Byline: Yxta Maya Murray

It feels like last summer was a long time ago. What with a year filled with electoral rage politics, acquitted police shootings of black people, the withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the Wall, the reintroduction of the Mexico City Policy, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education’s yanking of transgender protections in public schools—we’re so freaked out that maybe it’s time for a break. Visionary curators Bradford Nordeen and Brandon Stosuy understand this, and have returned to The Broad museum once again to kick off its second annual Summer Happenings season with a seemingly anodyne theme: On Saturday, they treated LA to an action titled “Warhol Icon,” organized around the model/singer/Chelsea Girls star and Factory muse Nico (1938–1988). Artillery & Co. wandered by, sniffing the promise of nostalgic fun in the air, and wondered if the moment had come to kick off our heels and just have a blast.

Nico! So blond, so chic, so unconcerned with the grubby brass tacks of social justice. After all, wasn’t she the one who said that she didn’t give two damns about the boring details of state oppression? “Jim Morrison tells me that people are looking at the streets while I am looking at the moon. I do not feel connected enough [with the issues] to throw stones at a policeman. I want to throw stones at the whole world,” she once warbled to an interviewer.

Plunking down our $10 bill for the Broad’s white wine, we entertained the brief fantasy that we, too, might smile at the moon while listening to some tunes and getting tanked, ’60s style. But when we looked at our program, we realized that Nordeen and Stosuy had no intention of letting us escape entirely from today’s state of emergency. This first act was no lightweight—it was Vaginal Davis! She’s a (now Berlin-based) genderqueer artist, writer and performer who has graced the LA scene since the 1980s, and for all of this time has kept her eye directly on the street.

“NICO HATED BLACK PEOPLE,” Miss Davis hollered at us in the Broad’s intimate Oculus Hall. Dressed in golden jewelry and brown jersey couture, she did an excellent job of showing Nico up as a glittering generality—that is, as a soothing abstraction used to lull the masses into compliance. Davis reminded us that old Nico was not just Warhol’s icon of biddable femininity, but also a ferocious white supremacist who reportedly once attacked a black singer with a broken wineglass. Why do you hate black people so much, Nico? Davis hissed into the microphone, and then shrugged. “It must be because hate is such an exciting emotion.”

Now we were wide awake, and began running around the Broad campus to see if other artists would also de-glitter Nico. Did musician Geneva Jacuzzi function as a you-are-here mapping device as she performed on the Plaza stage? Or was she a siren designed to tempt you off of a political path? Resplendent in a stripy body suit and bracketed by half-naked and polka-dotted backup dancers, she wriggled before us singing what sounded like I WANT SEX but actually turned out to be I WANT SAD/I WANT SAD/MAKE ME SAD, so maybe her hermeneutics concerned the tragedy of incomplete agency and the problematics of victim blaming. The follow-up act, Norwegian songstress Jenny Hval, also offered an agnostic reinterpretation of pussy-grabs-back when she sang tracks off her 2016 album Blood Bitch while clutching what appeared to be a disemboweled teddy bear.

Nao Bustamante’s excellent lobby installation of a crochet-swathed television featuring images of Bustamante crying while drinking red wine and flipping channels reminded us of our own healthy coping mechanisms. Jesy Fortino of Tiny Vipers, up on the third floor, wore a fetching orange beanie while poking at a music computer. The machinery sent out extremely loud waves of cochlea-breaking synth dissonance. We clutched at our heads and recalled the moments in our lives when people said that we were overreacting as we tried to explain that power might be invisible yet also so insidious that it kills.

Then it was time to get reminded that we are damned. Kembra Pfahler of the shock-punk-performance band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black did the honors. Pfahler appeared before us in the Oculus painted orange, wearing a teetering black Troll wig, and bookended by comely blue and red girl clones. “This thing is supposed to be about Nico,” Pfahler drawled. “Ughg, yeah. There was this LA Times reporter who interviewed me earlier and was super cute. Where is he? Also, the production coordinator at the Broad is really mean and made me come here at 10 o’clock this morning for a meeting.” With that, the women quickly stripped off their clothes and broke into a banging version of “Ghost Boyfriend.” Pfahler’s wig fell off and she did a naked headstand and then inserted an upside-down cross into her vagina.

For a moment, atavistic religious panic replaced Trump-induced arrhythmia, and we found ourselves doing the Pogo. Was this throwing rocks at the whole planet? Or maybe we were just being socially conscious while also completely out of our minds?

“Performance art is not entertainment!” Pfahler screamed at us, as midnight closed in and the crowd roared back in a happy frenzy.

Photography by Chris Jarvis

There’s a scene in Paul Greengrass’s 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum when former CIA operative Jason Bourne/Matt Damon kills a Moroccan man named “Desh” using a book, what appear to be shampoo bottles, and a towel. The death match goes down in a Tangier apartment, and reaches a peak when Desh grabs a brass candlestick and slashes it at Bourne’s head. Bourne, on his back, reaches around and snatches the nearest item he can find—a rather beautiful hardback tome—which he then uses to pummel Desh’s face in an grisly feat of literary pugilism. The two men afterward run into a bathroom and Bourne messes around with Prell bottles before strangling Desh with a towel.

The fight scene is obviously a scary metaphor for the way that agents of statism will turn the artifacts of enlightenment into the instruments of extinction. But what’s also miraculous about the declined Bourne franchise is how its puppets of imperialism will use anything —pens, magazines, electrical cords, aerosol cans, oscillating fans, vodka bottles —to succeed at domination and murder. Their improvisation and dazzling creativity allows us to look at our tea cups, Chihuahuas, Voltaire biographies, and bottles of acrylic paint (I’m in my studio as I write this list) as the multiply-potentialed raw materials of life and death, if we so care to quicken the world around us with such heightened attention.

The artist Marisa Merz bears an artistic practice similar to Jason Bourne’s, thought with one key difference. Merz, who at the age of 86 won a Golden Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale and has been recognized with a fantastic retrospective (first at the Met Breuer and now, the Hammer Museum) made her name as the sole female participant in the Italian Arte Povera school. She has worked as a sculptor since in 1965, when she began fashioning massive, painted, jelly-fishish sculptures out of what looks like twisted HVAC tubing and hanging them in her own home.

These euphoric repurposings (Untitled, 1966), which today glint and tinkle in the Hammer’s elegant halls, seemed a natural entrée to her inclusion in the Arte Povera movement. “Poor art” became a rallying cry for about a dozen artists in 1960’s Italy, who found themselves collected in Germano Celant’s martial manifesto Arte Povera: Notes on a Guerrilla War (1967). Here, Celant described Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pino Pascali, Jannis Kounellis, and Merz’s more-famous husband, Mario, as exiting the “ranks of the exploited” by using “poor” materials like cardboard, coal, cotton, and live animals. In Celant’s view, the Arte Povera insurgent bears a magpie bellicosity: He “becomes a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantages conferred by mobility, surprising and striking.” In their deployment of poverty’s ordnances, these soldiers resisted capitalist cliché and mind-control.

Merz, who did not find herself mentioned in this dizzying summing-up, later allowed herself to be counted among these peers, but did not startle her audience with zoos (like Kounellis, with his tweeting birds and snorting horses) or cool, gravity-defying motorcycles (as in Mario’s 1975 Accelerazione = sogno, numeri di Fibonacci al neon e motocicletta fantasma).

Instead, she went from big to “small.” From the godlike HVAC aliens, she moved to knitting small bits of copper wire. Copper wire—you can get ten feet of it for $4.95 right now from Home Depot—conducts electricity, and so is used to transfer energy in items ranging from telephones to air conditioners to railroads. Merz knitted this encouraging substance into stars, scraps, sails, and shoes.

At the Hammer, the small, bronzey squares scatter across a white wall like a stellar constellation (Untitled, 1976). In a vitrine, you can also find small slippers (Untitled, 1975), stitched of this strange fishnet. Merz used to wear these zany huaraches as a kind of performance, perhaps to signal her own queer conductivity, and her talent for transferring power to herself. She also abstracted a ship’s sail by stitching together a series of delicate copper triangles, and then placing them on the floor by a metal rod, as well as a klieg light, so that her imaginary trireme’s captain won’t lose her way as she sails across the wild world (Untitled, no date).

At other stages of her career, Merz took bumps of unfired clay and caressed them into undated little beasts who wear the astonished expressions of hand puppets, or wear copper knit veils to hide their bafflement. Some wear make-up and jewelry made out of red paint and gold leaf. She additionally made sculptures out of bundled canvas, as well as drawings: One paper piece is of a creature who looks like a harpy that didn’t make Hesiod’s cut, since it’s part-bird, blinks awkwardly, and possesses a paraffin complexion that makes it look like it’s molting.

Except for this gawky Gorgon, and a charming gold angel who looks like she can’t figure out how to fly, the works with frames around them do not hold the power of the weird HVAC sea creatures and knitwork and shy clay mole-people. Merz’s work may resemble that of her brothers in guerilla art warfare, but it also recalls that of Louise Bourgeois and the chorographer Trisha Brown: Both of those latter artists transformed small banalities—white sticks, shoulder-shrugging—into compositions that seem negligible at first glance, until the viewer realizes that Bourgeois had crafted a community of the lost (in her Personages), and Brown lifted the unconscious gesture into radiant ritual.

This is why Merz is also like Greengrass’s ingenious international assassin, because she grabs at everything and anything in the service of her art – plumbing, wiring, earth. But, here’s the key difference: Her I.E.D.’s don’t kill and dismantle the forces of empire and exploitation in a Celant’s “place of battle.” Instead, they detonate into living potential, and show us how to gently remake the detritus we’ve inherited and collected (whether it be teacups, candlesticks, books, or sexism) into an unexpected world.

Marisa Merz’s The Sky is a Great Space runs through August 20.

Photos by Yxta Maya Murray

Can art hurt people?

In mid-February, I sat in Boyle Heights’ El Tepeyac café across from a revolutionary named A. and probed him with questions in order to find out. A., a slim Latinx man wearing Elvis Costello glasses, belongs to the anti-gentrification group Defend Boyle Heights. DBH is a nationally recognized rebellion against the encroachment of art galleries into communities of color, and also forms the subject of an LAPD hate crime investigation.

“This is our neighborhood, we were raised here,” A. told me, staring down at the uneaten burrito he’d ordered. “We have a stake in it, and we tell them—you are not going to build this art gallery here. Get the fuck out! Private property be damned!”

I first contacted A. through Defend Boyle Heights’ website after reading about DBH’s riotous July, 2016 interruption of a coordinated dialogue about art and gentrification staged by Self Help Graphics and Art, the revered neighborhood gallery devoted to showing Latino and Chicano work. DBH’s fame had enlarged considerably since then, particularly after protesters laid siege to the Venus and Nicodim art galleries on Anderson Street. That September, DBH-ers, some wearing bandanas over their faces, massed on Anderson, yelling Fuera Fuera Fuera! while Venus and Nicodim patrons peered at them skittishly through the plate glass. Some demonstrators (possibly unaffiliated) also shot potato guns at the windows. And one dissident, whom A. insists did not belong to DBH, sprayed Fuck White Art on Nicodim’s door, spurring the LAPD to open a hate crime file.

“How do art galleries hurt you?” I asked, sipping my cooling decaf.

“[DBH] got started in November of 2015.” A. stared at me with huge, earnest eyes from behind his lenses. “There was an action against Hopscotch. It’s an [majority Anglo] opera or theater troupe. They showed up in Hollenbeck Park. An organization called Serve the People of L.A., which does food distribution, sets up at the park every Sunday [the Hopscotch cast showed up there to rehearse a show]. Serve the People saw them and thought: ‘This is an obvious project for gentrification. You’re a bunch of fucking gentrifiers, and we want you to leave.’ That’s when we realized that we needed to move against arts organizations, the galleries.” According to Serve the People’s own website, its members had a “confrontation” with the company’s rehearsing players at Hollenbeck, and warned them that “their very well-being [was] at risk.”

DBH grew out of that action: It acts as a coalition with Serve the People, Union de Vecinos, Ovarian Psycos, the Brown Berets and Backyard Brigade. Together, these networks also form the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement (BHAAAD), which targets art galleries’ “artwashing” of gentrification.

In resisting galleries, Defend Boyle Heights responds to a received wisdom that arts institutions attract wealthy people to “undiscovered” neighborhoods that swiftly see rent rises. Poor communities have worried about arriviste galleries since at least the 1970s, when Paula Cooper moved her renowned white box into SoHo’s “Hell’s Hundred Acres”—though the connection between art and poverty arguably ranges back to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s mid-19th-century Paris renovation, which simultaneously saw the exile of indigents from their habitat and the appearance of privately owned salons around the Tuileries.  

Some economists reject the connection between art galleries and prohibitive land values: In 2013, USC’s Jenny Schultz published a study concluding that art gallerists were “unlikely” to cause gentrification, and could only be faulted for spying up-and-coming neighborhoods before prices blow up. A more trenchant appraisal of DBH’s agenda observes that a violent fight against gentrification wastes political bullets, most of which will probably ricochet. As sociologists at the University of Toronto and Stanford argued in a recent paper about “extreme” political protest, tactics that involve threats “typically reduce popular public support for the movement by eroding bystanders’ identification with the movement.” A far more viable neighborhood preservation model will be found in Houston’s largely African-American Third Ward, which has resisted gentrification under the careful land-banking efforts of Texas State Representative Garnet Coleman. Coleman protected the Third Ward through negotiation and sober economic planning with community members and arts organizations—not by scaring people.

Nevertheless, with Boyle Heights’ property values spiking 9.3% in 2016, it is gentrifying, and A. emphasized that DBH and BHAAAD’s activism against art galleries springs from locals’ sensation of getting pushed out: “On a Friday or Saturday night, in the arts district, we are surrounded. And we can’t afford [what’s coming]. I used to live in this apartment paying $600 a month, and a family of six lived there, too. Now, it’s $1,900 a month for a two-bedroom loft. I mean, it’s frightening.”

Boyle Heights gallerists don’t express much sympathy. A week after I met with A., Nicodim Gallery’s elegant, white-haired owner Mihai Nicodim swept his hand in the air when asked about the September protest. “I am from Romania, so it’s nothing. But, no, you cannot tell me to leave. It is very dangerous, they had potato guns. They didn’t like white people here. What is the difference between [what DBH says] and Trump?” Nicodim started laughing. “I have an opening tonight, and you know what I did? I sent them an invitation. They didn’t like that. I put it on their website. They just take it off.”

Other Boyle Heights residents, such as housing advocate Margarita Amador, echo Nicodim’s frustration with DBH: “They’re like gang members. They’re anti-change.  I don’t agree that the battle is white people, [race] is irrelevant. And we need tax revenue.” But Amador also recognizes the damage that gentrification can do to poorer, elderly people, particularly those thrust out of their homes in the cash-for-keys scams that often accompany escalating property values: “We can’t afford to move any more of our senior residents.” She’s already seen the grim effects of dislocation in Pico/Aliso, she says. “At least five residents passed away when we relocated them. They get sad. They get lonely. They were missing the community, and here, you know people by name.”

: : :

It seems that everywhere you look in Boyle Heights, someone is suffering as a result of gentrification and its blowback. On February 22, the administrators of PSSST gallery, a prominent target of DBH protest, announced their closure on their website. “Our staff and artists were routinely trolled online and harassed in-person,” the gallerists said in a statement. “This persistent targeting, which was often highly personal in nature, was made all the more intolerable because the artists we engaged are queer, women and/or people of color.”
At the time of my interview with A., DBH still worked to dislodge PSSST from its East 3rd Street location. “Don’t you feel bad about making people who work at that art gallery feel terrible, and maybe even frightened?” I asked.

A. shook his head: “I’m not actively wishing suffering upon them, and we always have to reiterate we don’t hate art. We hate the economic process, what’s happening to the working-class residents. But if that’s what it takes for them to understand that gentrification is a terrible process and displacement is a terrible thing to go through, then yeah, feel how painful this is to see your community get swallowed up by an economic train that’s trying to run you over.”

In Boyle Heights, art isn’t the force hurting residents—hell, as usual, is other people. Who is at fault? Lalo Alcaraz, the artist and Self Help Graphics affiliate, posted on Facebook last July: “I’m all against gentrification… [but DBH’s] attacking Self Help Graphics… is just plain WRONG.” In a recent phone interview, Alcaraz explained that he himself has experienced threats: “[So,] I stand by what I said. I just don’t agree with violence or intimidation… It’s not the way to do things.” To this critique, we might also add that it’s imperative to reject persecution of queers, racial minorities, and women, as well as the noxious use of racist rhetoric.

If we look to the state to help break this feedback loop of homelessness and harm, it would only offer the bitter exigencies of the criminal justice system to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Those of us who remain wary of criminal justice’s brutal power balk at the idea of a social justice effort that would meet with yet another police sweep of Latinos. The fight over art galleries in Boyle Heights is a story of overlapping structural racism, classism and homophobia, and the real trouble here comes from the fact that, in Amador’s words, the players don’t “know people by name.”

The July 2016 dialogue hosted by Self Help Graphics devolved into a hostile carnival. But mutual recognition and dialogue could have formed the heart of so many imaginative responses to the change of Boyle Heights’s fortunes. Anything from the traditional—such as community benefits agreements—to the radical (e.g., talking circles) might have repaired the rift that threatens to install hate alongside the neighborhood’s freshly painted galleries and clothing shops.

“People are being evicted, and it’s a loss of home, a loss of culture,” A. explained that day at El Tepeyac.
Maybe there’s still time to address inequality in the neighborhood with some fresh thinking. Along with Houston’s Third Ward, Chicago is a leader here: the artist Theaster Gates opened the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative in 2009, and art galleries like Weinberg/Newton have housed homeless people. Such innovations could help defuse the distrust that leads to potato guns, slurs, and possibly worse. And so far, nothing seems irreversible.

In my conversation with A., he proved a sensitive militant who listened to other opinions when approached with respect. Couldn’t that be a starting place for change? Nemeses have put aside their aggressions before, and in far worse worlds: In 1947, Mohandas Gandhi lived under the same Calcutta roof as his supposed ethnic enemy, Bengal’s Muslim League Chief Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Maybe there will never be another Gandhi, but his legacy is at least as compelling as the implications of internecine war and race and class cleansing that vibrate in some DBH-affiliated propaganda. Peace remains possible: It’s not too late to voice the pain of dislocation while working to create community and cooperation in Boyle Heights.

Maybe every gesture that you make can birth a fresh way of living. Perhaps by merely looking over your shoulder, or touching the ground, you can create a brand new philosophy or a radical break with reality.

So argued the dancers in the Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Getty Museum last Friday, on March 10. The nine performers assembled in the Getty’s Tram Arrival Plaza at 2 pm, all dressed in white, and wearing sunglasses to guard against the glare reflecting from the white pad covering the museum’s travertine plain. A small clan of spectators gathered on the court’s ascending stone steps, awkward and blinking beneath the sudden sun.

The dancers milled about on the periphery. At an invisible sign, a man walked out onto the stage, unaccompanied by music. No one introduced him; no throat-clearing speech announced the break between expecting and making art. The trees framed the dancer’s sleepy arm stretches and head-rolls, which gradually escalated into leaps and lunges. He did not look at us, the audience; he did the thousand-yard stare of the star concentrating on his form. Then he slowed down and stopped; his face took on a placid, welcoming expression. We clapped.

A group of five quickly followed. One woman, with her head half-shaved, dominated.   The dancers swarmed the area, curving beneath her stamping geometry. They formed into pairs and collapsed on the ground. They propped each other up as if at an impromptu picnic, trying to get comfortable as they leaned and tugged on each other’s limbs. For brief moments, luminous abstracts appeared – a triangle formed of crooked legs, a circle made of entwining torsos. Or were the dancers making shapes less cubist than neoclassical – like the disarmed magnificence of the Getty’s own Air by Aristide Maillol? The dominant woman with the shaved hair faded away without an argument. The dance unraveled spontaneously, as do the compositions made by people waiting in lines and sitting at bus terminals.

Trisha Brown, a MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow, formed her company in 1970, retiring as head of in 2013. She became famous for her astonishing site-specific performances, such as 1971’s Roof Piece, where dancers improvised and transmitted movements from the tops of twelve buildings in New York’s SoHo district. 1994’s If You Couldn’t See Me, which had Brown dancing all the time with her back to the audience, also figures in her pantheon. Brown additionally collaborated with a numinous collection of visual artists and musicians, such as Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Laurie Anderson. Artistic directors Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas now lead the group. They bear the mission of preserving Brown’s archives through re-enactments, such as in their massive Proscenium Works, 1979-2011 tour, which brought Brown’s dances to five different continents. The TBDC also initiated a review of Brown’s oeuvre in its Trisha Brown: In Plain Site series, of which the Getty performance formed a part last weekend, along with LACMA, the Broad, and Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel.

This august history of prior performance, however, did not strike the observer as much as the dancers’ immediate message that all human movement creates unscripted possibility. After the dancers lolling about in picnic-mode dispersed, two women took the floor. At first, they did yoga poses, specializing in one-legged downward dogs, as if at a sweaty Santa Monica studio. All at once, they then started heaving each other up aggressively like Hercules and Antaeus. A mixed-sex couple next gently stepped all over each other, transforming a matched battle into a domestic curio of passive-aggressiveness. Skreaky music began playing out of hidden speakers; a sound like a clock or a robot heartbeat tocked through the air. The audience sweated silently on the travertine, clapping lightly and tottering cheek-a-cheek on their similarly off-key sit-bones.

The best moment passed when the bellicose woman with the shaved hair appeared alone with a light aluminum ladder. As she played the contraption upon her body, she neatly shaped it into a prison, a toilet, a vagina dentata, an albatross, and—my favorite—a phallus of which all of us could be very proud. These metamorphoses blended together in swift, elegant progress, indicating that all matter could be thusly transformed with just an inkling of will. The dancers filled empty space with substantial tree-green shapes; they made a shrug or a hand-fillip into Renaissance sculpture just by making you notice it.

In the 1980s, the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote: “You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at full moon.”

What did they mean? I have no idea. But I grew closer to understanding when I watched the TBDC make the simplest signal pregnant with art. As I sat, bent and creaky, on the stone steps, I had the momentary hallucination that my every move, too, could be a moonshot. If I stood up from my seat just the right way, maybe I could also be a wind of locusts or a moody werewolf. And as I departed from the performance and caught a glimmer of my own reflection in one of the Getty’s manifold shiny surfaces, I couldn’t tell: Was that me, irradiated with potential? Or just the same old Yxta, shuffling along?

Photos by Yxta Maya Murray

Five years ago, San Francisco–based painter, sculptor and performance artist Ana Teresa Fernández woke from a long night’s sleep with a sudden inspiration: She would erase the border fence that divides the United States and Mexico.

It was June, 2011. That October, President Barack Obama would announce the record deportation of nearly 400,000 people. The year before, the U.S. Senate rejected the DREAM Act, and Arizona passed SB 1070, requiring immigrants to carry registration documents.

Fernández stared up at her bedroom ceiling and decided to banish these horrors: She would paint the border fence sky-bright blue, so that it would seem to melt into the empyrean.  
“You know how sometimes you wake up with courage?” Fernández recently mused in a phone interview. “I thought, I’m a painter. Why don’t I just paint it out?”  

Twenty-four hours after her epiphany, Fernández, her mother Maria, and a videographer traveled to the San Diego–Tijuana border armed with periwinkle house paint and a ladder.  Fernández had long been making work about Mexican identity and gender, often painting herself performing household chores while dressed up in a black cocktail gown and sexy heels. She wore such attire as she climbed to the tops of the border fence’s long steel pickets, and began to daub them light blue. Within minutes, a police truck screeched up. Two officers jumped out of the vehicle and told her to stop.

“I climb down, and they’re almost going to arrest me,” she recalled; “and we get into this whole debate. But I think that because I was wearing the dress they couldn’t identify me as a hoodlum. I realized that I had an entry point of conversation [with them]. In about 45 minutes, their minds started to decipher it. I said, ‘Let me just finish what I started.’ They said ‘okay,’ and five hours later I’d painted the whole thing out.”

Fernández documented the work, Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), by her signature move: She does not just photograph or videotape her performances, but also makes hyperreal and massive paintings of them. Her video and these vibrant oils became sought-after relics of what is now surely Fernández’ most celebrated piece—with the election of President Donald Trump and his continuous calls for “The Wall,” Borrando has grown into an immigration-rights talking point.  

Famously, Trump has signed an executive order that clears the way for the building of an “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful” concrete, 55-foot, 200 to 2,000-mile-long Southern border wall that Mexico “will [eventually?] pay” for. He also signed orders that would withhold federal grant funding from sanctuary cities and that further ease the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump has pursued his anti-immigration goals with such zeal that he not only sent shockwaves through our culture, but also threatens international relations. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled a meeting with Trump on January 26, explaining that Mexico would not pay for the barricade.

These dramas have added to Borrando’s meanings: When asked about the immense amount of attention this one performance receives, Fernández allowed that it is being read as resistance to Trump-style nationalism and racism: “It lets people see what we should be striving for.”

This yearning for a Mexican-American rapprochement percolates through all of Fernández’ art. A dark-haired woman of elegant bearing, Fernández was born in Tampico, Mexico, in 1981. She began to traverse the border at the age of 11 when her physician father, Genaro, commenced a career in San Diego. Her mother, Maria Teresa, taught her to pay close attention to the people who had “risked their lives and become separated from their families.” Fernández developed a “complicated awareness… of what that border stood for—all of this division, all of this sadness.”

Since studying at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early aughts, Fernández has honored her mother’s lessons by creating a body of work that recognizes immigrants’ dignity and insists on their rights. She does this by dematerializing objects as well as making Mexicans as visible as possible.  

Vanishing acts, like Borrando, include 2016’s Erasure. This performance eulogizes the 2014 disappearance of 43 young male student-activists in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, who were presumably murdered.  Fernández painted her body black in a slow, complex fade, leaving unmarked only shards of skin around her eyes and mouth. “I wondered, how can these [students] be erased that quickly? Even though I was on this side, I wanted to unify in protest with people who are in Mexico.” Fernández’ personal eclipse obliterated borders just as Borrando did: The work narrates how, through the forces of news, memory and shared grief, what happens “there” also happens “on this side.”

 
Fernández’ other gift is for the big reveal. In 2008, she memorialized the orphans of the Juarez femicide: Since 1993, the bodies of hundreds of raped and murdered women have been found in the desert, victims of organized crime and government corruption. Fernández worked with three young girls, who modeled for sculptures made in translucent resin. Fernández covered the forms with shards of glass. She crafted the waifs and protected them with dangerous spikes so that people would witness that these “orphans are exposed and vulnerable.” She titled the series “ECDESIS,” after the scientific term for the shedding of skin or protective armor.  

2010 saw Fernández chasing down San Francisco’s community of trucks carrying stacks of recyclable cardboard. Fernández persuaded four immigrant drivers to redesign their pickups’ exteriors.  One vehicle shimmers with blue-green waves; another brandishes orange-green Mondrian color-blocking. With Troka Troka, Fernández helped make the conveyances more conspicuous so that observers could see “that this type of job is so important in our community—it is the ecological flora and fauna of the city.”

Fernández’ work creates an ethos of transnational humanism that demands liberation, mutuality, compassion and respect. She creates hope that, in an age of rising fear and hate, people might look upon her art and “decipher” it, as did the police when she painted Borrando.  

“I’m showing what’s happening in Mexico to bring a sense of awareness and empathy,” she insisted on the phone in a clear, calm voice, when asked about her own work’s border crossings. “We’re all interconnected. Political policy doesn’t just stay in the U.S. Our actions here affect people on the other side.”

All images courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly nothing.

MacArthur “Genius” Grant-winning Toba Khedoori’s massive and recondite oil-on-wax drawings of a table and a chair, a segment of a brick wall, an empty stadium, and a chain-link fence hovered in the room like the fading afterimages of a distressing dream. The unoccupied chair and table, expertly rendered and daubed with faint beige paint, drifted within a vastness of pale and unmarked wax paper (Untitled) (table and chair) 1999. The evacuated stadium (Untitled), 1996 and fence (Untitled) 1996, too, appeared to hang within two vellum-colored vacuums. The exquisitely conjured brick wall levitated in another sea of blankness, accessorized with faint pencil marks made with a ruler (Untitled) (wall) 1995. All issued from the late 1990s, early 2000s, looking like architectural or design drawings made for so many discarded projects.  

“What?” I asked, turning around. I had just snapped an extreme close-up of the brick wall, so that the picture filled with rectangles instead of confusing zilch. I am in my 40s, Latina, and skeptical. The security guard was in her 20s, female, black, and looked around the room with a bright face. She wore LACMA’s anonymous gray uniform and a white shirt, and solid, comfortable black shoes. Visitors scattered across the floor, gazing at the drawings with unsure expressions, but the guard studied the images with confidence.

“The artist,” the guard said, “She made negative space her own thing. She thought about it, and made it her signature. She’s famous.”

“I see,” I said, as we walked deeper into the eponymous exhibit, which began on September 25, and lasts until March 19, 2017. In another room, we found a welcome burst of color: Khedoori’s two alluring paintings of fire in brick hearths glowed at us with bouquets of gold, black, and red. In one of the dyad, Untitled (white fireplace) 2005, she surrounded the flames with the same drabness as that stranding the chair and the stadium. In the other, Untitled (black fireplace) 2006, Khedoori painted the titanic margins with pitch-dark oil paint.

“I like that one,” the guard said, about the black-bordered work.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s cozy,” she explained.

In the final gallery of the show, we saw that Khedoori had broken style: She painted smaller canvases and filled them in nearly or entirely. Untitled (Clouds) 2005, held a gray-and-white thunder cloud that took up 2/3 of the paper. Untitled (black squares) 2011-12, bore a multitude of tiny mother-of-pearl-hued squares, like a pixilation, or fine bathroom tile. A winter woodland occupied Untitled (branches I) 2011-12, and a leafy branch crowded Untitled (leaves/branches), 2011-12.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

 “O’Shikeya Williams,” she replied, smiling.

As of this writing, Williams has been looking at Khedoori’s negative space for weeks, and still finds in it not only a testament to female ambition, but also a cause for rejoicing. It does not seem likely that everyone given the job of absorbing Khedoori’s difficult negations would have such a reaction. It would take patience and tenacity to see Khedoori’s something in her nothing.

Khedoori is Iraqi-Australian, attended UCLA, and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. When the MacArthur Foundation awarded her their famous grant in 2002, its judges described her fin de siècle drawings as “quiet, reticent works [that] . . . convey a sense of mystery and invit[e] the viewer to speculate on their meaning while appreciating their serene beauty.” And in its ad copy for Khedoori’s exhibit, LACMA tells patrons that museum officials gave her a show to “contribut[e] to the rapidly growing recognition of the work of women artists.”

That is to say, the MacArthur folks remain baffled by Khedoori’s work, and LACMA detects in her oeuvre an opportunity to participate in a feminist art trend.

Experts talk and talk and talk. Parmenides said that nothing cannot exist (“What Is is; for it is to be,/ but nothing it is not”), and Albert Camus took the void for granted, saying that it “stung like fire.” I contemplated Khedoori’s absences and presences for an hour, went home, researched ancient philosophy and French existentialism on the question of Zero, and devised a theory that Khedoori has traveled backward in philosophic time, moving from the emptiness of modernist absurdity to the cozy abundance of a golden age.

But Williams teaches us the more important interpretation, which holds that negative space will claim you unless you fill it yourself. Hers is a kind of endurance criticism, hard-won by the task of guarding artworks as if they are more valuable than people, and, as a consequence, staring at them for hours at a time. Contemplating art under such circumstances teaches the watcher if the work is really worth something or not. Williams gives it value by approaching it with joy and curiosity, and seeing in it the ambitions of Khedoori, a woman artist who cracked an art-world code by taking the rapidly growing nothing it apparently would otherwise offer her and making it her own.

LACMA is lucky to have an employee such as Williams and should encourage her sight and gift, which was offered to me with such generosity and illuminated a beautiful show that does not yield its messages easily.

Los Angeles performance artist Molly Jo Shea knows that you’ve got some genuine feelings, you’re just scared to reveal them. If you attend one of her shows, maybe you should be afraid. Shea operates as a doula of the emotions and she will barf blood or take a tough unripe tomato to the kisser to make sure that you give birth to as many of your passions as possible.

A striking, brown-eyed 27-year-old woman with a dark pageboy, Shea may be most famous for sampling Shia LaBeouf’s unintentionally hilarious performance art tapes in her promotion of an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign for 2015’s “Perform Chinatown— Rush Hour” festival. But though LaBeouf’s wacky screaming of “DO IT! DO IT!” qualifies the pledge drive as the most excruciating in history, Shea deserves more notice for reminding startled viewers that love dies, that they possess a dangerous will to power, and that the old maxim “never give up” could have been the worst piece of advice they ever took.

“I’m driven by fear,” Shea explained on a recent sunny morning at Blue Bottle Coffee in downtown Los Angeles. She wore black slacks, a patterned blouse, and a ceramic “snake/penis” necklace she made herself. Her huge eyes glowed as she described her latest act, in Vienna, where she used Snapchat faceswapping and rainbow lighting to convince the audience to project their desires onto her. “I’d pretend to be their mother or their wife or their girlfriend, and then I’d crouch down next to them and promise that I’d love them forever, even after they wound up in the grave,” she exclaimed, sipping a cold brew. The show riffed off the opera Tales of Hoffmann, and Shea encouraged her subjects to have supersized panic attacks, as did the protagonist in that grim tale.

Shea understands extreme emotional states and finds Los Angeles the perfect city to freak out in. Born in Northridge, CA, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, returning to LA upon graduating. In her art career she executes work that processes “the evil undercurrent of a city without seasons, that doesn’t reset.” Whereas in Chicago she learned that “it could be okay” to “not go outside” because of the cold and snow, in Los Angeles there’s an expectation that people will always be productive, happy and “at the beach.” But Shea apprehends that a lot of Angeleños fail at that stereotype, and how rough that can make their lives.

“I never feel comfortable feeling things,” she admitted, taking a bite of chocolate chip cookie, and smiled.

Shea’s talent for finding her audience’s triggers energize her earliest performances, which jeer at physical, professional or sexual failure. In 2011’s Bloodsport, filmed in Chicago while she was “having a nervous breakdown,” Shea gamely danced to Sugar Ray’s peppy song “Someday” as her septum spouted a prolific nosebleed. Upon moving to LA in 2012, she enacted “It’s My Party and I Can Die If I Want To,” where she joked about the mesmerizing badness of a life dedicated to the arts (“What’s the difference between an orgy and a performance art piece? People at an orgy know when they’re sucking.”) and puked up the fake blood. Around the same time, she initiated a “Misogynist Massage” series, where she rubbed naked clients as they watched a woman-hating video (“Remember all the fucked-up shit your mother ever said to you …She was probably a huge bitch. And now release.”). Shea also took a star turn in Season’s Greetings With John Baldessari, where she dressed up as Santa/Conceptualist John Baldessari and sang Christmas carols to the classy folks that inhabit something called “Chatroulette”—a wrist-slitter of a service mostly populated by men seeking chat companions via Skype-ish technology. Season’s Greetings’ reveals Shea/Baldessari/Santa getting rejected by about 30 suitors (“Your partner disconnected. Press ‘Next’ to find a new person!”) when she wasn’t blinking at penises getting masturbated.

But the 2015 Taking Stock in Yourself probably measures up as the, literally, biggest punch to the face: Shea got locked up in the kind of wooden stocks that the Sheriff of Nottingham would have used to torture Robin Hood, and gave her audience a lecture on how to “overcome humiliation.” While her head and hands waved from their enclosures, Shea merrily covered the debasements that arrive with Love, Money, Ego and Outside Forces (“Sometimes you do something totally depraved for love, like drive to LAX.”) as an assistant squirted water in her face. The dénouement arrived when she required audience members, including her own mother, to read out personal affirmations (“I can positively take responsibility for my own actions”) and throw unripe tomatoes at her head while she screamed at them for being pussies.

In his Poetics, Aristotle argued that the best dramatic tragedies inspired catharsis in the audience. “Catharsis” derives from the Greek medical term katharsis, meaning “bodily purging, or cleansing,” and the term seems apt here. Shea will stomach pump a wad of emotions out of you whether you like it or not, and in the process you might find yourself laughing with anguish, while conceivably committing assault and battery like those frightful guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment.  

“I’m trying to be more empathetic, because people are complicated,” Shea explained at Blue Bottle, while her snake/penis necklace glittered softly. She shrugged about the tomato concussions and suggested her work revealed how people share the same sadness she often struggles with. “By giving [the audience] my own vulnerability I’m able to do a trade—I mean, to understand something else. [I want to] trade what is inside of me, and gain knowledge about the audience, so that I can understand something.” Shea paused, looking out the window at LA’s warm, golden sky. “Something that was invisible to me. Something I didn’t see.”

See Molly Jo Shea’s work in “I Can’t Even… A Pet Peeve Funeral,” a collaborative installation and performance with artist Steven Frost on January 7th at Basement Projects in Santa Ana at the Santora Arts Building.

Jibz Cameron, the performance artist and poet of female panic who goes by the moniker Dynasty Handbag, is trying to make more user-friendly work. Cameron has made her name by staging wild and incandescent actions that make you feel excitedly deranged. In her 2015 show Come On at the RADAR Queerfail Festival, she imagined trying to seduce a prospective lover by sticking out her butt and singing encouragements like “come on my face!” “come on my tooth!” in a high-pitched Phyllis Diller squeal. In Live Birth! she appeared before her audience in a black cowboy hat and Spanx, and proceeded to pantomime herself bitchily expelling a fetus while screaming out insults to an invisible wife in a combo baby voice/Exorcist demon growl. And in a 2016 video titled Oh, Hummingbird she appeared in a naked suit with drawn-on droopy breasts and a big bush to sing merry Anthropocene warnings like “Oh hummingbird/just a word/do be careful when munching that flower/because it may have been rained on by/toxic clouds of polluted gas.”

Cameron’s antics earned her the praise of the late critic José Esteban Muñoz, who singled her out in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity as an artist who imagined possible futures apart from capitalist and heteronormative models. Muñoz praised Cameron’s performance of “failure”—her displays of her botched efforts to gain love, look like a natural mother, and deal with environmental devastation: “Dynasty Handbag’s queer failure is not an aesthetic failure but, instead, a political refusal. It is going off script, and the script in this instance is the mandate that makes queer and other minoritarian cultural performers work not for themselves for but distorted cultural hierarchy,” he wrote.

One may hypothesize, rightly, that a lesbian feminist performance artist who dedicates her career to limning failure via political refusal may perhaps not earn a ton of cash while so engaged. The entire point of staging actions that require audiences to travel from comfort to bemusement to disgust and finally to radical re-imagining requires that the artist liberate herself from an entertainment market trapped in an eternal return to reassuring remakes and a patriarchy of superheroes.

Even if the artist wants to go on-script for a while so as to make a couple of ducats, that’s pretty hard to accomplish, too: In a 2015 issue of Jacobin Magazine, Canadian academic Miranda Campbell observed that “despite the supposed glamor of being an artist, most earn an income that falls near or below the poverty line.” In May 2016, the Atlantic Monthly rightfully lambasted Minneapolis’ artist-supportive housing for serving mostly white tenants, who earned a still-not-princely average income of $29,890. One of the best essays on this topic is poet Morgan Parker’s 2015 My Dreams of Being a Feminist Housewife, where she confesses: “I have approximately six jobs. My friends and my mom say I am ‘overextended’ and wonder about the psychology around my impulse to ‘do too much.’ It is very simple. It is the psychology of the poor.”

Thus it came with little surprise that Cameron tried to style last Sunday afternoon’s performance, I, An Moron, at the Hammer Museum, as more of a peppy variety act than as a master class in white female abjection. She announced as much at the beginning of her set in the Hammer’s packed, dark Annex, when she relayed that she was in television development talks (rumors have it with Jack Black’s outfit Electric Dynamite), and currently cherished a goal of trying to “make more accessible work for the masses.” She hoped to avoid a future filled with museum acts like this one, with its miserable pittances that were the equivalent of the Hammer, that “baking soda capital of the world,” “tak[ing] a shit in [her] mouth.”

As such asides might indicate, Dynasty Handbag’s dreams of financial security couldn’t completely kill her nihilist streak, thank God! She started family friendly enough, dressed in a dapper white pantsuit and talking about lesbians who BYO hemp water to cultural events, because they are so environmentally conscious that they won’t use corporately wasteful and probably racist Dixie cups for soy milk beverages that are responsible for destroying the rain forest. “We lesbians always have a large hairy foot in the responsible hole,” she noted.

Cameron started to bring back the freak soon enough, though—oh, here’s Dynasty Handbag stripping to her flesh-colored Spanx and giving birth with groans and Beelzebub screams to an invisible tot—oh, here’s Dynasty Handbag now talking about how she got pregnant with her wife’s eggs and her dog’s, stepfather’s, and brother’s sperm. Next came a super weird bit where Dynasty Handbag enacted “being in a woman’s body” and her joy of “being in my golden globe” by pretending to pick muffin crumbs out of her sweats for several minutes, and then pantomiming washing her feet for several more. Next, she sang Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” (Hey lady—you got the love I need/Maybe more than enough) in a frantic shriek and then shouted “This is going to get me into the Whitney MacArthur Guggenheim gift card, but if not, I don’t care because I’ve got Hollywood!”

Successful comedy can be art. Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman and Chris Rock, among others, have touched that ephemeral intersection. But performance this filled with unmediated vaginitis does not typically rake in the dollars, because it makes you look at where you’ve placed your own large hairy foot in the distorted cultural hierarchy. Maybe the near future will see a fully naked Dynasty Handbag teaching us acerbic yet soothing life lessons on a mid-budget HBO property. But for now, Dynasty’s still here with her full-blown crazy, and we can always dream of an equitable state that offers generous stipends for the nuttiest and most brilliant artists working today.

Photographs by Yxta Maya Murray