propositions press... 2.0

a pause in the action matters

Sara Daleiden alerted me to the opening of Monument, a solo show by lauren woods at University Art Museum at Cal State University Long Beach. A brewing controversy peppered the air, having to do with the dismissal of Kimberli Meyer, the director of the museum, less than a week before the opening. At the end of a 40-minute gallery talk, the artist made a dramatic gesture in solidarity with Meyer, whom she considers a primary collaborator for this project. It was totally worth witnessing. It is not everyday that an artist declares a just-unveiled interactive installation “paused” and walks out of her own opening. 

The controversy has been reported on Hyperallergic, ArtNews, and Dallas News with good pictures. Meyer is appealing the termination.

The show is excellent. This is the best artistic treatment of the BLM movement and BLM urgency I’ve yet seen. This is in comparison to Hank Willis Thomas’s Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, and Lauren Halsey’s recent installation for Made in L.A., among others, so I offer it as high praise.

 

 

 

The artist shortly before speaking.

 

Lauren Halsey, Detail, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (2018). Photo credit to Colony Little. 

The centerpiece of the show is an arrangement of 25 turntables on pedestals, each loaded with a vinyl pressing of audio documents relating to police killings of African American people. It is true, I am a sucker for vinyl and turntables. But I would say that this installation well exceeded that basic favoritism of mine. On top of the impressive visual display, there is the sound. It makes for haunting listening for anyone with ears connected to the least bit of heart. woods played an excerpt from the cop killing of Philando Castile, one of the most egregious human rights violations caught on a phone in recent memory. The voice of Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend and a passenger in the car at the time of the shooting, filled the hall. I’d heard that recording before and just like the first time, it brought to surface a physical response. It was hard to settle my agitation; some in the gallery shed tears.   

One of 25 unmarked turntables with unmarked records in Monument by lauren woods

Two side galleries also contained displays, all of them rendering primary documents from incidents of police murder into objects for aesthetic consideration–aesthetic in the sense that Susan Buck-Morss uses the word, i.e. in opposition to the unfeelingness of shock and the everyday anaesthetics of capitalism. woods gives us a enlarged graphic reproductions of the coroner’s diagram marking the sixteen bullet holes riddling the body of young Laquan MacDonald, from head to thigh. She presents printed transcripts from the incidents beautifully stored in metal boxes on tables measured to lengths matching distances specified in case law justifying police fear of “suspects”–which is to say, of course, just about any African American person engaged in just about any activity. Together with the central installation, the show is an emotional wringer, a work of collected trauma that undoubtedly tested the resolve of the artist, and an indictment of a national shame. 

Detail of graphic appropriated from coroner's report on Laquan MacDonald.

Transcript from dialogue of Diamond Reynolds and officers Yanez and Kauser, moments after Yanez shot Philando Castile.

I also read the Hyperallergic account on the quashing of the proposed feature whereby audio would be broadcast outside the museum. I didn’t miss it. I think the artist is already successfully walking a fine line. Organizing documents of traumatic racist violence and re-presenting them in ways that create physical and mental space for absorbing them anew, and in ways that put the discrete incidents in relation to each other, is the strength of the show. And to do it all with such attention to detail is quite admirable and, I would say, a big service to the ongoing need for careful political analysis—a need, just like careful art making, that runs counter to the immediacies of crises. Putting the audio out in the public air for unsuspecting passersby…ah, I am not sure that would perform the same service. As I am imagining it, that would more likely fall into a recursive strategy, i.e. taking a traumatic document and calling it art without a lot of evident organization. Even if there were thought and labor put into the editing, sequencing, etc. (which there might not have been, given the suggestion that the audio was to have been directly channeled from the turntables as played randomly by gallery goers), but that part of the work wouldn’t be readily available for interpretation—in contrast to the gallery arrangement of turntables, wherein the arrangement decisions are very evident, as an essential part of the work, as much as the raw documentation. A broadcast of the audio—again, only as I am imagining it—might smack more of Christoph Büchel’s proposed treatment of the prototyped border security walls: display them as is, and justify it as art for reasons of historical preservation, but make no accomodation for the mixed messages upon reception. This is a long way of saying, no matter the administration’s meddling with the artist’s intentions, as a viewer I did not miss anything for the absence of the outdoor audio. The show was plenty powerful without it.

In the reporting about the controversy, in many places it has been said that Meyer’s declared agenda was to address white supremacy and the museum’s role in both upholding and dismantling it. I hate to be critical at this moment of personal upheaval, but if those reports are accurate, then I must say, I find politics reduced to stances against white supremacy disheartening. I have many reasons for this, chief among them, an analytical lens of white supremacy simply leaves out too many other factors. This is not to flatten all regressive vectors into equivalent forces, but it is to say that they are all intertwined. Race or class or gender–to speak only of the Holy Trinity of Difference–make for primary antagonisms in different situations, and reinforce (or contradict) each other in different ways, both at micro and broad, historical scales; this is something we all know. A reduction to any one, particularly that of race, in my estimation and experience often clouds political intent with distractions like virtue-signaling and conversation-halting moralism. Let’s just say that, like Asad Haider lays out in Mistaken Identity, I find more of value in the late phase Amiri Baraka than in the current Frank Wilderson. Guilt-mongering by calling out white privilege is a pseudo-politics. That said, let me emphasize that I have no way to judge Meyer’s politics except as has been reported; I will grant her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she has a complex and nuanced analysis of power that is not being told. Facilitating a project like Monument certainly speaks well of her courage as a curator.  

The firing, by appearances at least, falls into the over-determined pattern of tone-deaf administrations that create mediagenic controversies while ostensibly seeking to avoid them. If the administration wishes for everything “to be centered around art,” as quoted in the Hyperallergic article, then maybe those decision makers ought to liberate the art from such bone-headed interventions as firing the director days before a major opening. 

The exhibition remains paused; the audio has gone silent for the time being. I can only hope that the museum and university resolve the disputed firing so that more people will be able to fully experience this important work. Our growth in political thinking–and feeling–to match the ongoing crisis in police violence, extremist racism, and rising violence in general, depends on shows like this one.

the city after today, political art after yesterday

The exhibition After Today up now at Gallery 400 has the feel of a Chicago show from ten years ago, in a good way. I could call it a “strategy” or simply a response to a demand—either way, the exhibition space is turned into a platform for playing with ways to see city problems and imagine city solutions, that city being Chicago. And “problems” in this instance mostly being out-of-whack property economics and Chicago’s security-carceral complex.

In the familiar Chicago way, the roster of exhibitors is a mix of individuals and groups, and a combination of trained artists, political organizers, and educators.  There are more than ten events planned for the run of the show, including screenings, workshops, performances, and a group bike ride. The displays include a room designed for viewer participation set up by 96 Acres, with tables for drawing and a chalkboard wall; a selection of framed watercolor drawings of titles from the canon of radical lit by Cauleen Smith; a diptych of video documents by Jan Tichy showing a Little Village community event and the once-contested Northerly Island lakefront parkland; a reading alcove with a selection of books assembled from the university library and more.

After Today has the combined sprawl and focused topicality of Pedagogical Factory at the Hyde Park Art Center and Pathogeographies at Gallery 400, both of which were mounted in 2007, and the even earlier exhibitions Critical Mass and Autonomous Territories of Chicago, not to mention the decade-plus of Version fests. In the years since, a discourse has grown to surround the arts of political commitment that make use of participatory forms, to an extent choking politics out of the conversation. Probably the best known frame was provided by Claire Bishop, first disseminated in an Artforum article, “The Social Turn,” published in 2006. Attending to the formalization of social interaction and participation rather than political topics, Bishop interprets work based on form and type and assesses work by identifying the most aesthetically interesting of the type.

Bishop’s negative assessment of the political dimension—often reducible in her estimation to a moralism regulating participation and standards of fair treatment in collective art practices or community-located projects, or the efficacy of an ameliorative intent—de-emphasized any conversation about art as it relates to creative political strategy. In its stead, and with the help of a deterritorialized sphere of discursive venues with national and international profiles, ie comparatively less anchored to a specific place, “social practice” emerged. The Chicago shows of the early 2000s stand as proof of an opposing discursive grain and After Today continues in that direction. This show grants zero attention to concerns of genre or type, and to my great relief, the term social practice is nowhere to be seen. Rather, the show is framed as an occasion to consider

“...this moment of rapid change and political debate—with increasing income inequality, in the long wake of the 2008 recession, as neighborhoods across the city continue to transform, with the rise of labor movements, as the tech sector expands in Chicago, with the transformations of Chicago’s public sector, as wider attention is paid to police violence, and given the long story of race in the city.”

Directly put, the show is about the present and future of the contested polis under conditions shaped by massively concentrated capital, an ever-broader security state, and worsening social inequity. Recognizing that these trends are a legitimately urgent preoccupation, the gallery has been made into a temporary lab for rendering visible the forces at work, for thinking about effective ways to influence the ongoing transformation of the city, and for sharing ideas with others in a city evolved to keep groups separate. As sociopolitical conditions have taken a turn for the worse, this show feels like a throwback, a re-engagement with a lot of unfinished political work and political thinking. As the critical art group Not An Alternative might say, Goldman Sachs doesn’t care what anybody labels this art. Neither do Stewart and the participating artists.

Not that anybody in the Chicago critical art scene ever did. But the timing of this show has an added significance because the city’s radical art scene from the first decade of the century, influential far beyond only Chicago, is now an object to be historicized, which in the economics of contemporary intellectual activity means an infusion of capital, social and monetary. There will be new courses, new conferences, new publications, and ultimately, new careers (ie further entrenchments in the professional realm, where the two kinds of capital intersect). And established reputations have a opportunity to be freshly reinforced, as in the case of last fall’s Sullivan Galleries show A Proximity of Consciousness. An extravaganza comprising the exhibition, the impressive five-volume Chicago Social Practice History series, and the accompanying symposium A Lived Practice, this was the chief effort thus far to package the history and it cemented the authority of Mary Jane Jacob, the curator who oversaw the whole.

Thus, After Today also stands as a refusal to historicize and thereby reify a type of art (“social practice”) belonging to a place (“Chicago social practice”). So the show works as a counter primarily to A) the forces of capital reshaping the city as an exclusionary territory, and secondarily to B) the forces of capital reshaping art discourse as zones of fixed types that now include much of the work born of the struggle to make Chicago livable for its residents. The works on display are presented as strategic intrusions into the wider civic sphere. Amanda Williams’s installed photo-text, in part made of a demolition order scaled larger than a print of a condemned building in Chicago’s tough-break cityscape, frontally addresses the real estate crisis grinding through the neighborhoods. The display says this is what is going on; this is a snapshot of the process of disinvestment. That these images could have been captured in hundreds of cities and small towns across the Midwest deepens the wound a viewer feels, too real to indulge the faded romance of ruin porn. Following the same line of distress, Marianne Fairbanks (with whom I once shared labors as Mess Hall keyholders) presents arrangements of dyes-as-documentation, in fiber works and a window arrangement of dye jars. She sourced the dye-releasing plants from overgrown lawns around vacant homes in foreclosure in the fast changing northwest barrio, giving color to the process of displacement. 

The installation attributed to 96 Acres, a project series led by Maria Gaspar, invites people to hand write on prepared note cards and a chalk wall for free versing words and thoughts, all with a mind toward the Cook County Jail in particular and incarceration generally. On the third wall of the alcove is a grid of portraits produced by William Estrada, Anthony Rea, and Erica Brooks, documenting the impromptu thoughts of passers-by regarding Cook County Jail, encountered across the street from that facility (and to which the project title 96 Acres refers, that being the spatial footprint of the jail). The set-up has the coziness of a seminar room, and reminded me that the whole show defies spectacularized scale, very much to its benefit. Finally, in a most experientially intimate, spatially non-existent move—and harkening back to DIY methods from a pre-Web 2.0 era—Gallery 400 invites viewers to contribute responses and feedback by phone. Written and recorded voice responses are shared here. 

In sum, to me the show re-asserts the sited political thinking that frequently made Chicago art of the 2000s so fierce. With the forces of enclosure moving toward an extreme within urban spaces and within the rarified activity of art discourse and interpretation, I love that Gallery 400, as a non-commercial space administered as part of a public institution, continues to meet the demand for spaces in which to explore, strengthen, and rehearse our sense of citizenship, of belonging to a city and a society. Resisting monumentalization, After Today enlivens a medium-sized gallery and returns political art to rumors of a show. My one suggestion for the future is to facilitate works that problematize our inherited understandings of what regional and global spaces, and therefore what people, belong to or may lay a claim on Chicago.

*

For the predictable but nonetheless important questions about political efficacy and the relationship between art projects and actual political organizing and activist labor that necessarily follow viewing After Today, the just-closed exhibition Sentenced: Architecture & Human Rights picked up where After Today leaves off. I was lucky to see that show on the evening of its closing reception, June 23—the date chosen for its number, signifying the 23.5 hours per day that solitary confinement inmates in the US are kept in their cages. Without full description or analysis, I will only say that the exhibition went beyond symbolism, exposure, and education only. In fact, at the reception it was announced by public interest attorney Alan Mills to cheers that on the very next day the Uptown People’s Law Center would be filing a class-action lawsuit to force a reform of Illinois’s solitary incarceration practices.

So was it an organizers’ social event? An indoor political rally? An exhibition reception? It was all of those things at once.

 

 

justseeds in milwaukee, again

I walked the 100 block of State Street some weeks ago and something didn’t feel right. I stopped and looked the storefronts up and down. It was gone. Ian’s on State was gone. I guess the WI Uprising—the social movement that lived on Ian’s pizza—is really over.

Not it is not. Ian’s, that is. I didn’t know they had moved across the street. As for the movement, it is going into hibernation, if you can call sleeping on a hair trigger hibernation.

*

In spring of 2009 the print media artists’ cooperative Justseeds opened a large-scale graphic art installation in the Union Art Gallery of UWM. I noted back then that the installation Which Side Are You On? was one of the most effective uses I had seen of an exceptionally difficult exhibition space. A cavernous zone with an odd foot print, the suffocating concrete architecture of the Union Art Gallery normally washes over whatever feeling emanates from the work on display. In that takeover, Justseeds did not merely tame the space, they bent it to their will.

In March of 2013 Justseeds does it again, only better than the first time. Compared to the earlier project the new installation, Uprisings: Images of Labor, is edited and simplified, but not in any way compromised or lessened. Elements have been reduced, formats unified, and the stylistically diverse design work, typography, and handworked imagery allowed full visibility. This time around the group attacks the walls neither as aggressively nor as freely as they did four years ago, but instead grabs attention through an aerial hanging of numerous but repeating forty-inch screen prints.
The multi-point messaging effectively broadens our ideas of what qualifies or defines itself as a labor struggle. At floor level the installation is a village of Justseeds activity and production—tables for blocks and brayers, books for sale (including, I was happy to see, a short stack of Deep Routes), small prints and publications on display, pulp vats and floor tarps for a papermaking station, and other stuff I didn’t get around to scrutinizing.

What is interesting to me is taking the two shows as a measure of time in social movement terms. Picture a line beginning in March of 2009 and ending in March 2013, with March 2011 in the center. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and Arab Spring, the Wisconsin Uprising, the movement of indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and other insurgent flare-ups happened over the year halfway between the time of the two shows. In 2013, it makes some sense, in fact, to think of the current installation not as a “show” but an occupation. Not comparable to 2011’s actual social movement occupations of political space, obviously, I am speaking rather of a functional gesture and/or metaphorical act that extends the dream of those beautiful, frightening, and exhilarating occupations of 2011—events that currently sit on the two-years-later cusp of falling into the slow fade of memory. 

But Uprisings: Images of Labor is also more than a retrieval of the once-heady feeling of recent movements gone stale, particularly in Justseeds’ strategy of organizing a two-day free conference (shadowing the SGCI academic conference), of which I attended for a half day.
The programming created exactly that which our social movements need now, spaces in which partisans since dispersed by defeats and exhaustion can freshly connect, educate each other, exchange views, and be visible to one another.

Lane Hall and Lisa Moline's breakdown of OLB encounters with law enforcement set the afternoon tone of movement self-analysis.
By the time we had an intense twenty-minute audience discussion about feminist politics, feminist process, and feminist criticality following Meredith Stern’s afternoon presentation, a vibe of shared struggle and respectful inquiry settled into the room.
In other words, in an art event Justseeds created temporary conditions for what arose organically during the capitol rotunda occupation in Madison, the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and (on an incomparably huge scale) the occupation of Tahrir: a social forum. After 2011, the constituent elements of social movements are searching for space within which to locate themselves. Justseeds, with special effort by the Milwaukee-based members, has that space for a little while. In as potentially cold a gallery as the Union Art Gallery, this was a feat of social engineering equivalent in spirit to raccooning the birdfeeder.  

 

 

 

 

just like people, caution!! poster gets around

The Fourth of July is as good a day as any to say no matter how unfriendly to immigrants the immigration laws get, the United States is still a country of immigrants. The laws and policies themselves do not change that. Proportionally, the population is now more foreign-born than it has been for decades. Therefore I suppose it is not surprising that the broadside Caution Migrant Workers of Arizona that Nicolas Lampert and I printed up in the spring of 2010 continues finding audiences, now mainly in the form of its enlarged wall-hung gallery version.

The first exhibition for the enlarged piece was in Arizona. Very appropriate, yes. But as familiar as the immigrant narrative is, in some states the story is relatively new, as are the attendant anxieties. For example, parts of the Southeast—for generations the most proportionally native-born region—have seen its Latino population spike over the last decade, bringing in whole new communities, flavors, and sounds to cities and towns across several states. So we are happy to have our piece now on display in North Carolina, at UNC-Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum, in the very timely exhibition Zone of Contention: The US/Mexico Border.

Here is a gallery shot of the opening from June 16. I am glad to see that a young African American viewer is snapping a digital image of the poster, since the poster is an appropriation of an abolitionist broadside from the 1840s. Our piece was done before the recent Supreme Court ruling upheld the main provision of Arizona’s SB 1070. The meaning of that word CAUTION!! is more weighty now, after the ruling. If anything, the ruling brings the parallel between antebellum and contemporary liberation paranoias even closer.

Next up for the piece will be in a show called artWORK, opening in our backyard, at the Crossman Gallery at UW-Whitewater in September.

As Caution Migrant Workers of Arizona circulates, I imagine it intersecting with the circulation of humans. Will there be Salvadoran-born custodian who takes a moment out of her after-hours gallery cleaning to view the piece? Will a South African-born professor take his class to the museum to view the show? At what fleeting points in their circulatory systems do this particular art object and the narrative of human migration become one? 

If you want to kick around these questions with the poster in your own home, I remind you that a screen printed version of the poster is still available from Justseeds, as well as the original letterpress printed one.