between Disney and violence, both personal and institutional, continues in Augustin Sabella’s Disneylandia (2010). Painted on an album cover, the word Disneyland, in the corporation’s characteristic script in vibrating red and blue, dominates the top third of the image. Below, an enormous, gun-toting Mickey presides over Cali, Colombia, home of one of Latin America’s most notorious drug cartels. In Mickey (2003), Dr. Lakra transforms a found Mickey Mouse toy into a tattooed, gun-toting gangster caught with his pants literally down. “Dr. Lakra” is the pseudonym of a Oaxacan tattoo artist who applies his stylus to a wide variety of mediums in addition to human skin. Here, the artist inks images and words that evoke the barrio and its seemingly omnipresent street gangs. The bandana wound around Mickey’s head and the grossly out-of-scale toy pistol complete the picture of innocence corrupted and pledged to the twin divinities of sex and death: Live Fast, Die Young! Robert Yager’s searing black-and-white photograph Crack-Cocaine and Cash (1994) shows an infant sleeping alongside a plush Mickey and other toys on a bed surrounded by bullets, guns, and the cash and drugs referred to in the title.20 The photograph provides a dark commentary on the complex cultural entanglement of Disney and Latin America. Crack-Cocaine and Cash is accompanied in the exhibition by Toon Town (1993), which shows a tight crowd of children and their apparent gangster fathers, one of whom brandishes a sinister-looking blade, clustered around Roger Rabbit at Disneyland. Both works take us inside the world of Los Angeles street gangs that Yager chronicled in his award-winning photo-essay Playboys.21 Beyond the poignancy embedded in the juxtaposition of childhood innocence with a culture saturated with drugs and violence, we can see the image of an endless circulation of drugs, cash, violence, vast cartels, local street gangs, even individual gangsters across the border so assiduously (yet apparently fruitlessly) guarded by Border Patrol Mickey. And if Disney culture—legal and superficially benign yet insidiously corrosive—is one of the United States’ main exports to Mexico and other Latin American countries, another of those exports—this one illicit and explicitly deadly—is guns.22 20. The stuffed Mickey’s eyes are averted upward in an ambiguous expression that could be read to say: “Here we go again.” 21. For Yager, see his website:

http://www.photoloco.com/ Robert_Yager/Robert_Yager. html. 22. For a recent report on this problem, Chelsea Parson, “American Guns Abroad,” Los

Angeles Times, February 6, 2018, A9, http://www. latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/ la-oe-parsons-us-guns-abroad20180206-story.html.

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Demián Flores, Battle of Molino de Ret, 2011. Intervened Facsimile, collage, gouache and watercolor, 17 ¾ × 23 ¾ in. © Demián Flores.

Dr. Lakra, Mickey, 2003. Found toy and mixed media, 10 ¾ × 3 ¼ × 2 in. © Dr. Lakra. Courtesy of Vanessa Bransen.

El Pato Pascual and the Republic of Children Because the exhibition is so expansive in its scope, it is simply not possible to address all the relevant issues, or even all the most important themes, in the space allotted here. For example, the exhibition devotes a section to documenting the amazing (and to me quite new) story of Argentina’s counter-Disneyland, La Rebublica de los Niños (The Republic of Children). An apparent ideological reversal of the idea behind Disneyland—which sought to create a homogenous “magic kingdom” completely shut off from the outside world—the theme park in Buenos Aires was conceived “during Juan Domingo Perón’s presidency and the glorification of his wife Evita” as “a public recreation and civic education center for the children of working families.” 23 Like Disneyland, the Republic of Children is dominated by a fairy-tale castle, but the latter predates Disney’s original Anaheim theme park by several years. Daniel Santoro’s Winter at the Republic of Children (2012), was evidently conceived as a commemoration of the death of Eva Perón. The painting, in oil and acrylic, provides a stark testimony to a fairy-tale ideology plunged into an endless winter by the death of the princess. I am reminded of the eternal winter of C. S. Lewis’s children’s book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), although the two white-clad children with black mourning bands resonate as a doomed Hansel and Gretel just entering the witch’s woods. Yet perhaps the princess is not in fact dead, as Santoro suggests in his amazing recapitulation of “Sleeping Beauty,” Eva Perón Conceives The Republic of Children (2002), which also suggests the display of the body of the dead Lenin, as well as evoking the architectural framework of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Another thread in the exhibition concerns the ongoing dispute behind the character El Pato Pascual—a corporate logo bearing an uncanny resemblance to a certain Duckburg resident. This story involves Disney’s relentless legal maneuvers aimed at promoting its own intellectual property rights (suing for violations of copyright or trademark) despite the fact that the company involved, the iconic Mexican soft-drink and juice manufacturer Refrescos Pascual (sometimes also referred to as Pascual Boing after the name of its most popular brand), had originally appropriated Donald via a valid licensing agreement in the 1940s. At the same time that the Refrescos Pascual corporation was embroiled with Disney over the licensing issue, its ongoing dispute with workers over low wages, denial of overtime in violation of Mexican labor law, and attitude of paternalism, among other factors, led to a strike in May 1982 that dragged on for three years. Eventually, the owner filed for bankruptcy and the workers formed a collective that took over management and production. This long and bitter dispute is chronicled in the exhibition in Carlos Mendoza’s Super-8 activist video, Pascual, la Guerra del pato (Pascual, The War of the Duck, 1986).24 Although in the

23. Fabián Cereijido, “The Republic and the Kingdom,” in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 82. 24. See Lerner, “Of Mice and Men, Women and Ducks,” in

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Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 45–47, for a summary of the history and the later redesign of the logo.

present context the 1982 Pascual strike might recall the divisive animators’ strike against the Disney studio, in 1941, the outcome was completely different. As described at the time by the Marxist journalist Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez, the triumph of the proletariat at Pascual rendered their whole enterprise “intolerable for a parasitic bourgeoisie, unacceptable for a parasitic bureaucracy, and unforgivable for a parasitic sectarianism.” 25 Yet, as the artworks in the How to Read El Pato Pascual exhibition demonstrate on numerous occasions, the doctrinaire Marxism deployed by writers such as Dorfman and Mattelart has been abandoned by cultural producers today, who favor a much more free-wheeling postmodernism. In the case of the Pascual cooperative, the logo character has been redesigned in an explicitly hip-hop vein as Pato Cholo (Cholo Duck).26 In a commercial on view in the exhibition, Cholo Duck seems quite at ease dancing Gangnam style in front of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, with two heavily made-up young women in tight mini-skirts. Lerner maintains that Eisenstein would have been proud. I’m not so sure.27

Disney in Deep Time I would like to end with what seems to me one of the triumphs of the show: Nadín Ospina’s faux artifactual evocations of a lost Disney civilization. For example, her Hallowed Siamese Twins (2001), a delicate sculpture of goldplated silver, might almost rival the work of the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas, although the mythology of the twins’ smiling Mickey Mouse heads will not be covered in any handbook of Mesoamerican art or culture. Enrique Chagoya’s The Governor’s Nightmare (1994) similarly summons up an imaginary pre-1492 Mesoamerican world. Chagoya’s painting on paper brilliantly conjures that world via a faux post-conquest codex that illustrates a bloody cannibalistic sacrifice in which Mickey himself is trussed up as a treat for a horrific deity who sits quite literally on a throne of blood: the conquered “natives” recall their own indigenous history as a quasimythical ritual offering up of the remains of their massacred conquerors.28 In contrast, Ospina reverses that entire history and sinks Mickey and friends into deep Mesoamerican time, where, no longer signifiers of conquest, they might resonate more easily with Jung’s theory of archetypes or Sergei Eisenstein’s notions regarding the deep totemic roots of Disney’s anthropomorphic animals than with the idols of cultural imperialism and globalized corporate capitalism.29 In essence, Ospina’s (re)constructed civilization depends on an actual artifact: a zoomorphic ceramic pot that evokes the shape of a duck and can be dated c. 300–700 C.E.30 It might 25. Ibid., 46. 26. Ibid., 47. Needless to say, the word “cholo” has multiple connotations, some of them negative. 27. For Pascual’s current cultural affinities, see their corporate website: http://www. pascual.com.mx/. For Eisentein’s imagined reaction, see Lerner, “Of Mice and Men, Women and

Ducks,” in Lerner and OrtizTorres, 47. 28. Note also the tiny illustrative gloss in the upper left-hand corner: a picture of Christ bound to the column where he will be mocked and whipped prior to his Crucifixion. 29. See Lerner, “Of Mice and Men, Women and Ducks,” in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 39 for

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Eisenstein on the conundrum of Disney’s “connect[ion] with one of the deepest traits of early man’s psyche,” and appearance of his primitive (a term that, in this context, would have had positive associations for Eisenstein) and emancipatory anthropomorphs in a technologically advanced environment like the United

States, with its rigid and “formal logic of standardization.” Is the early Disney, then, “the return of the repressed” in a world of industrial capitalism? 30. This artifact is illustrated in Lerner and Ortiz-Torres, 43. Unfortunately, the catalog provides no other information regarding localization or cultural affinities.

Daniel Santoro, Winter at the Republic of Children, 2012. Oil and acrylic, 39 ¼ × 55 in. Courtesy of MAK Center.

Nadín Ospina, Hallowed Siamese Twins, 2001. Gold plated silver, 4 ¾ × 4 × 1¼ in. © Nadím Ospina.

almost be labeled: “Donald Duck (very early concept art),” and it provides Ospina with a marvelous taking-off point, most closely for her Three-legged Zoomorphic Plate (2001), an aged-looking bowl supported by three feet in the shape of duck’s heads that resemble Donald. Ospina’s plate is embedded in the artist’s extensive production in ceramic, stone, and gold-plated silver of a wide variety of artifacts: domestic (including the marvelous Erotic Drinking Cup with a quite engorged and obviously enraptured Mickey, 2009), architectural, and religious. Her works in the exhibition include a ritual ceramic vessel crowned by a shamanic Donald (Vessel with Shaman, 2001) and a small, elegantly detailed altar of carved stone that honors Goofy as the God of Hallucinogens (2001).31 Ospina’s work draws on both anthropology and ethnography, as well as notions of primitivism in belief and primitive power in art—all intensely contested ideas and disciplines—in a discussion that is already complex and multivalent. There seems little question that contemporary “Disney culture” is one of the major drivers (although there are certainly others) at work in the ongoing creation of a global culture. It is easy to imagine a distant future in which, like Ospina’s objects, culture will speak to our descendants across the expanse of deep cultural time a message that is heterogeneous, conflicted, and difficult to understand. But that, it seems to me, is how culture inevitably works. It can indeed aspire to greater and greater hegemony, but as long as there remain artists like Ospina and the others represented in this exhibition—not to mention critics such as Dorfman and Mattelart—that hegemony will remain only a grim façade, or, perhaps better, an appearance of death evoked by a wicked spell and spread by the voluptuous beauty of a bright red apple, but easily dissolved by true love’s kiss. Glenn Harcourt has a PhD in art history from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Pasadena and writes on various aspects of the history of art and culture. His most recent book is The Artist, the Censor, and the Nude: A Tale of Morality and Appropriation (Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2017).

31. It is quite true that various Mesoamerican cultures made use of a variety of hallucinogens in political and religious (or politico-religious) ceremonies, although these rituals could be quite horrific. Compare the Lady Xok drawing a thorn-studded rope through her tongue on Lintel 24 from Structure 23 at Yaxchilan, Mexico to Ospina’s blank-eyed and gloriously blissed-out stoner Goofy. For Lady Xok, see Mary Miller and Simon Martin, Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 106–9.

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Anthony Carfello

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History

History on the Make

September 16, 2017– January 7, 2018

Within the second Chicago Architecture Biennial, the exhibition Vertical City revisits the venerable 1922 design competition for the Chicago Tribune Company headquarters. The exhibition is part of the overarching theme of “Make New History” put forward by the biennial curators—Los Angeles architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee. Fifteen towers by 15 architects and firms, including Ensamble Studio, of Madrid and Cambridge, Massachusetts; Basel’s Christ & Gantenbein; and Berlin-based Kuehn Malvezzi, form a gauntlet of model skyscrapers in the Sidney R. Yates Gallery of the Chicago Cultural Center. Each posits a contemporary response to one of the 1922 competitors. The goal of the competition, almost 100 hundred years ago, was to design “the world’s most beautiful office building,” 1 and at the time, the publishing and display of the original 263 proposals for Tribune Tower operated much like its own biennial. While the New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood won with their Gothic Revival beacon, which still stands four blocks up the street from the Cultural Center, Viennese architect Adolf Loos’s gigantic Doric column and Germany’s Ludwig Hilberseimer’s no-nonsense rabbit-eared framework have exerted the greatest influence on architectural discourse today.2 Indeed, models of both appear here, and they bookend the fifteen new and imposing, half-inch-to-a-foot-scale proposals. Didactics on the wall portray a selection of the original 1922 renderings alongside statements of intent by the Vertical City participants. The model towers, each around 16 feet tall, stand tightly clustered in rows like colonnades. One approaches the works at eye-level, then cranes one’s neck up, like a tourist walking through the Chicago Loop. The collected models are sketched notions, not resolutions offered for urgent specifics. Because each puts forth an imagined program for a fictional vertical space, the proposals invite viewers to engage through narrative. For example, Other Histories, by London-based Serie Architects, a proposal for the Tribune’s “Far East Asian Headquarters,” is filled with brightly colored tables, chairs, and benches straight out of a miniature Design Within Reach showroom. Looking at Serie’s 1. Katherine Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13; Blair Kamin, “The Tower and Its

Glory,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1997. 2. Loos’s entry is often understood as a joke or a riff on the “column” of a newspaper. Hilberseimer’s was never actually submitted to the jury. See

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Pier Vittorio Aureli, “The Barest Form in which Architecture Can Exist: Some Notes on Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Proposal for the Chicago Tribune Building,” The City as Project, October 31, 2011, http://thecityasaproject.

org/2011/10/the-barest-formin-which-architecture-canexist-some-notes-on-ludwighilberseimer’s-proposal-for-thechicago-tribune-building/.

Vertical City, installation view, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, September 16, 2017â&#x20AC;&#x201C;January 7, 2018. ÂŠ Hall Merrick Photographers. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial and Steve Hall.

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, (Not) Another Tower, 2017. Installation view, Vertical City, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018. © Tom Harris. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial.

stacked white pavilions, the viewer envisions the productive activity—breakout sessions, pitch meetings, Skype calls with advertising sponsors, content aggregation, and coffee breaks (mini treadmills are included too)—that might take place within this “tower for a media [conglomerate] with global reach and capital based off-shore,” 3 as the firm’s statement describes it, that could be anywhere or nowhere, detached from everything but its readership.

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New York’s MOS describes its entry, & Another (Chicago Tribune Tower), as “a ghostly figment.” 4 One can picture the underpaid and over-caffeinated Tribune staffer within watching the light at dusk coming through its translucent walls with a sense of foreboding. Surely at night the icy whole of the stacked glass monolith would appear like the gleaming citadel of a comic book villain’s headquarters. Mexico City-based PRODUCTORA’s Two Towers appear as twin gridded volumes of MDF framing densely covered with red and blue cross-hatching, a reference to co-founding architect Carlos Bedoya’s sketches from a previous competition. This viewer wonders, who in the office had the onerous job of coloring the 16-foot model with a ballpoint pen? Undercurrents of alienated labor swell in Ensamble Studio’s Big Bang Tower: A Column of Columns for the Chicago Tribune. In its statement, the studio observes: “In our contemporary culture working spaces can no longer be understood as the fixed cubicles where the worker spends the entirety of her day immersed in her own particular task, progressively accumulating piles of paper that will require ample amounts of physical storage. A shift of paradigm is happening, enabled by information technologies, that opens new avenues to reimagine the meaning of space.” 5 Steel framing studs around the exterior of Big Bang Tower relegate core infrastructural systems, like plumbing stacks and elevators, to the outside of the skyscraper. This move allows the opening up of variable floor plans at different levels. Visually, and paradoxically, the building becomes a sleek and airy cage for the worker described within. (Not) Another Tower, by Tatiana Bilbao Estudio of Mexico City, is the one model that targets a specific social concern: the luxury residential highrises sprouting across the globe, which make up the majority of towers being built today. In her statement, Bilbao observes, “As buildings tower upwards the social fabric of a community is stretched thinner, effectively enclosing people within vertical suburbs.” 6 These towers stand detached from the city and encourage alarmingly isolationist tendencies within. Bilbao instead tries to envisage a diverse skyscraper “neighborhood.” (Not) Another Tower is subdivided into 192 different “plots” that are then each designed differently with “fourteen collaborating neighbors,” mimicking the Tetris-like amalgamations that produce cities in the first place. 3. Serie Architects, “Other Histories,” in Mark Lee, Sharon Johnston, Sarah Herne, and Letizia Garzoli, eds., “Vertical City,” Make New History: 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial

(Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2017), 246. 4. MOS, “& Another (Chicago Tribune Tower),” in Make New History, 236. 5. Ensamble, “Big Bang Tower:

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A Column of Columns for the Chicago Tribune,” in Make New History, 229. 6. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, “(Not) Another Tower,” in Make New History, 248.

In her statement, Bilbao poses the important question: “How can space be manipulated and connected [by architects, builders, or residents] to create truly vertical communities?” 7 Each parcel in the model contains its own design language—smooth white archways here, angled wood beams there—and hints at the lives to be lived inside. The final result is a pillar of dioramas clinging to a central framework that ruminates on an oftenunrealized potential for a complex and layered urbanity within a typology of space that originates and generally endures as a monument to business.8 Interestingly, in the inaugural Chicago Architectural Biennial of 2015, Tatiana Bilbao presented, in this same room, a full-scale prototype responding to housing shortages in Mexico.9 Made of painted concrete blocks and wooden pallets and adaptable to different conditions, the split, pitched-roof house could be built for around $8,000 in its simplest formation. Since then, 3,000 of the houses have been built in the Mexican state of Coahuila.10 Bilbao’s move from a tangible solution to a thought-experiment in 2017 is indicative of a curatorial shift away from crucial applicability and toward navel gazing. As a whole, the models in Vertical City offer formalist meditations on the “tower type.” 11 One can add narration to their design elements or note their references to architectural history, but they will never fill a corner of Chicago. They offer choose-your-own-adventure stories within the binding of the historical Tribune Tower competition, not involvement with the complex social world of the built environment. Chicago’s problems—whether one experiences them firsthand or via Chicago Tribune articles—are spatial problems. A headline such as “8 people shot in Chicago over 24 hours, including man killed by police on South Side,” 12 an article from the November 30, 2017, edition of the Tribune, can be diagrammed to reveal decades’ worth of the city’s planning and design manifesting as housing segregation, ghettoization, militant policing, gang culture, cyclical urban renewal, and now rising rents alongside population loss. Moving from Vertical City to Horizontal City—the biennial’s companion exhibition of models riffing on historic images of architectural interiors—only pulls visitors further from the Chicago context and into esoteric fantasy spaces. In its “interior made of interiors,” 13 MAIO of Barcelona stockpiles miniature pink sofas, chairs, shelves, tables, and beds atop a mirror that reflects the ornate ceiling of the Cultural Center’s Grand Army of the Republic Hall, in response to a photograph of a door swinging between

7. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, “(Not) Another Tower,” in Make New History, 248. 8. There are numerous exceptions that function closer to the tower neighborhood idea that inspires Bilbao, such as the Chungking Mansions in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and Torre David in Caracas, Venezuela, both of which have received extensive study. Residents of the former Cabrini-Green in Chicago described their demolished public housing complex as one such urban community.

9. Ben Schulman, “Public Housing Like You’ve Never Seen: Tatiana Bilbao Brings Low-Cost Modular Home to Chicago,” Newcity, September 30, 2015, https://design.newcity. com/2015/09/30/public-housing-like-youve-never-seentatiana-bilbao-brings-low-costmodular-home-to-chicago. 10. See Leo Shaw, “Two Years Later, These Projects from the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial Are Still Making an Impact,” Chicago Architecture Biennial Blog, June 15, 2017,

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http://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/blog/impact; and Carlos Ortega Arámburo, “Does Tatiana Bilbao Estudio’s social housing in Ciudad Acuña address the needs of its inhabitants?” Architectural Review, March 9, 2016, https:// www.architectural-review.com/ buildings/does-tatiana-bilbaoestudios-social-housing-in-ciudad-acua-address-the-needsof-its-inhabitants/10003823. article. While critical in parts, this latter article nonetheless represents the way Bilbao’s

work from the 2015 biennial now operates in the lives of many others and thus enters into countless arenas of debate and impact. 11. See “Vertical City,” in Make New History, 220. 12. Rosemary Sobol and Tony Briscoe, “8 People Shot in Chicago Over 24 hours, including Man Killed by Police on South Side,” Chicago Tribune, November 30, 2017. 13. MAIO, “The Grand Interior,” in Make New History, 258.

MAIO, The Grand Interior (model), 2017. Installation view, Horizontal City, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, September 16, 2017â&#x20AC;&#x201C;January 7, 2018. ÂŠ Tom Harris. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, September 16, 2017â&#x20AC;&#x201C; January 7, 2018. ÂŠ Hall Merrick Photographers. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial and Kendall McCaugherty.

two frames that Marcel Duchamp once had installed in his Paris apartment. The New York/Berlin firm June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff invites one to step up to a mirrored bar setting and into Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére (1862). Viewers are invited to play the imaginary roles of either the female bartender or the top-hatted man soliciting her in that famed painting, and experience Manet’s use of the mirror to define interior space. All 24 such musings are presented on plinths laid out in the original footprint of Mies van der Rohe’s plan for the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). This curatorial conceit visually unifies the scattered works in Horizontal City within the easy reference to one of Chicago’s greatest hits of architectural landmarks, and a specifically horizontal one.

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A gigantic white model of the entirety of the IIT campus and the surrounding Bronzeville area stands just outside the Republic Hall. The model, made by IIT College of Architecture students working with Tokyo’s SANAA, is one of a few works in the biennial that reference a real Chicago neighborhood. The objective of the project was to visualize a way to connect the campus to Lake Michigan via the addition of new “mountain-like buildings” 14 in the blocks between. The mountains of rubble recently made of Chicago’s past, particularly by the demolition of housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes—which stood just south of IIT—are unintended references. In this context, the biennial’s Make New History signage—inspired by the 2009 Ed Ruscha book of the same name, which contains 624 blank pages15 —begins to feel like a cousin of the “Building a New Chicago” signs that have blanketed the city in promotion of development throughout Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tenure. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy has recently called out the mayor’s “strategic gentrification” of areas such as Bronzeville.16 Emanuel supported the school board’s closure of 50 public schools in one fell swoop17 and, under his helm, a surge in violence has earned the city the nickname “Chiraq.” It’s generally assumed that projects on the scale of the Chicago Architecture Biennial will have municipal support and cooperation. Still, the embattled mayor’s proud letter that prefaces the biennial catalog foreshadows that any critique of the city’s political situation may not be easily detected. Instead, the biennial spreads its bets more or less equally between practical design (such as MG&Co. of Houston’s division of the Cultural Center’s bookshop into differently colored quadrants—library, shopping, archive, discussion), friendly spatial alteration (for example, Mexico City’s Frida Escobedo’s skate ramp flattened into interior parklet), and Modernist hero worship (the ghost of Mies van der Rohe haunts throughout).

14. IIT College of Architecture + SANAA, “Lake 33rd, Bronzeville,” 2017, http:// chicagoarchitecturebiennial. org/participants/iit-college-ofarchitecture-sanaa/. 15. Ed Ruscha, Make New History (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2009).

16. Rick Pearson and Bill Ruthhart, “Kennedy Accuses Emanuel of ‘Strategic Gentrification Plan’ to Force Blacks Out of Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, January 4, 2018. 17. Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, John Chase and Bob Secter, “CPS Approves Largest School Closure in Chicago's History,”

Chicago Tribune, May 23, 2013. See the work of sociologist, author, and artist Eve Ewing, e.g. “‘We Shall Not Be Moved’: A Hunger Strike, Education, and Housing in Chicago,” New Yorker, September 21, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/ news/news-desk/we-shall-notbe-moved-a-hunger-strike-

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education-and-housing-inchicago; and “Phantoms Playing Double-Dutch: Why the Fight for Dyett is Bigger than One Chicago School Closing,” Seven Scribes, August 26, 2015, http:// sevenscribes.com/phantomsplaying-double-dutch-why-thefight-for-dyett-is-bigger-thanone-chicago-school-closing.

Occasional nods in the direction of political reality can be found in print. Sarah Whiting’s essay in the catalog, “Figuring Modern Urbanism: Chicago’s Near South Side,” places the history of the IIT campus within the modernist urban planning trends that shaped Chicago in the mid-twentieth century and the later societal trends that led to their demise.18 She concludes with a call to recapture the initial hopeful spirit that encouraged such large-scale civic cooperation, though without acknowledging that such energies do exist today—in the form of investors and gentrification, rather than visionary architects. Edward Eigen’s “South Park: Proleptic Notes on the Barack Obama Presidential Center,” also in the catalog, is a swirl of historical quotes and debates that contextualizes the Chicago site selected for the forthcoming institution dedicated to the 44th president.19 It stops short of engaging the ongoing debates that have surrounded the location, such as the alteration of an Olmstead and Vaux-designed park, the awarding of construction contracts, and the possible economic impacts on neighboring residents. Displayed at the exhibition’s entrance were freshly printed copies of And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency.20 These essays were published by Columbia University’s Avery Review as a response to a letter by American Institute of Architects CEO Robert Ivy, published the day after the 2016 election, in which he made a collective first bid on any of the new president’s infrastructure projects.21 Pushback in the architecture community was immediate, and the sense captured in And Now is that contemporary architects and their students are ready for a wholesale rejection of their industry’s complicities and of the ways in which architecture has become like the Apple corporation: a Janus-faced performance of talking left and acting right.22 Outside of the opening reception, members of a climate action group called Architects Advocate were handing out flyers imploring “Make the Chicago Architecture Biennial Matter.” But once inside the British Petroleum-sponsored biennial, visitors found that spirit of a new architecture underground resistance less than readily apparent.23 Instead, one was left to sift through the three floors of installations searching for relevance, and finding it in unique instances. David Schalliol’s documentation of the dismantling of public housing across the city, Untitled (Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation) (2003–17), brings the city’s ever-present specter of demolition squarely into the 2017 biennial. His photographs capture Stateway Gardens melting into rubble, CabriniGreen before it was supplanted by market-rate housing and a Target store,

18. Sarah Whiting, “Figuring Modern Urbanism: Chicago’s Near South Side,” in Make New History, 89. 19. Edward Eigen, “South Park: Proleptic Notes on the Barack Obama Presidential Center,” in Make New History, 147. 20. James Graham et al., eds. And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency (New York: Columbia Books on

Architecture and the City, 2017). 21. “AIA Pledges to Work with Donald Trump, Membership Recoils,” The Architect’s Newspaper, November 11, 2016, https://archpaper.com/2016/11/ aia-pledges-work-donaldtrump-membership-recoils. 22. In theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s polemic essay “The Californian Ideology” (1995), first published in Mute, they describe

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the Silicon Valley of the 1990s as “emerg[ing] from this unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter-culture radicalism and technological determinism—a hybrid ideology with all its ambiguities and contradictions intact.” 23. The irresoluteness was noticed by critics. See Nicholas Korody, “The Amnesias of ‘Make New History,’” Archinect, September 27, 2017, https://

archinect.com/features/article/150030298/the-amnesiasof-make-new-history; and Mimi Zeiger, “Architecture as Intellectual Inquiry Needs to Take More Risks,” Dezeen, September 26, 2017, https:// www.dezeen.com/2017/09/26/ opinion-mimi-zeiger-secondchicago-architecture-biennial.

and Loomis Courts, one of the properties left standing but turned to private Section 8 housing.24 Part of A Love of the World, curated by Jesús Vassallo, Schalliol’s photographs are mounted in the Cultural Center’s awkward Landmark Gallery. In one of the site-specific commissions for the biennial, the gallery’s narrow space is divided up by an enfilade set of structural tiles, “a material commonly used in train stations, public schools, recreation centers, and other municipal buildings,” as the Chicago architects Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner describe them.25 Side-by-side with images of lone, desolate project buildings and sharing the same utilitarian aesthetic, one cannot shake the feeling of being inside the next building about to be turned to rubble, and then to condos. The biennial also includes films, for example The Property Drama (2017) by Brandlhuber+ and Christopher Roth, which screens on a loop in a darkened booth. The Property Drama asks probing questions about land and ownership in relation to the commons in Central Europe. The subjects of the film philosophize about the values of and challenges to shared resources and community ownership, ideas that resonate in a city that has eliminated public housing, schools, and outsourced more and more city services to private companies.26 Aires Mateus’s Ruin in Time (2015), which also plays continuously in the Cultural Center, walks viewers through halted construction at two sites in Portugal. These abandoned, unfinished houses now serve only to remind us of their promises and foundering, and to recall similar small-scale boondoggles instantly familiar in debt-ridden Illinois (and elsewhere in the United States). An installation of drawings and models by ZAO/standardarchitecture of Beijing shares the needed perspective of architects operating in a country that is building and demolishing at speeds and scales that far surpass Chicago’s. Make New Hutong Metabolism charts a way forward in anticipation of further threats to the traditional hutong neighborhood layouts in older sections of the Chinese capital. The architects frankly criticize both the forces that want to wipe out these alleyways and those who would preserve them in vitrines. The biennial makes efforts to extend beyond the Cultural Center, occupying venues across the city. Photographer Lee Bey’s exhibition Chicago: A Southern Exposure, at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park, documents the South Side’s architectural classics, placing vernacular works alongside projects by notable designers. The exhibition makes a case for what may need to be fought for in an often-maligned area of the city endangered by future speculation. In a partner program at the 24. The city’s public housing first started to fall in 1998, with the goal of “dispers[ing] the project's concentrated poverty without introducing or aggravating social problems in the new neighborhoods,” Pam Belluck, “End of a Ghetto: A Special Report; Razing the Slums to Rescue the Residents,” New York Times, September 6,

1998. That specific intention is a failure when viewed through twenty-first century crime rates. See Susan J. Popkin, Michael J. Rich, Leah Hendey, Christopher R. Hayes, and Joe Parilla, “Public Housing Transformation and Crime: Making the Case for Responsible Relocation,” Urban Institute, April 5, 2012, https://www.urban.org/research/

publication/public-housingtransformation-and-crime-making-case-responsible-relocation. Misunderstandings of the connections between housing, displacement, entrenched racial segregation, and violence in Chicago abound, and they receive their largest platform from the US president’s Twitter account.

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25. “Five Rooms, Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner,” Make New History, 134. 26. The Property Drama’s collection of voices, opinions, and experiences brings to mind the work of Chicago-based chronicler of the people, Studs Terkel.

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Beverly Arts Center on W. 111th Street, Bey, architect James Gorsky, and photographer Rebecca Healy mounted Elevation: The Rise of Beverly/Morgan Park. The exhibition placed the neighborhood’s architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, H.H. Waterman, Walter Burley Griffin, George Washington Maher, and Edward Dart in a geographic chronology reaching back to the Ice Age glacier that formed Southwest Chicago’s hilly topography. The photographs in both Chicago: A Southern Exposure and Elevation—of buildings in use, buildings being torn down, buildings as stylistic declarations, buildings representing lifestyles—present architecture to a public with the same level of discursivity found in the Cultural Center but without the solipsism, demonstrating a potential direction for future Chicago Architecture Biennials. What if the next edition skipped the Cultural Center installation and spread the entirety of the Biennial’s energy to the three off-site locations and six collaborating venues in separate sections of the city that were included as only auxiliaries in this version—DuSable and Beverly plus the DePaul Art Museum in Lincoln Park, the Hyde Park Art Center, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture? Dispersing the exhibition entirely throughout the city, like Germany’s decennial Skulptur Projekte Münster, could be a step toward rectifying the sense of aloofness in this biennial’s central hub. If New Yorkbased WORKac’s Power Point-like preservation study of a 1930s art deco building in Beirut were moved from its pop-up installation space in the Cultural Center to a cultural battleground like the Pilsen neighborhood, could its models and renderings find an audience that palpably understands the kinds of real estate development forces that would seek to demolish, and thus necessitate the saving of, a building in Lebanon? And mightn’t they find strategies that could work as well in Chicago? Make New History is an “argument about architecture’s need to reset itself— and rely on itself,” 27 writes architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, paraphrasing the curators. Every discipline takes its moments in the mirror,28 but as contemporary architecture exhibitions proliferate at all scales—from low-budget student shows and architecture-focused galleries to glossy new biennials—it is valuable to question their ability to activate visitors in following and forming their own chains of signification outward from the works shown. Erin Besler and Fiona Connor’s Front Door (2017), which duplicated the Randolph Street entrance of the Beaux-Arts Cultural Center, offers another example of the capacity of an exhibition to radiate out from its center. The artists reconstructed the heavy stone doorway, with its glass and bronzeanodized aluminum doors, in the underground pedestrian walkway (Pedway) that trails through the Loop from buildings to parking lots to trains. The artists then imitated the Pedway’s fluorescent lighting, bringing 27. Christopher Hawthorne, “‘Make New History,’ the Second Chicago Architecture Biennial, Brings the Focus Back to Square One,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2017. 28. It opens another discus-

sion to ask how the biennial even addresses “internal” issues: Where are the gender equity conversations that have been in the architecture media throughout the 2010s?

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Above: Erin Besler and Fiona Connor, Front Door, Part 2, 2017. Mixed media. Installation view, Chicago

Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Chicago Architecture Biennial. Photo: Andrew Bruah. Previous spread: David Schalliol, Untitled (Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation), 2003–17. Ten prints installed within Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, Five Rooms, 2017. Installation view, A Love of the World, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017: Make New History, Chicago Cultural Center, September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018. © Tom Harris. Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial.

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the Chicago underground up to street level by installing glowing tubes in the window displays that bracket the original entryway. Commuters in the Pedway navigate past Besler and Connor’s freestanding, 1:1 scale doorway (which sits with doors closed in front of the elevator that takes one to the Cultural Center lobby) much like Romans walking by ruins on their way to work. Pronounced and unobtrusive at once, Front Door becomes another layer of the physical and experiential site of the subterranean city, redirecting one’s attention toward other often overlooked spaces and conditions. Bits of the Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the Great Pyramid, Rouen Cathedral, Lincoln’s Tomb, the Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal, and Hagia Sofia stud the neo-Gothic exterior of Tribune Tower at street level.29 Since its construction, these and many other building fragments have been inserted into its base. The first ones were pilfered by Tribune correspondents at the request of then-publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick (1880–1955). The broken off pieces function as a permanent outdoor exhibition and sample platter of global heritage sites. Their operation is magnetic: one is drawn in to read the plaques, then one’s thoughts are catapulted to images of faraway lands, the looted rock’s origin story, or the concept of the American abroad. Their pull offers some advice for the 2019 biennial curator: Viewers will participate more readily in the depths of histories, with their twisted social and political entanglements, than in the insularity and make-believe that marks the 2017 edition. Is an architecture exhibition under any obligation to empathize with the place in which it is presented? Is an architecture exhibition intended to be an encounter with context or refuge from it? Asking over 130 (mostly) out-of-town practitioners for reflections (likely to be overwrought or underinformed) on Chicago’s specific struggles would carry obvious risks and dismiss 50 years of denunciation of the discipline’s panacea tendency in the early twentieth century, when Modernism was going to save us all. We are no longer clamoring for architects to supply grand “fixes” for the city today, but if the Chicago Architecture Biennial—a highly publicized mega-event of spatial thinking—cannot be a place for analysis of the physical spaces and places of its host city’s conflicts, then the biennial dooms itself to being a tourist in its own town. Anthony Carfello is the Deputy Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House.

29. “About those Stones,” Chicago Tribune, September 18, 2012.

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Realized Sketches in Two Dimensions Collected by Travis Diehl and Brica Wilcox

We admire the finished works of the following artists so much that we wanted to see how they start. Each of the twenty preparatory images collected here represents an early stage of a time-based work—an idea in two dimensions, realized (or to be realized) in three or four. There are storyboards and maps, abstractions and systems, renderings and research images. A shakily rendered line opens onto a dancer’s motion, and a series of pictures shapes an actor’s movements. We have not been disappointed. These sketches do not all have the same relationship to what followed them, or even the same sense of destiny. You can think of a work narrowing into being, sketch by sketch, until it reaches the single point of its execution. But maybe these sketches, even if they led to titled works, also represent a limitlessness. They could still be picked up again and lead the artists somewhere else. The work may be finished, but the sketch never is. The present project takes after X-TRA’s Sketchbook issue, curated by Karin Lanzoni, in 2002. It was the fourth issue of the fourth volume—when X-TRA was a two-color, newsprint sketch of its future self. Here we are, in our twentieth year, looking back into our archive and asking artists to dip into theirs. Twenty sketches for twenty years. Here’s a sketch for twenty more.

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Poppy Coles Sketch for Tongue-tied (video work in progress), 2017 Graphite on paper, 12 × 9 in.

Jonathan Billet Storyboard for 10 (Two), 2016 (feature-length screenplay) Ink on paper, 8 ½ × 11 in.

A mouth shaped like a C stutters, unable to speak. In another frame a pair of hands attempt to tie a noose. Over and over, they falter and begin again.

An ancient yew tree and a Medieval church wall have been friends for hundreds of years. When a section of the wall collapses, a longforgotten object is revealed that compels them to revisit moments from their past.

Danielle Dean Cel from True Red with matching nails, 2015 Hand-drawn digital animation, 3:45 min. The image is a play on early animations where the animator (usually) male and white— is seen in the animation drawing, creating the characters, giving them life, like he is god. Here, I am the author drawing the animation with matching nails. The nails and the drawing are real, but are enhanced digitally. I like the play between the red in the animation that is like this amorphous material that can be Nike one minute and a person the next.

Galeria Perdida Sketch for No Matter How Much You Push the Envelope, It'll Still Be Stationary, 2014 (16mm film, 10:22 min.) Graphite on paper, 7 ¾ × 5 in. We filmed the attempt to bring a donkey inside a house and up/down a set of stairs. The set up was simple and absurd, naturally difficult. The film is cut out of sequence to suggest the circular frustration and intercut with black-and-white images— from various sources—that interrupt the narrative. These images often support or interrupt the donkey narrative at random intervals, as if both needing the animal and attempting to push it away.

João Enxuto & Erica Love ISCA Global Exhibition Module Prototype, Institute for Southern Contemporary Art (ISCA), 2016 (video, 16:00 min.) Digital rendering The Institute for Southern Contemporary Art (ISCA) was founded in 2016 to promote meaningful alternatives to the problem of global contemporary art by rerouting capital from the contemporary art market to fund institutions and practitioners developing new terms for artistic production. Modules are an important ISCA promotional strategy. They are mobile vessels for contemporary art products—sized to fit as pairs inside of standard cargo containers. Moving from port to port, modules can be positioned on the beach near the high tide line, a fluid boundary between private property and the public trust—bound to a state of groundlessness.

Maria Petschnig Digital rendering for a new video, 2017

Lucy Raven Sketch for RP31, 2012 (35mm film installation, color, 4:48 min. looped) Felt marker on paper, 9 × 12 in. This was one of a series of drawings I did to work out the rhythm and pacing of frames for my 35mm film installation RP31 (2012). In that piece, I repurposed film projection test patterns and calibration charts from throughout the 20th century into a stroboscopic visual score. These patterns have an indexical relationship to the film projector they were made to calibrate, many of which are now obsolete. The drawings helped me think through how to work out the visual composition for what I see as a sort of anachronistic history of film projection—one type of ghost story of the 20th century.

Liz Magic Laser Sketch and diagram for Handle/Poignée, 2018 (set for daily performance and video installation at the Centre Pompidou, polyurethane foam and acrylic coating, 22 × 23 × 3.8 ft.) With dancers Lise Benoit, Carisa Bledsoe, Yun-Chen Chang, Célia Chauviere, Fabiana Gabanini, and Martina Musilova. Performance developed through a process that included workshops with dance therapists, France Schott Billmann and Mandoline Whittlesey, and choreographic consulting by Cori Kresge. Costumes by Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Set and costumes produced with generous support from Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris. Handle is co-produced with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Gulbenkian Foundation, Paris, and the Confort Moderne, Poitiers. Developed in partnership with ACTS and Micadanses. Project produced on the occasion of Talismans, Le desert entre nous n'est que du sable, Gulbenkian Foundation Paris, and traveling to the Confort Moderne, Poitiers, in October 2018.

Upon entering the lobby, three dancers will greet selected visitors and evaluate their personality type based on their handshake. Each person will be ascribed one of four archetypes: the disciplinary parent, the nurturing parent, the compliant child and the rebellious child. These types are based on cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (1996) in which he uses a model of the family to analyze dynamics between politicians and citizens. Responding to each visitor with movement that treats her type, the dancers will guide visitors to a soft sculptural set that uses a Venn diagram to outline three spheres of experience: home, work and politics. The dancers will use the props in this therapeutic space to demonstrate the potential of each personality using choreography devised to improve the functionality of familial and societal relationships.

Jon Rafman Sketch for Dream Journal, 2015–17 Watercolor on paper, 11 × 15 in. © Jon Rafman. Courtesy Sprüth Magers In Dream Journal, 2016–17, the latest in my surrealist video series, a contemporary epic cycle emerges. Arising from daily dream recording and free association, the film weaves unconscious fantasies with web vernacular. Rendered in hobbyist animation software, Dream Journal is a Dantean journey, transposing ancient archetypes onto twentyfirst-century dreamscapes to explore the contours of fear and desire.

Shana Moulton Sketch for Galactic Pot Healer Ascension, 2010, companion piece to The Galactic Pot Healer, 2010 (video, 8:32 min.) Ink on paper, 8 ½ × 11 in.

Rasmus Røhling Photo documentation from the artist's studio: research imagery for Self Passage, 2017 (HD video, 14:21 min.)

Terre Mécanique is a collaboration with the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. The project brings together experiments in the evolution of still and moving images, Laban Movement Analysis, and architecturalscale 3D printing in a gel suspension. One aspect of what we are exploring is a kind of dynamic crystallography of human movement in which spatial pressures and transformations are examined in parallel to the building up of matter.

These are research images from what ultimately ended up being Self Passage. I was interested in how the authority of the typical “all-knowing” male voiceover often relies heavily on that deep, calm, low pitch, and how any diversion from this is potentially read as a lack of authority/masculinity. Somehow this led me to the idea of Kermit’s voice as the neutered male commentary voice. I was trying to formulate a kind of thesis/conspiracy theory that, somehow, the urgency and self-doubting Woody Allenesque pitch of Kermit’s voice was some sort of rebellion or attempt to escape from the bad trip/flesh prison of manliness. I ultimately ended up not using any of it. It was just too lame. In the top right corner is a picture of French Minister of Culture André Malraux, who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, at dinner at the White House with the Kennedys. In the final video, I do, nonetheless, take on both an imitation of Vito Acconci’s troll-like voice as well as the strange snuffling singing style of Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. Both probably enabled, somehow, through the Kermit theory.

Andrew Norman Wilson Digital collage sketch for Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016 (HD video, sound, 8:30 min. looped)

Adam Linder Sketches for To Gear a Joan, 2017 Two pages, ink and graphite on paper, 8 ½ × 11 in. each

I send collages to my modeler/ animator to initiate the design process of each model. He sends a model draft back, then I respond with another collage, and so on. This is the first collage I sent to my modeler/ animator for one of the models.

A musical work in which a carbon-fiber armor functions as a wearable libretto for a solo performer. Conceived especially for Norwegian vocalist Stine Janvin Motland. In the work, the figure’s custom suit of armor is a second protective skin that can modulate into a sculptural seat, a music stand, and a sound amplifier.

The main step structure was built from wood painted white, and it supported about eight vases, several broken pots, and a video projection of the "Pot Healer" healing shattered pots. It was meant to look like an assembly line of broken pots going into the Pot Healer's domain through a tunnel and then ascending the steps whole.

Kelly Nipper Sketch for Terre Mécanique, 2017 Collage, 9 × 12 in. Courtesy of the artist and Performa, New York

Meriem Bennani Sketchbook pages, looking for a title for FLY, 2016 (12-channel projection-mapped digital video installation, 17:33 min.) Ink and graphite on paper, 10 × 15 in. Part documentary travelogue, part soap opera, and part juicy gossip session, FLY is a multimedia work that immerses the viewer in an environment of brightly colored, geometric forms and surfaces. An animated fruit fly serves as a guide through the video, mischievously buzzing around an openair market, weaving through Medina quarters in Rabat and Fez, and bringing viewers beyond the walls of private homes and into lavish private celebrations. This work was commissioned by MoMA PS1 and exhibited there in 2016.

Jibz Cameron Map study poster for Soggy Glasses, A Homo's Odyssey, 2014 (live performance with animated film) Drafting pencil, colored pencil, and Photoshop on paper, 11 × 11 in. Soggy Glasses is a feminist send-up of Homer's classic mono-myth. Dynasty Handbag acts along with a projected film showing the landscape of her journey, which she embarks upon through her vagina, naturally. This is a sketch of the map I created, which she uses as an animated guide in the film that runs during the performance.

Miljohn Ruperto Storyboard for Scene 28 of Ordinal (SW/NE), with Rini Yun Keagy, 2017 Storyboard by Kelsey Boncato This storyboard is from the production of Ordinal (SW/ NE), 2017 by Rini Yun Keagy and Miljohn Ruperto. The illustration depicts the nightmare scene of the character Josiah (played by Josiah Ihem), suited in his California State University Bakersfield mascot costume, “dance battling” the ancient Mesopotamian demongod Pazuzu in its Malevichinspired form.

Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs Study for Rite of Fall at High Desert Test Sites, October 21, 2017 (performance) Ink on paper, 9 ¾ × 12 in. This site- and season-specific ritual responded to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) and the myth of Persephone, paying homage to the pith of the season: harvest and the ensuing darkness, a time to turn inwards, re-group, and rest.

Tarwuk Sketch for Cast_KITEong_ BROW (video work in progress) Graphite on paper, 8 × 10 in. This image is an interior space study for a short animated movie based on an excerpt from a Reddit story that surfaced in 2016 on unrelated discussion threads. Reddit users pieced all different threads into one story, but the author remained anonymous.

Simone Forti News Animation Drawing— Past Future, 2012 Graphite on paper, 18 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Box, Los Angeles This drawing is one of a series of about 35 News Animation drawings that I made in 2012; a selection was exhibited in the Hammer’s Made in L.A. show. They are an extension of my News Animation performances (1985–present), in which I “Dance the News,” often with stacks of recent newspapers.

X-TRA Sketchbook Issue Volume 4, Number 4 Summer 2002

Rheim Alkadhi Madena Asbell Robert Bordo Steven Hull Marina Kappos Allan Kaprow Mike Kelley Heidi Kidon Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Lisa Lapinski Thomas Lawson Daniel Libeskind Mark Robert Lewis El Lissitzky René Magritte

Euan Macdonald Chris Nichols Jim Ovelmen Bonnie Porter Man Ray Diego Rivera Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié Carolee Schneemann Kristina Solomoukha Brad Spence Mitchell Syrop Izumi Tachiki Lebbeus Woods Richard Wright

Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative Aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. Russian Cosmism Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys, collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism. Contributors include include: Alexander Bogdanov, Alexander Chizhevsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Boris Groys, Valerian Muravyev, Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood

Buy now at mitpress.mit.edu/cosmism

Carmen Argote YMC

Patrick Staff Made in L.A. 2018 June 3—September 2, 2018 Hammer Museum

July 7—August 18, 2018 Commonwealth and Council

Carla is a quarterly magazine, online art journal, and podcast committed to being an active source for critical dialogue surrounding L.A.’s art community. Carla acts as a centralized space for art writing that is bold, honest, approachable, and focused on the here and now. contemporaryartreview.la

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Through September 3, 2018 | MOCA Grand Avenue

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with lead annual support provided by Sydney Holland, founder of the Sydney D. Holland Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by Judith and Alexander Angerman, Delta Air Lines, and Nathalie Marciano and Julie Miyoshi. In-kind media support is provided by KCRW 89.9 FM and Nan Goldin, Philippe H. and Suzanne kissing at Euthanasia, New York City, 1981, Cibachrome print, 11 Ă&#x2014; 14 in. (27.9 Ă&#x2014; 35.6 cm), The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Nimoy Family Foundation

June 3â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Sept 2

1 MUSEUM

Los Angeles