William J. Simmons, art historian and Special Projects curator of the Felix L.A. art fair.

EMILY WELLS: Your curatorial practice seems to be steeped in your background in queer and feminist art history. How do you see these two as informing each other?

WILLIAM J. SIMMONS: It is an oft-forgotten fact that feminist and anti-racist activism informed, enabled even, queerness and queer art history. Identity movements build upon each other. Queerness does not replace feminism, for instance. In some ways, feminism and anti-colonial theory opened our eyes to difference, and queerness has offered increasingly vast ways of discussing difference. One cannot exist without the other. 

My most important professors at Harvard were women who might be labeled “second-wave.” So too are some of my favorite artists, like Judy Chicago, who has been a friend and mentor for nearly a decade now. I am so grateful to have had those feminist experiences, in some ways “before” I came to queer theory. I want to approach a cumulative art history as well, one that takes into account the conflicting attachments that writers, artists and curators may have simultaneously.

You’re featuring artists that you’ve championed for a long time: Judy Chicago, Betty Tompkins, Martha Wilson, Eve Fowler, Math Bass and more. In putting the project together, did you find yourself relating to their work differently than you had before?

Well, I wish I had a more profound answer, but I would say it was definitely interesting seeing all of their work from a business point of view. It’s an experience that everyone who deals in “objectivity” should have. We ought to have much more respect for gallery professionals—shoutout to folks like Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Sascha Feldman, Maggie Clinton and Kristen Becker, who empowered me more than any professor. Anyway, this process was a reminder that there is no such thing as objectivity. Art historians are not objective. Critics are certainly not objective. I think that’s great. We should all be unabashedly supporting our friends. We should be helping queer, female-identified and POC artists make money and get famous and get verified on Instagram. 

The Special Projects series this year is focused on gender, queerness, and feminism, and the art you’ve selected grapples with the possibilities and limits of art-making on these fronts. How do you see the show as grappling with that enigmatic confluence?

I think all of these artists work through those concepts in very capacious ways, which is why it was so interesting bringing them together. For instance, I think of Paula Hayes and David Benjamin Sherry as eco-feminists and/or eco-queers. How often do we forget to consider the natural world and spirituality in our queernesses or feminisms? Likewise, Deborah Kass’ work has always operated in those interspaces because of her interest in pop culture, which is an area wherein we can discuss gender, sexuality and race, certainly, but we can also discuss slipperier terms like attachment and aspiration. 

And I also think that each of these artists is both loving and critical of their chosen media. For instance, I think that Anne Collier’s work has been associated with feminism in a simplified way. I’m not mad about that and I don’t think it’s wrong, but I wonder what kinds of feminisms emerge when we focus not so squarely on deconstruction and critique as markers of “good” feminism, but rather on feminist attachments, feminist hopes, and disappointments, or feminist loves that are paradoxical or unexpected. 

I really love your curatorial text to accompany the Special Projects series, focusing on “cruel optimism,” which theorist Lauren Berlant says “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” How does your relationship with language inform these vivid visual experiences?

I’m so glad that you asked this question. I tell my undergrads to read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, which is sort of an ur-text in art history, like it is a poem. I never tell the faculty that I do this, because what they want is for the students to understand it, to “get” it, to map out the studium and punctum. That’s wrong. Academia always gets it wrong. Much of Barthes’ work is about being sad and queer and horny. In the case of Camera Lucida, he uses images and visuality alongside those feelings, not necessarily as illustrations of those feelings. Julia Kristeva, another philosopher whose work I think art history has wildly misread, does the same. This is what I want to do as well—to use language and vision in proximity to each other and to never reduce one to the other. Whether this is actually doable in a curatorial capacity remains to be seen. I hope people read the text and wonder if it has any relationship to the work I selected at all. I also hope that Lauren Berlant will read it and not be entirely repulsed that her words are being used in the context of an art fair.

You wrote, “We expect so much of art, of representation, and yet it cannot ever fully articulate the dreams we have for ourselves and society, creating thereby a state of endless oscillation between hope and despair,” which was apt, as I’m trying to finish a book chapter on the limits of representing the experience of invisible illness. As our culture increasingly grapples with demands of representation, how do you see the conversation about what can/can’t be represented playing out?

I can’t wait to read your text. I’ve always admired how you talk about illness and the body and movement. Illness is a fascinating context. I’m working on something about Félix González-Torres. In his work, illness is often read into it, as is the case with most artists associated with “AIDS art” – Jimmy DeSana, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, etc. González-Torres’s work is often discussed in terms of “infecting the canon” or even infecting our bodies, as with the candy sculptures. But this is a paranoid reading and not a reparative one. Such readings are steeped in negative affects. How can we get past those without forsaking radicality?

I think we are definitely in an anti-representational space in certain ways, and that concerns me. I’m glad that we are past the years of Ryan McGinley photographing cute white boys being passable queer art. Don’t get me wrong – that’s still going on with this new crop of white, gay painters who paint their boyfriends and Grindr dates. But I think the language now centers more forcefully on abstraction, and that anything abstract is inherently “queer” or “between binaries” or “radical” or what have you. That’s not the answer either. But everyone can do whatever they want. I think everyone has good intentions. And cancel culture is just fine with me. Some things just cannot be “represented” by certain people. Just don’t cancel me!

What are the benefits to a smaller, ancillary fair like Felix? / Did you get to take any risks you might not have at a larger fair?

I don’t know! Because I didn’t actually go to Felix last year! So it remains to be seen.

Melanie Pullen invites me into her sunny apartment as she cleans up from a party the night before, “This is why I left New York!” she says, gesturing to full-length windows with a sweeping view of Koreatown. “All this room!”

Pullen’s enthusiasm for Los Angeles is apt, given that her photography consists of cinematic explorations of beauty, crime and the city’s history—she is perhaps best known for her “High Fashion Crime Scenes,” which recreate glamorized versions of real murders and suicides. Some of the shots were published as a book by Nazraeli Press in 2005; all based on real crime photos. Pullen acquired the murder scenes through an immense amount of research with the help of the Chief of the LA County Coroner’s office and former LA Chief of Police William Bratton, who had just stepped down from his position as Commissioner of NYPD. Both of these men gave her access to records that were not easily found otherwise.
“News coverage is a circus!” she tells me as we sit sprawled on her living room floor. Pullen is warm, friendly, and seems like the sort of person who can sit and talk with anyone. “I’m taking these real, horrific scenes and playing them up like we do in the news. Back to the days of the Black Dahlia, there’s always been this fascination of wealth, or perfection, or beauty. The fashion and the models I use are playing with that—diminishing the value of the crime. It’s all about playing it down, dumbing it down.”

Pullen began making Super 8 films while growing up in New York, and was drawn to photography through her love of cinema—she has had no formal photography training, and is entirely self-taught. “I noticed I wasn’t very good at it,” she says of her early films. “I studied the difference between my own crazy films and great films. I looked at Kubrick and the French New Wave, and realized if you freeze a frame, the shots are composed so beautifully. I grew up around photography and always loved it, but didn’t know what I would do with it. There was a moment when I realized if I could master this, I could master an art film one day, or use cinematic qualities to do the narrative of film in a picture.”

The High Fashion Crime Scenes are just one of Pullen’s thematically linked series—the artist seems to work best when she captures a concept in multiple instances. The crime scenes are more recently joined by the “Soda Pop Boys” series, which are created with a very specific set of rules: Pullen leaves her apartment between midnight and 3 a.m. where she goes to neighborhoods known for male prostitution and other “outliers of society.” She solicits men to take off their shirts for $20, has them select one of many vintage soda bottles, then speaks with them intimately for an hour or two while she shoots them. This series is based on a personal re-creation of a moment in her childhood.

“I grew up in West Greenwich Village during the early ’80s,” she begins to tell me. “My bedroom window was a second-story window that looked out onto Washington and Christopher Street, [somewhat] analogous to what the entirety of West Hollywood is to LA—one of the most flourishing LGBT communities in America.” Pullen continues, “Late at night, as an eight-year-old girl suffering from intense insomnia (which I’ve had all my life), I would stare out my bedroom window and every night at about 1 a.m., like clockwork, a virtual Zeus, a seven-foot-tall, bare-chested Nigerian man—wearing no more than a little golden speedo—would show up right below me on the corner of my street. He would flip his head under my streetlight and put on a long ratty bleached blond wig. I inevitably became friends with him; we spoke almost nightly for a year or so… He would stand on the corner and turn tricks for $20 every night. Then, one day, he vanished.”

The memory plagued Pullen later in life, when she once again found herself in the throes of insomnia. Then she came up with the idea for the soda pop series: she began collecting vintage soda bottles from around the world. “I found many of the names to be highly sexualized and the adverts to be equally so,” she says. Indeed! A few examples of the brand names: Pleasure Time, Bubble Up, Treat-A. “I chose to combine these concepts, as both ideas had to do with childhood and my sleepless nights surrounding it, almost like my own strange fairy tale.” The portraits were recently shown in San Francisco, accompanied with plaques featuring each subject’s story.

Pullen created another well-known series of photos that explore the uniformed, performative nature of war photography, titled “Violent Times.” The shots are life-sized portraits of (recreated) soldiers from historic wars. What seems notable in each is that the soldiers are dressed to the nines, demonstrating the ceremonial aspect of dressing for death. “I started seeing these uniforms and outfits and realized there’s a ceremony to glamorizing a killer, or if they’re defending the country. They’re creating this heroic persona through dress. Even the Nazi uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss. With all of that, there’s the ceremonial side, and it shows up too when you know you’re going to die —dress and death.”

I mention that this seems to be in dialogue with the polished look of the women in the High Fashion Crime Scenes, and Pullen agrees: “I’m sure somebody’s done some study on it, and if they haven’t, they should—the people in the [real crime] photos I came across were dressed in their nicest clothes. People when they know they’re going to die, often do a ceremonial dressing or make an effort of beauty. With suicide, it was interesting because people would often wear their uniforms, or women would dress in a pretty dress with an art effect; men would wear suits.”

There is a textural relationship between the two series. While the war photos seem to be only about fashion, with the violence completely removed from the frame, the crime scenes are more explicitly violent. The choice to leave out the violence associated with war was a conscious one, Pullen says: “The series is about the taking on of man’s most violent acts and extracting the emotion, showing man’s ultimate vanity. It’s entirely about the ultimate glamorization of violence but in a highly desensitized manner. This work also touches upon one’s last moments and the vanity that is portrayed.”

Pullen’s career took off with her High Fashion Crime Scenes series, shown at the now-infamous Ace Gallery in Los Angeles in 2005. I inquired how that is going and if she is still represented by Douglas Chrismas, the gallery’s owner. “Over the years, Douglas had sold a lot of my work, which I was paid for—or so I thought. I wasn’t always paid on time but I received, for many years, nice big checks for my sold work. Then it came to my attention earlier this year that Douglas had filed for bankruptcy, and I found out pretty soon after that bombshell that he had hid from me that he had sold more than 20 of my large-scale artworks—over the course of about 10 years—and didn’t pay me. The majority of the sold pieces went to two major collectors, who chose to keep the artwork stored at Ace (which made matters more confusing). This all began to come to light earlier this year and I became one of the larger art creditors in the court filings with so many pieces that had been sold unbeknownst to me.

“Douglas Chrismas was the backbone of the curatorial portion of Ace Gallery and he did have an amazing eye for art and artists, as the history books prove. There’s no court-appointed person, or random Joe off the street that can replace a legendary curatorial eye,” she insists, alluding to the gallery’s subsequent takeover by a court-appointed trustee and assisting team. “I do have to say that despite the downfall of Douglas’ Ace we all had a slight hint of fun dancing with the Devil,” she adds slyly.

See Melanie Pullen performance of “Violent Times” (re-creations of her war scenes which are a cinematic glamorization of violence) at LA Art Show in DTLA Convention Center, January 12–15, 2017. Pullen will create a limited-edition work based on this performance; each piece will be entirely unique and will be available to the public at the LA Art Show.

One of Los Angeles–based artist Audrey Wollen’s Instagram posts features an undated 1890s painting in which a nude woman reclines, examining herself in a mirror she is holding up to her face. Red beads are wrapped around the woman’s neck and ankle, bringing to mind Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (“A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”). Wollen has captioned the photo: “if u look at paintings of girls and replace each mirror w/an iPhone in yr head, u will realize that nothing has ever been different.”

With her Instagram-based work, 24-year-old, CalArts-educated Wollen seems to have set out to prove just this. She uses her phone to objectify herself, to document her pain, her tears and her hospital visits. Most of all, Wollen fosters a critical dialogue on feminism, art history, representation and performativity of femininity, sadness—and how the expression of that sadness is an inherent threat to the status quo of oppression. She does so specifically through challenging the hyper-positive, self-love-or-nothing feminism that permeates the Internet, and alienates feminists who are unable to subscribe to it.

“Working hard, staying positive, fighting back, keeping strong: this isn’t my language,” Wollen tells me in an email interview. “I think it’s time to reassess our ideas of protest so that all the available languages can be heard in feminism…  Our bodies and our pain, physical and emotional, have to be taken back, and I don’t think it can be done by romanticizing the inverse of our symptoms: strength, energy, vigor, sanity, “health” as defined by masculine standards. Our symptoms can be transformed into our weapons, and create a new image of what strength can look like.”

She has coined a term for this idea: the Sad Girl Theory, which says that the expression of female sadness ought to be viewed as an act of political protest and resistance rather than personal failure. Wollen lives out the Sad Girl Theory in a big way: the most compelling images in her project are often those in which she documents her own medical experience, photographing herself in hospital gowns or coquettish outfits at a pain management center and the hospital. “Taking selfies in hospital rooms opens up a small bubble of autonomy in a world where I am objectified the most. There, I am undressed in front of strangers who prod and measure, calculate my risks and rates of life, cut me open or sew me closed, and it’s hard not to feel like a rag doll or a mannequin. I have to go to the doctor a lot for a chronic disability—at least once a month, and that in itself is an endurance performance piece, but to go and document my body over and over again reminds me that I am still a person, capable of my own performative gestures and my own artistic practice.” In a post, a follower asks Wollen why she is “always at the Dr.” Wollen never says; nor did she for this article. But in another post, she reveals: “as some of u may know… I was diagnosed with cancer at 14” for which she is routinely monitored for recurrence.

Wollen is incredibly sensitive to the patriarchal nature of the medical system. Her hospital photographs remind me of the phenomenon of “hysteria” in 1800s France, a since-debunked disease applied exclusively to women based on vague “symptoms” ranging from sexual desire to anorexia to seizures. I think of Augustine Gleizes, whose “hysteria” was documented at Salpêtrière hospital. There, the focus under doctor Jean-Martin Charcot was not on a cure but on managing the “disease” and recording what it looked like. Augustine and other women were used in staged re-enactments of their symptoms, both in public lectures and through photographic documentation. These women, while surely experiencing real illnesses, were also celebrities to a public fascinated with hysteria. By participating in this hospital culture of performing their illnesses, the patients were able to articulate their very real distress. When comparing Augustine’s medical performances to Wollen’s, there are uncanny similarities. Both are constructed through the gaze of others; many of Wollen’s are taken of her, not by her as she poses on medical examining tables.

Wollen is quick to confirm that Gleizes is one of her Sad Girl muses, as well as St. Catherine of Siena, Alice James, Zelda Fitzgerald, and many other women whose suffering was difficult to medically classify. “I think the history of girls’ sadness, as something that has been eroticized, glamorized, sedated, dismissed, and caught in the medical gaze, is essential to understanding how we can utilize it now for our own political purposes,” she explains. “We’d like to think that all that nonsense ended in the early 20 th century, when we debunked “hysteria” as a legitimate disease, but it’s still going on. There are plenty of chronic conditions that are unofficially considered ‘women’s’ diseases, and plenty of women who are manipulated into silence by a patriarchal medical system. I don’t know if all that much has changed, it just goes by a different language now.”

Much like the general conversations surrounding social media–based art projects, performing one’s illness and suffering makes it convenient to raise questions of authenticity. But Wollen says, “I don’t care about seeming authentic. Like, at all. This idea of the authentic as this inherently good, measurable, static thing that you can either be or not be—it’s a truly bizarre and horribly oppressive ideal… It leaves no room for uncertainty, plurality, wobbly ideas or personhoods.”

Wollen’s work largely functions as seizing and manipulating the male gaze that she is inherently subjected to. (“I wish I could just be a person, and not a walking photograph of a naked girl. But I wasn’t given a choice. I was being treated as if I was only a photograph of a naked girl long before I started taking photographs of myself naked,” she once said in a VICE interview.) But the question of whether or not these manipulations are productive is a valid one.

Rosza Zita Farkas writes in Temporary Art Review: “There are hierarchies that are afforded to certain (female) bodies, degrees of agency in one’s self-representation, perhaps at the expense of the visibility of others. The act of reclaiming agency over one’s body—of having control over its image—is not only a well-trodden ground, but also exists in a society where that act (both in art and in general culture) has not demolished the gaze. The body needs to do more than simply present itself; it needs to insert itself… the image does not exist alone… “

That being said, I argue that Wollen’s work does seem to insert itself quite forcefully into a historical conversation of capitalism and the patriarchal oppression of women. Wollen says she chose Instagram as her platform deliberately, which makes sense, given that her topics of dialogue (girls, bodies, objectifications, and performance) literally constitute what Instagram is. It also provides a platform by which she is better able to reach other Sad Girls than through traditional media. “I realized that I may be giving my content to some tech company’s insidious empire,” she says, “but I’m also having a conversation about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with a 14-year-old girl in Kansas, and she’s teaching me about her experience of girlhood. That’s so precious, and that’s an okay trade-off for me.”

In Wollen’s project, it seems that the body’s representation and the terms of its reproduction are intertwined, and with just cause. Her manipulation of her representation seems to be taking tangible steps toward redirecting the male gaze, though it might not yet be clear toward what.

I’m quite curious to watch what Audrey Wollen will do with her newfound platform. Instagram makes her work accessible to a large number of women, but it is also easy to see her as an artist in conversation with Frida Kahlo, whose art communicates both her physical frailty and emotional strength, or Cindy Sherman, whose concept photographs required her to fill many roles—photographer, model, author, director, etc. At the very least, her use of self-documentation and fearless expression of her own pain and suffering serve to create the fuller dialogue on feminism that the Internet so desperately needs.

All Instagram images courtesy Audrey Wollen.

Catch Audrey Wollen at an Artillery sponsored panel discussion Saturday, May 7, at LACE in Hollywood. For more info visit our facebook page.