room for clouds

Lori Waxman was both my professor and my thesis advisor. I once babysat her son (well, kind of. She was just in the other room). Though I did not interview her about her work or practice specifically, we have had long conversations in and out of class. She has bought me cookies and coffee on more than one occasion.

 

Art critic and historian Lori Waxman married an artist. She told us so. Her essay “So I Married an Artist,” included in threewall’s Talking with Your Mouth Full: New Language for Socially Engaged Art, discusses the sticky (or at least, “taboo”) relationship between art, artist, critic, and what is “appropriate proximity”—in this case, discussing husband Michael Rakowitz’s Return (2006), a relational project in the form of a small import-and-export shop of Iraqi dates (as in the fruit) in Brooklyn.

The shop was open six days a week from 1 October to 10 December, and she is candid in her intimacy with the project just in terms of being there, working in the shop before it opened, after it closed, discussing it over the dinner table, absorbing these details she would argue contain the most meaning. And it is precisely this relationship, this unusual closeness that gives her more understanding of the subtlety and nuance Return encompassed.

Her unique position both to the project and the artist lead her to question, then answer, whether a critic can pass “unbiased judgment” on a piece from such close proximity, with particular regard to relational artwork. The short answer is: how the Hell else are you going to get it? To elaborate on this, Waxman discusses FOOD, a 1971 SoHo restaurant founded by artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard, Waxman admits no amount of research, no matter how thorough, could compensate for being there.

“This realization, by no means a comfortable one for a critic-historian to have,” she writes, “jolts me into questioning the kind of presence both possible and necessary for the reviewer of today’s relational artwork.”

When the relationship is the art, how does this shift the critic’s position? Where do you stand? With regard to Return, Waxman might be the only person to speak with authority about the meaning of the piece, as a whole, other than Michael Rakowitz himself. This does not necessarily invalidate whatever other reviews about this project exist. But more than needing time, relationships are time, and cannot be researched, simulated, sped along, or experienced vicariously. Sometimes, you just have to be there.

About a year ago, I had a conversation with a gallery attendant at Alderman Exhibitions in West Loop. I was there to critique Joel Dean’s The Real Problem, full of bright, flat, candid landscapes and awkward freestanding sculptures. It was fun but it felt a bit—I don’t know, gaudy, a bit forced. There was a lot of okay, but what I am actually looking at here in the first 30 minutes I spent in the space, “hmming” dutifully and touching my chin, trying to give each piece its due.

After a while, the gallery assistant asked me what I thought.

“I don’t know, it’s kind of funky, kind of weird. My thoughts haven’t gelled.” I grinned. “Do you like it?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with the artist…and I’ve spent a lot of time with the work being here, so I think—well, my opinion’s changed a lot—and I think I’m at peace with it now.”

These relationships, between viewer and art, become both part of the aesthetic experience and a critical practice in and of themselves. If we reframe criticism as an exploration of relationships, not only between the critic and the work, but the relationship between the work, the artist, and the larger framework of culture, then a close relationship has the potential to build layers of comprehension, to add dimension and complexity. In the case of relational artwork, this is a tool to use rather than a handicap to overcome.

But even in the case of The Real Problem and the gallery attendant, why is allowing a relationship time to develop necessarily “uncritical?” Obviously, journalistic timeliness and opportunity play a factor in whether it’s possible—we can assume, in Lori Waxman’s case, she is Rakowitz’s only wife, so the chance to cohabitate with his work to such a degree is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And at this moment of technological connectivity, the demands for new media are increasingly urgent. Output is rapid and continuous. Intake is immediate, indiscriminate and, because of the sheer quantity of information, superficial. Intimacy is then the antithesis of this consumption; time-necessitated, personal, private rather than public, close, and familiar. We see it less and less, especially with regard to arts writing as it succumbs to the demands of the 24-hour news cycle.

Why shouldn’t those critics then with the means and opportunity be encouraged to take it slow?  Why shouldn’t there be more room for accidents, chance, subtlety, nuance? More room for details, for surprises and changes, for layers to develop? Why should we expect art, and our understanding of it, to remain static? Why shouldn’t we make more room for confusion? For changes of heart, changes of mind? More room for contradiction? More room for clouds?

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Continue reading » there’s a fire on evergreen street
This is part of “Radical Storytelling,” originally submitted to the SAIC Collections on 14 Dec 2013.

shoot

1. to hit, kill, or wound
2. to fire or let fly
3. to put forth new growth, germinate
4. to pour out, empty out, discharge
5. to be felt moving or as if moving through the body
6. to record, as with a photograph

Ex: Two women, poised to shoot.

Shoot contains a kind of violence, and photography, said Laurie Anderson, is “a kind of assault.”

A shooting.

Here is a tale of two photo series shot forty years apart. 1973’s Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity), a photo-narrative by then New York-based experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson, and photographer Hannah Price’s incomplete series City of Brotherly Love from early 2013.

Fully Automated Nikon presents a collection of men—men in the streets, men in cars, men with their mouths open—as they catcall to Anderson during her pedestrian commute through Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Frustrated by a sense of vulnerability, Anderson initially snapped photographs of street harassers as a kind of counter-attack, a way to take back the power in an otherwise humiliating situation. But she pushes it a step further, whiting out their eyes and presenting the doctored photographs as a series in the context of this initial assault.

The whiteout is not a gesture of secured anonymity but stripped identity. It’s a visual representation of the power shift that took place the moment she became an active participant in the situation. These stripes both obscure the male gaze and criminalize the gazer, observes scholar Philip Nel in his 2002 book The Avant Garde and American Postmodernity.

“[She] puts herself at risk,” he writes. “Turning the tables on them did make some of them angry and could have provoked a violent response…part of [the work’s] success lies in Anderson’s willingness to take such risks.”

Anderson becomes a kind of vigilante, and the viewer, seeing these eyeless black-and-white figures, these anonymous offenders, cannot feel sympathy for them. Many of the subjects, caught by surprise, still wear the ghosts of provocation. But like their words, they have become bodiless ghosts, visible but transparent, powerless in reality. Initially subject to aggression, she assumes the role of aggressor.

“I realized photography is a kind of mugging,” she writes of the piece. “I was shooting…then stealing something.”

Laurie Anderson was shooting to kill. Not so with Hannah Price.

While the context and content of her encounters with each person is largely unspoken, Hannah Price’s work exists in the larger framework of the city, Philadelphia. In such, her photographs define her relationship to the city more than her relationship to these individual subjects.

These are not mug shots. These men, their eyes staring squarely through the frame, sometimes sad, sometimes intrigued, mostly unreadable, are not being criminalized. Price obtained verbal consent for most of the photographs, actually talking to these men, and said despite the mostly positive response, she respected their wishes if they declined.

When “Photographer Turns Lens on Men Who Cat-Call” started popping up in my newsfeed a few months ago, I eventually decided to investigate. I didn’t really want to though. My knee-jerk reaction was discomfort.

“Who is Hannah Price,” I muttered, “and why is she taking pictures of black men?”

It’s the kind of thing that gets the “It’s not always about race” look, and almost never from other Kids of Color. Now, I hate catcalling; I find it both invasive and derogatory. But then, like Price, I grew up in the ‘burbs. Orange County can’t exactly be called white suburbia—there are substantial Mexican, Korean and Vietnamese communities—but I went to a mostly white school, lived in a mostly white neighborhood, and hung out with my mostly white friends. My expectations about public behavior are mostly white.

I didn’t get catcalled very often. Sometimes walking to the library, or on the edge of my neighborhood near the tiny Catholic Church.

But my mom had stories. Santa Ana, where she and my dad both grew up, used to be more diverse, a pretty even split between blacks, whites, and Latinos. There was an air base nearby, and all the blacks—my mother’s family included, and later my father’s—were sequestered to four square miles between Bristol, Warner, Harbor and 17^th Street. Between the two of them, my parents could name a couple of families on every block.

So everybody knew everybody one way or another. That still didn’t stop the whistles and solicitations. My mom described the walk through McFadden Park on her way to school as the worst instance of harassment in her life.

“I used to hate it,” she said. “Older guys—like seniors in high school—would hang out in the park in the morning on my way to school calling to us. I mean, I was ten or eleven.”

“What kind of things did they say?”

“‘Hey you, cute little girl. Where you going? Don’t run, don’t run!’”

When she got older, male strangers would often offer her and her friends a ride home from high school. She told me she got cussed out for not wanting to slow dance with a guy at a party. When she explained it was too intimate, he said you’re just a bitch who thinks she’s too good for anyone.

I’ve been called that before. Too Good.

City of Brotherly Love is often incorrectly reblogged as My Harassers, and gained internet fame exactly because of the vigilante angle, the promise of revenge for the humiliation and fear you feel just Commuting While Female. Yet, while initially crafted in response to both the discomfort of the situation and her frustrated feelings, Price isn’t assaulting anyone, not the way Anderson did.

“The nonportraits are more sort of how I envision a romantic encounter,” she told Kat Chow in an interview for NPR’s Code Switch. “I’m in the photograph, but I’m not. Just turning the photograph on them kind of gives them a feel of what it’s like to be in a vulnerable position – it’s just a different dynamic.”

Would Philip Nel consider Price on par with Laurie Anderson in terms of “risk?” While in both series the men are predominantly black and Latino, Anderson is white, while Price identifies herself as “African-Mexican-American.” Even if we update Anderson’s project, place it in 2013, the perception of danger both intrinsically, on the part of the artists, and extrinsically, on the part of the viewers, will likely differ. The sociocultural interaction between all parties is different. The power dynamic between all parties is different. A white woman getting in the face of Men of Color with a camera is going to look different, almost automatically, from a Woman of Color turning a negative interaction into a conversation (because that’s what she did) with these men, who are also mainly People of Color.

There is danger in being catcalled; when it happens, I feel unsettled, physically vulnerable. A chill goes right up the back of my spine, and I walk faster, I hurry to escape. Male sexual aggression toward women, especially from men of color who are historically portrayed as lustful aggressors and sexual deviants, is bright and familiar in the popular imagination. I would argue the visceral response to street harassment is largely a reaction to this legacy of male dominance over/violence against women. But I am also reacting to the breach of social contract, of societal “standards,” an assault against what puritanical, sex-negative Anglo-America considers acceptable behavior.

Not that catcalling is positive, or harmless, or justified. But my relationship to it, like Price’s, is different than if I’d grown up on the south side or far west side of Chicago, or if I’d been born and raised somewhere like Italy, where these actions are considered more as an annoyance than a threat. It’s not just sex differences; it’s class differences, it’s color differences, it’s culture differences.

Can we condemn the action—and the perpetrators—while forgiving the colonialism that set these dynamics in place? Can we blame these men as individuals, when as individuals they are not responsible for the cultural fetishization of the female body, of Whiteness, when they are not responsible for the insidious systems of patriarchy that give them power? Can we blame them, these men of color, like we blame them for so much else? And if I say, “It’s not their fault,” do I become a catcalling apologist? How do I forgive these men but damn the institution, when actually they are one in the same? How do I forgive them when I still leave my house at night feeling anxious and vulnerable, when I lower my eyes to avoid confrontation, when I’m the one with a rape whistle on a keychain? How do I forgive them? How can I?

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Continue reading » the walking class, reprise
This is part of “Radical Storytelling,” originally submitted to the SAIC Collections on 14 Dec 2013.

figure 8

The circumference of the earth is just over 24,000 miles. If you walk 66 miles every day for 365 days, you will have walked 24,090 miles—just over the length of the equator. If you walk 10 miles a day, it would take six and a half years. If, like those 1,136 Americans from the 2003 America On The Move report, you walk an average of two and a half miles each day, a trip around the world would take just over 26 years.

This year I traveled, via plane, train, bus, and car, around 27,722 miles. It’s a loose calculation. I didn’t include the miles walked between Wicker Park and Logan Square, the distance between my front door and the grocery store, or the front door and the coffee shop. I didn’t include the aimless circling I took to during the summer, the pacing from kitchen to bedroom to living room while calling my parents, the running for the bus, or the tipsy footsteps back and forth to the bathroom at the Rainbo Club.

I didn’t include a walk up a hill in Glanusk, sinking mud paces through a sheep pasture at dawn, or the steps around the slate wall I couldn’t climb in my treadless boots. I didn’t include the dream walking through a psychedelic Paris built entirely on parking structures.

My body has moved around the circumference of the earth and still the actual miles under my feet rival nowhere near that distance. I am too small, and I will only get smaller; the universe will continue to push my body until I am compacted, the pressure pushing closer and closer until I am one with everyone else.

I dreamed a conversation between Carl Sagan and Gertrude Stein.

Carl recalls a photograph snapped by a space probe, a portrait of Earth in 1990 taken 3.7 billion miles away. The picture is grainy, streaked by faded colors. In the center of the rightmost beam, a tiny light—a point less than a pixel in size—hovers in space.

Carl shows the picture to Gertrude and tells her, “That’s us. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives.”

A pale blue dot. A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Gertrude’s dark eyes swim in the muted colors of the photograph, her mouth as I imagine it slightly agape, then closed, and her hands clasped on either knee.

“Hmmm,” she says, after a while. “You live on this earth and you cannot get away from it and yet there is a space where the stars are which is unlimited and that contradiction is there in every man and every woman and so nothing is ever settled.”

This strikes a chord of terror straight through my heart, but Carl just smiles and Gertrude gives him her kind, bright eyes. And though I am dreaming this, I’m not there anymore. She leans back in her armchair, a cigarette poised between her fingers.

“It really is the most interesting thing,” she says

The Pale Blue Dot, NASA/JPL

(This is the earth, Valentine’s Day, 1990. I am 2-years-old. Where were you then, dear Reader? Where are you now?)

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*
Conversation adapted from the following works: Carl Sagan, The Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937.

notes for further exploration
This is part of “Radical Storytelling,” originally submitted to the SAIC Collections on 14 Dec 2013.

radical storytelling – an introduction

My graduate thesis, “Radical Storytelling,” explores alternative forms of contemporary art criticism, specifically examining subjectivity, intimacy, and individual experience as tools for critical practice.

As with art history, close relationships with either the art or the artist are traditionally considered taboo for the critic. It’s a question of proximity: how can one objectively critique something so close to home?

Using an admixture of Gertrude Stein, Hunter S. Thompson, interviews, fiction, and personal narrative, “Radical Storytelling” offers, for the reader’s consideration, criticism that embraces the intimate, the messy, and the subjective. Reflecting upon the shifts in technology, cultural values, art consumption, and arts education, it examines the boundaries and possibilities of memory and identity-based relational criticism within a contemporary framework.