Land has been a constant throughout history. We bring to land our personal experiences, and land in turn acts as a witness to the people and events that come and go. For artist Allison Janae Hamilton, land is her most enduring subject. She describes land as a participant in and reflection of histories from the beautiful to the traumatic. Her works are haunting and inspiring, unnerving and captivating as she examines issues of social and environmental justice and unpacks narratives both personal and collective.
Hamilton’s work centers on imagery and folklore of the American rural South. She grew up in Florida, also spending time working on her family’s farm in Tennessee. Her upbringing instilled in her an understanding of issues involved with land. She explained as we connected recently over the phone: “Growing up, I was surrounded by family members, especially elders in my family, who were deeply involved in conversations around land from a political and policy perspective, as well as from an environmental perspective, in particular the changing environment.” From her personal connections and family experiences, land became a “main character” in her work. She continued, “I’m always mining my own experiences and referencing normal conversations from within my family and community.”
Hamilton addresses these topics through photography, film, sculpture and installation. In a photographic series from 2019 titled “Floridawater,” the artist appears, in character, in the Wacissa River. In the hauntingly beautiful images, Hamilton is in a white dress with her body partially submerged in dark water clouded by plants and algae. The viewer sees her from the shoulders down with her head above the water, lending a sense of control as she always retains the ability to breathe.
The Wacissa is part of a river system laden with history. In the first half of the 1800s, enslaved Black people were forced to dig a canal in the dense, swampy system to provide the cotton trade with a path for barges to reach the Gulf of Mexico. Called the Slave Canal, it was never put into use. By the time digging was complete, new railroads filled the transportation needs.
As a subject for this series and other works in Hamilton’s practice, the Wacissa carries this traumatic history. The series begins with Floridawater I, in which the artist floats calmly, hardly disturbing the river as small bubbles rise and little fish swim by. In Floridawater II, she kicks one leg forward with her toe pointed straight ahead. Her dress, shining in a bright light that penetrates the dark water, appears to slowly descend. The colors and orientation of her body recall Jean Honoré-Fragonard’s Rococo masterpiece The Swing (1767). Hamilton’s photograph is both beautiful and troubling.
The final works in the series are further unsettling as Hamilton stands impossibly still with her feet on a submerged metal grate. Was this space once above water? Is this Florida after a devastating flood? There is a heightened tension between the softly rippling water and the complete stillness of the artist’s body, as if the entire scene is about to burst into motion.
Floridawater builds upon ideas that Hamilton explored in earlier works. “At the time, I was interested in these entities or figures as witnesses who watch over the landscapes,” she explained, “I imagined that they were haints, which is another word for ghosts down South, that took the form of animals or human-like creatures.” The figures connect the past with the present and act as witnesses to the people and events that used the land. Part of this witnessing, Hamilton noted in our conversation, includes events both good and bad. She elaborated, “The history of land is intertwined with so many other histories, like the history of brutal labor practices. Land can reflect traumatic histories while also representing something liberatory, such as healing and ritual practices involving nature. For me, this touches on a relationship between Black cultural practice and Black experiences.”
In her sculptures, Hamilton takes this idea of entities witnessing history further with figures like Blackwater Creature II, an otherworldly being that resembles a giant eight-legged, spindly reptile lying on the ground. The creature has metal feet and limbs, a long hairy tail, a thick band of feathers in place of a head and a torso of jagged sticks. The work feels both contemporary and ancient, existing in the present day, but appearing to be made up of materials from different generations. Hamilton explained that in creating these sculptures, she was interested in exploring the idea of history as something constructed by the powerful. The strange woodland creatures are what she describes as “neutral watchers” that are “in part spiritual, almost like ancestral apparitions or mythological beings.” Indeed, the disparate assortment of materials and objects make it feel as if the sculpture has just climbed out of a swamp with evidence of all the histories it has witnessed sticking to its body over time.
Hamilton brings these spiritual beings into her photography through masks and props. Her latest works, exhibited in the spring of 2021 at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, are part portraiture, part landscape photography. They feature Black women standing on the edge of a forest or marsh, perhaps along the Wacissa. The settings are lush and calm, but also eerie and even haunting. The women wear white dresses and adornments like wigs and headdresses. They face the viewer with dark sunglasses covering their eyes and expressions that seem at once stony and soft. In All the Stars Appointed to Their Places (2021), Hamilton’s subject holds two large broom-like palm fronds. Her bright white dress and white wig shine in a mythical, supernatural way.
Hamilton made these works in response to the political climate of the presidential election in 2020. From her home in New York, she watched the news leading up to the South Carolina primary and was alarmed by the way in which New York progressives referred to voters in the southern state as “low information voters.” Hamilton explained, “This didn’t sit with me. These were not low information voters. It felt like an attempt at erasure.” A few months later during the general election and at the height of the pandemic, she was back in northern Florida in an area right across the Georgia border. Being so close to the state, Hamilton saw the outpouring of ads during the Georgia Senate runoff. After the Democratic candidates won, the tone of the messaging suddenly changed away from “low information voters” to celebrating the Black women who were seen as having saved the day.
For Hamilton, the flip-flopping of messaging and unfair generalization of Black women was personal: “These constituents who were being tossed around, dismissed as low information and then celebrated as saviors, they’re like my aunts, my elder cousins, my community, and my family members,” she exclaimed, adding that her new photographs put Black middle-aged women at the center as a “jab at that dismissal” and a way to introduce other important conversations. She said, “When I go home, everyone is talking about issues related to sustainability and the environment because it’s a part of life there. I want the face and the voice of the movement to be closer to reality. The way we’ve come to talk about climate activism, Black women are not the face we are commonly encouraged to think of when we picture an ‘environmentalist’.”
Through art and climate activism, Hamilton is claiming space as a Black female environmentalist. Her show at Boesky included a thorough Climate Impact Report and was the gallery’s first carbon-conscious exhibition, in which they tracked the carbon output and donated to permanent, old-growth forest conservation. Hamilton’s works include a monetary climate contribution, a practice Boesky is now implementing with all of its artists. Hamilton often speaks on panels discussing sustainability in the arts and is a member of groups like Artists Commit that share resources on sustainable practices and tips on how to keep galleries accountable, including through the aforementioned Climate Impact Reports.
In December 2020, Hamilton’s immersive five-channel film installation Waters of a Lower Register (2020) was presented in Brooklyn Bridge Park along the East River. The film shows powerful, mesmerizing images of landscapes in northern Florida in the aftermath of a tropical storm and acts as a metaphor for the tumultuous events of 2020. The imagery, personal to Hamilton and her native Florida, presents a stark contrast to the urban environment of New York. And yet, as with all of Hamilton’s work, there is no one way to approach the film. It speaks to countless issues—climate change, social justice, politics—and the viewers bring to the work their own histories. Images of flooded landscapes might have seemed foreign in New York then, but as the climate crisis worsens, storms like Hurricane Ida that hit the city 10 months later are redefining how we see our infrastructure. Hamilton constantly reminds us that our personal experiences and histories are more intertwined than we may think.
Explorations of gender identity are central to the work of Oakland-based artist and curator Leila Weefur, how they felt that their identity was suppressed by belonging to the Christian Church is at the crux of their latest project, “Prey†Play.” Presented in two separate and complementary incarnations, both in San Francisco, one is at Minnesota Street Project, as part of their California Black Voices Project, the other at Telematic Media Arts. Many such twinnings and juxtapositions are found in Weefur’s work, who laughs and acknowledges, “Yes, I’m pretty interested in duality.”
We meet at Minnesota Street Project on one of the artist’s rare days away from their teaching responsibilities—this fall Weefur is a lecturer at both Stanford and UC Berkeley. Their own academic background includes an undergraduate degree in journalism from Howard University, followed by a degree in film from Cal State LA. Weefur then spent several years in the film industry in LA, working on music videos, independent films and reality shows.
It was during this time working in the film industry that Weefur decided to shift to fine art. In the 2010s, it was before the advent of the “movement around contemporary Black cinema” and their interests in any event lay outside the “formulaic structure” often found in Hollywood. Seeking out a liberal arts college, Weefur returned to the Bay Area, to Mills College, where their interests in cross-disciplinary exploration were satisfied by studies in the book arts, creative writing and music departments. The latter is where they met composers Josh Casey and Yari Bundy, who form the duo KYN, with whom Weefur has continued to collaborate on the immersive soundtracks for numerous projects, up to and including “Prey†Play.”
Between Beauty and Horror, 2019, video still, courtesy of the artist.
Weefur’s current work builds on earlier film installations such as Blackberry Pastorale Symphony #1 (2017), Noise and Thirst (2018), and Between Beauty and Horror (2019). The first references the phrase, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” a reference to the idea that darker-skinned Black women were somehow perceived as more voluptuous, sexier, in the context of “colorism”—racism against darker-skinned Blacks. Weefur, who never connected with the idea of the femme Black body, creates potent images of men and women interacting with, crushing and consuming, blackberries. Noise and Thirst evolved in response to the artist being accused of stealing from a market in San Francisco by a woman who described Weefur to the police as a “Black man.” It functions as “an experimental sound collage expressing the cadences of Black masculinity.”Between Beauty and Horror “teases out the uncomfortable dynamics and violence that are present in racism” and, as the artist describes it, “performative Blackness.”
Between Beauty and Horror, 2019, video still, courtesy of the artist.
Drawing on their personal experience of the constraints and rigidity implicit in Black Christian churches, Weefur paints a picture that is nuanced and bittersweet, with the pageantry and allure of the church, it’s promise of salvation and the love of God, contrasted with the subtle and not-so-subtle ways religion has worked to control those under its sway. At Minnesota Street Project Prey†Play: A Gospel is set ina darkened space defined by three imposing arches. The video is set in Havenscourt Community Church in Oakland, where the artist was baptized, with red-upholstered pews and stained-glass windows. We hear a childlike voice speaking. “Stand up. Bow your head. Bring the palms of your hands together. Close your eyes. Talk to God.” As the narrator speaks, the actors perform symbolic gestures. Weefur intends the nonbinary characters to act as a point of entry for many different people—a spectrum of LGBTQ and BIPOC, as well as many others.
PLAY†PREY: A Performance, 2021, image courtesy of the artist and Minnesota Street Project Foundation, photo: Jenna Garrett.
The narrator continues, “Dear God, can you see me?… I come in afraid to show myself.” At a young age, perhaps 10, Weefur first became aware of gender discomfort, “I knew I was never going to give birth to a child,” and their parents eventually relented and allowed them to wear pants—rather than a dress—to church; they left the church after baptism at age 15. The narrator speaks, “Power is only power if everyone wants it, and no one has it. I used the only power I had, the power to remove myself from view.”
The actors hide within the pews, then reveal themselves, playing hide-and-seek, then peek-a-boo. These gentle games act as a metaphor for early experiences. The atmosphere darkens as a stern voice intones lines from the Black writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones, his “sermons” on themes common in Black preaching, and an image of his poem “The Judgment Day” appears on the screen. We see images of fire, candles burning, a charred sprig of blackberries. This leads us into the work at Telematic Media Arts, Prey†Play: The Old Testament, where Weefur fills the screen with an image of a burning Bible.
PLAY†PREY: Old Testament, 2021, video still, image courtesy of the artist and Minnesota Street Project Foundation.
Telematic, a much more compact space, sandwiches the viewer between the imagery as a burning book sizzles and snaps, gray flakes of ash curling up and blowing off: Turning, one is startled to catch their own reflection immersed in the video—this side actually a reflection. Weefur likes to catch one off guard, “seeing themselves implicated in the work structurally and conceptually.” Wax candles in the form of crosses lie heaped in a corner, the contribution of collaborator Sandy Williams IV. There are 506 of these, equal to the number of times the word “fire” appears in the King James Version of the Bible. A performance event was also held by Weefur in the nearby St. Joseph’s Art Society, with five other queer and trans writers invited to share “prayers” to be performed with ritual within the highly charged environment of this former Catholic church.
Winding down our conversation at Minnesota St. Project, Weefur reflects for a moment, then speaks, “ …it’s like a child wanting to run around on a field of grass, but there are sanctions that tell you you can only run so far. Like Jim Crow laws, it tells you there’s only one place you can go. That certain places aren’t for you.” Addressing issues very much of this moment, Weefur’s fascinating work raises uncomfortable questions of how we see ourselves, and each other, on a very fundamental and intimate level.
I’m on the freeway traveling through the San Fernando Valley to see the Ron Athey exhibition of art, documentation and ephemera called “Queer Communion” at the ICA in downtown Los Angeles. All of the LA tropes are in place: It’s a sunny and clear June day, the hills of Griffith Park are dry and brown, the plentiful commuters spawning upstream on the 5 all slow to see a majestic Honda engulfed in flames in its natural habitat. It’s all a beautiful sight for plague-weary eyes. Athey’s 40-year praxis along with his countless collaborators have a part in this exquisite corpse known as LA. Although Athey’s international reputation portrays his performances as extreme and on the bleeding edge of the fringe, this new-found institutional embrace of his work in an historical frame makes his densely conceptual ideas about art and existence more accessible than ever before.
Inside the ICA, the show, guest-curated by Amelia Jones, is smartly divided up into several thematic sections playing out like chapters in the Book of Ron. It works well as a complement to the publication of the same title edited by Jones and Andy Cambell. There are sketches, personal effects, photos, posters, costumes, performance objects and of course documentation of several performance pieces. The themed section I encountered first is called “Religion and Family” and is the best place to begin the journey.
Installation view, Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 19–September 5, 2021. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA
Amongst the very personal objects and documents are not only storyboards and writings, but also family photos and intimate relics that display a collage of the artist’s origins. “Religion and Family” opens for the viewer the often-sited early years of Athey’s work as an artist who has instinctively used his troubled biography as fuel for art-making. Included in this particular vitrine are posters and flyers from evangelical revivalists like Miss Velma and Dr. Lee Jaggers. For the viewer, this particular collection of life objects sews together a river with diverging flows. First is a young Athey with a hospitalized schizophrenic mother, missing an absent military father (Ron Sr.), raised by his maternal grandmother amongst Pentecostal extremists who search far and wide for radical religious zealots to learn from and to show to the young artist. Second is the compulsion to honor lineage while reinventing his own views of things like channeling spirits or fire and brimstone Evangelicalism. Extracting the value of the ritual without the judgment, it seems as though he saw the power of the chosen family and the weakness of blind faith. A spiritually precocious young Athey was considered to be a promised child in this context and would jump up and shout out in tongues during tented revivals. Other parishioners would lay their hands upon him as a showing of respect to the Lord who had given Ron such gifts. Here, Jones makes visible the lifelong path Athey has laid out for himself in these early years, one of a loving leader in spirituality, here to guide other lost souls.
Joyce, a 2002 performance named after Athey’s mother, was presented in London and included collaborators Sheree Rose, Patty Powers, Lisa Teasley, Gene Gregorits, Taj Waggaman, Rosina Kuhn and the late Hannah Sim of Osseus Labyrint. The work is about the mad matriarchs that raised him, with each one depicted by varied on-stage performances while three channels of projected video content portray harsher aspects of their personalities. The installation shows documentation from Joyce, and it also presents the original video content on its own, while very cleverly synchronizing it with its identical projected material in the documentation footage. This is the first place where the viewer will notice the use of older video monitors to overtly illustrate the difference between documents and live works, asserting that these are mere representations of the work and not an effort to replace the lived experience.
Installation view, Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 19–September 5, 2021. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA
The next sections blend well together as the viewer is moved through the chapters in what Jones refers to as a recursive chronology, where Ron often pulls from past experiences. With the section “Club/Music” we see the very early foundations of the artists’ compulsion towards the performative act, writing and most importantly finding like-minded communities to escape his past, and to survive the different waves of queer hate that became even more omnipresent during the early days of the HIV pandemic.
The most mindblowing thing to learn from this portion of the show is how truly original and diverse were the different lives that Ron was able to live. He and his boyfriend Rozz Williams lived together in Rozz’ parents house in Pomona not long before Williams founded the band Christian Death. He began doing performances with Williams as Premature Ejaculation, and the venues for this work were already presenting all the post-punk bands alongside fetish nights and cabaret-style hot messes. Here he also took on the role of organizer and curator of sorts as he would mash together these floor shows with local artists like Vaginal Davis, Buck Angel, Catherine Opie and Bob Flanagan.
Into the ’90s, Athey continued with a similar strategy in the BDSM community. In these underground spaces Athey had again found a setting for his ideas and discovered the crossover that can exist as his work continued to evolve and expand. This expansion attracted the attention of Jesse Helms, a senator from North Carolina. Helms took to the senate floor to yammer on sloppily while describing Athey as handsome and telling everyone about how Athey exposed a live audience to his HIV-positive blood. Inaccurate retellings spiraled out of control, leading to a Republican effort to defund the NEA—reactive cancel culture before it had a name. In truth, the performance 4 Scenes In A Harsh Life presented at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis, received the tiniest amount of NEA funding indirectly through the Walker Art Center. It was barely enough financial support to produce flyers for the show.
Installation view, Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 19–September 5, 2021. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA
When looking at the mass of “Queer Communion” and the catalogue, the visitor can easily see Athey in the role of the guru, not just as someone who attracts followers, but as someone who creates safe spaces for communities to develop. In the guru’s truest form, his self-found and deep knowledge of a broad range of things like history, religious practices, philosophy and existentialism originates from an authentic provocateur, and followers seek that out.
Finally, the exhibition presents the viewer with objects and documents in a touching tribute to the groups of people that have circled around Athey in various capacities—collaborators, fans, lovers—a patriarch in the best possible sense of the word. It’s easy to see this loving gesture as a “thank you,” but in fact it is Athey who has brought them to him as collaborators and supporters, and it’s hard to imagine the community coming together in the same way without him.
Yxta Maya Murray—art writer, law professor, fiction author—draws upon the disparate threads of her writing practice to construct her new novel, Art Is Everything, a kind of Bildungsroman of the Los Angeles art world.
Written as a series of first-person confessions and guerrilla essays penned by the novel’s sole narrator, queer Chicanx performance artist Amanda Ruiz, the tale is pieced together in a series of snapshots as Ruiz’ art career rises and falls, along with her personal relationships. The novel kicks off with an article of indictment titled, “Hey MOCA, why is Laura Aguilar’s Untitled Landscape (1996) ‘Unavailable’ on Your Website?”
Interspersed with Ruiz’ essay on Aguilar’s invisibility come declarations of love and desire for her girlfriend X–ochitl Hernández, who she describes in ways that intersect with Aguilar—“large-bodied, queer, and of a complex racial background.” Exposing the kind of erasure she also encounters as a queer Chicanx artist and shares with Aguilar, she writes,“… museums either do not collect her, or they conceal her as if they are ashamed.”
The authur, photo by Andrew Brown.
Ruiz audaciously places her essays as disruptive acts, hacking museum websites with unauthorized texts, subverting Wikipedia with position pieces, and leveraging social media. One guerrilla post, on the Whitney Museum website, skewers the Max Mara Whitney bag as an unattainable object and unmasks the commercialism of the art world’s high temples. Ruiz’ many compelling texts—on, for example, Sanja Ivakovi´c’s performance implicating the state surveillance apparatus of Yugoslav strongman president, Marshal Tito (Triangle, 1979); Mickalene Thomas’ Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires (2010) and Stendhal; or David Wojnarowicz’ death portrait of Peter Hujar—are clearly informed by Murray’s art- and law-writing. Indeed, some have their origins in articles published previously, as noted in her acknowledgments. Yet they are wholly believable as Ruiz’ work, composed here in her voice.
In spite of Ruiz’ convincingness as a writer—with a punk-rock ethos—she seems miserable as an artist. Ain’t Nobody Leaving, the performance film that wins her a coveted Slamdance award, ironically documents the dissolution of her relationship with the long-suffering Xochitl, as well as a performance in the extreme—seven days of self-starvation and semi-hallucination. Yet the film feels juvenile and the dialogue utterly pedestrian: “I’m really hungry and I can’t believe that you are eating that sandwich in front of me,” and “What does love even mean?” Her other projects feel one-dimensional as well.
In an early essay on Agnes Martin and Jean Genet, Ruiz asks how artists survive a break—foreshadowing the impending attenuation of Ruiz’ art production, which withers away post-X–ochitl. In a particularly exquisite chapter titled “Private Language”—on Wittgenstein, Melville and Hawthorne, the semiotics of love, and the limitations of our subjectivity—Ruiz writes on what it feels like to be destroyed by love. The final third of the novel answers these two concerns in a variety of ways, each acknowledging the difficulty of making a life after loss and the death of one’s dreams. It is no surprise that Ruiz turns to art writing when her performance work is exhausted, for that is what she has been all along—a writer—which we readily recognize from the handiwork of Ruiz’ dexterous creator.
Human connection and relationships are at the heart of Paige Emery’s “Ritual Veriditas” at Coaxial. Though small in size, the works create an immersive experience with video, sound and mixed-media visuals created entirely by the artist. The praxis of “Ritual Veriditas” can be found in the name—Emery shares rituals that are vulnerable, earnest and otherwise private with the audience. Dried rosemary and sage hang from the ceiling, while three plant altars (Veriditas) sit in the middle of the room. Above the altars hang two figurative paintings, painted on transparent PPE barrier shields. Each day Emery will perform a ritual from her home practice in her garden that includes burning sage and rosemary, and audience members can view the ritual either in person or through a live stream video. The atmosphere of the show is ethereal, and the music paired with the lighting give the impression that the space is one of meditation, while the hanging figurative paintings continuously move and sway making the figures look like dancers.
With so many elements, the show engages and becomes more enthralling the more one looks. No detail is overlooked; even the epiphytic plants were chosen for their metaphorical properties of symbiotic relationships. The video Where the Swamp Meets the Sea (2021) also uses ecological properties to explore the human condition, and meditate on where one begins and the other ends. This metaphor of boundaries, space, separation and closeness is at the heart of each element, and even extend toward artist and viewer, human and object, space and self. The space serves as both a proposition and an answer for something that is both age old and somehow fresh—what does it mean to be an independent human, and does that even exist?
The show opens up a dialogue of something that is both novel and timely— how do we connect, renter society and form human connections in a post-COVID world. During the pandemic many people took to meditation and ritual to cope, and we have even developed new cultural norms and practices that would have seemed strange in a previous time. By exploring her own personal practice, Emery has touched on something universal, and invites the audience to both engage with her in her practice and to ponder their own rituals and existence.
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What makes some spaces private and others public, if not rituals? In Los Angeles, a complex series of rituals reify our belief in private property. Property deeds, for instance, give physical form to a political notion; signing a deed a symbolic ritual that shapes spatial realities and delivers economic consequences. This is a ritual of exclusion, an agreement that this parcel of land is private and not public; it is mine and not yours.
The pandemic greatly altered our daily rituals, sequestering homeowners to their private spaces, while those without a deed are left to live “private” lives in “public” spaces. Throughout modern history, few factors have had a greater impact on shaping urban landscapes than contagion. In 15th-century Italy, an epidemic led to the construction of leper islands; in newly industrialized 18th-century London, the outbreak of cholera resulted in modern sewage infrastructure. These upheavals remind us that urban spaces reflect rituals that are neither determined nor static. These spaces are daily experiments in collective living and continuously reconfigured by competing visions for the future, which contour the conditions and needs of the present.
In her 1979 documentary Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes, Barbara McCullough interviews fellow LA artists of the 1970s Black Art movement (known as LA Rebellion) on the meaning of ritual in their work and practice. In the film, sculpture and performance artist Seng Nengudi describes her public performance work Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978)as a ritual that used public space as its medium.
In the performance, Nengudi gathered several artists from the Studio Z Collective (1974–1980s) together under a freeway on Pico Boulevard. The participants carried instruments and small talismans and tokens, while adorned in head wraps, sheet scraps and other garments constructed by Nengudi from the nylon mesh of women’s tights. During the performance, artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger danced and dueled to free-form jazz, acting out the tensions between “feminine” and “masculine” societal poles. Nengudi—draped in a large sheet—presided over them to perform an impassioned and improvised ritual of healing between them.
In a 2018 interview with Frieze magazine, Nengudi reflected on the performance’s freeway underpass locale, where “the energy of humans” was “already infused” by the unhoused people who had made it their home. A steep ledge beneath the freeway created a raised plateau where they had built encampments and left behind remnants of daily life. According to the artist, it was here, in a shadowy recess above LA’s privatized public space that people felt “protected,” and subsisted in an “almost ancient way of survival” akin to “Native American cliff dwellings.” Her performance sought to make these invisible rituals visible.
Nengudi was exploring ritual as a means of transforming the mundane materials, bodily habits and forgotten land of everyday life into something sacred. Ritual can create a moment to acknowledge change and turmoil—but harness it towards collective healing, rather than strife. Today, when collective grieving, healing and recognition feel imperative and yet unattainable, Sengudi’s work reminds us to question the rituals that dictate urban space. Mass upheaval can open space to create new rituals, to choose how we change, and decide what is to remain sacred.
In many ways, opera is the high point of the Western classical music tradition. Originating as royal entertainment in Italy at the close of the 16th century, opera evolved to become fashionable throughout Europe. This remained the status quo until the early 20th century, when the development of motion pictures and changing public taste relegated opera to the domain of the art-conscious upper class. As such, it was prone to “cultural upgrading” and composers like Schoenberg introduced atonality and other variations. Such High Art innovations did more to confuse than clarify the position of opera in modern music, so by the latter part of the 20th century, it was clear opera needed to be modernized in a more popular way. Avant-Pop arbiters like Peter Sellars began staging operas in new ways, like his 1980 production of Don Giovanni, cast, costumed and presented as a blaxploitation film, complete with nude actors and heroin addicts. As it would turn out, once this thematic Pandora’s box was opened, every kind of bastardization of the artform became possible in the name of forward aesthetic progress.
John Cage, Europeras 1 & 2, Photo courtesy Craig T. Mathew / Los Angeles Philharmonic
Not to be outdone by such wild musical youngbloods, the venerable composer John Cage decided to apply his personal brand of deconstruction to opera, and his 1987 Fluxus work Europeras 1 & 2 was the result. Currently directed by Yuval Sharon and staged in Culver City at Soundstage 23 in the Sony Pictures Studio, the production is hyped as “an opera of independent elements… determined by chance procedures.” So, although the orchestra was under strict directions to play “the actual instrumental parts in the literature”, Cage allowed the singers to belt out whatever aria they chose for as long as desired. Which basically means that the audience was subjected to a high-end clusterfuck of snippets of operatic arias, mixed and matched elaborate costumes, and non-existent stage direction, all of which was periodically interrupted by an overwhelmingly loud recording of Truckera, a tape of 101 layered fragments of European operas. None of the characters onstage related to one another, and even their accompanying props had nothing to do with their timeframe or identity; at one point, a nun with a surfboard stood at the edge of the stage, peering into the audience as though judging distant waves. Unfortunately, even in the Fluxus tradition such cheap laughs only fill ocular time and space until the next heresy, so this senselessness became disconcertingly boring after 90 minutes without pause. Perhaps in anticipation of this, the second segment of the opera promised two sections of supposedly refreshing silent, general inactivity. Even so, judging from the exodus during the intermission, an opportunity to hear a sample of Cage’s smash hit 4’33” wasn’t much of a motivator to stay.
Stories, Rachel Guettler in Room 14 at the Rendon Hotel, photo by Anthony Ausgang
Meanwhile, in Downtown L.A., a far less self-aggrandizing manifestation of operatic disconnection was taking place. Directed by Ralph Ziman and staged at the under-renovation Rendon Hotel, Stories presents actors in separate rooms engaged in activities as equally unrelated to each other as those in Europeras 1 & 2. The difference between the two productions is that while Sharon defies the audience to find any narrative in Cage’s visual and sonic cacophony, Ziman encourages such speculation; in fact, figuring out what’s going on is the whole the point of the experience. It’s a great idea, but the lack of any unifying element other than location make it impossible to connect the separate elements. It also doesn’t help that the majority of the acts are obviously by non-actors subscribing to the myth that calling something Performance Art excuses lack of professionalism. Fortunately, there are exceptions: in room 14, opera singer Rachel Guettler successfully presents herself as, well, an opera singer, later duetting marvelously with baritone Kenneth Enlow on an outside roof; and in room 20, Johnny Cubert White convincingly natters away in his room like a tweaker in the beginning stages of a meth binge. But the relative success of Stories lies in its lack of pretentiousness; when the going gets Lowbrow, the Lowbrow get going.
Stories, Johnny Cubert White in Room 20 at the Rendon Hotel, photo by Anthony Ausgang
Stories allegiance to its low roots ultimately makes it more interesting than Europeras’ claim of High Art, but it’s equally frustrating to experience. There are reasons that stage direction, plot, and developed talent are essential to calling an event opera or theatre. Without them it’s just like Humpty Dumpty, and no amount of deconstruction will ever put it together again.
Featured image of Rachel Guettler courtesy Andy Romanoff
Fluxus: Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2, Sony Pictures Studio, November 6, 10, 11, 2018
The overt theme of “Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950,” curated by Terry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, is the presence of destructive force(s) in art since World War II—a trajectory of investigation whose origins in the war (especially its nuclear finale and Holocaust coda) are apparent and compelling to all observers. A sense of destruction-once-removed pervades “Damage Control,” beginning as it does with photo-documentations of ’60s actions and, more tellingly, books and magazine articles about Hiroshima. And more than once, the mesmerizing footage of a burning World Trade Center provides the heart of a contemporary artist’s anguished fantasy.
Arnold Odermatt, “Buochs,” 1965. Courtesy Galerie Springer, Berlin.
The subliminal theme here, however, is that art, as a process of representation, upends the grasp on life we attain through mass media, while at the same time insisting that mediated depiction is the only authentic experience we have.
In both the 1950s and ’60s, artists struggled to harness or at least direct destructive forces in gestures of annihilation and decay. Jean Tinguely made self-immolating machines, Yoko Ono guided her readers and audiences into almost dreamlike destructive rituals, Rafael Montañez Ortiz enacted happenings of mattress burnings and piano axings, and Gustav Metzger, high priest of the Destruction In Art movement, applied hydrochloric acid to canvas. But rarely did these artists’ gestures result in objects that retained—mutilated as they were—a tragic self-possession (Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing being a poignant exception).
Jeff Wall, “The Destroyed Room,” 1978. Glenstone.
Other artists, many of them friends and colleagues of Metzger, Ono, et. al., did produce artwork that inhered the destruction to which they were subject; these were surveyed in Paul Schimmel’s 2012–13 valedictory MOCA show, “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–62.” As if to critique Schimmel’s point while extending it into the current era, curators Brougher and Ferguson involve themselves less with damaged goods than with gestures of destruction, theatrical remains, and scenes of damage. Those scenes often play out in carefully fabricated structures or camera-captured circumstances, whether the late-’60s photos of Swiss car wrecks by Urs Odermatt or destruction-staged-for-videos by Dara Birnbaum and Mircea Cantor, Thomas Ruff’s news-photo-like shots of collapsing buildings, or paintings clearly based on news photos by Vija Celmins, Jack Goldstein, Monica Bonvicini, and, inevitably, Andy Warhol.
Ed Ruscha, “The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire,” 1965–1968. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.
One can play the “what’s missing” game with such an ambitious survey. Didn’t Piero Manzoni do anything apropos? Where are the Viennese Actionists, masters of bloody mayhem before the lens as well as the audience? On the other hand, the concept of “destruction” blossoms among contemporary artists as various as Steve McQueen, Juan Muñoz, Douglas Gordon and Mona Hatoum.
Destruction In Art was a movement, as “Damage Control” documents; but now, among artists whose world will end with a whimper and not a bang, it’s a preoccupation.
Yoshitomo Nara, “No Nukes (in the floating world),” 1999. Courtesy of Eileen Harris Norton.
Puke performance artist Millie Brown just returned from the South by Southwest Festival where she “performed” with Lady Gaga. The UK artist has recently relocated to Los Angeles and painted her colored vomit canvas to a very small crowd in a rare performance at club Mmhmmm at The Standard, Hollywood, Saturday night. There were a little over 20 audience members, half of them photographers; the other half working their iPhone video cameras.
Brown entered a makeshift stage a little before 8pm with a single spotlight on her. She was dressed in an exquisite sequenced sheer floor-length dress revealing her slender figure (near anorexic?) and chunky black wedge heels with her flowing waist-length sandy-colored mane. She sat on a chair with four tall glasses of chalky-colored milk on the floor beside her with a blank white gessoed-canvas lying flat in front of her. She quietly sat down in a chair and sipped her first glass of green milk from a straw (maybe a third of its contents), very prim and proper, not an ounce of spillage on her lap. She put the glass down and contemplated the empty canvas before her. She then proceeded to get up and walk toward the right of the canvas, sweeping her dangling golden locks away from her face as she bent over the canvas. She spread her fingers of her right hand and daintily poked her forefinger and middle finger all the way into her mouth. She began to retch a little, but nothing was coming out. She did it again, her body trembling a bit. There—she finally got a little of the green liquid to come up and spill onto the canvas. Not wholly impressive for a vomit artist, but there were three more glasses (and colors) to go.
Brown drinks from her first glass of green liquid
Brown contemplates the empty canvas
Brown purging her first round of “paint”
Accompanying the performance was a looped operatic soundtrack of a diva singing “meow, meow, meow” stretching out each vowel, then an actual recording of a cat’s meow…with a laughing audience (laugh track?) every time the cat’s meow came on. That lent a bit of humor to the performance, but then it’s hard to laugh while watching someone throwing up in front of you. Personally, I have a weak stomach for this kind of stuff, and found myself gagging several times. Often I had to look away for fear of making her painting a collaboration.
Her second glass was an aqua tint. She now had a blue mustache and drank slowly and deliberately from the glass, sans the straw. At this time we were all rooting for her to get a good ralph on, for the sake of the painting. There were a few splatters, but more bile than color.
Brown’s second glass of aqua-colored milk
Brown’s third glass of magenta-colored milk
Brown “painting”
Her third glass of liquid was a magenta color and she still seemed to be having difficulty regurgitating. It was disturbing as it seemed she might be in pain. Without deconstructing this performance, many issues start to arise. Is this about eating disorders and purging—these are seemingly obvious references. With the repeating bizarre soundtrack, and Brown now starting to look disheveled with streaks of bile and colored liquid running down her face, one was just hoping for her to hurry up and get through this. She has yet to get a good projectile vomit going, and that’s now what the crowd was there for. Finally, on her third and fourth glasses, the liquid started spewing out and the painting was starting to “fill” up. The audience’s concern for the painting was palpable and the barf was starting to resemble a painter’s medium.
Aside from the spectacle value of this performance, it was very emotional. The British artist tidied up before coming out after her performance and made herself available to the small crowd of people that remained. I approached her and my first question was, “Are you okay?” She responded yes and didn’t seem bothered by my inquiry. She looked like a beautiful delicate flower, but her constitution cannot deny her strength. Brown told me her art is about using her body and she’s been doing this for 10 years now. Her paintings are for sale and I’m not entirely sure of the archival quality of vomit, but her aim is true.
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” at New York’s New Museum is the artist’s first major exhibition in the U.S. in over 25 years. A legendary provocateur, Burden has challenged traditional concepts of art through his galvanizing performance pieces and later thought-provoking sculptural work, consistently questioning physical, moral and structural limitations over the course of his 40-year career.
I first encountered Burden as a goggle-eyed schoolgirl, introduced by my much older cousin, an art historian, who showed me a catalog of his work. I remember poring over Shoot (1971) and Trans-Fixed (1974), trying to make sense of them. They profoundly disturbed me because they seemed to shake the very foundations of what I thought, not only about art, but about rationality itself. In the end, my “why?” questions unanswered, I gave up, dismissing Burden as a complete loon.
Of course, as my thoughts about contemporary art evolved over the years, I came to appreciate him and his enormous impact, and to accept that back then, putting himself at risk, using his body to test his and his audiences’ limits, was central to his artistic expression.
But I’m still not sure if having yourself shot in the arm (I discovered via a BBC interview playing on a continuous loop at the show that Burden actually had intended only to be grazed by the bullet) or nailed to a Volks-wagen, qualify as visual art. They’re certainly something, but to me it’s more akin to a theater-philosophy hybrid. Burden was not alone in this type of art-making. Plenty of post-Duchamp artists engaged in this, often shocking, dematerialization of art. For Burden, as for others, it served its purpose, recalibrating things in such a way that a return to the object once again became possible. Chris Burden, L.A.P.D. Uniforms, 1993 With his objects, one thing’s for sure: Burden is obsessed with weighty issues (pun intended). Big ideas and big work abound. Nearly all his pieces are immensely heavy, and those that aren’t: A Tale of Two Cities (1981), All the Submarines of the United States of America (1987) and L.A.P.D. Uniforms (1993) make up for it in their size. It’s as if when he made the switch from nonobjective (weightless) performance art to sculpture, he used bulk as a means to anchor himself.
Burden has quite literally taken over the New Museum, with work on the roof and every floor below. He’s even on the front of the building where his 2-ton 30-foot wooden Ghost Ship is mounted. It’s a strange apparition against the sleek Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA façade. In 2005 the unmanned vessel made a 400-mile journey between Fair Isle, Scotland and Newcastle upon Tyne, England, navigated by computers. It’s in far stranger “waters” here. A meditation on the nature of energy, Burden’s The Big Wheel (1979) features an enormous cast-iron flywheel with a 1968 Benelli 250cc motorcycle positioned in front. When the bike’s backed up so rubber wheel touches metal and the motor revved to 200 rpms, the flywheel is set spinning. This kinesis continues for 2.5 hours after the motorcycle is switched off. Cool, huh? It’s also really cool looking, a 19th-century/20th-century pastiche of esoteric bright blue motorcycle and simple, yet massive rusted flywheel. Chris Burden, The Big Wheel, 1979, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesOn the other side of the gallery, Porsche with Meteorite (2013) features a 400 lb. meteorite dangling on one end of a long steel beam. On the other end, hangs Burden’s acid yellow 1974 Porsche 914. It’s a wonderful counterbalance arrangement not just of weight, but of form and substance. The sleek automobile, so interesting in terms of design and color—a triumph of human engineering—paired with the hunk of ancient, alien, raw matter.
Then there are the bridges. This is where Burden wins my heart. I love his obsession with these early structures of industrial design and the painstaking care with which he recreates them using metal toy construction parts—and in Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, ¼ scale (2013), hand-cast concrete blocks. They are things of beauty and testaments to his devotion to his art. I think my favorite one is actually unbuilt. The ultimate Erector set, it’s the Tyne Bridge Kit (2004), which he came up with after he’d gone to such lengths to produce the original downscaled version of that bridge. Weighing in at a ton, the kit consists of the tools, blueprints and the 200,000 parts needed to erect the model, all of it housed in an elaborate wooden chest. Burden’s idea is not so much that you would build it, but that you can see the bridge in condensed form. I love the uselessness of it: the enormous effort put into something that has no practical purpose. All the parts are there, but the bridge exists only as an idea. To me, this piece tells you what you need to know about Burden: his integrity, vision and unflagging commitment to his art, all of which are so eloquently embodied here. Chris Burden, Three Arch Dry Stack Bridge, 1/4 Scale, 2013, courtesy of the artist
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at The New Museum in New York, runs thru Jan. 12, 2014; info newmuseum.org
The traveling art bash “Station to Station” concluded its nationwide tour in Oakland last week and it just goes to show: There’s nothing like a road trip fueled by a cool million in corporate donations for having a good time.
Ask anyone on board for the coast-to-coast rail fest and they’ll tell you what an “amazing” trip it was.
Beyond that you’d be hard pressed to say just what was accomplished by Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken’s extravagant expedition. There was music, but nothing to rival the average output of Clear Channel or Goldenvoice, or any other mainstream concert or club promoters. The professionals do a better job with tickets, security and promotion—it turns out experience counts for something after all.
And there may have been art—that judgment is reserved to the beholder—but nothing that will survive the end of the tour, unless road-trip slide shows are your cup of chai.
Urs Fischer’s, Kenneth Anger’s and Ernesto Neto’s nomadic, photo Alayna Van Dervort courtesy of LUMA Foundation sculptures in Barstow
Artillery caught up with the roadshow in Barstow, on the high harsh edge of the Mojave, the last stop before Los Angeles. The town’s main strip is the old Route 66, with its parade of fading dive stucco motels featuring cactus themes and postage-stamp pools. Take a right off main street and in half a mile you’ll find the Skyline Drive-in theater, a mainstay since the ’60s. This is where the Aitken’s posse staged its “happening,” a gift to the Barstow residents.
Never lacking ambition, tour promoters propose to make Barstow “the most interesting place in the country,” if only for the night. The whole venture was, apparently, a mission of mercy, bringing the blessings of grant-funded art to unwashed masses from Brooklyn to San Francisco, and at eight lucky waystations in between.
Inside the Ernesto Neto nomadic sculpture, photo Ye Rin MokUrs Fischer’s disco ball–topped nomadic sculpture, photo Ye Rin Mok
Inside Kenneth Anger’s tent, photo Ye Rin MokI
We arrived early and found parking quickly; it felt sparsely attended as dusk turned to night. There was a concession stand serving popcorn and soft drinks, just like a real drive-in. Over to the right were food trucks and scattered further out were several round tents set up yurt-style for art installations. Urs Fisher did a disco-style tent, complete with dry-ice smoke and disco ball. There was a Kenneth Anger video dome, and a pink squishy Ernesto Neto “sculpture” that felt like a Bedouin makeout cabana. These tents constituted the principal art presentations for what purported to be a public art event. They were underwhelming, to say the least. You couldn’t help but wonder, is that all there is?
There was more of course. Close by the yurts, LA scenesters No Age knelt before one of the two movie screens and strummed dissonant chords beneath images shot by photographer Stephen Shore. He’s famous for capturing the banalities of American life—easy pickin’s in desolate Winslow, Arizona—his subject for this slide show. Colored flags by Sam Falls hung from a chain-link fence comprised another installation. And nearby was a pile of the shipping crates hung with posters from previous tour stops. The desultory assemblage posed the question again: Is that all there is?
There were some excellent videos projected on the big screen: underground classics by art-film gods like Bruce Conner—kids today don’t know them, so I suppose that was the purpose of featuring them. Or perhaps the organizers wanted to show they were cool and knew their art videos. But without context it all felt very disjointed, like MTV but without any link between the music and the images.
The Bruce Conner video projection, part of the moving image, photo Alayna Van Dervort courtesy of LUMA Foundation
After scoping out where to buy a drink (only lite beer? what’s up with that?) it starts to become clear: however fabulous these people are as artists, they are not very good at running a show. They immediately ran out of the only non-lite beer (Corona!). There was never an emcee. Nobody knew whose art was whose. Nobody ever announced who was performing at the time. There were programs, but apparently they were an afterthought—somebody wandered through the crowd passing out a printed lineup sheet. It was reported later that nobody told anyone in Barstow about the happening on the edge of town. And where was the almighty Doug Aitken?
Part of the problem may have been the setting. The high sky and far horizons of the Mojave would dwarf any event thrown by puny humans—even artists with unlimited technology at their disposal.
The show felt more coherent two nights later, in Los Angeles, although the “nomadic sculptures,” as they called the art tents, were just as lame in the Union Station patio as on the tarmac in Barstow. And Beck put on a descent show at both venues—more a tribal stomp than his usual edgy ensemble arrangements—but it’s hard to credit that to the folks on the train. (I should add, the crowd at Barstow was much more sedate; my companion kept getting dirty looks everytime she yelped a whew-hoo!)
Beck in Barstow, photo Mara Mckevitt
But it was hard to get past the impression that Aitken and his merry band had failed to accomplish much more than convince the people at Levis to underwrite a month-long fantasy road trip for the truly hip. They traveled, according to the Station to Station website, in “ease and elegance.” The principal hangout was the “Super Dome,” a second-story observation car, glass all ’round, decked out with customized furniture decorated by Jorge Pardo. All that suffering-for-art business was banished, the clever creatives enjoying “daily organic meals” prepared by a “chef and forager,” and whiling away the hours noodling around on “incredible equipment” donated by Moog, Neve Designs and SE Electronics
Come to think of it, that may be one of the real proficiency demonstrated by Aitken and his staff. Somehow they managed to convince Levi’s, Moog, and a half dozen other “partners” to hand over more than a million dollars to make that party happen. Grantors dot the website like a case of the mumps—Levi’s, of course, and the Art Production Fund; the Open Arts Project, from the UK, and the LUMA Foundation, from France, all sold on the idea that Aitken would help elevate the masses just by rolling through town.
Unfortunately, the website also shows another area in which the artists-en-training proved deficient. They were very good at raising money for themselves, but when it comes to fundraising, they were pretty much a bust. One of the goals of the trip was to raise funds for the “Station to Station Cultural Fund,” which proposes to finance “artists of all disciplines to produce significant new work that advances public understanding of creative expression and introduces new definitions of art and culture to a global audience.”
LIVING LARGE: From left, artist Felix Melia, photographer Mara McKevitt, Audrey Snyder digging into their cactus omelets in Winslow. Photo Leif Hedendal
Ambitious as ever… and just as overblown as the rest of the project. Working with the smug slogan “If you don’t give back no one will like you,” the Station to Station fundraisers have tallied a total of $19,410. Not much bang for a million-plus bucks in startup funds.
Jeffrey Deitch, outgoing MOCA director and longtime Aitken supporter, recently told the New York Times, “Doug is one of the people defining what art can do right now.” It also appears, with Station to Station, that Aitken has touched on the boundaries of what art can’t do. Best, perhaps, to stick to the studio and leave American culture to find its way on its own.
It is tempting—though not entirely accurate—to report that this past spring and summer, Paul McCarthy’s new work made a big splash in new york. First we had “Paul McCarthy: Sculpture” at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea: an exhibition noted for several large, complex, digitally fabricated works in black walnut. Followed there by the video/sculpture installation “Rebel Dabble Babble,” in collaboration with the artist’s son, Damon McCarthy.
The artist’s latest take on the Disneyfication of the tale of Snow White, a multimedia extravaganza titled WS, filled the enormous Park Avenue Armory for seven weeks, and “Paul McCarthy: Life Cast,” an exhibition of five hyper-realist figures and the videos documenting their fabrication, was seen at Hauser & Wirth’s uptown space. The 80-foot-high Balloon Dog greeted visitors to the Frieze fair on Randalls Island back in May, and the slightly twisted Sisters, a massive bronze tableau, haunted the Chelsea waterfront all summer.
The sheer quantity of work was impressive; likewise the range of media and the enormous amount of planning involved in realizing these projects more or less simultaneously. Whether the psychically untethered spirit of McCarthy’s multifarious activities survives this newfound institutional approbation in the long run remains to be seen, but for now—unquietly entering a mature, baroque phase of production—the artist shows few signs of creative ossification, and none whatsoever of cleaning up his act.
Yet the splash all this work made was only medium-sized. The New York art world seems mildly curious but not particularly enthusiastic about what McCarthy & Son have been getting up to. The tepid response points to several difficulties McCarthy’s work presents.
Possibly there was too much to see: WS alone involves 21 hours of video on 10 screens, plus the complex set on which the videos were shot (back in LA). It is a loosely scripted and wildly associative reworking of the Grimms’ tale, fleshing out the part where Snow White gets to know the seven dwarves. The voice of authority is embodied not in an evil stepmother but instead a Disney/McCarthy hybrid named Walt Paul; fluids and food abound in a number of raucous party scenes, bringing to mind the moments of comestibles-related cinematic frenzy in Animal House and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No doubt many visitors to WS didn’t happen to catch the masturbation and urination/water sports scenes that earned the show its de facto X rating. Editing is rarely a priority for McCarthy, and there is a certain consciousness-altering effect in becoming immersed in his alternative standard of time. But WS is just a whole lot to process.
Perhaps the work’s difficulty is a matter of form—or rather, formlessness. McCarthy rides the monster wave of inchoate meaning without ever reaching the sandy beach of clarity. “I distrust linear language to explain anything,” he told a roomful of pre-opening visitors to “Rebel Dabble Babble,” in response to a question from the audience regarding the general unintelligibility of the videos’ dialogue. “Rebel Dabble Babble,” we are informed, is based on McCarthy’s imaginings of the psychosexual entanglement and power dynamics among Nicolas Ray, Natalie Wood and James Dean in their shared bungalow at the Chateau Marmont during the filming of Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. The saga of sadism and abuse unfolds on 13 screens and, like WS, is augmented by reconstructions of the sets themselves. And while the actors’ body language implies broad-based emotional manipulation, sexual predation, humiliation and lust for revenge, the piece isn’t for viewers who dislike not knowing at least approximately what is going on.
McCarthy told that same audience that his 1977 work, Sailor’s Meat, was “pivotal” in his development as an artist. A solo performance documented in photographs, Sailor’s Meat features the young McCarthy in a blonde wig, blue eyeliner and little else, enjoying intimate relations with a variety of foodstuffs including a pile of ground beef. Thus began the artist’s program of “resistance to the conditions of culture,” which has since become focused on the idea of patriarchy as an expression of the societal control of social dysfunction.
Patriarchal domination finds concrete form in the representation of domestic architecture, which functions throughout McCarthy’s oeuvre as pressure cooker rather than shelter. In performance videos such as Bossy Burger (1991) and Painter (1995), the set itself is an ominous presence, both channeling and constraining the protagonist’s movements and, by extension, his creative will. (“I referred to the set as a trap,” McCarthy has said. “You entered it and you couldn’t get out.”) When Walt Paul lumbers up onto the table in the Dinner Party scene in WS, bellowing madly at the reveling dwarves and their guests before plunging his face into a mysterious bowl of slop, he nearly bangs his head on the ceiling as if his huffing and puffing might blow the house down. But estrangement from architecture is a tough sell in New York, where being stuck in cramped quarters with unpleasant people is the natural order of things.
Another difficulty is that WS is a work in progress—to quote the artist, “a device that’s now in presentation mode”—on which he expects to continue work after its return to LA. Of course, McCarthy goes to great lengths to avoid narrative resolution in the first place, putting such elements as character development, motivation, plot and dénouement through the shredder. Certainly, presenting an unfinished work in such a grand manner, to such fanfare, is a ballsy move—the ends aren’t just loose, they’re not even ends—but its unfinishedness does nothing to insulate McCarthy from the obvious criticism that WS is by any objective standard an unholy mess.
I happen to like much of McCarthy’s work, but I can understand why someone might not. There’s a tremendous amount of slack framing those riveting moments of tension. That is what makes the work interesting to look at, and to think and talk about. So the recent art-world beatification of the dark clown of performance art is curious to behold, and a hopeful sign. The official embrace of a fervently anti-institutional troublemaker like McCarthy offers a reason to believe that the powers-that-be have a sense of humor, after all.
“And there it is…” Sage Charles smiled as he deftly inserted the business end of a baseball bat into the supine body of Ron Athey as part of the initial preparations for “Messianic Remains,” the latest installment in Athey’s “Incorruptible Flesh” performance series. The series, begun in 1996 with Lawrence Steger (who died of AIDS-related causes in 1999), addresses Athey’s own HIV+, post-AIDS survival and identity. In addition to the anal penetration of the bat and the injection of saline into his scrotum, a series of hooks were attached to Athey’s eyelids, forehead and cheeks, then secured by rope to the metal frame of the platform he lay on, stretching his face into a grotesque, grinning mask. While these aberrations appear, on the one hand, comical, they also denote sexual pain and pleasure, and illustrate a body in crisis.
The Performance Studies international symposium at Stanford University is an annual mega-conference of academic panels and lectures on the theory and history of performance art, as well as a series of live performances by contemporary artists. There are often notable tensions and a degree of wariness between “those who do” and “those who write about” art, each being unsure of the other’s approaches to communicating performance art. These tensions were palpable in the hesitation of some academics in the audience as they attempted to engage with Athey’s performance. In my role as Athey’s production manager for this tour, I did my best to help find a balance between scholarly distance and the visceral necessity that the piece demanded—all within the surreal, Logan’s Run utopia of the Stanford University campus.
In the first of the two acts of the performance, the audience was invited to directly interact with Athey’s invaded and engorged body by applying grease to his skin (latex glove optional). The torquing of Athey’s face and genitals provided a violent contrast with the beauty of tattoos and scars stretched across an aging yet vivacious frame. Many hands stroked or held his arms, legs and chest with silent curiosity and compassion, while others stood back and observed, perhaps already figuring out how to further their careers by using Athey as a case study in their next treatise on “The Relevance of the Post-AIDS, Post-Punk Body in Late-Capitalist Performance Art.”
In the second act, Athey was joined by Sage Charles and Llewyn Máire, who attended Athey’s transition from living corpse to otherworldly spirit by cleansing his body and creating a Crowlean thelemic ritual circle, a kind of ethereal portal. A recording of Athey reading the scene of Divine’s death from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers provided narration as, donned in faux Egyptian headdress and cape, he processed around the circle. The parallel of magickal imagery and the story of Divine’s haunting of her own funeral, set against the biography of Athey’s own continued survival, was both camp and melancholy. The piece ended with his body disappearing within a fading cone of light.
Like Prometheus, Athey’s tormented body rebuilds and heals in order to perform again. Perhaps this is a pre-emptive method of repeating and revisiting his possible deaths, generously bringing the audience in as witness to a life and a body that will no doubt, one day, refuse to go to the grave quietly.
Athey, on a promotional book tour in the U.S. performed in June at Stanford, and in July at Human Resources in downtown LA and Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, NY.
Nao Bustamante kicked off Human Resources LA’s July 27th benefit and Perform Chinatown After-party with characteristic mischievous flair. In the preamble to her performance, as she was thanking HRLA for inviting her and thanking us for being there to support the benefit, she seamlessly slipped in some minor mayhem: “Thanks for coming out on this hot LA night even though you all know how hot it can get in this room. Your donations tonight will go toward to a new AC system, so please give yourself a round of applause.” The crowd applauded, taking the bait and collectively dreaming of future where the vast, sparse Chinatown gallery space would be comfortably climate controlled. Then she continued on with a list of other dream remodeling projects that the night’s donations were supposedly going toward—hardwood floating floors, bathrooms with changing tables, and finally an adjoining parking structure—and the applause turned to knowing laughter and a shared recognition of the value of alternative spaces like HRLA. This was not a benefit for glamorous architectural renovations, but just to keep the doors open so that the HR collective can continue to bring us the kind of ground-breaking and politically astute performance art that we were offered that night.
Bustamante’s “Chase Scene” is a monologue that inverts the damsel-in-distress narrative into a feminist take-back-the-night fairytale. Performed as 1940s noir radio play with two microphones to capture the organically produced sound effects she made with feet and hands, and a third microphone for her voice that narrates the scene in a Betty Boop/40s glamour queen cadence punctuated with lilting tones, breathy gasps, and sprinkled with a generous use of “gosh.” The mood was further complimented in this performance by Karen Tongson’s live saxophone scoring. Like most of Bustamante’s performance work this was an intense physical feat of endurance and control, as hands, feet, voice are orchestrated to unfold the familiar story of a male stranger following a woman’s moonlit stroll down an empty city street, his implicit menace communicated only through the clodding sound of steadily increasing heavy steps matched by the increasingly frantic click-clack of high heels as the woman attempts to evade the stranger’s approach. The tense monologue includes all the familiar attempts at evasion—by turns polite (“no need to walk me home, Mister, I’m perfectly fine”), strategic (“I have lots of cousins and uncles who live on this street”), and, finally, desperate (“Maybe if I turn down this alley, I can lose him”). This last move initiates the piece’s denouement where, now cornered in a dead-end alley, she is forced to confront him. She stands her ground, “I’m warning you, Mister, don’t come another step closer. Not one more step.” Of course, we hear the inevitable, threatening step and then sounds of a struggle—assorted vegetables providing the sound effects for bodies receiving blows and a final crunch of bones snapping.
Yet this is where Bustamante’s story diverges from the familiar. The silence following the struggle is broken by the click clack of heels as our heroine gingerly steps over the body, apologizing to the stranger while also firmly reminding him that she tried to warn him. Bustamante’s campy fable about the routine use of threat to police gender in public space resonates even more powerfully in the wake of the Zimmerman acquittal, and the long list of less publicized cases such as Cece McDonald, Marissa Alexander, and John H. White, that all reflect the racially segregated and gender normative logics that govern the concepts of public and and private space and just who is entitled to “stand their ground.” Bustamante’s mode of campy temporal drag then becomes away to register the now decades long backlash against civil rights, feminist, and queer movements that have left so many of us feeling like we are fighting a backward slide into a dystopic noir version of cultural politics.
Narcissister, photo by Artemisa Clark
Narcissister’s performances also inhabit a strange temporality of post- or meta-drag. Her mannequin-like mask is frozen in both a bland affectless expression and a late 1970s/early 1980s temporality producing a combination that is surprisingly moving. As Narcissister’s movements give new interpretations to late disco hits, the movements of the bobbed wig framing her face shift and you can swear you glimpse new expressions flicker across the mask’s surface registering moments of exhaustion, abandon, curiosity, and desire as she explores and discovers hidden mysteries in her own fantasmatic and impossibly generative body. For instance, in “Winter/Spring Collection,” Narcissister’s collaboration with A.L. Steiner for MOCATV screened at the benefit, she positions a Chinese lantern between her decorative extra set of mannequin legs making it an expansive magical vagina that, like Mary Poppins bag (or is it that Poppin’s bag is really always already a magical vagina?), produces an array of objects for her consideration before offering up a large white magnolia flower that seems to finally satisfy the impulse that led to the self-plunging quest. As Narcissister takes the flower delicately to her face to see and smell through her senseless mask, there is a baffling sincerity to the gesture. Or later as she furiously rubs the touch screen of the machine that is now placed between her legs and clothed in thong underwear, the mask seems to betray a complex matrix of yearning, curiosity, and frustration. This trope of the magically generative and endlessly exchangeable vagina is common across other Narcissister pieces, but in addition to a sex-positive embrace of the grotesque and an illustration of capitalism’s relationship to the excessive feminine, there is also something almost therapeutic in this imagining of a symbolic equivalent to the phallus that is such a resource for creative genesis and pleasure—Narcissister’s vagina seems to offer whatever she needs most in the moment.
In “Dollhouse”, the piece she performed for the benefit, this self-production becomes even more literal as the vagina, through a process of acrobatic striptease, sprouts a new head complete with the same iconic Narcissister face. Indeed, the faces replicate everywhere on her body—with both heads donning masked faces on front and back—so that from any direction at least two faces are visible. This dance of self-fracturing is expressed in the soundtrack of Diana Ross’ “Upside Down” as it describes the vertiginous, destabilizing and even self-annihilating effect that characterizes the classic female experience of romantic love. Eventually, though, the faces paired on front and back begin to find each other as the music transitions to a more promising tale of romance in George Benson’s “Just the Two of Us.” Narcissister contorts her body in a stunning choreography that allows the faces to alternately gaze longingly into each other’s eyes. However, like lovers on the Grecian urn, or the expressions on their own mask faces, they are stuck, frozen in longing without hope of realizing the embrace they yearn for.
Among many possible readings of this conceptually rich work, I’m most drawn to the mode of sophisticated, and distinctly feminist/queer, meditation it offers on the discourse of self-love. We sometimes forget that in the myth of Narcissus, it isn’t mere arrogance that leads him to choose himself as love object but rather misrecognition of his reflection for another. Instead of the kind of entitled and self-conscious strutting that we so often label as narcissistic in our culture of ubiqutous Facebook selfies and incessant documentation of self-pampering vacations and dining experiences, Narcissus forgets himself completely and eventually dies from this self-neglect. Narcissister’s auto-erotic, and decidedly campy, reenactment of Narcissus’s attempt to caress his own image with her own body’s looping contortions reintroduce a much needed complexity to our examination of the framework of narcissism as she asks us to ponder the meaning, and even radical possibilities, of true self-love.
The mid-afternoon New York City traffic is uncharacteristically brisk on my way to interview performance artist Kalup Linzy. I arrive in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, half an hour early, with my photographer. Linzy greets us at his unmarked live-in work-space basement studio wearing a shiny dark gray satin shirt, white boxer shorts with orange and brown hibiscus flowers and a pair of rubber flip-flops.
Welcoming us in, he exclaims, “I know I told you 2 p.m., because The Bold and the Beautiful goes off at 2 o’clock.” Linzy pauses, “I mean, I can make exceptions.”
I am grateful, because this man is serious about his soaps. His most acclaimed work is a series of self-made soap opera videos, some of which are All My Churen, Da Young and da Mess and the ongoing serial “Conversations Wit de Churen.” They are equal parts gender-bending satire, daytime high drama and genuine heartfelt homage.
Kalup Linzy, “Keys to Our Heart,” 2008, still from digital video
Before excusing himself, Linzy announces that he’s going to make some popcorn because he has the munchies. He returns with a bag of microwave popcorn, wearing a brunette shoulder-length fuchsia-tipped wig. We want to take photos outside to catch some of the early spring light, but Linzy objects, “I can’t be going out like this; school will be getting out soon. I don’t want that kind of attention. You know how some high school boys can be.” He pauses, then adds, “But of course I’ll beat their ass!” The threat is difficult to believe. There is an easy grace about him: his newly added tresses framing his deep soulful eyes, his wide soft smile caressing the scruff of his beard.
Kalup Linzy, “Keys to Our Heart,” 2008, still from digital video
The wigs, high fashion and glamour that have become a hallmark of Linzy’s work don’t necessarily define his real world. “I’m not transgender; it’s not a lifestyle for me. I just use the aesthetic of drag in my work, but I don’t think I’m a drag artist either. I just decided consciously that whenever I was going to appear that I would be dressed up and performing because I think of myself as a guy who is pretty boring,” he says laughing. “I mean, that’s what the work is, but I didn’t necessarily want to be my characters from the videos. People are annoyed that it isn’t real, but I’m like ‘whatever — get ready!’ As people misunderstand, they’ll research my work more. There are many layers to a man putting on a dress. We’re all drag queens and drag kings, anybody who’s performing to create an identity.”
Linzy’s identity seems delightfully complex. He counts his influences as everything from daytime dramas, old black-and-white Hollywood movies, the romanticism of the Harlem Renaissance to Def Comedy Jam and the sitcoms of his childhood. He draws artistic inspiration from Andy Warhol, John Waters, Glenn Ligon and Lyle Ashton Harris. Munching on a handful of popcorn, Linzy muses, “When I was in college I had this Black Male Body book. I remember that exact moment I saw Lyle Ashton Harris, in like a tutu. I connected that to John Waters in my mind, and that sort of began to give me the freedom to do my work.”
Despite Linzy’s rather grand ascension into the art-world elite, he seems fairly unaffected by it. “I feel like the world is my art community anywhere I go. You hang out with the people that you’re around and working with and let the energy come and go. It’s like a fleeting experience. But I really do feel like the world is my home.” One of the “elite” that Linzy has been hanging out with recently is actor James Franco. They met in 2009 when Linzy was performing at a party for Art Basel Miami Beach. Last year, Franco asked Linzy to join him on General Hospital during his stint playing a deranged artist/serial killer, Robert “Franco” Frank. In an art-imitates-life twist, Linzy played Franco’s musical collaborator singer and performance artist, Kalup Ishmael.
This was a “full-circle moment” for Linzy: “I grew up wanting to be on a soap opera. I grew up wanting to be a filmmaker, a director and wanting to sing. I incorporate all this stuff into my art. So when somebody comes along like James Franco and says, ‘You wanna be on General Hospital?’, of course I’m going to say yes. The whole point of me doing the videos is because I didn’t think a soap opera could ever happen to someone like me. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really happening!’” Linzy is grinning. “It was a big event in my life! I had to rethink, because it really wasn’t supposed to happen in a million years. Especially because I had decided to be openly gay and not give a shit and instead just express it through my work. But it gave me the confidence to do more and follow more of my dreams.”
Linzy is reflective when talking about those early years growing up in Clermont, Florida. “When I started making art in my late 20s, I was confronted with things that I had missed or was missing, things I needed to confront and deal with. Like I grew up — my mother didn’t raise me. She was schizophrenic and on drugs for a period of time. I realized I had abandonment issues, but I would not deal with them. Moving to New York made me look that in the face. Just to really look at it and know how it affected things I did. It made me want to be a giver, to feel good about something. There are certain things that I didn’t get, and so I became more inclined when I was making my work to make something just for myself, or people who are like me to identify with and enjoy.”
Upon first impression, Linzy’s work may seem like zany high-camp performance art. It’s challenging to watch his soap opera video series and not get sucked in by the characters. You immediately want to tune in to the next episode and see how it all plays out — a common soap opera strategy. “In comedy, the tragedy happens first, and then the journey back from that is normally humorous, you know, to try to heal it,” Linzy says.
Kalup Linzy, Photo by Cecilia De Bucourt
High and low art brazenly crash into each other in Linzy’s work; any notion or division between the two is unimportant to him. While grateful for his success, he is unimpressed by art-world politics. “I remember being at MoMA, and I basically told the audience that I didn’t care what they thought, and I think people probably didn’t appreciate it too much, but I felt like I had to set myself free from these other people’s opinions. All they talked about was these crack addicts in the ’80s, but my mother was one. They talk about being gay, but I am one of them. They talk about being black, but that was me. Everything I felt I was a part of was being marginalized. I had to set myself free from all these opinions to be able to live.” Linzy pauses, becomes quiet and crumples up the popcorn bag. “It’s not the easiest thing. I think it’s important to care, but you have to have some kind of detachment at particular points in order to just survive and not emotionally kill yourself. The work became about my own healing and hopefully other people get something from that. I’ve done a good job with it. I’ve grown, and I’ve learned. It’s okay to let go of things you didn’t get and not dwell on it … and it’s okay to be liked. Everything doesn’t have to be so heavy all the time, you know. Early on I was just doing things so I could be accepted, but now my work is really about accepting myself.”
Linzy gets up and loads a dance mix on his laptop; the music floods the room. Suddenly we’re all up on our feet dancing and laughing. His words echo in my mind: “Everything doesn’t have to be so heavy all the time.” The photo shoot begins. Linzy serves up a powerful supermodel turn to the camera with an “I’ll beat your ass” diva glint in his eye, and suddenly I can plainly see a man in a wig who can take care of business if and when he needs to.
Greg Walloch is a writer and performer in Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.GregWalloch.com.
