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Plural

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Mackenzie

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Review

April Thompson is a writer and curator currently based in Vancouver. Her practice is guided by critical investigations of photography and the moving image, spatial politics and new media.

##### “If light does come from within does that make us walking movie projectors? Are we casting form onto a dark screen?”  
—David Wojnarowicz, _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_, 1991

A mechanical heartbeat in heard in the gallery space, the methodical click-pause-click of a timed slide projector. A Super 8 video projection casts a slice of electric-blue light that spills from wall to floor. The monotone voice of the artist, David Wojnarowicz, is punctuating a film soundtrack of clumsy keyboard chords and canned, synthetic drumbeats. These immediate audiovisual signals are not overwhelming. Instead they draw you in, as if to forewarn, through a multitude of frequencies, that you are about to enter a space indexed by a depth of interior worlds.

_David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film_ 1978–1992, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, displayed over 100 works and was the first exhibition to focus solely on the artist’s photographic and filmic practice. Wojnarowicz’s output increased in both scope and quantity toward his death from AIDS\-related illness in 1992\. While he is known for his paintings, photo graphs, collages, and video collaborations, he is above all a writer. His 1991 collection of creative essays, _Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration_, documents the rage, grace, and futility of life in America, with an honesty that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. And while Wojnarowicz deftly experimented across different media, his unique handle on language stitched all these explorations together. 

In the artist’s collaboration with Marion Scemama, _When I Put My Hands on Your Body_ (1989), a roaming Super 8 camera gives a cropped view of two bodies touching, licking, and rubbing. An insatiable tongue caresses the body, matching the intensity of words uttered by Wojnarowicz: “it makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh between my hands in a time of so much loss.” The flesh of a naked male torso fills the majority of the screen but in the margins there is the implicit presence of society—the rigid denim jeans and belt buckle that block the tongue’s advance, daily life layered upon the self, a barrier to skin-on-skin contact. 

Wojnarowicz is known for working through themes of mortality in his work, and this probing is cast both inward and outward; there is self-portraiture alongside portraits of others. In _Untitled (Deathbed Portrait of Peter Hujar)_ (1989/2012), there are snapshots of Hujar’s resting face, eyelids slightly open and mouth ajar, of his hands with distressed fingernails and of the undersides of his feet—that vulnerable bedrock of the body so often grounded and unseen. The compositions are slightly askew or unbalanced by negative space, making the surrounding hospital room seem stark and momentous despite its reality as a generic and unremarkable setting. 

Other artists returned Wojnarowicz’s gaze: there are portraits of him by Andreas Sterzing, Peter Hujar, Ivan Dalla Tana and Scemama. In Krist Gruijthuijsen’s exhibition curation, this balance between the self and others, between seeing and _being_ seen, skilfully conveyed a duality: closeness of community (street life, being gay in New York City during the HIV/AIDS crisis) as well as the loneliness of selfhood (the artist’s solitude, and that of illness, and death). 

Numerous works featured objects, animals, and text, though the human body was keenly felt throughout the exhibition. Wojnarowicz is inscribed in each Super 8 video: the plastic, hand-held camera would have fit snugly in his large hand like a gun, his fist closed around the base and his finger poised on the trigger. With every step Wojnarowicz made there is a slight vibration on the image. Registering this exhibition also meant indelibly taking in the presence of other bodies around you. When walking underneath the scaffolding to view works, you heard footsteps on the overhead platform creaking as other viewers’ weights shifted. The exhibition put you in a relational zone with Wojnarowicz: an outsider looking in, observing the stories of other bodies, feeling the weight of your own body, and the sphere of your existence weaving through time and space with that of others. 

The HIV/AIDS crisis placed the body in particular relation to others. For decades, transmission was a dirty word used to stigmatize those living with the virus, and their community. Throughout Wojnarowicz’s work the idea of transmission is powerfully present, and radical. Here, “transmission” is a signal, meaning communication—a concept that propelled the artist’s use of language. Transmission is also a midpoint, a passageway between signal and reception, and in this there is liberation. Wojnarowicz once wrote of a road trip: “I’m getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me.” 

Alongside his search to document, remember, and understand through the visual, Wojnarowicz was aware of the insurmountable gap between life and image. It is the gap between representation and reality, between the transmission of a non-verbal moment through to the language that denotes it. This seems a space of freedom—where language and image break down—and it is present in all of Wojnarowicz’s work, an invisible interval between the dust particles illuminated by a projector’s beam, or in the blank pause of the rotating slide carousel. 

Writer

Gather

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April Thompson reviews _David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992_ (2020) at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. The comprehensive exhibition was the first to focus solely on the artist’s photographic and filmic practice, and featured more than 100 works intersecting sexuality, intimacy, transmission, illness, and mortality. 

David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992 Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver Jan 10–April 5, 2020 

Emma Steen is a curator, writer, and the Outreach & Membership Coordinator for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective in Toronto/Tkaron:to, her hometown. Emma’s area of interest lies in the intersection of self-determined Indigenous sexual agency and anti-colonial strategy within the arts.

Walking into the Native Art Department International (NADI) _Bureau of Aesthetics_, I am immediately greeted by the rhythmic sound of jingles. They are coming from _There is No Then and Now; Only Is and Is Not_ (2018), a projection of Bronx-based artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem dancing in an empty theatre in his powwow regalia. At the end of each loop, his statement reads across a black screen, “I feel like everyone has had a hand in defining Native people, except ourselves.”

When Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan began planning for the first Canadian solo exhibition of their long-term collaborative project, they could not have imagined that just as it was set to open, the world would shut down. How bizarre it feels to be in a gallery right now; its rules of engagement (where we can and cannot sit, stand, or lean while considering work that we can or cannot touch) feel heightened with the presence of COVID\-19, but are also elements of the kind of curatorial rigidity that NADI turns a spotlight on. _Bureau of Aesthetics_ has been closed to the general public since its opening in March, and there is something strangely familiar about entering a room full of Indigenous creative excellence that has been silenced. This is of course through no fault of Mercer Union— who had expected to run the show until the end of May and host a full month of performances by Hupfield— but being in an empty gallery reminds me of entering archives and seeing shelves of carvings, paintings, and masks that have been left mostly on their own. It is that exact culture of curating—one that projects reductionist assumptions onto the work of Indigenous cultural producers—that NADI does so well at satirizing and dismantling. The show emphasizes kinship, relationality, and methods of disruption, all of which seek to liberate the confines of so called authenticity and classification that are so ingrained in a colonial approach to art history and exhibition.

Working across various media, NADI’s artworks actively aim to upend essentialist expectations of Indigenous aesthetics in their viewers and decentre aestheticism in their   
work. In _Untitled (Carl Beam)_ (2017), a “No U-turn” neon sign is overlaid on a print of Carl Beam’s _Traffic_ (1997), which depicts a lithograph of a raven above a traffic sign. It was inspired by Lujan and Hupfield’s visit to a Beam retrospective, the artists observing that major institutions, galleries, and private collectors were only interested in purchasing artwork with traditional Indigenous imagery. The artists’ response was to problematize the notion of an “Indigenous aesthetics,” deciding to honour Beam’s work here by intentionally obstructing the view with unconventional materials that seek to decouple Beam’s aesthetics from any supposed such thing. With the sign, NADI is directing how we now approach and value Beam’s work—directed by Indigenous artists themselves and not, as RedMoon Darkeem cautioned against, by others. In a similar vein is the structural sculptural work _Maintaining Good Relations_ (2017), a neon-pink Plexiglass light box with a mirrored floor, originally installed in Artists Space (New York), illuminated to signify when NADI’s independent FM radio broadcast was on air. The broadcast, which spanned a full day, hosted conversations with an array of guests which sought to prioritize intersectionality between artists and arts communities. In these works and others, Hupfield and Lujan consistently poke and prod at the ways in which art, especially art made by non-white artists, is categorized and contained within rigid boundaries. In turn, they create works and spaces that negate colonial art-historical structures and instead promote anti-colonial discourse and strategies to enact reciprocity, care, and knowledge sharing.

Exhibited at the back of the gallery is _Everything Sacred is Far Away_ (2019), a video series of public access television–style satirical scenes which feature Hupfield, Lujan, and a cast of characters from their network of peers, discussing authorship, anthropology, and the invisibility of Indigenous agency in art in pseudocientific fashion. At one point Lujan, clad in a lab coat, holds up a print of Southern Cheyenne multidisciplinary artist Edgar Heap of Bird’s _Point Of Sword Who Owns History_ (2004) as well as a crudely done painted copy and asks another cast member, “Which is more authentic?” _Everything Sacred is Far Away_ embodies NADI’s approach to collaboration, focusing on humour to create non-competitive structures that include many different participants with the shared goal of solidarity and relationality. This collaborative practice seemingly extends to the viewer as well, asking us all to consider how to use non-competitiveness to foster care within communities and interrogate the capitalist structures within art that focuses on individual success, a concept which NADI can be seen actively resisting.

As their collective’s title suggests, Hupfield and Lujan draw upon academic and administrative language to cheekily push back against the limitations many Indigenous artists face as their work in placed in a box of what is and isn’t considered Indigenous; they quite literally build their own box in the case of _Maintaining Good Relations_. Their approach to addressing the double standard in art, which seeks uniqueness while punishing Indigenous artists for stepping away from traditional cultural signifiers, is to laugh openly, in the case of _Everything Sacred is Far Away_ —at the ways in which art historians, curators, and critics have been trained to use academic language to engage with Indigenous art but ultimately fail to understand the complexities of its practitioners’ self representations. It is because of this active energy to disrupt the expected that _Bureau of Aesthetics_ still accomplishes what it has set out to do, despite a global pandemic getting in its way.

NADI’s _Bureau of Aesthetics_ promotes an understanding of Indigenous lived experience and identity as complex and ever-changing. As the audience, we are clearly expected to take time and care to challenge our own preconceived ideas around Indigenous art and aesthetics, and to leave feeling implicated in their project. I consider RedMoon Darkeem’s words as I watch him dance in an empty theatre, as I stand in an empty gallery. Keeping each other company in our isolation, a new form of kinship rises. With each step and jingle, I feel a bit lighter. I expect the unexpected with NADI and was thrilled by the bright colours, humour, and moments of pause that this show offered.

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Emma Steen reviews exhibition _Bureau of Aesthetics: Native Art Department International,_ featuring Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan at Mercer Union, Toronto. (March 14 – October 31, 2020).

Bureau of Aesthetics: Native Art Department International  

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