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Review

Alex Quicho is a writer and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. _Small Gods_, her book on terror and transcendence in drone technology, was published by Zer0 Books in 2021. 

Heading to _On Venus_, Patrick Staff’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery, I crossed Hyde Park on foot. Rain poured from an open, sunlit sky. A real rainbow arched over Winter Wonderland, the holiday-themed amusement park that occupies the royal lands over December, where empty rollercoasters rattled along and strains of Frank Sinatra drifted across the grass, serenading no one. Birds swarmed overhead; the river teemed with animal life; and I entered the Serpentine via automatic doors that may as well have been an airlock, sealing off the arid, burning hostility of _On Venus_ from the wet and fertile Earth. Staff had transformed the ordinarily picturesque building with a number of architectural interventions that made up the site-specific work _Acid Rain_ (2019)—first, transparent coloured panels arranged over the building’s generous skylights, turning the gallery’s vessels of sunlight into urine-hued vats. Throughout, the floors were coated in gleaming chrome, and a system of thin pipes laced across the ceiling, intermittently dripping a mysterious liquid into rusting oil drums below. A lone jellied print of an acid-eaten gargoyle, _Gargoyle (the throat)_ (2019), guarded the building’s entrance, cueing me into absorbing the building’s new atmosphere as one that was intentionally poisoned, potentially dangerous to forms of life. 

From time to time, an industrial clamour filled the gallery, superseding the slow percussion of drips and drops. Curious, I went straight to its source: _On Venus_ (2019), a single-channel snuff film projected onto a Perspex® screen in one of the gallery’s two central rooms. The clang of metal gates; rotors whirring; blades being sharpened or cleaving down into flesh: it became evident that I was hearing the sounds of a slaughterhouse, scrubbed of the squeals of animal death. In the few minutes that I could stand to watch, a cow gazes into the camera as it is being killed; its face is caught in a lag of time, still alive as its body dies, looking surprised as blood cascades abruptly from its mouth. Another beast is yanked up to the slaughterhouse ceiling and split down the middle, spilling its guts. The found footage is treated so that its colours are inverted into biting pinks, blues and yellows, mercifully estranging the scenes from pure gore. They look like afterimages—the way that too-bright objects sear into our closed eyelids, our eyes’ response to visual overstimulation, bringing to mind how a traumatic event can linger with us long after its occurrence. 

Here, I thought of how Whitney Claflin, reviewing Juliana Huxtable’s _Interfertility Industrial Complex_ (2019), wrote: “PTSD may be the main ingredient in most of our food,” a claim that I would extend to everything that is industrially produced. The slaughterhouse is the genesis of the assembly line, as Nicole Shukin writes in _Animal Capital_ (2009). The blood and guts processed by the phalanxes of stationary workers, each responsible for a single repetitive task, inspired Henry Ford’s lust for mass production, bringing the logic of the abattoir to the factory floor. So goes the history of the terrible conditions that now beget what we eat, wear and enjoy. Even film is made from gelatin, derived from the boiled bodies of the animals depicted—a materiality we’re coaxed into considering as Staff scratches and corrodes individual film frames. These abstract marks dance across the thrumming accumulation of death, mingling between the bodies of the factory worker and the animal, each subjected to the meat grinder of capital. 

The adjacent chamber houses _On Living_ (2019), an arrangement of metal cubes etched with reproductions of articles from British tabloids: _The Sun_ and _The Daily Mail_, publications notorious for their extreme conservatism and wide readership. All feature variations on the same theme: an entirely false story about murderer Ian Huntley, circulated between 2017 and 2018, claiming that he wished to undergo a gender transition while in prison. Huntley himself is not really the subject here; rather, it’s the machinery of the press and how harmful myths take mass root. In the original articles, transphobic “experts” chime in to fabricate the link between murderousness with transgenderism, eager to legitimize bigotry. All slick surface and dim, unmoving presence, the blocks are eloquent on the subject of conservative social norms: how stubbornly they root, and how frictionlessly they circulate. In contrast to the gruelling task of resistance, where tireless investment seems to yield only nominal advancements of safety or freedom, marginalizing forces spread rampantly like contagions. 

Staff has long been interested in how surviving violence also requires violence — by no means at equivalent scales. Their previous video installation, _Weed Killer_ (2017), cast trans-identifying actors to perform sections of Catherine Lord’s cancer memoir _The Summer of Her Baldness_ (2004), where Lord refers to chemotherapy as “mainlining weedkiller.” Hormonal therapies, too, carry a risk of bodily destruction, with one understudied effect being a heightened risk of cancer. Conflating the two treatments, Staff taps the well of violence that feeds modern medicine: chemo was accidentally discovered during research into using mustard gas as a weapon; hormone pills are still derived from the urine of mares trapped in interminable breeding cycles. Still, _Weed Killer_ ends with an irradiated ode to contamination—embracing the implied toxicity of “lovesickness,” with its blurred boundaries, the intermingling that togetherness demands. It pushed back, cautiously, against the quarantine, segregation, erasure and disposability that come as off-label uses of the medical institution. 

_On Venus_ possesses no such final optimism. The show’s reigning planetary metaphor expresses, not the uninhabitability of another world, but that of our own. A poem written by Staff flickers in slanted subtitles across blank, damaged film, transmitting a story of sickliness inside and out. It describes a world rubbed raw by its own harsh climate, populated by creatures eaten away by acid and medicine: “dogs with guts / full of — something / like wailing / \_ and sobbing / like buildings.” This is no sci-fi: as Staff says in an interview with _TANK Magazine_‘s Lydia Figes, “I’m ambivalent about talking about the future; hell is now.” Later, I learned that the entire gallery was once an arms cache for the ruling classes of London, who wanted weapons close to hand in the event of a people’s uprising. On Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love and beauty, as on Earth, all suffering is entangled; the weight of oppression may be distributed multiply, unevenly, but its source is the same. 

Leaving the central room that contained _On Venus_ (2019), I felt newly sensitive to the subtext of the exhibition and beyond. The reflective floors were those of the slaughterhouse, perpetually rinsed of blood. The leaky circulatory system of _Acid Rain_ (2019) turned the building into a sick body labouring, like all of us, towards an impossible equilibrium: that of desire sated, of a system in perfect balance, begging the question: what must die in order for us to stay alive? And more importantly, what constitutes “us”? Disconcerted, I left the way I came, skirting the theme park and its rollercoasters, whose mechanical sounds and juddering tracks now resembled the meat-packing plant, the swinging cars like carcasses on their hooks. I sat alone in a restaurant and stared at the shining, stainless-steel surfaces of the open kitchen, the knives and cleavers on the wall. I felt more than a little sick, thinking of the ways that we fail to live without cruelty. 

Writer

Criticism, Again

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Alex Quicho reviews British-born, Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Staff’s exhibition _On Venus_ at Serpentine Galleries in London, UK (November 8, 2019–February 9, 2020)

On Venus: Patrick Staff

**Hamish Hardie** is a writer currently studying English at the University of Victoria.

The walls of the Nanaimo Art Gallery’s exhibition space were left bare during Krista Belle Stewart’s recent solo show, _Truth to Material_. The viewer’s attention was drawn instead to the large photographs that completely covered the gallery floor. Printed on vinyl, these images coated the concrete so tightly that many of its minute cracks and indents remained visible up close, evidence of an imperfect foundation below the flat representations on the surface. Two objects, an engraved silver arm band and a decorated deerskin dress, were displayed in glass vitrines. Along with a short video playing in a separate room, these components comprise an exhibition that portrays and explores the vexed relationships surrounding objects of cultural study, attraction and appropriation.  
  
_Truth to Material_ documents Stewart’s encounter with a European subculture, known in Germany as _Indianer_, of recreational enthusiasts of a mythologized, hyper-essentialist version of North American Indigenous cultures. Earnestly recreating the customs and costumes of particular tribes (as depicted in Western literary and anthropological accounts from decades past), they dress up as “Indigenous people” at large outdoor gatherings that last for days at a time, finding pleasure and escape in pre-modern roleplay. Many of Stewart’s floor-bound photographs show _Indianers_ dressed in regalia and among tipis, though a stray T-shirt or electronic device often disrupts the attempted verisimilitude of the scene.

  
The hobby’s survival in Germany is partly due to the enduring popularity of German writer Karl May, whose 19th-century adventure novels set in the American West invigorated countless German childhoods and shaped perceptions of North American Indigenous peoples. Stewart’s interdisciplinary practice often considers how archives and their materials inform historical narratives. Photos from her visit to the Karl May Museum in Radebeul, Germany, show ghoulish mannequins in faux tribal garb and a stony, ghostlike bust of Winnetou, the Apache hero of May’s fiction. In _Truth to Material_, these lifeless avatars of the museum appear alongside the images of white hobbyists in costume, both functioning as emblems of the shallow and reductive ways in which Indigenous cultures have been represented, their complexities smoothed over and histories of colonial displacement erased or depoliticized.

  
The individual motivations behind the _Indianer_ hobby appear as an indistinct morass of social, cultural and libidinal desires, though such a description runs the risk of depicting them as overly mysterious. Indeed, it should be acknowledged that in some ways the _Indianer_ performances are familiar iterations, part of a long history, of racial costuming for the purpose of white enjoyment. But it is worth exploring, as the artist does, what is particular about this German hobby, how the attachments that sustain it exceed the fleeting pleasures of a costume party. The two objects, displayed and rarified in vitrines, are suggestive starting points. The title of the engraved silver arm band, _Give’r Indianer_ (2019), resembles both an expression of hearty encouragement and the imperative phrase “give her.” Spontaneously gifted to Stewart in a bizarre interaction captured by the video, the band is visibly smeared with the reddish body paint used by its previous owner to darken his skin. It thus epitomizes the way in which hobbyists’ recreational commitment to detail and immersion—perhaps endearingly eccentric in the context of something like cosplay—be- comes sinister when incited by racial fantasies. To its wearer, the physicality of the body paint may reflect the desire for a sensuous and liberated “noble savage” subjectivity, but the pathos of that figure, derived from the tragic state of being oppressed or out of place in modernity, is arguably the even more sinister aspect of this multifarious attraction to Indigeneity. A view of Indigenous peoples as terminally victimized and relegated to the past, as representable by time-frozen mannequins in a museum, proves to be a necessary condition of _Indianer_ identification.

  
The intricate deerskin dress, titled _The Gift_ (2019), decorated with beads, shells, deer tails and acrylic paint, was handmade for Stewart specifically by an _Indianer_ friend she made during her early encounters with the group around 2007\. The giving of a gift, far from being a one-sided expression of generosity, calls up the web of relations between the giver and the recipient in the same moment that it produces new ones. The experience can be an uneasy one, bearing the traces of past, present and future attachments and obligations. It is easy to see why, when history, violence and the politics of representation enter into the exchange, a gift could be a source of pain and confusion. As the literary critic J. Hillis Miller once noted, _gift_ in German translates to “poison.” By titling the garment this way, calling it what it is, Stewart invites the viewer to stay with ambivalence and mine the connotations of the word.

  
The museological display of the two objects invites a reading of the exhibition as a kind of anthropological exhibit. In this figuration, Stewart, a member of the Syilx/Okanagan Nation, would be the intrigued ethnographer, bringing home the results of her study of a niche subculture, the arm band and dress the “authentic” artifacts called upon to metonymically represent the milieu to which they belong: in this case, a community founded on imitation. In the video titled _Nine_ ∞ (2019), Stewart moves through an _Indianer_ gathering, holding the camera at a low, arguably furtive angle. She does not appear in the footage, but her voice is heard in conversation with participants, asking how they came to be involved with the hobby and, in one instance, if they had ever considered the effect that their re-enactments might have on the people whose cultures and appearances they imitate. The video invites the viewer to experience Stewart’s difficult object of study from her point of view, with her personal concerns, productively disrupting any pose of objectivity that the exhibition might otherwise have assumed. In a similar disorientation of the ethnographic gaze, the photo-covered floor is given the emotional German title _Die Angst_ (2019), which translates to “the fear,” and immerses the viewer in its milieu just as it destabilizes them. Navigating it forces you to move shiftily around, lifting your feet and contorting your body in order to see more clearly what your own position obscures. The top-down power dynamic implied by having the photos under one’s feet, where the figures depicted are stepped on and demeaned, is undercut by one’s eyes needing to be downcast in what, to an onlooker, might resemble a state of gloom.

  
_Truth to Material_ is only one iteration in what Stewart anticipates will be an ongoing engagement with the _Indianers_ and the questions raised by their activities. Their community, like any other, is no inert object of study but a lively group of subjects that powerfully affect those who set out to understand or rep- resent them. The exhibition does not stage an exposé, and any didacticism that the viewer identifies must be tempered at least partly by the artist’s closeness to her subject: why spend time cultivating a relationship with this group—over a period of about 12 years—if one only intended to condemn them? _Truth to Material_ refuses an easy dismissal of the phenomenon, preferring to investigate the questions and contradictions of cultural, artistic and anthropological representation that it raises, even if it means drawing the viewer uncomfortably close to these dark and intolerable fantasies. 

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Hamish Hardie reviews Syilx Nation-born, Berlin-based artist Krista Belle Stewart’s exhibition, _Truth to Material_, at the Nanaimo Art Gallery (September 20–November 10, 2019).

Truth to Material: Krista Belle Stewart

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