Column

**1.** A wall in the gallery is crying.[^1] The wall’s colour is initially confronting, painted a deep, rich green. One of three works that comprise Divya Mehra’s 2016 exhibition, _It’s Gonna Rain_, the wall is constructed to conceal a pump system that releases water into the wall itself. The water steadily accumulates in the plaster, forming large, droplet-like shapes that pool beneath the surface of the paint. Slowly, these oversized beads slide down, still contained within the stretched exterior layer. After a time in stasis, the weight of the water becomes more than the stretching paint can bear. At this point, the spherical forms give way, producing discreet ruptures in the paint’s surface that expose the damp plaster underneath. These small wet wounds become the source of delicate streams of water that move silently down the surface of the wall. Reaching the floor, the water pools before draining through the pump system to begin the process again. Fresh droplets of water form, burst and intersect with the dry, silvery lines that mark the previous tracks of tears. This process repeats over months, for the length of the exhibition. The air is heavy; the humidity of grief.

**2.** In his essay for _It’s Gonna Rain_, writer Kegan McFadden recounts a series of events in the artist’s life that informed this body of work.[^2] In May 2015, the artist’s father passed away. In the months that followed, a tree that Mehra’s father would often pray at was cut down; and a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesh was stolen from outside of a restaurant owned by the artist’s family in Ottawa.[^3] The seven-foot-high brass statue was estimated to weigh three to four hundred pounds.[^4] How many people would it have taken to accomplish this painful act?[^5] One theft, private; the other, public. What remains materially of both is minimal; a cross-section of a tree and the brass base of a statue, now punctuated by a hole where the figure had been. These are the only objects in the exhibition, resting on the floor, without pedestals. Adjacent to Mehra’s weeping wall, the literal evidence of loss.

**3.** Grief is a practice of containment; suppressed by the norms that govern acceptable behaviour, it is then suppressed again through the internalizations of these codes. Within the field of art, too, there are judgements on work that displays “too much” emotion. Scholar Jennifer Doyle speaks to how, within art criticism, what is deemed as an excess of emotion has become wrongly associated with a “naïve practice”[^6] – a perception that is especially fraught in relation to representations of tears specifically, which “seem to embody both the height of unquestioned emotionality and the depths of emotional manipulation.”[^7] These arguments function as their own form of containment, a threat to the reception of works that engage the subject of tears. The power of the work in _It’s Gonna Rain_ is its ability to confront these biases, at the same time as it reflects the challenge of making work on the subject of such recent and difficult events. In a wholesale refusal of this containment, it is tears that erode the very confines of the institution; the paint on the wall, literally bursting under the pressure of emotional force.[^8] The result of a series of losses with both private and public dimensions, the exhibition is a defiant complication of public grief.

_It’s Gonna Rain_ by Divya Mehra was exhibited at The New Gallery in Calgary from September 9 to October 22, 2016.

[^1]: This characterization of the work is also found in a review of the exhibition by Sarah Todd, “Divya Mehra at The New Gallery,” _Akimbo_, September 28, 2016, “http://www.akimbo.ca/akimblog/?id=1177”:http://www.akimbo.ca/akimblog/?id=1177; and in Kegan McFadden’s essay for the exhibition, “In Every Life,”: available on The New Gallery’s exhibition page at “http://www.thenewgallery.org/its-gonna-rain/“:http://www.thenewgallery.org/its-gonna-rain/
[^2]: McFadden, “In Every Life.”
[^3]: McFadden, “In Every Life.”
[^4]: An article on the theft was published under the title, “East India Company Restaurant’s Lord Ganesh statue stolen,” _CBC News_, February 25, 2016\. “http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/east-india-ganesh-statue-stolen-1.3464345”:http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/east-india-ganesh-statue-stolen-1.3464345.
[^5]: In the CBC article, the statement that it is likely that more than one person would have been needed to remove the statue is attributed to the Mehra family. I have paraphrased this statement here.
[^6]: Jennifer Doyle, _Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 71.
[^7]: Doyle, _Hold It Against Me_, 84.
[^8]: In his essay, McFadden also references the work as an architectural intervention, writing, “\[t\]his portrait confronts architecture, changes it so that walls crumble slowly from shed tears.” McFadden, “In Every Life.”

Writer

Refusal

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Walter Phillips Gallery assistant curator Jacqueline Bell reflects on three selected works from Divya Mehra’s 2016 exhibition “It’s Gonna Rain”. 

Inventory: The Subject of Tears: Reflections on three works by Divya Mehra

Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexico D.F. 1985) is a Mexico City- based writer, publisher and curator. In 2013, he founded Guayaba Press, an independent publishing house and curatorial platform based in Mexico City. Guayaba Press publishes Sur Journal and is committed to developing projects in Spanish and English that expand discussions of contemporary art locally and globally. 

There are few written accounts of conflict unfolding within the art world: fights among artists, artists and curators, or critics and artists. Jef Cornelis, however, was drawn to such moments; if there was anyone who could record these artistic rivalries, it was Cornelis through his work as a television director, documentarian and screenwriter.

Between 1963 and 1998, Cornelis worked as a TV director at the cultural news show _Zoeklicht op de culturele actualiteit (Spotlight on Current Cultural Events)_, broadcast by Belgium’s former national radio and TV chain. The programs Cornelis produced dealt with a variety of topics, ranging from visual arts, literature and theatre, to architecture and urbanism. Between 1968 and 1973, he documented iconic exhibitions and compiled a series of interviews with artists – a strategy the director used to provoke artists into revealing both their personal and professional conflicts.

A good example of this strategy at work is _Sonsbeek buiten de perken_ (literally, “Sonsbeek beyond the limits”), from 1971\. Conflict lies at the centre of this documentary about the sixth edition of the Sonsbeek biennale exhibition in Arnhem, Netherlands, with the 45-minute black-and-white film portraying disagreements among the exhibition’s protagonists, artists, curators, politicians and Arnhem’s city councillor. Moving beyond the pivotal manifestations, it demonstrates Cornelis´ use of television to reflect the clash between the postmodern world and contemporary art.

##### **Sonsbeek buiten de perken, Arnhem, June–August 1971**

There are two particular aspects worth mentioning about Sonsbeek, the first being its format. This exhibition takes place in Arnhem’s Sonsbeek Park. Conceived initially in 1949 as a biennale, it was later held every three years and then, from 1958 on, its frequency became irregular. In 1971, the format changed radically when curator Wim Beeren decided to take Sonsbeek beyond the limits of the park, extending the exhibition throughout the Netherlands. This shift enabled new spatial relationships and the integration of new communication technologies such as, the organizers’ decision to include a tent, where the audience could communicate with people in other parts of the country, by telephone or by Telex. In addition, the curator invited international contemporary artists to participate for the first time – including Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Daniel Buren, Ger van Elk, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, among others – and also commissioned pieces to be made _in situ_ for Sonsbeek.

The second notable aspect of Sonsbeek is the cause of the dispute that inspired Cornelis’ documentary: not a single local artist was included in the 1971 edition of the biennale. In reaction, the BBK national artists’ association went on strike. Its members criticized the curator, the exhibition director, the educational director of the exhibition and the participating artists, with their motto being “A Million Guilders of Elite Art for the Elite.”

##### **00’00”**

Cornelis’ documentary begins with a cartoon of two men fighting, followed by footage of the live broadcast of Sonsbeek ’71’s opening. Poet Georges Adé – an accomplice for most of the films Cornelis produced during those years – then interviews one of the BBK demonstrators:

> Sonsbeek is a perfectly proper, neat exhibition. \[It\] is much ado about nothing. Sonsbeek is a fact packed in a plastic bag and put in a display case, whereupon everybody declares in the newspapers that it smells delicious. Conviviality, magic, chaos, fantasy and people – all of that is missing. Sonsbeek is dried out and dead.[^1]

Throughout the film, Cornelis does not favour any one point of view over another. On the contrary, he acts as a mediator between different voices, a strategy that allows the interviewees to express themselves freely. In another interview, Adé speaks to Sonsbeek education program director Cor Blok at a moment when the latter likely felt under attack:

> There are so many things that are more important. Should you spend so much money to organize an exhibition of visual art? In fact, you should begin by changing all of education, because that is where the problems come from. That’s why people go into the world so badly prepared, among other things, in this field.

The conflict deepens when Adé asks some of the participating artists to express their opinions on the protesters’ critique, especially their claims that the exhibition was elitist. Artist Robert Morris, for example, talks about his work, an observatory, which wasn’t finished when the show opened:

> I hope that when it is finished, it will be a space that makes this area very special, that people without any knowledge that it is in fact partly an observatory will be able to enjoy it, because I don’t think that this is fundamental to it. It is a space, a place to be, for anyone.

##### **44’45”**

It is significant that the documentary ends with an interview with artist Daniel Buren about his collaboration at Sonsbeek ’71, considering that Cornelis did another film that same year in which Buren appears with his piece _Travail in situ_.[^2] It seems to have been an intentional choice to close with this interview since Buren is critical of the concept behind Sonsbeek ’71 namely, the idea of expanding the exhibition beyond the limited space of a museum. As the artist says, “on the one hand, by claiming that one cannot simply go outside the boundaries of the museum; on the other, that the organizers are behaving like enemies to the people when they do move beyond the museums.”

For Cornelis, the editing process was where he could handle conflict best. While the first scene featuring the cartoon of the two fighting men at first doesn’t make sense – and might even seem like an editorial mistake – it’s a perfect example of how incorporating apparently absurd images can introduce the elements to come. Here, the two fighting men foreshadow later drama – a soap opera featuring the art world’s characters.

[^1]: Koen Brams, “Two Exhibition-Related Films by Jef Cornelis,” in _Tate Papers_ no. 12, 2009, accessed December 24, 2016, “http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/two-exhibi-tion-related-films-by-jef-cornelis”:http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/two-exhibi-tion-related-films-by-jef-cornelis”
[^2]: In 1971 the curator of the Guggenheim Museum, Diane Waldman, and artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, decided to exclude Buren from the Sixth International Exhibition. The same year, Buren presented the piece he conceived to exhibit at the Guggenheim, _Travail in situ_, at Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium, where he was invited to hold his second solo exhibition. It was one single piece to be installed outside the gallery. The film, a short five-minute black-and- white recording starts with a shot of the gallery’s exterior. Adé asks Buren: “You always do the same: how come this rep- resents a rupture?” and “Do you believe in the development or the so-called progress of artists and art?” These questions are both allusions to the commotion that the exclusion of his piece from the Guggenheim exhibition caused in the mass media.

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Film

Installation

Public art

Documentary

This article explores Jef Cornelis’s 1971 documentary “Sonsbeek Beyond the Limits”, which is a documentation of the sixth edition of the Sonsbeek biennale exhibition in Arnhem, Netherlands. 

Artefact: Sonsbeek Beyond the Limits

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Walter Phillips

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NSCAD

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Casey House 1

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Editorial

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

> _For some people the day comes_  
> _when they have to declare the great Yes_  
> _or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes_  
> _ready within him; and saying it,_

> _he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction._  
> _He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,_  
> _he’d still say no. Yet that no–the right no–_  
> _drags him down all his life._  
> —C.P. Cavafy, “Che Fece … Il Gran Refiuto”

Or, as the friend who sent me this poem said, on the subject of refusal, “but, as a woman, I would say the right no lifts you up all your life” – a sentiment to be extended to anyone who has found themselves facing untenable conditions. This issue is about that no – the right no – and how acts of refusal can be psychologically and politically demanding, and at the same time a necessary means of self-preservation.

The theme of refusal was suggested by C’s editorial advisory group last summer, and in the months since it has become ever more pressing. We discussed ethics in art and institutional practice, and how refusal or non-participation can work as a political strategy; and more broadly at ethics in art and institutional practice; we discussed the histories of artists who have declined, dropped out or refused; the relation of consent to refusal; when and how one says no, who actually refuses and who should be refusing?

We discussed Audra Simpson’s writing on the politics of refusal as a strategy for Indigenous self-governance amidst settler colonialism; refusal as the possibility of finding an “otherwise,” following the thoughts of Ashon Crawley; Sara Ahmed, Rebecca Belmore, Lee Lozano, Tehching Hsieh and many others’ decisions to leave flawed institutions or art systems. We considered the power of maintaining the terms of your own participation; Divya Mehra’s refusal to allow art audiences to ignore their complicity; Maria Eichhorn closing Chisenhale Gallery during her solo exhibition to give staff members a paid break. Someone voiced the desire to see a white privileged person refuse, and stated the conundrum that, if this isn’t altruistic, it’s often invisible.

The issue theme piqued interest – perhaps more than expected – but the difficulty of taming refusal soon became evident – of writing it into 2,000 words, editing it, forcing it to lie in pages assembled according to deadlines. It seemed counterproductive at times to nudge writers to synthesize thoughts, to hurry to fit the print schedule, when the issue impelled us to say no. This issue is thus necessarily messy and disparate; refusal is often approached sideways – it is not theorized as much as demonstrated both overtly and subtly in the work of the artists, writers, organizers and institutions in the pages that follow. Some writers did choose to say no, but overwhelmingly I was struck by the vigour with which potential contributors saw the issue as a vehicle for proposing alternatives rather than stasis.

Some texts privilege a radically personal voice – insight into those private conversations usually made invisible in art’s public life. This voice pulsates in texts by Joshua Vettivelu and Lido Pimienta, and in the unbridled honesty present in Stacey Ho’s interview with the Vancouver collective Killjoy. The refusal to accept existing institutional terms comes out in this discussion of Killjoy’s creation of QT2IPOC\-only space, and in the self-organization of the Wood Land School – a shifting project started by artist Duane Linklater and currently residing at SBC Gallery in Montreal for the duration of 2017\. Jonah Gray’s essay – a report on the Wood Land School’s 2016 conference – outlines the School’s continued push by Indigenous artists to organize critical conversation. Lauren van Haaften-Schick and Sabrina Tarasoff also propose alternatives to the institutional

status quo: the predominance of object fetishism and capitalist acquisition as the ultimate end-goal for art objects is challenged in van Haaften-Schick’s text, while Tarasoff’s lyrical profile on Lutz Bacher suggests ways in which Bacher refuses participation in her work after the moment of its creation. Bacher’s work offers too a means of considering what kinds of refusals are supported by dominant art systems, and the perhaps unanticipated ways in which refusal adds intrigue to the artist’s persona.

I’m thrilled to feature a powerful body of work by the young Brooklyn-based photographer John Edmonds in the magazine’s centrefold. The portraits in this ongoing series at once refuse to give too much – the subject has literally turned his or her back to the camera – while sparking the imaginative potential of the unknown, and forcing a conversation of one’s assumptions in looking and naming.  
The texts in these pages have purposefully been left with a light editorial hand – given the force inherent in the concept of refusal, it felt vital to demonstrate the layered ways in which refusal can operate, the many faces of refusal as a strategy, to see its effect across different “art worlds.” To me it feels slightly unhinged and contradictory, befitting what could be called the current collective mindset. There is a vital sense of dynamism in seeing these unexpected statements and voices appear together, in their own ways.

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Politics

Representation

Activism

Race

Identity

Editor Kari Cwynar introduces this issue’s theme of “Refusal”, emphasizing its inherent “messiness” and deep relevance in today’s political climate. 

Editorial: Refusal

Feature

Joshua Vettivelu is an artist based in Toronto.

This idea of refusal has been writhing around in my head since the first time I was tricked into being curated into a show “about diaspora” – a reductive curatorial framework that has plagued South Asian artists since the birth of ’90s identity politics. I was uncomfortable with the lazy curation and exploitative artist fee but, being fresh out of undergrad, I felt compelled to “take an opportunity.” I largely regret the time, resources and energy I put into my participation in that show, but ultimately it was a nice line on my CV that helped legitimize my efforts to continue being an artist. 

A year later, in 2014, the collective HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? publicly withdrew their participation from the Whitney Biennial. The next year, the entire first-year MFA cohort at the University of Southern California dropped out to protest reduced tuition subsidies.[^1] In 2016, Black Lives Matter Toronto halted the Toronto Pride Parade until their demands were met. Now, in 2017, singer Rebecca Ferguson agrees to sing at Trump’s inauguration dinner under the sole condition that she sing Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” a song that recounts the lynching of black bodies swinging from trees. 

For me, refusal has always come with a complicated relationship between desire, ego and recognition. The ego tries to appease desire in a way that is socially and materially realistic, and recognition gives you a way to imagine yourself being in the world. When faced with precarity, outright refusal is not always an option for everyone. However, the reality of precarity is often overlooked when artists are forced to make ethically uneasy decisions about when to accept money and opportunity. The accusation of “selling out” seems deeply invested in upholding artists to a utopian politic of liberal purity that disregards sustainability; it is a fantasy that absolves the accuser of the reality that, under capitalism, we are all always selling pieces of ourselves. 

As the Canada Council for the Arts unveils its New Chapter Grant, we are seeing a flurry of arts organizations apply for this funding. It is a funding opportunity that joyfully commemorates 150 years of continued violence against Canada’s First Nations populations, while offering extraordinary sums of money rarely seen in arts funding. From a settler perspective, is the course of action to refuse outright this opportunity that could otherwise revitalize a sector? Or does it present an opportunity (read: obligation) for organizations to redistribute state funds they do receive and build stronger relationships with Indigenous arts workers and organizations? There is no clear-cut answer, but it makes it very clear that refusing large sums of money when you have very little is often a tricky negotiation of how to participate in the world. 

In May 2016, as part of my then-newly appointed position as Director of Programming at Whippersnapper Gallery, I helped organize and moderate a discussion titled _Damned If You Do: A Conversation on the Politics of Refusal_ featuring artists Deanna Bowen and Abbas Akhavan. The idea was to have two established artists speak to Whippersnapper’s emerging artist audience about navigating neoliberal art systems. The framework behind the panel was generated through our PEERS group, composed of five brilliant emerging artists of colour: Maandeeq Mohamed, Brian Joe, Rekha Ramachandran, Sean Sandusky and Zinnia Naqvi. We boiled down the framework to three questions: How do you refuse? What if they don’t let you refuse? And what if you don’t want to refuse? 

Deanna opened the conversation by making the amendment that her practice was one that doesn’t necessarily revolve around refusal, but rather strategic affirmation:

> My work is about honouring my family and their history. The times that refusal comes into the equation is when I go into institutions and I experience this need for me to perform in a very particular way – it largely arises from institutional desires for pain-porn: black bodies that have been brutalized, specific to civil rights and slave history. My family history is obviously rooted in all those things, but I don’t honour that impulse. Instead I go the route of affirming what I understand of my family, which is that they have been wonderfully resilient and courageous over the generations. 

This sentiment of negotiating/refusing institutional desires was echoed by Abbas who saw inclusion as “hospitality that can become ambivalent. It’s whether or not when you’re invited into a space being understood for who you are or \[whether you are\] serving as a placeholder.” 

The institutions from which we seek recognition also have their own desires that limit their ability to fully accommodate the politics of artists whose subjecthood cannot escape politicization. The burden that artists (who are not afforded the neutrality of whiteness or maleness) carry is that their work can be mobilized by institutions to prop up a facade of diversity that distracts from the systemic violence that is foundational to their structure. As Abbas explains, navigating this is: 

> \[A\] negotiation of how much contradiction you can live with as an artist and how much of letting your work go is part of its production \[…\] There’s this obligation to be an exception in a system that you are essentially negotiating with and not capable of fully rejecting or having a constant fight with. 

Around the same time as _Damned If You Do_, I was invited by the Art Gallery of York University to collaborate with student groups to create a float for the Toronto Pride Parade. Not to be too opaque with my politics, but I have always disregarded Pride as the pursuit of apolitical neoliberal pleasure; an event that is symptomatic of the ways we are seduced into forgetting our political origins. The students I worked with were also very cognizant of the inherent contradictions and exclusions Pride contained, especially as the 2016 Pride theme was “You can sit with us” (a play on the quotable “you can’t sit with us” line from the 2004 film _Mean Girls_) – a suspicious invitation if there ever was one. 

When we are asked to leave our table and come sit at another, who is left behind? It became apparent to me that if I was to participate in Pride, it would be to reveal that the terms of inclusion were, in fact, not inclusive, that the happiness narrative that Pride offered was not extended to everyone. So I used the form of an undecorated float to bear the words: 

> HOW FOOLISH IT FEELS / TO TAKE THESE STEPS / THINKING YOU’D PROTECT US. – A MESSAGE TO THOSE AT THE TOPS OF TOWERS. 

The float was accompanied by T-shirts that read: 

> THE FARTHER YOU ARE FROM THE GROUND, THE HARDER IT IS TO FEEL A HEART STOP BEATING.

I see these negotiations of inescapable contradictions running parallel to queer theorist José Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, a strategy of identification and survival for those who are caught up in an ideology that they can neither fully reject nor assimilate into but rather, 

> …tactically and simultaneously work on, with, and against, a cultural form. \[…\] Disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.[^2]

I see disidentification as a way of participating that holds space for both intentional refusal and acceptance. It was utilized brilliantly in May 2014 when HDYSYIA? pulled out of the Whitney Biennial. In an interview with Ben Davis for Artnet, collective member Christa Bell said that, “One of the ways that we have discussed framing our participation – even before it started – was as a protest. Our participation inside of this white supremacist institution is a protest in itself. Of course we were aware of the politics of exclusion, the politics of white supremacy that make up the institution of the Whitney. I think a great way to consider this is that the entire participation was a protest, and the withdrawal was part of the protest.” To which collective member Sienna Shields added: “Exactly. Saying ‘yes’ was the first step to protest.”[^3] 

To me, this withdrawal was a part of their installation: a performance of refusal as concrete and valid as any material sculpture. To accept and then publicly withdraw had a larger impact than any singular art piece could have had because it drew attention to the ways in which a structure like the Whitney cannot be neutral and is thus unable to accommodate the work/politics of a collective of black artists. Their action highlights the fact that refusal is not always a dichotomous reaction, but rather a series of negotiations that can reveal invisible structures. 

However, this strategy is not without risk. The reality is that showing at institutions like the Whitney and Guggenheim places artists in a strata of visibility that allows for a different kind of leveraging to occur. It would be naïve of me to suggest that the strategies listed above are viable for everyone. The risk of providing a critique of inclusion, even when solicited, is that eventually opportunities dry up when your critiques become demands. We want critical artists ready to take risks, but only so far as those risks are discursively exploitable and not asking too much. 

During the panel, Abbas briefly mentioned that, “there is a certain nutritional value in neglect” and the sentiment felt familiar to me. I have often felt that the starting stages of my career, when there were no eyes on me, was when I was able to experiment and make mistakes with few repercussions. In retrospect, I realize that during this period I may have been invisible to the institutions from which I sought recognition, but I was far from being neglected. Instead, I was being fostered by a community that understood my intentions – and this was an incredibly fertile source of recognition. 

Because of this, I often feel like I am standing on the shoulders of giants, trying to focus my eyes to avoid vertigo. I wonder if the strategy of balance is to realign where we desire recognition from and interrogate if these higher places are nourishing us and if our access to them allows us to nourish those around us. A sentiment Deanna shares: 

> \[I’m trying to\] figure out how to work around the sense of singularity by including as many people of colour onto my party parade, as much as possible, with the understanding that whatever it is that I’m achieving is really important to share with other people. I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing if it wasn’t for the people in this world who have kept me afloat and told me what I was doing was important. So yes, I’m singular but I’m also very much part of a community of people who think very much like I do – and we all benefit from whatever it is I’m experiencing right now. And I hope that whatever I am doing will open some doors for the collective. 

I think there is a way that we – those of us who are afforded the agency to do so – can neglect the institutions that need our critiques, our work and our energy and refocus our attention back into the communities that allowed us to have a platform in the first place. 

When we climb to a higher strata, where the air is thin, will we have enough breath left in us to pull another up? 

[^1]: “Entire First-Year MFA Class Drops Out in Protest at the University of Southern California”, in hyperallergic.com; http://hyperallergic.com/207235/entire-first-year-mfa-class-drops-out-in-protest-at-the-university-of-southern-california/
[^2]: José Esteban Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 
[^3]: “The Yams, on the Whitney and White Supremacy”, in artnet.com; https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/the-yams-on-the-whitney-and-white-supremacy-30364

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Critique

This article discusses the nuanced politics of refusal within the art world and examines the many degrees of refusal by critiquing oppressive systems within art communities and the importance of remembering communities that helped foster one’s creativity in the first place. The article examines Vettivelu’s moderated discussion “Damned If You Do: A Conversation on the Politics of Refusal”, which ensued at Toronto’s Whippersnapper Gallery in May 2016 and which lends itself to the article’s initial discussion. The article assesses the ways refusal is navigated through various lenses.

When We Are Welcomed Into The Fold, Where Do We Keep What Is Left Behind?

Jonah Gray is an art historian, curator, and PhD candidate at UC San Diego.

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Site-specific

Participation

Social

Indigenous

Narrative

In this article, curator Jonah Gray introduces the Wood Land School, a symposium that took place in March 2017 at Vancouver’s OR Gallery, which focused on discussing Indigenous contemporary art. The article is not a comprehensive account of the symposium (something Gray left to the upcoming publication of “Wood Land School: Critical Anthologies”), but instead recounts some of the most pressing concerns that were commonly shared among select presenters. Gray explores the implications of these discussion topics and their applications to existing institutions and Indigenous art efforts, while offering a nuanced institutional critique within the context of the topics discussed.

Wood Land School: A Brief Report

Sabrina Tarasoff is a curator and writer based in Paris.

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Environment

Video

Exhibitions

Found a

Sensory

Examining different aspects of her career, this article explores the significance and dynamic creative practice of Lutz Bacher, whose evocative work includes poignant cultural relevance, immersive installations notably incorporating found film and sculpture, and abstract text and book works.

Lutz Bacher: Glitter and Resign

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Business

Abstract

Collections

Economy

Curatorial practice

This article focuses on the multifaceted question of art as a commodifiable, ownable, or as a material “thing” on display. By focusing on selected works as examples, the article describes the various cases in which conceptual works transcend the fabrications of physical space and the ways that art commerce or ownership must adapt to the often immateriality of artworks. 

Art After Property

Stacey Ho is a 90% chill 10% not artist who’s into community building, books, and being sort of boring. They recently finished writing a short novella about aliens, love and boundaries tentatively called _George the Parasite_.

Since August 2015, the Killjoy collective has organized events in Vancouver for Black, Indigenous, mixed-background folks and people of colour who are also queer, trans, two-spirit and intersex (common abbreviations are QT2IPOC, BIPOC and QTIBIPOC). They started out by throwing BIPOC\-exclusive dance parties, then later organized a three-part speaker series, with events culminating into a one-week festival of workshops and social gatherings held August 8–14, 2016\. Killjoy Fest aimed to “create a festival that both celebrates difference and empowers the queer community to actively address the harm perpetuated by racism and colonization.” Events included workshops on anti-pinkwashing, sexual health, art and writing and how to have open dialogues with deaf community members. There was a femme meet-up and a free picnic brunch. Founded by listen chen, Ayesh Kanani and Alexis Nicole, current Killjoy organizers are Ayesh, listen, Kelsey Cham Corbett and Lindsay Mestatew.

listen and Ayesh live in a shared house in East Vancouver, where listen invited Lindsay and I for dinner for the purpose of this interview. Ayesh is a youth worker at Qmunity. Lindsay, a two-spirit Cree Métis person from Treaty 8 territory, works as a community organizer and sexual health organizer. What’s been left out of this transcript is a lot of discussion about lipstick and Tinder, the food we ate, cute animal videos and much awkward silence. At the beginning of the conversation Lindsay and listen declared that Killjoy was on hiatus. Everyone was burnt out and folks had all gone through separate personal crises concurrent with organizing the festival. However, as the group processed, together and aloud, what had happened over the course of a long year, people also began talking of organizing another party and began thinking of ways to develop Killjoy to make it do better. So, perhaps there is more to come.

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**STACEY HO**: Why did you want to do Killjoy?

**listen chen**: My personal impetus was realizing that all my friends were white, and then panicking. I felt an overwhelming urgency to change the situation as well as a simultaneous claustrophobic powerlessness. I couldn’t ignore the white supremacy that hung like an ether over my house and the spaces I moved through, and thought the most efficient way to change that would be to help create spaces that were BIPOC\-exclusive. So… short answer, I wanted to make friends.

**LINDSAY MESTATEW**: I have such a petty response.

**lc**: I’m excited.

**LM**: Kelsey reached out to me through the Killjoy speaker series to do a workshop. I sent back a list of demands. I said, “SURE, I’ll do this workshop… but first we need to sit down.”

We sat down. I decided I wasn’t comfortable being the only Indigenous person speaking. Then I requested to have a panel of Indigenous folks who were non-academics. Then I spoke about compensation because I wasn’t going to reach out to people without compensation. Then said I wouldn’t participate in something that was an exclusively sober event. Then we all met and I gave feedback at Kelsey, listen and Ayesh for two hours. Then… I’m just such a top that that’s how I started organizing.

**SH**: Those all seem like pretty reasonable requests in terms of addressing the power dynamics of that situation.

**lc**: Totally. I mean, it was great. I enjoyed it, being topped, organizationally.

**SH**: What did you talk about at the speaker series?

**lc**: It was you \[Mestatew\], Kara Ashkewe, Sam Nock, Quanah Napoleon… I feel like part of the description was about destabilizing the idea of allyship.

**LM**: The original talk that Kelsey saw me give was called “Problematizing Allyship.” That is why they reached out to me. This one was called “Addressing and Unsettling Settler Colonialism in Queer Spaces.”

**lc**: It was awkward at first. You had to call an unscheduled break. I was sitting in front and I kept looking at the room. It was tense and there was not a lot of reaction. It felt like everyone was just staring blankly.

**LM**: To be fair, we were also slowly getting drunk on stage, because it was so uncomfortable. I interpreted it as people coming to this speaker series by queer, trans and Indigenous people to prove that they were allies. Once we started talking about how they weren’t allies, and they needed to stop stepping on our backs, they were not happy. People didn’t respond until we started making fun of them for having racist family members. Then they started laughing.

**lc**: It was better after the break. I got on the mic and told people to give more to the speakers.

**LM**: Another thing we can talk about is how grumpy I was during the Killjoy festival.

**AYESH KANANI**: And I was depressed and…

**lc**: I was suicidal and depressed.

**LM**: Remember how crazy we were? I legitimately thought one morning someone would email us and we’d all have killed ourselves.

**AK**: I didn’t attend any events, really. Just two workshops then I disappeared.

**LM**: I didn’t even attend two. We had to put in so much co-ordination work to make sure one of us was the stable one for the day and would show up. We’d tag team, send a person home to go have a breakdown, and then come in. There are just not that many volunteers.

**AK**: People were asking if we could do a concert in the park or host artists when they came into town. They wanted to do things that they didn’t have money for. Killjoy had money through our fundraising, but not really the energy to co-ordinate.

**LM**: There was just no capacity. The plan was huge. It would have been entirely doable if we had more people organizing, or committees to take on different projects. It was a lot for four of us to do. Maybe when I’m 27.

**AK**: For QTIPOC organizing, doing a fest is always a recipe for disaster. You’re trying to do a year’s worth of stuff in one week. For Killjoy, people want QTIPOC\-only events. They don’t have to be events in a week. It could be multi-year.

**lc**: People are so enthusiastic at the events, but we don’t get a lot of help. Especially within the QTIBIPOC community, people are dealing with all sorts of things that limit their emotional capacity. There’s a relationship between the enthusiasm for spaces that are so rare, and the structural pressure that creates barriers to making those spaces happen more sustainably. As demonstrated by the group mental breakdown.

**LM**: We survived, though.

**lc**: Ayesh, why did you want to join? Did you want to? You didn’t want to.

**AK**: I did want to help, but I didn’t want to organize. I said I could help get people together and I posted in QTIPOC groups to ask if anyone wanted to organize because I didn’t want to. We had coffee on Commercial Drive and everyone said that they didn’t have the capacity to organize except you and Alexis.

**LM**: Wait, you weren’t best friends yet? Did we all fall in love at Killjoy? Aww, that’s so gay.

**SH**: How did you become an organizer?

**AK**: I was just like “Cool, I’ll keep _helping_,” and all of a sudden I was an organizer. I definitely wanted to. It felt important to me that we had QTIPOC\-only spaces. I wasn’t willing to let it fizzle. I felt excited about a dance party. That’s still something that excites me. I still value that space. It’s complicated and requires a lot more of me than I have to give, but it’s still an important space, especially since our queer dance parties are so white and so…

**LM**: Boring.

I have so many sad Killjoy stories. Logan and I were at the first one. We were both really uncomfortable, so we went and sat out front. We were smoking cigarettes, talking about how it did not feel like a space that we wanted to be in. We were like “I’m sure no one’s really making friends here anyway,” then looked up and there were like 10 people in front of us shouting “OH MY GOD, THIS IS LIFE CHANGING!!! YOU CHANGED MY LIFE. I LOVE YOU!!!” They were all hugging each other. Then we left.

**lc**: I only knew Ayesh, Alexis and Stacey at the first one. I just tried to keep busy doing tasks, because it felt weird being one of the organizers but not having that many friends.

**AK**: Dance parties are hard because people want to be out and connecting at the shiny new event, but don’t really want to be there, don’t have a good time or would rather be at home – like me so much of the time.

**LM**: I’m looking at mine and Kelsey’s first messages on Facebook. I was super salty because I had this other POC wanting an Indigenous person to come talk and it was boring.

**AK**: \[…\] When we started, we knew that we were not necessarily doing well. We were doing it, which was a start, but it needed to involve more people and voices for us to be accountable. A lot of people who have attended and participated have also given us feedback.

**LM**: There’s a lot of negotiating. I’m reading back and appreciating Kelsey because my entire correspondence was personal disclosures where I was like “You can share this with them” or “Don’t tell them this” and they were trying to wade through everything!

**SH**: What was it that won you over then?

**lc**: Yes, why on earth did you join these people?

**LM**: Was I warm the first time we met? Was I nice?

**AK**: I mean, you were giving us a lot of feedback and also sharing a lot about other experiences, saying, “This is serious. Don’t screw up.”

**LM**: It was two hours of talking. I think that everyone was really receptive, but I also don’t know if I necessarily even feel won over by Killjoy at this point. I feel close to the three of you, but I still don’t feel comfortable at Killjoy. I don’t really feel like it’s my space, because it feels like it’s based for settler POC predominantly. Also sober spaces are really violent against Indigenous people and those most affected by colonization.

I remember having a moment, talking to Alexis and to other queer and two-spirit Indigenous friends who wouldn’t go to Killjoy. I was pissed off that Indigenous people were being named in conversation but not actually represented. I remember literally sitting on the bar at Heartwood. I spun around and I said “You know what? I don’t care if it’s petty. I’m going to join because you can bet your ass there’s going to be a Native person involved.”

That’s when I was won over. I was just being grumpy because… that’s who I am. I had also initially considered not doing the talk, but worried that if I didn’t, there would be an academic brought in. I’m really tired of academics representing the queer community and queer Indigenous experience. I decided that I would do it, but then bring in anyone who also wanted to do it with me, which was really nice.

**lc**: I wonder to what extent the people who come to events are just our friends, friends of our friends… because it feels very much like it is. It’s hard to map how people hear about it. We need to try and reach communities that aren’t traceable through Facebook friends or whatever.

**SH**: Sometimes that’s just how communities happen, through ever-expanding networks of people that you know. That’s okay. Although I understand the desire to have the event be a space that is more accessible.

**LM**: I don’t actually think it’s okay, though. The issue with Killjoy is that the only people coming are predominantly folks who have university education. That’s a very set framework and it’s not just a coincidence that this is who’s being allotted this space or being made comfortable in this space. It’s not just happenstance that predominantly middle-class university-educated people just happen to all be together. That’s a very, very direct line.

**SH**: Now that this structure is in place, would it make sense to try and pass that over to people from non-academic, non-middle-class backgrounds? How would one shift that?

**LM**: Well firstly, I’m not middle-class and I don’t have a university education, but the problem with that framework is that it’s being presented as a top-down approach. As if anyone involved in Killjoy could hand that down or it’s their place to hand that down. Which, turns out, is…

**SH**: Patronizing?

**LM**: Yes… Patronizing, colonial. Boring. I don’t think that there is a direct answer on how to bring in folks who are framed as the most marginalized. It’s already set in motion, the fact that it’s not a safe space for Indigenous people. There have also been a lot of experiences of anti-Blackness that haven’t been addressed.

_Laughs_ The interview of Killjoy organizers trashing Killjoy.

**lc**: That’s better.

**LM**: Kelsey’s done a lot of work to talk about the language that we use. QTIBIPOC in and of itself is an alienating term that assumes a lot of knowledge based in anti-oppression and academia. The fact is that many folks that I know, who don’t come from UBC and don’t study race in a colonial institution, also don’t have a background in breaking down what QTIBIPOC means. They have to reach out, which is condescending. \[…\] And I guess we can’t really question why people who have different experiences, who are already alienated as soon as we use the term QTIBIPOC, aren’t accessing the space.

**lc**: Remember we were talking about the QTIBIPOC acronym? Before Lindsay joined, Ayesh, Kelsey and I felt uncomfortable to include two-spirit there, because none of us are two-spirit. We don’t have significant relationships with the two-spirit community. Yet, because we have access to the language, we could put it in the description of Killjoy. Of course, we want to be accessible but, I don’t know, language is just so sneaky. You can say a word, but the integrity that puts meaning into words doesn’t come from the word itself, obviously. It comes from practice and relationships that are outside of the word. I feel like everything comes down to relationships between bodies – lived, real relationships with communities in real life.

**LM**: I think that’s true. It’s also strange to see how people take up Killjoy, the ways that people read it. A lot of people describe it to me as a decolonial space, which I disagree with. I don’t just disagree with it, I categorically reject it.

**lc**: I’ve been encountering a lot of people trying to use language to address the structural injustices of the world in ways that I’m not sure about. I don’t know how I feel about language right now. There are too many words, too many discourses that I’ve been exposed to. It gets confused in my head. It’s November and I just want to nap, watch TV and try to be a good friend. I’m quite tired of talking and trying to phrase things through language.

**SH**: When I got the call for this article, I was feeling something similar. Art writing usually speaks in this very specialized language and everything I want to say seems to lie outside of it.

**AK**: What is this for?

**SH**: _C Magazine_, a contemporary art magazine based out of Toronto.

**LM**: That is cool. It’s really funny to think of Killjoy in an art magazine. For accessibility’s sake, could you give us examples of how this publication speaks?

**SH**: They’ll usually have a few features on Canadian artists and cultural issues and some reviews… typical of a culture magazine? It speaks in the language of art criticism. My personal approach is to try to talk about art or talk especially about history in ways that aren’t academic and instead highlight oral histories, social histories or people’s experiences.

**LM**: Are you reviewing Killjoy?

* SH\*: I’m not reviewing Killjoy.

**LM**: This is a meta-review.

**SH**: The way that I’m thinking about it is that there’s always a push to steer art and culture towards becoming something really great but also strongly towards something that is academic, professionalized, white or snobby. However, I still see possibility in art-making to push at structures in ways that you can’t do in other disciplines, because it’s quite open. I guess that’s why I continue to participate in it. But I’m pretty embedded, so it is hard to talk about.

**AK**: Is it a pretty white magazine? What would this be amongst?

**LM**: Oh yeah, if this is going to a bunch of white art people, I don’t want them to hear us criticizing ourselves.

**lc**: We’ve said no or just not replied to every single interview request.

**LM**: I deleted Killjoy’s email off of my phone.

**lc**: Good call. We got an email from somebody who’s in a grad program… it’s to do with urban queer youth?

**LM**: Ew, fucking pay me. That’s what we can respond. You could end the article by saying, “listen stoically said, ‘Fucking pay Lindsay.’ Lindsay turned around and said, ‘That’s what I want.’”

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Gender

Feminism

This article is a transcription of a conversation between artist and curator Stacey Ho and Killjoy Collective, a Vancouver-based group that has organized creative community events for queer black and Indigenous people of colour. 

Killjoy in Conversation with Stacey Ho

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Love

Body

Poetry

Sexuality

In this prose piece, Lido Pimienta explores the humour and subtle sadness of modern-day intimacy and the way relationships can evade commitment or conversation. Through a stream of consciousness-style soliloquy, Pimienta works through feeling both used by and apathetic to love and intimacy, and the ways that these feelings intertwine with everyday obligations, critique of oppressive institutions, and the desire to work towards a meaningful and impactful art career as a marginalized individual.

We Are in a Non-Relationship Relationship

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Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

One might assume that a portrait of an anonymous subject, back to the camera, gives little information. Few clues as to the individualities of this person, the before or after of the photographed moment, the setting or the interaction. In the photographs that follow – excerpted from larger and ongoing series of hooded portraits – all subjects are turned away from the camera, tightly framed, unknown. These four are all in blue, offering perhaps a gendered clue. 

John Edmonds began his project Hoods in spring 2016, as a graduating student in Yale’s Photography MFA Program. He describes his prior photographs as generous and romantic – perhaps too much so for unreceptive audiences – leading to a desire to make work that was less exposed, that prompted deeper looking; thinking of how viewers would read these images and the subjects within them from the symbolism of a hooded jacket or sweatshirt. The clothing is all his own, worn on his body and now worn by strangers. The stranger becomes a pseudo self-portrait; how the artist himself might be seen, glimpsed from behind.

It’s significant that the figure is anonymous. For the artist this work is less about the broad beast of identity and more concerned with the terms of relating to one another. Edmonds asks how you relate to someone you can’t see; how the coded visual language of clothing leads to the impossibility of an undetermined first encounter, of giving your own information when it has already been assigned. Edmonds’ _Hoods_ insist on this conversation. Portraiture thus gives rise to questions of the language we use talk about other bodies, to talk about someone. 

While the images appear deceptively simple, they are incredibly sharp: every detail is present, describing the contours of each figure’s silhouette. There is much information in this detail, as in the gesture and the clothing. If this information is subtle, it is reinforced by repetition – Edmonds often works in repetitive series, looking and re-looking and impelling viewers to do the same. He gives fragments of a whole, leading one to consider the reality beyond the frame: what a sliver of thigh, the texture of a polyester suit, the back of a hooded athletic jacket might say. There is imaginative potential in these anonymous portraits, and there is nuance in repetition – of near imperceptible differences that encourage a second and third take on what seemed a familiar image or scene. Edmonds’ _Hoods_ insist on a close reading.

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Photography

Portrait

Artist John Edmonds began his series _Hoods_ in 2016\. In these selected portraits, the evocative nature of the anonymous hooded subjects suggests a new kind of conversation about bodies and communication. Kari Cwynar introduces the series and proposes her critical stance on the work. 

Hoods by John Edmonds: Words

Artist

Artist John Edmonds began his series _Hoods_ in 2016\. In these selected portraits, the evocative nature of the anonymous hooded subjects suggests a new kind of conversation about bodies and communication. Words by Kari Cwynar.

Hoods

Review

**Xenia Benivolski** is a writer and curator currently based in Toronto.

From the balcony of Europe in North America – Montreal – the fabric of European Socialism looks to be fraying at the edges, as the city sees the notion of the Marxist revolution, with Germany at the helm,[^1] turning its ship and heading squarely back into the realm of nostalgia, survived by a strong urge to do nothing. In Anne Imhof’s _Angst III_, a group of bored-looking teens nonchalantly scours the surfaces of a large white room filled with artificial vapour. Edging towards the runway, they encounter stuffed hawks, cigarettes, pop cans and other accessories while performing the slow-motion feat of mounting one of them onto a pedestal, only for that person to collapse into the arms of their peers and be carried to safety soon after. Several sit above the scene, chewing gum or simply observing. The audience waits patiently, despite the slowness and the fog, for the young people to engage in some radical action but the performance is purely aesthetic. A young man looks into my eyes as he slowly pours a can of Pepsi on the ground before resuming a thoughtful position on the ground. By the end of the public reception, the entire museum is shrouded in thin vapour.

A critique of a critique, the exhibition of the 2016 Montreal Biennale – _Le Grand Balcon_ – recounts the hedonistic joys missing from the Marxist texts we like to use as guidance. In his single-channel installation, _The Swap_ (2016), Michael Blum reminds us that _Das Kapital_ refrains from mentioning joy, sex, teens, music or alcohol and bears but one spirited mention of dance. Like _Angst III_, _The Swap_ is the third chapter in a trilogy, which includes _Wandering Marxwards_ (1998) and _The Three Failures_ (2006). In it, Blum’s recurring character wanders purposefully through the streets of Shanghai until he arrives at a party. Up until then, a heavily accented woman narrates _The Swap_, calmly describing the now overly familiar repetitive global injury set in motion by Capitalism. Now, recordings of Karl Marx and Lenin ominously pierce the techno soundtrack. It hurts a little but in a good way.

The Nun’s Island gas station in Montreal is a modernist filling station designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1969, which has been out of service since 2012\. A stern counteraction to Buckminster Fuller’s Utopian dome of 1967, the station was commissioned by Imperial Oil, and the structure is now a designated community space and a focal offsite location of the Montreal Biennale, which places a well-timed investigation of cross-continental European Imperialism in the hands of a slippery cast of absentees: Günther Anders, Claude Eatherly, Marquis de Sade, Bob Hope, Wendy, Molière, Chantal Akerman, Adolf Loos, The Five Wives of Lajos Bíró, a Lady and two Invisible Men. The presence of these ghosts haunts the exhibition, taking immediate form in collective IMPURE FICTION’s intentionally and playfully mistranslated Anglo-Flemish adaptation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope; the performance injects fresh queerness into a comedy of manners that manages to fully embody the ludicrousness of European society, its connection to Montreal and the tired moralism of the art world at large, siting that “… Mankind has grown so base, / I mean to break with the whole human race.”

A few blocks away, Marina Rosenfeld’s performance _Free Exercise_ (2014–2016) takes place at the Cathcart Armoury, performed by the Fusiliers Mont-Royal (an enlisted band based at the Armoury of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal) as well as some local musicians. The 70-minute piece engages in a series of collective musical exercises – which might better be described as drills – underscoring ritualism and cooperation in military subculture. The work is one of several performances referencing traditional European performance platforms: over the course of the week, I also see a play, an opera and a symphony. Not all of the performances work to challenge the European canon as well as Rosenfeld’s, but the combined experiences leave the viewer seeking another perspective.

That window becomes available unexpectedly when entering the exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, through Valérie Blass’ playfully hollow _8 sculptures_, which make the appealing gesture of revealing by concealing. Blass’ reference to H.G. Wells’ _Invisible Man_ (1987) novella stands as a reminder of the equally absurdist _Invisible Man_ by Ralph Ellison (1952), a novel detailing the conflict between Black American identity and Marxism, and whose nameless narrator was modelled after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s _Notes from Underground_ (1864).[^2] Directly across the room, Luke Willis Thompson had reproduced the conditions of Warhol’s original “screen tests,” in which less than a handful of participants were people of colour. By casting the victims of police brutality in _Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries_ (2016), Thomson does the double duty of questioning representations of racialized people in film and media while reproducing the formula that was essentially designed to exclude them.

The exhibition title, _Le Grand Balcon_, rolls out of a baggy reference to a 1956 play where the inhabitants of an upper-class brothel articulate a microcosm of an impending revolution outside while awaiting intervention by the authorities. Jean Genet3 uses the situation to explore power shifts between a bishop who forgives a criminal, a judge who punishes a thief and a general who rides his horse. Genet’s concerns with meta-theatricality beg for a reflexive position to justify the model of the European Biennale and a serious consideration of the pleasure and ritual in participating in the hedonism of the art system, however these desires are only met within the confines of the system that created them. Grounding the work at the MACM, a partial namesake, Luzie Meyer’s _Le Balcon_ (2016), sees three men (Reece York, Dan Kwon, Salomo Andrén) verbally live out their fantasies of domination with a prostitute who also happens to be the narrator. While inside the work these interactions and desires are neutralized through the use of overdubbing and playful montage, the viewer is implicated in another form of sadomasochistic subjectivity: that of the institutional critique.

[^1]: Sebastian Brant’s _The Ship of Fools_ in German verse was published first in 1494 in Basel, Switzerland. Consisting of 112 printed blocks, the trope was commonly used in the pre-Reformation period to legitimize criticism. The fiction had involved a court jester, and so by writing in the voice of the fool, Brant was able to criticize the church without precautions.
[^2]: Famously refuting the utopian vision of _What Is To Be Done?_ Dostoyevsky ridicules enlightened self-interest in notes, and later a case for equating fear, suffering and criminality with freedom via Raskolnikov in _Crime and Punishment_, first published in 12 monthly instalments in the _Russian Messenger_ in 1866.
[^3]: _Saint Genet, Comédien et Martyr_ is the title of Sartre’s 1952 book concerning Genet’s semi-autobiographical _Thief Journal (Journal du voleur_, 1949). The journal depicts various criminals and law enforcers in stages of power struggles and reconciliation. In it, Genet appropriates a Christian terminology of sainthood to describe and execute his crimes: a robbery becomes a ritual, a theft an act of devotion, homosexuality a virtue.

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This article reviews the group show “Le Grand Balcon”, BNLMTL 2016, which was held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from October 19, 2016 to January 15, 2017 as part of the Montreal Biennial. 

Le Grand Balcon, BNLMTL

Amy Luo is an art writer currently based in Vancouver.

“It’s a difficult and a long show to commit to in many ways as a viewer,” admitted Jean-Paul Kelly in an interview about his recent solo show, _That ends that matter_, which premiered a new video work of the same name. One reason why the work might frustrate could be its nerdish deployment of multiple image sources and genres across its three-channel video-installation format, putting off viewers with its sheer heterogeneity. Kelly has used this combinatory strategy before: his 2013 video work _Movement in Squares_, for example, was composed variously of found video footage, an appropriated soundtrack and original video recordings produced in his studio. This new work, which was exhibited on hanging screens across the darkened basement space of the Delfina Foundation in London this past fall, enjoins materials and strategies plucked from even broader sources: blog feeds, documentaries, reportage, abstraction and animation, to name but a few. Kelly uses the relationships between multiple lines to tease out insights into representation and fairness.

The courtroom offers the raw material for exploring these topics. During an artist residency at the Foundation in 2015, Kelly visited the City of London Magistrates’ Court for eight weeks and observed trials for offenses from petty theft to large-scale embezzlement. The UK court prohibits live documentation of trial proceedings in any form – photography, video or even hand-drawn sketches. For Kelly, this situation magnified the contradiction inherent in the justice system between the ideal of “open justice” and the real-life impossibility of objective reportage. The court proceedings he witnessed can only persist as memory’s warped product.

In memory, we often remember what we want to remember. This editing act shaped by desires and predispositions is a suitable analogy for documentary making, which is essentially the selection, both willed and automatic, of images and narratives that refer to reality. And just as memory remakes the event, the re-enactment is a common documentary strategy for representing the past. In _That ends that matter_, one of the three videos presents a reconstructed court scene using a handful of actors. The video contains no sound, except for the hum of white noise. In this near-silence, the camera shifts its gaze from one character to the next. Its view often enframes multiple actors only then to zoom in and out to alternately draw each figure into focus. This glaring movement merely calls attention to the video’s construction in a structuralist way, without cohering with any narrative line. In fact, the video’s soporific 12 minutes contains no perceivable narrative at all; the re-enactment is not reproductive but analytical, and the subject on trial is the representational form itself.

Vision and its obstruction – as theme, motif, allegory – is everywhere in the work. It’s especially prominent in the second video, which presents a succession of photographs culled from online image-based sites, wherein several motifs recur: trials under process, defendants with faces shielded, scenes from protests and riots, teargas victims with milk splashed across their eyes. Kelly assembled this slideshow to represent his courtroom experience by way of a “re-enactment through found-images,” a mode of narrating modelled after the Tumblr page. Compared to the opioid pace of the re-enacted court scene, this image stream gives us photographs that shout out loud, in quick, steady succession, much to the satisfaction of the contemporary viewer.

Despite being billed as a work that interrogates representations, it directs quite as many questions at the nature of the viewer. The synesthetic viewer is implicated in the third video, which transposes the formal qualities of the slide photographs into black shapes and lines that appear, disappear and glide around on a white background. These abstract graphics are in turn transformed into the soundtrack that plays in the room. This indexical translation between sensory forms draws on the animations of Norman McLaren, a Canadian filmmaker who experimented with producing sound from graphical marks and turning that sound back into picture, so that the same content could be simultaneously seen and heard. Experiments in synaesthesia can be traced back to 19th-century developments in modern physiology, which eclipsed the more unified classical understanding of human perception; it splintered sensorial experience into distinct nerve bundles, one for each of the senses, which were shown to produce different sensations from the exact same stimulus (say, electrical input). This model of the perceiver surfaces in Kelly’s work, in which the repetition of the same court experience by various modes of stimulation provocatively denies a transparent, gestalt kind of reception of the outside world.

The abstract components of the work also help to bind the multiple elements of the installation, looping back to relate abstraction to documentary, by way of the index. The indexicality of the photographic medium is linked to the truth claim of the image, and this is the most common topic of debate in art theoretical discussions on documentary. Kelly’s manipulation of indexical forms, however, is concerned not so much with questions of truthfulness as with the underlying structure of representational forms. In this work, he embeds indexical information in abstract visuals and sounds, turning them into non-representational bearers of data. This contradicts the modernist discourse of optical purity attached to abstraction, which John Ruskin heralded as an art to restore the “innocence of the eye” – an art of pure vision liberated from signification.

Contra Ruskin, Kelly does not grant innocence to the image, not even to abstraction. But his project is not at all given to cynicism. It is, rather, guided by curiosity and a sense of ethical responsibility that comes with being a maker of images, as well as one who consumes them. Beyond its structuralist and formalist concerns, it is a project that interrogates not only the image but also the viewer, and which shows them to be inseparable – continuous, even. Perhaps it retains a vestigial romanticism, echoing William Blake’s words: “As the eye, such the object.”

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This is a review of Jean-Paul Kelly’s “That Ends That Matter”, which was shown from September 19 to November 12, 2016, at Delfina Foundation in London, UK.

That ends that matter

Dory Nason (Anishinaabe/Chicana) is a Senior Instructor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. She specialized in Indigenous feminist art and activism. 

As a scholar who focuses on Indigenous feminisms, I am drawn to visual and performance art by contemporary Indigenous women in Canada because of the potent challenge their art poses to colonial expectations of Indigenous women, our politics and our intellect. In viewing their work, I am often reminded of Leanne Simpson’s description of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore as a person whose performances embody sovereignty and remind us as Indigenous peoples about our power to do the same. Simpson describes Belmore’s art as “the very best of Indigenous storytelling grounded in the very same process that have \[sic\] brought meaning to the lives of our Ancestors– multi-dimensionality, repetition, abstraction, metaphor and multiple sites of perception.”[^1] As a literature scholar, I look to the stories generated by women artists, such as Belmore, and to the many layers of conversation that generate and are generated by the subject of this review: the multi-faceted and dynamic project _#callresponse_. The project’s organizers commissioned works from five artists whose home territories stretch across Canada, with a focus on performance and action and local community networks. _#callresponse_ includes a touring exhibition, a website and a social media presence, which serves as a hub for ongoing collaboration and dialogue.

The _#callresponse_ project is a collection of multiple stories drawn from five artists – Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory – and their invited respondents. Despite my lack of art experience, I am emboldened by the reminder that the co-organizers Tarah Hogue, Tania Willard and Maria Hupfield – want each of us to begin our engagement with _#callresponse_ and its many elements, from our own positions, emphasizing context, place and history. To begin, we might consider our role in the stories we encounter online, at performances and in the exhibition space of _#callresponse_. Who we are impacts how we move among the exhibition’s objects, its cacophonous voices, soundscapes and images, and the emotions each artist or set of artists brings to their stories. Indeed, this kind of exhibition impels us to ask, as we move amongst these spaces, if we are responding to the artists’ calls for critical reflection on our responsibilities in building a decolonial future and enacting a vision of reconciliation more expansive than forgiveness. Or, as so many have done in the past, are we replicating colonial relationality, ignoring Indigenous voices and stories of the land in order to construct a narrative of reconciliation that is palpable and easy to consume? For me, these questions foreground the ethical imperative of any single engagement with Indigenous story, whether you are Indigenous or not. What I think makes this particular exhibition so impactful is that it challenges and redirects the discourse of reconciliation through art by presenting a call to “stand together across sovereign territories as accomplices in awakened solidarity with all our relations both human and non.”[^2] In this way, the artists bring into the conversation commitments to the land, non-human kin, language and cosmologies that have been covered over by a discourse of apology and _moving beyond_ without a _reckoning with_ our collective histories as Indigenous and settler peoples. In addition, the call specifically looked to support women artists in their communities, a distinction that counters the domination of male voices in either political or artistic discourses on reconciliation.

My visit to grunt gallery, which housed the opening exhibition in Vancouver, was prompted by a conversation I had in November 2016 with the co-organizer and curator-in-residence at the gallery, Tarah Hogue. Hogue encouraged me to visit the gallery with students from my Indigenous feminisms course for a guided tour. What stood out for my students and me was more the methodology than the theory. What we encountered was not necessarily Indigenous feminist statements on reconciliation, but an Indigenous feminist methodology that carried through each of Hogue’s descriptions of the artworks. Each piece represents a much larger story of collaboration, grounded in ethical commitments to seek out and bring in those bodies, voices and kin marginalized by the colonial story and contemporary reconciliation efforts. As such, objects like the toolbox co-created by Maria Hupfield and her respondents, IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, stand in for multiple performances that brought together audience members and the artists to imagine a decolonial future using tools that seem unfit or way too small for such an enormous task. Yet in the co-creation of the final piece on display, the audience and artists built upon each other’s ideas to make the toolbox bigger and more meaningful for the next group that picks up its contents.

The impressive amount of media generated online and in print by the project speaks to the co-organizers’ insistence that the artworks on display are not the sum total of the artistic process or simply representative of the five artists’ and their respondents’ contributions. The works in the exhibition instead evoke community contexts and connections that are often at the heart of Indigenous women’s art practice, as well as the artists’ activism. As Maria Hupfield said in a podcast interview about the project, “artwork isn’t something that happens on its own, we need people,”[^3] and the artworks created for _#callresponse_ make that very clear. Contributions from two of the artists, Christi Belcourt and Tania Willard, come out of collectives that feature land-based art practices– the Onaman Collective and the Bush Gallery, respectively. Their work thus emphasizes community ceremonial practice, Indigenous historiography and an ethical commitment to land-based pedagogies as imperative to an Indigenous response to this age of state-based reconciliation efforts.

Beyond the artists of _#callresponse_, the works also invoke the publics engaged in the performances, in the making of objects and in the gallery space itself. Yet this statement, too, does not capture the project’s most important contributors: the non-human kin and the land itself that are often left out of political conversations about so-called reconciliation. Not simply a name, _#callresponse_ references the dialogue that is generated between viewer and artwork, community and artist, land and sound, Indigenous and non-Indigenous in the space of the gallery or the online iterations of the project. Through these dialogues, the creators challenge the notion that reconciliation could ever really be made tangible in the ongoing present of settler colonialism: each piece seems to reference a fleeting moment of a conversation, one that is not yet finished (or even started). As a whole, the project suggests that the word “reconciliation” cannot capture what justice looks like to Indigenous peoples. As such, the contributions to _#callresponse_ refuse the call of reconciliation promoted by the Canadian government by responding with their own series of calls and responses, conversations that are started on the collaborators’ own terms, in their own artistic languages, from their own territories, bodies and spaces

[^1]: Leanne Simpson, “Canada Day, Rebecca Belmore and Me.” “https:/ www.leannesimpson.ca/writings/canada-day-rebecca-belmore-me”:https:/ www.leannesimpson.ca/writings/canada-day-rebecca-belmore-me”
[^2]: ”http://www.callresponseart.ca/“:http://www.callresponseart.ca/
[^3]: Audio interview with Maria Hupfield, Tania Willard and Tarah Hogue in _Broken Boxes_ podcast, ep. 43, August 2016\. “https://soundcloud.com/brokenboxes/callresponse-artist-curators-maria-hupfield-tania-willard-tarah-hogue-episode-43?in=brokenboxes/sets/callresponse”:https://soundcloud.com/brokenboxes/callresponse-artist-curators-maria-hupfield-tania-willard-tarah-hogue-episode-43?in=brokenboxes/sets/callresponse

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This article reviews the #callresponse project, an initiative which featured a touring exhibition, website, and social media presence in an effort to encourage collaboration and community involvement regarding Indigenous sovereignty and creative discourse. The show featured five main artists: Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, and their guest respondents Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff, IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Marcia Crosby, and Tanya Tagaq. The article focuses on the project’s opening exhibition, which ran from October 29 to December 10, 2016, at Vancouver’s Grunt Gallery.

#callresponse

The earth’s circumference is 40,075 kilometres and 47 hours is the travel time required to circumnavigate the earth by plane. At the entrance to Patrick Cruz’s solo exhibition _Archeological Apathy_, co-presented by the South Asian Visual Arts Centre at 8eleven Gallery, a lightbox displays this distance while traditional folk music compiled from YouTube forms a 47-hour-long soundtrack of “world music” for the exhibit. These numbers are a conceptual nod to scientific and “factual data.” As poetic displays of a _measured_ sense of time and distance, culture is summarized here in an effort to reduce concepts of the “global” and to depict worldliness. Folk music carries a history of political weight; as an immaterial history, oral narratives circumvent ownership and authority over culture, in contrast with artifacts preserved in a museum or in academic institutions. As a shared form of expression that escapes institutional frameworks, it also creates a common platform for exchange. 

Cruz begins his process with the performative act of digging and uses archival mining as an inquisitive search for meaning. The viewer is left to witness the evidence of his exploration and archeological excavation of the courtyard space behind 8eleven Gallery. As such, the performance considers the intersection between a site, its history and cultural representation. That line of inquiry also lends itself to other aspects of the exhibition – for instance, regarding the “space” of the Internet, which navigates an unsettling-yet-recognizable pseudo-reality of mysticism and knowledge-making. 

The flattening of time occurs in the threshold space of the gallery’s hallway. Sourced using Facebook, Google and Twitter, the images accumulated in Cruz’s research archive, which completely cover the walls and ceiling of the hallway, have been printed in black and white with a low-quality aesthetic. The immaterial space of the Internet is thus made material, creating an embodied and abstract space referencing the deep net. The images themselves also present parallels that pose questions about the intersection of material culture in the technological age, and its conflation with pre-historic and primitive narratives. For instance, a larger, visually compelling image – and a respite from other more unsettling images – displays a mountainous land- scape, which could be interpreted as a clearing or an open pit mine, both human instrumentalizations of the natural landscape. In all of the images, there is a fragility to the document and a sense of subjective interpretation of information read through personal lenses and backgrounds of knowledge.[^1] Some of the images depict current atrocities and include images widely shared over social media, while others, seemingly based in reality but leaning toward fiction, elicit abject responses. A woman wears a burqa in camaraderie with a police officer and an individual in a KKK robe; Tupac and Osama Bin Laden give each other props; a hand is morphed into the shape of a computer mouse. The effective treatment of the images, pointing to low-tech displays, positions the viewer in a space of outmoded aesthetic. The artist resists the impulse to present information that is comfortable to look at, or with any explicit finality, or clear logic. 

A recurring theme that weaves through the images and fragments of the exhibition is mysticism and religion/spirituality. A few of the images mirror the gesture of encompassing the world, systemizing the passage of time and religion: for example, a Soviet calendar from the 1930s that orders the major religions is pictured. When measured quantitatively and presented as data, the complexity of mystery and mysticism is reduced and becomes a humourous critique of empirical research. 

Connecting the performance of digging to a “funerary” and religious space, bricks that have fallen from the wall adjacent to the 8eleven courtyard are collected and reconfigured in the front space of the gallery as a tomb-like structure. The space is treated as a mortuary, with the walls painted stark white and harsh fluorescent lighting, as Cruz responds to the sensibility of the front gallery as a white cube or “dead space.” A cyclical relationship between the life and death of people, nature and land is demonstrated here, with no clear beginning or end to the exhibition’s narrative. In response to the tomb, Cruz installs a shrine next to the display window. The shrine is an arrangement of objects and artifacts combining relics from Chinatown with objects from Cruz’s personal collection. A plastic dog figurine wrapped in lights; a pineapple; coconut cups containing dirt and a fake plant; a cleaning brush placed in a vase; a painted primitive mask with a mop placed atop as its “hair.” The eclectic arrangement includes cleaning products from the 8eleven bathroom and a tool for plastering the walls between exhibitions. The shrine combines the primitive and tribal with the kitschy and commercial, representing a subculture of Chinatown and the appropriation of Western commercialist aesthetic. The “primitive” is usually isolated in the museum, presented as historical material, whereas here it collides with the “modern,” in a configuration of “cheap” objects as mobilizing counterparts to material culture. In this way, Cruz challenges the assumed need to separate and reserve objects according to their respective historical contexts. There is a dismantling of principles and rules in favour of an intuitive sourcing of information and presentation of culture, loosely sensing the site’s past histories. 

_Archeological Apathy_ does not directly engage museological language but instead meanders between an understanding and concretizing of cultural materials. Somewhere between those two points, empirical methods break apart to reveal their limitations. There is a resistance to established forms of generating knowledge, bringing forth the notion of democratic access and decentred authorship. Cruz inserts his own cultural narrative within established colonial viewpoints and histories. In doing so, he seems to suggest that while we can return to the act of archeological digging and sourcing, this search appears futile and existential, yet it is satirical in its sincerity, acknowledging that the weight of knowledge is our potential demise. 

[^1]: South Asian Visual Arts Centre and 8eleven co-presented an artist talk and conversation between Alvin Luong and Patrick Cruz in conjunction with _Archeological Apathy_ entitled _Your Civilization Suffers a Complete Collapse._ Luong explained how he used the lens of art history to interpret an ISIS trench  
as Michael Heizer’s _Rift_ (1968) earthwork. This provides a thought-provoking relationship to the notion of misguided knowledge-making in the images in _Archeological Apathy._

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This article reviews Patrick Cruz’s show “Archaeological Apathy”, which showed at Toronto’s 8eleven Gallery from November 10 to December 3, 2016.

Patrick Cruz: Archeological Apathy

Simone Krug is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. 

Hips jut and shoulders sway, bouncing in time to a blaring bedroom boom box. _We Dance, We Smoke, We Kiss_ at Fahrenheit is a study in joyous movement and the mundane routines performed behind closed doors. With this mentality in mind, the show celebrates recent works that have emerged from and around the Middle East and Arab world, circumventing the tired narrative of political conflict and perpetual unrest en route to a realm of pop culture and global outlooks. Fahrenheit resident and curator Myriam Ben Salah presents a region prone to misrepresentation and stale tropes, feeling around for a new identity even as it clings to customs and traditions. The show straddles these two spaces, stretching, contorting and contracting to portray a character and place that defiantly resists singular definition.

In the hall that leads to the main gallery, an ambient, calming British female voice drifts over Muzak from a looped recording by the Arabian Gulf-based collective GCC, _revitalising spaciousness_ (2016). Her saccharine tone mimics the clarity of an airport loudspeaker announcement as it desperately strives to sell something abstract. Even its title is a vacuous promise, an unfinished skyscraper looming over a brightly lit downtown Dubai. Her message is rooted in the bureaucratic international English spoken throughout the rapidly expanding gulf region. “Welcome to a more comfortable vertical world,” with “global business at your fingertips” and “Dreamliner legendary hospitality,” she murmurs. Culling text from antidepressant ads, the Qur’an and airline marketing, GCC collapses these seemingly disparate spheres, promising adventure, wealth, access and luxury. As in real life, psychological fixes, religion and leisure products vie for our attention; yet, melted together in this recording, they are indistinguishable. If these directives all sound the same, what, if anything, can provide a cure for our suffering? The tangle of corporate and spiritual jargon continues its circuit.

As GCC engages the lofty and universal, Jumana Manna hones in on the particular in her video portrait of a male Palestinian thug community in her East Jerusalem hometown in _Blessed Blessed Oblivion_ (2010). Fixating on their quotidian antics, Manna echoes the male-centric cinematic gaze and experimental format of Kenneth Anger’s depiction of gay Nazi bikers in _Scorpio Rising_ (1963). Her camera follows these social packs as they drive around at night, lift weights at the gym and smoke cigarettes outside an auto body shop. She casts an intimate, almost private, perspective onto decidedly masculine activities and public spaces. As men mill about on camera, here, the hijab is quite literally hidden. The explicit gender division manifests not simply as the artist’s gaze, but as evidence of the gendering of public space in this territory, itself occupied and divided by statute, war and violence. Manna challenges these gendered bifurcations, inserting the stereotypically feminine into the testosterone-charged sites she documents. Men appear in different states of grooming at the barbershop, as they lather, primp and preen over stray hairs. The 1993 Culture Beat song “Mr. Vain” hums as young men lift, pump and heave at the gym, its walls decorated with fading bodybuilder posters. Even as one man evokes the culture of machismo and misogyny that thrives in this community – “I started hating her because she loved me. I wanted to push her away…” – elsewhere in this conflict zone, a carwash employee boasts about his business’ superior soap products.

A similar levity seeps into Tala Madani’s paintings of rotund and balding men who stand naked or in tiny underpants in stark interiors. In these anonymous places, her scenes exist nowhere and everywhere at once. The signifiers of masculinity soften on her canvases, awash with loose brush strokes and bulging belly fat. In _Rear Projection: Soft_ (2013), a stout man holds a flashlight to his mouth as a magisterial light emanates from his bare behind, bathing a piece of floating excrement in a glowing orb. Here, when he opens his mouth, he is at once empty, and to put it crassly, “full of shit.” Filth appears in _Avatar_ (2012) as well. In this work, a grinning man scrambles up a ladder balanced on a mucky swamp as the quagmire gurgles and rises behind him. Is the mud that trails him his shadow or a haunting apparition? It is only clear that he is stuck – and naked – on a ladder that leads nowhere except down into the bog. In _Up and Down_ (2012), Madani affords this poor character underwear, which he adjusts over his hips, forming a V-shape. The same shape appears upside down above his head, streamlined and clean like a car logo. _Is this his brand?_ It protects him even as it pushes him down. Madani’s farcical depictions highlight the patriarchy’s vulnerability, obstinacy and flaws in a mode that resists geographic specificity. Her men, poor fools, are the butt of a global joke.

The global and local intersect in Meriem Bennani’s video installation, _Gradual Kingdom_ (2016), where two opposing convex and concave screens moulded like step pyramids play outdoor scenes from Bennani’s native Rabat. This recreated form, imagined here as a site for video projection, hearkens back to ancient regional architecture. Most compellingly, the distorting effect of the levelled screens renders ordinary Morocco magically kaleidoscopic. Split into fragments, pastries fry in an open-air market, old women relax on a park bench, clay pots are fired in a ceramics factory kiln, and an iPhone on a stool broadcasts a soccer game. Slowed-down Mariah Carey and karaoke renditions of Justin Bieber play alongside the sounds of the bustling market. While the artist depicts ordinary moments in the city, she applies digital manipulations that squish, exaggerate and even set certain objects and characters aflame. Rabat becomes a video game of sorts, as Bennani magnifies and augments the bodies of hijab-clad women relaxing by the beach. Like absurdist cartoons, they expand and deflate. Her effects highlight hidden subtleties.

The show as a whole teases out the hidden. Sophia Al-Maria’s video _Your Sister_ (2014) plays found footage of women shimmying in the m’alayah style, gyrating seductively in tight dresses and lingerie. They dance in messy rooms strewn with laundry, in the privacy of the home. Yet, here, these private, sensual encounters are broadcast to the world. Nearby, eyes peer out from a slit in the cover of French-language magazine _Téléramadan_. Turning its pages reveals first a veiled and then an uncovered woman’s face. The magazine uses the month of Ramadan to open dialogues about Islam today. Its editors declare, “We are the great replacement of a generation that is active on the Internet and that counters low blows. A generation of artists left alone in the battle, taking on all the fights.” The conversation is necessary, as it deconstructs the ways the region and its culture has shifted and changed. What lies underneath is not always what we expect.

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This article reviews the group show “We Dance, We Smoke, We Kiss”, which showed at Fahrenheit Gallery-FLAX Foundation in Los Angeles from September 16 to December 10, 2016.

We Dance, We Smoke, We Kiss

Jesse McKee is a curator and writer in Vancouver, where he works as Head of Strategy at 221A. Previously he was the Curator of Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery and a curatorial resident with tranzit, Romania and Things that can happen, Hong Kong. 

Bellingham is a sought-after destination for Vancouverites looking for cheap flights to destinations within the US. This modest town, with fewer than 100,000 citizens, is just an hour and a half south of Western Canada’s largest city, lying in the shadow of Mount Baker and resting on the edge of the Pacific. Rather than paying for the convenience of taking a flight from YVR, you can take a shuttle bus from downtown Vancouver to the Bellingham Airport and often save hundreds of dollars. As Fran Lebowitz has said, her generation wasted their time on drugs and promiscuity, while my generation is content to waste our time trying to find cheap cellphone plans and plane tickets. Another writer on my mind these days is Marcel Proust, who tells us that many potentials are found in lost time. This past summer I encountered another proposition through the _Primary Research Lab_.

Mostly a collection-based exhibition and series of live events curated by Lee Plested at Western Washington University’s art gallery in Bellingham, this exhibition played partly outside across the balmy season, hosting weekly performances and scenarios enacted by contemporary artists from the Cascadian region. Different aspects of _Primary Research Lab_ responded to the notable and crucial public art collection on campus, which features major works by Anthony Caro, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, Isamu Noguchi, Bruce Nauman, Lloyd Hamrol, Joel Shapiro, Mia Westerlund Roosen and Mark di Suvero, among many others.

In the gallery, Plested pulled from the collection to organize a spacious yet engaged approach to Minimalism across schools, from the inclusion of works like Josef Albers’ _Gray Instrumentation I_ (from a portfolio of 12 prints he made in 1974); the slightest and most transcendent drawing in the show by Agnes Martin, _Untitled_ (1965); and Michael Heizer’s _Dissipate/ runic casting/a match drop_ (1968), a collage – unstable and full of potential – made with instructional drawings on several pieces of paper and a couple of fresh matches stuck to the surface with Scotch tape. The most recent work in the gallery was by Vancouver-based design duo Amber Frid-Jimenez and Joe Dahmen, whose _They Grow Without Us_ (2016) is a honeycomb-shaped sectional bench, made of composite sawdust brick that’s brewing with mycelium networks so that every so often the furniture sprouts an oyster mushroom overnight. The works are further accompanied by a dense, lab-like area of books, drawings and research materials by these same artists, held in the archives of the university, as well as recorded interviews and moving image works that echo the reductive and generative spirits inside the gallery.

Throughout the summer, across the campus, artists enacted their own forms of research and presentations that responded to the public works collection. Gareth Moore encouraged his audience to lie on the ground blindfolded while he played a sculptural soundscape inspired by Mark di Suvero’s _For Handel_ (1975), dedicated to the composer of the same name and located on the grounds of the Music Department. Moore performed many sounds, including: a mouse decoy, a dog biscuit rattle, a gong, a mosquito coil, an electric car engine, deer rut incense, a jar of curdling milk, outer space, mud, peanut butter on steel, tossed white bread and an old tire rolling. Seattle-based dancer Matt Drews focused his engagement towards Scott Burton’s _Two-Part Chairs, Right Angle Version (a Pair)_ (1983–1987). Flanking the entrance of a building, Drews and another man framed the sculptures as a site of connection, while the performers’ bodies become active through both utilitarian and weight-bearing positions, referencing a sacred series of movements while appearing as individual and contemporary bodies soaked with personal knowledge and personal encounters. Adding to a further collaborative spirit in these acts, Seattle-based artist Dawn Cerny and Vancouver-based artist Colleen Brown paired up to offer a series of campy tour-guidelike excursions, heightened with props and costumes for improvisation by the artists and the audience. Mostly focused on the iconic male artists on the campus, Cerny and Brown poked at the seriousness with which Minimalism was embedded at its point of creation. Relaxing things to a conversational tone, away from the weighed _histoires_, they led the audience into a series of primary and personal encounters with works that allowed for a sincerely playful mode that earnestly reanimated the sculptures towards the transcendental experiences alluded to inside the gallery. Other situations enacted by the exhibition included curatorial gestures that collided the personal, social and spatial qualities of campus life and public sculpture. For instance, a picnic was hosted on Bruce Nauman’s _Stadium Piece_ (1999), inviting us to sit on the wide, raised, staircase-like structure and commune, meeting the artist’s ambitions for the work to be a model or form for students to learn how to communicate and perform in larger environments.

Through _Primary Research Lab_ the public sculpture collection at Western Washington University was imbued with moments of virtue around that notion of lost time. Time spent with art, time spent outside in the summer, time spent with friends and strangers who may become friends. Through these moments, the American Minimalist school was re-schooled, and perhaps deskilled a little, by the contemporary artists encountered through the project. This dose of the messy and more fragile ecologies of life, at the eclipse of capitalism that was 2016, revealed the longevity and evolving roles of this kind of work. This longevity is born thanks to the alchemy of time that the works are able to continue to create amongst groups and communities, newcomers, those from away, students, artists and the appreciatively curious. We may not have been millionaires by our bank accounts or pocket books, so those deals on phone plans and plane tickets may have been at the backs of our minds. But, amongst these works and these activities, we were made to feel like millionaires by our calendars and watches. And with that kind of shift in perception, the possible becomes visible.

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This article is a review of “Primary Research Lab, Minimalist Labs and Field Research”, a group exhibition that also featured live performances and events. This show took place from June 25 to August 30, 2016 at Bellingham’s Western Gallery in Western Washington University.

Primary Research Lab

Georgia Phillips-Amos is a British-American writer. Her art criticism has appeared in Border Crossings, The Village Voice, BOMB, and Signal. She lives in New York and Toronto. 

In London’s Hyde Park, in the bend of the Serpentine Lake, the late architect Zaha Hadid built the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in 2013 from two separate elements: a repurposed brick gunpowder store from 1805, and a woven, glass-fibre tensile structure. In her eulogy celebrating Hadid, Lebanese-American artist, essayist and poet Etel Adnan praised the architect’s curved constructions, writing that each of her buildings “has a poetry, a spirituality such that in sheltering us, it makes us dream.” Two months after Hadid’s death in March 2016, the Serpentine opened _The Weight of the World_, Adnan’s first-ever solo exhibition in the UK.

Born in Beirut, in 1925, Adnan has spent her adult life between California, Paris and Beirut. She has written more than a dozen books of poetry and prose in English, and with her writing, she confronts war, destruction and despair in the Arab world and beyond. With her painting, she offers a different perspective: a refuge against that severe reality. The humility of her practice and her earnest appreciation for beauty are rare among contemporary artists. Critic Negar Azimi calls Adnan’s success “a corrective to exuberant art-world bling.” Within the Serpentine Gallery’s walls this corrective is at work; with each piece Adnan creates a meditative space moored by brilliant colours, in hues ranging from Helen Frankenthaler’s landscapes to Fra Angelico’s monastic cells.

Three woven tapestries cover the wide wall at the gallery entrance. They were designed by the artist and made by hand at Ateliers Pinton, in the Commune of Felletin, in France. One of the tapestries, _Acrobaties Printanières_ (1967-70/2015), calls attention to itself by containing the only trace of a white background in the room. Adnan often begins with a red square and piles on other colours. In this composition, her square is distinct but roughly hewn, bleeding into a larger yellow square below. These squares float above a splash of red – in the shape of a buffalo or a Lynda Benglis polyurethane pour – set between a dashed foliage of greens and brown. A web of black lines is woven over the colour, connecting a constellation of dots scattered over the wool, and echoing the black dots and lines in the paintings of Joan Miró. To complete the sense of entropy, a black moon stands alone over the bare white wool. “Images are not still,” Adnan has said. The balance in this tapestry slid every time I looked at it.

A long wall left of the tapestries includes 13 untitled oil paintings from 1964–1987\. They are patchworks of thick colour scraped into bands by Adnan’s palette knife, raised from the surface and set in contrast to each other. This surface work creates the effect of weather that escapes reproduction in photographs. Adnan is a master of depicting the margins of the day, sunset and sunrise, when colours burn brightest. In Night, her latest poetry collection, Adnan writes, “We have to break the absolute into prisms that distort perception.” These remarkable early colour studies can be read as prismed landscapes. Without titles I could not tell where they were set, but each painting made me forget where I was. Adnan’s partner, Simone Fattal, wonders if they are “formations that can be seen on the moon.”

Twenty new paintings form the title series The Weight of the World (2016), and each contains at least one full moon. Flatter than her early work, and painted more thinly, these orbs rest flush against empty skies. Lacking the layered and craggy texture of her earlier paintings, these are closer in form to Ellsworth Kelly’s colour cutouts. The series is displayed in its entirety on a single narrow wall, in a 2 × 10 grid, making it impossible to take in one work without the others. The horizon line of each canvas is not absolute but knocked off kilter by neighbouring horizons.

A break from colour awaits in the two transepts that slice across the width of the Serpentine. Narrow and high-pitched, these separate rooms stand hushed in low natural light from the skylights above. The floor of one room is filled with squares of carpet, and a film is projected onto a screen in the room’s centre. Adnan’s film _Motion_ (1980–89) is all washed out greys, shot on a Super 8 in New York. A collage of images, it shows the city’s refracted light, smoke stacks, seagulls and barge boats, in a mash-up of nature and industry. The second transept holds a series of black-and-white folded cityscapes: the leporello book _San Gimignano_; and two _shoji_, Japanese screen doors, their backgrounds gently aglow. Speaking of her landscapes, Adnan has said, “I want to be there,” and the feeling is palpable.

When asked about the histories of violence that underpin her work, Adnan has said, “We all breathe it. We are all in it. Nobody can say ‘I don’t know.’” At 91, Adnan’s life has been shaped by the states of crisis and war she that has lived through. She argues that all of our lives are. Her keeping of history through poetry and prose is blunt and devastating. Yet her work in all mediums contains glints of hope. “We must be happy!” Adnan insists, “Happiness is resistance.” She often describes Beirut as it was in her childhood: “It smelled of jasmine and orange blossoms, and you could look at the sea from almost any street.” In the face of perpetual war, Adnan’s visual work offers this kind of reprieve.

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This is a review of Etel Adnan’s first solo exhibition The Weight of the World, which showed at Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, UK from June 2 to September 11, 2016.

Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World

Kegan McFadden is a writer and independent curator whose research explores printed matter, recent histories and melancholy. McFadden’s curatorial investigation into magazines produced by artists in Canada during the 1990s, >em>Yesterday was Once Tomorrow (or, A Brick is a Tool)</em> will be hosted by The Banff Centre later this year.

We are rarely told the story of a little boy who would make his own fun by cutting up newspapers and magazines only to collage them back together into a world that made sense only to him. What would that boy fantasize over? Lying on the living room floor or concentrating at the kitchen table, too-big scissors in his still-tiny hands, his imagination would conflate the allure of faraway places or experiences equally as foreign to his young eyes with the way men fit together when they aren’t engaged in war; or how he might become someone, anyone, different than who he was, if only the ads in those cut-up magazines showed his skin tone. That little boy we are rarely told about knew at an early age that popular culture was a road map and that when you deviate from those glossy confines you can create your strategy for living.

Ho Tam doesn’t exhibit very often these days. He has had a career of note, having immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong when he was 14, coming of age during the late 1970s, being employed as a social worker for many years, only to make art his full-time pursuit at the age of 30\. And now, some 25 years later, after a decade spent teaching on the west coast, his engagement with the world of contemporary art is through the publishing of artist books (his own and by other artists who interest him).

The story of the little boy continues. He grew up to be so ambitious as to attempt to photograph everyone in the world. This is how Ho Tam’s series, _Posing_, started. First there was a trip to Six Flags Amusement Park where he asked strangers to pose depending on their attire (white shirts or black shirts). Then there was Grand Central Station, where he documented the “casual Friday” uniform of the desk jockeys who traded in their drab wools, en masse, for blue shirts and khakis. This indexical analysis continued to encompass monks in Thailand whose golden yellow robes and shaved heads have a similar but opposite effect to a group of men documented at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition grounds proudly displaying their recently won stuffed animals. The series comprising this body of work, viewable for the first time as unbound book pages teamed with the original photographs, leads to thoughts about class and race; about post-9/11 mob mentality; about gender and multiple as well as mutable masculinities. This is how Ho Tam navigates the world, using the lens as a means to capture likenesses and as a tool for further categorization. The _Posing_ portraits are contrasted by three distinct but equally inquisitive projects: _Barbershops_ (2014), _Medical Cabinets_ (2014– 2016) and _The Greatest Story Ever Told_ (2015). From a pictorial investigation of storefront shops in New York City’s Chinatown that might as well have escaped a black-and-white _LIFE_ magazine spread to covert snapshots of friends’ bathroom cabinets to the fantastical reimagining of fables based on world currency, these recent projects show a further meandering through the world.

_The Greatest Story Ever Told_ displayed as an opened bookwork pinned to the wall (as is all the printed matter in this exhibition), reveals a cohesiveness in approach that acts as a key with which to open the entire exhibition. The book is a collage of figures, animals and architecture selected from global currency and arranged to illustrate brief stories of the artist’s making (or is it the other way around?). There is “The Elephant and the Frog,” a fable of miscegenation and the reality of limitations, in which the denouement sees both animals weighing the same amount on a scale. Here, their two-dimensional qualities become an equalizing factor instead of an impediment or weapon of alienation. Ho Tam’s critique of the world and its power structures is furthered when the question of what exactly constitutes a city is posed in “City Planning.” A list of amenities is rattled off – houses for our citizens, hospital, schools, a fire hall – which quickly jumps from amenities to luxury: “In the years to come, what else should we ask for? A nuclear plant and an Olympic stadium for all.” The conspicuous gender imbalance on bank notes, as depicted through the portraits of generals, philosophers, prime ministers and royalty (all male), is made clear with “A Place Called Harem.” The artist once again collages smiling and serious faces of men into a single scene in order to contextualizes the fantasy of a house full of powerful and revered figures all gathered to serve the pleasure of a single woman – in this case, Bubusara Beyshenalieva (1926–1973), one of the founders of the Kyrgyz ballet. Of course it doesn’t really matter that it’s Beyshenalieva; it could just as easily have been the Queen of England, or now Harriet Tubman.

Each of the photographic projects described above made their way into artist books under the imprint of HOTAM and now they are once again released from their covers to make up the exhibition _Cover to Cover_ at PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts in Winnipeg. It’s worth noting that even though his exhibition is at PLATFORM, the artist doesn’t think of himself as a photographer in the formal sense. Ho Tam identifies, at least these days, as a maker of books. 

The aping of the magazine format is something Ho Tam has all but perfected. He stops at the cover, and maybe rightfully so. The checkerboard-patterned installation, _Magazine Covers_ (2014), is humorous in its surreal juxtaposing of original photographs the artist has taken with real-world titles familiar to most newsstand browsers. The appropriated titles – _Artforum, Brides, Dwell, Interview, National Geographic, Popular Science, Vanity Fair_ – run the gamut and the photographic pairings are jarring only when we allow our expectations to tell us what should be on these covers, instead of imagining what a little boy with a pair of scissors – now a middle-aged man with Photoshop – might make us see.

issue-133-p65-67.pdf

This article reviews Ho Tam’s solo exhibition “Cover To Cover”, which showed at Winnipeg’s PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, from November 4 to December 17, 2016.

Ho Tam: Cover to Cover

##### bq. I hold that the formation of recollection is never posterior to the formation of perception; it is contemporaneous with it . . .  
—Henri Bergson

I first encountered Yuki Kimura’s work in 2005 at her solo exhibition, _untitled puzzle_, at Kodama Gallery in Osaka. By this time, Kimura had been working with photography as her primary medium for more than 10 years. Her first solo exhibition with Taka Ishii Gallery (by whom she is still represented) was in 1995\. During the 1990s and early 2000s, when the documentary point-and-shoot aesthetic of the so-called _onnanoko shashinka_, or “girl photographer,” movement was at its peak in Japan, Kimura was instead employing a conceptual approach to staged photography.

By 2005, digital photography had transitioned from specialized professional applications to global vernacular, but as images became ephemeral, Kimura celebrated their materiality. _untitled puzzle_ marked a shift in the artist’s practice towards a sculptural engagement with found images. A sequence of five standard 5 × 7s, for example, involved a table breaking out of the picture plane in different ways, eventually replacing the entire image space with a rectangle of wood. Recent work explores increasingly specific cultural and historical references, but continues to embrace the unsolvable forms of entropy that occur when images are objects.

_Kagami mochi_ (“mirror rice cake”) is an edible ornament that embodies object and image. A stack of two disks of _mochi_, one representing reality and the other its reflection, are adorned by a bitter orange called a _daidai_ (“several generations”). It is also the Japanese New Year’s decoration evoked in the title of Kimura’s recent exhibition at CCA Wattis in San Francisco: _Inhuman Transformation of New Year’s Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2\. Kagami mochi_ signifies both the passage of time, and a specific moment in time. It remains on display in Japanese households as a decorative and symbolic object across the new year until the second Saturday or Sunday of January, when it is broken and eaten during the Shinto ritual _kagami biraki_ (“mirror opening”).

Kimura’s exhibition opened on December 13, 2016, and remains on display across the new year. While there were no direct representations of _kagami mochi_ in the exhibition, its stacked form, shifts in symbolic and use value, multiplicity and the commemoration of the passage of time were present throughout. Ten years had passed since I last experienced Kimura’s work in person, but arriving in the expansive main space at CCA Wattis, the works elicited the pleasure of discovery that I had felt a decade earlier. There were just four works in the exhibition, but the generous layout was necessary: not only for visitors to engage the work, but also for the works to engage each other. In Kimura’s conceptually resonant practice, all spaces are implicated.

The largest of the works, the centrally located _Table Stella_ (2016), consists of six table structures scaled up by twos, and installed in a triangular formation. Each of the six surfaces is laminated with a reproduction of the same image, a photograph Kimura found in New York. The image is slightly out of focus, but it is clear that it depicts a mirror in some kind of medical office. The mirror, however, reflects nothing. Its surface is black, dense, a negation. These six dark pictures, however, don’t speak by themselves. They are adorned with constellations of ashtrays that the artist sourced on eBay. Many are lumpy and organ-like, made of polished stone in bright orange, burnt umber and olive. From rocks to ashtrays to artwork, these are objects twice removed. These receptacles may have once appeared meteoric with smoking craters full of butts, but clean air laws and Kimura’s artwork liberated them. Now, along with the six image-tables below them, these groupings of cast-offs are vessels for new ideas.

This engagement with multiplicity is reflected in _Division and Revision #2_ (2016), two large seemingly identical photographs of a three-tiered stand populated with unopened wine bottles and partly consumed liquor bottles. The stand’s contents evidence celebration, but did the picture commemorate a recent party, an event in progress, things to come? Speculating on the ontology of images is an enticing, but losing game, and even these two images are not exactly the same. Two small spots on one print suggest dust spots were touched up on the other, or perhaps Kimura came upon the image as a pair of prints in different condition and blew them both up as she found them. Either way, when noticed, this minor aesthetic shift reminds us of the latent potential of all images to be other than they are.

Across the room another table is covered in objects. For _Table Matematica_ (2016), Kimura designed a long thin table in reflective black marble and chrome adorned with multiples of all 13 internationally available sized bottles of Jägermeister liquor. The myriad unopened bottles, reflected in the black marble surface of the table, were inspired by Kimura’s engagement with Bergsonian concepts of multiplicity. They also activate dialogue with the ashtrays on the image of the black mirror in _Table Stella_, and the bottles on the three-tiered table in _Division and Revision #2_. Kimura, referring to _Table Matematica_, told me that she would often find Jägermeister empties scattered on the streets where she lives in Berlin. With their sloped shoulders, the bottles reminded her of people. The associations building upon each other became dizzying, as I began to think about Kimura’s early-2000s staged photographs, many featuring consumer goods like cigarette packages in mimetic encounters with human subjects.

The multiplicities present in Kimura’s work are compounded yet clarified by the deceptively simple _Mirrors_ (2016), a pair of large mirrors identical in size to the photographs _Division and Revision #2_. Unlike the other works in the exhibition, which point to potential futures and pasts, _Mirrors_ indexes the precise moment it is encountered. The work directs the viewer’s gaze outward to what is happening elsewhere in the gallery: itself an object and an image that changes based on the contents within. Like other objects in the exhibition, the overall space is prone to shifts in temporal, economic, social and use value, and in the context of Kimura’s exhibition, these transformations bear reflection.

issue-133-p66-68.pdf

This is a review of Yuki Kimura’s exhibition “Inhuman Transformation of New Year’s Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2”, which showed at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts from December 13, 2016 to February 25, 2017.

Yuki Kimura: Inhuman Transformation of New Year's Decoration, Obsolete Conception or 2

Grace Linden is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of York. 

In 2010, Jennifer Doyle, professor of English at University of California, Riverside, filed a Title IX complaint against a student who was harassing her. Doyle was unhappy with the resulting inquiry, and her perception of the campus (both UC Riverside, specifically, and the campus as a concept) were profoundly altered. Her experience with university administration serves as a jumping off point for the new book _Campus Sex, Campus Security_ (2015), which examines the security apparatus in place on college campuses in the United States. In the first pages, she writes, “I had direct experience with how the administrative structures ostensibly designed to protect the integrity of a campus produce the campus as a conflict zone.”[^1] This, in essence, is the driving force behind the slim volume.

Of late, college students’ safety has been a reoccurring discussion point, particularly in light of growing attention given to sexual assault cases. _Campus Sex, Campus Security_ is an important and laudable critical text insofar as it endeavours to probe these issues. But for Doyle, rape is not confined to sexual acts. Instead, assault encompasses all the ways in which students and faculty are left unprotected: in this cosmology, the university becomes the rapist.[^2] Indeed, there is relatively little talk of sexual assault; rather, the author begins by discussing the now notorious pepper spraying of Occupy protestors by campus police at the University of California, Davis.

Doyle accuses universities of favouring risk management over real change and nowhere is this more apparent than the case of Penn State University. In 2012, Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach, was found guilty of 45 counts of sexual abuse of young boys. The conviction led to the firing of the university’s President, Vice President, Athletic Director and Head Football Coach, all of whom were found to have had prior knowledge of Sandusky’s actions. That these decision makers were in “hierarchical relationships”[^3] with one another exemplifies the difficulties of effecting true change within schools themselves.

Physical assault and the inadequacy of response by the university are obviously linked, but the size of this book (141 pages including endnotes) limits the depth of discussion. In fact, _Campus Sex, Campus Security_ feels like two different texts: one half examines assaults of the body, while the other, the extensive and pervasive failures of the university. Individual assault cases are jarring, but the larger attack against the university system as a whole is weak. At one point, Doyle begins a diatribe against the rapidly rising costs of California’s public universities and the debt many students must take on: “The assumption is that students will mortgage their adult life.”[^4] And, yes, while UC Davis Occupy protesters were in part demonstrating against tuition hikes, the narrative around the price of education is for a different book. Doyle’s disenchantment with university education is clear and important, but her argument about assault is undermined when the book becomes a vehicle for her complaints.

However, it is Doyle’s use of sweeping, unspecific language and staccato sentences that most detracts from the narrative. Her use of “you” and “we” to include the reader attempts to create a shared sense of outrage, such as when she writes, “They spray us, in our faces.”[^5] But this false sense of empathy flattens any emotional connection that might have been forming. Similarly, the clipped sentences and one-line paragraphs are meant to underscore the seriousness of the argument at hand, as seen here in this stand-alone paragraph, 

> “A woman violated by a man becomes a woman at war with the world.”[^6]

But the examples themselves possess a gravitas that is evident without Doyle’s extra efforts. Perhaps in her other books, _Sex Objects: Art and the Dialects of Desire_ (2006) and _Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art_ (2013), Doyle had to prove that these were subjects worth writing about, but assault in all its forms possesses an inherent power.

This is a book (and an issue) that needs specificity and while Doyle is precise when recounting the Penn State scandal and the pepper spraying at UC Davis, much of her analysis is vague. In fact, there is no talk about the actual implementation of Title IX, something she should be able to relate firsthand. Title IX says that, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”[^7] While familiarity with the text of the statute is one thing, understanding its execution is another and is not often discussed. Title IX, Doyle explains, is fundamental to a “university’s sense of security”[^8] but how remains unclear.

Still, despite its flaws, _Campus Sex, Campus Security_ is a necessary conversation, and it marks a departure from Doyle’s earlier scholarship, which has focused on queer theory, art and sports. Doyle’s insights are intriguing, but the research, and the national conversation, would benefit from a deeper dive.

[^1]: Jennifer Doyle, _Campus Sex, Campus Security_ (South Pasadena, Ca: Semiotext(e), 2015) p. 8
[^2]: Doyle, p. 32
[^3]: Doyle, p. 39
[^4]: Doyle, p. 96
[^5]: Doyle, p. 98
[^6]: Doyle, p. 40
[^7]: “Title IX and Sex Discrimination,” U.S Department of Education, accessed on 25 August 2016\. “http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/tix\_dis.html”:http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/tix\_dis.html
[^8]: Doyle, p. 24

issue-133-p68-69.pdf

This review, written by Grace Linden, discusses “Campus Sex, Campus Security” (South Pasadena, Ca: Semiotext(e), 2015, authored by Jennifer Doyle.

Campus Sex, Campus Security by Jennifer Doyle

Whitney Brennan is the Master of Arts Critical and Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia and works as a freelance curator with Decoy Magazine. 

Following their first issue in 2012, feminist materialist journal _LIES_ produced a second journal of essays and poetry with _Volume II_ (2015). The survivors, practitioners, scholars and activists who form the editors and contributors of _LIES_ explore the social and political conditions that have categorized them as bodies with labels: “woman,” “queer,” “Black,” “other,” “not-men.” They interrogate these terms through a materialist lens and question how the publication of a journal functions to express their feminisms, their voices and their experiences. Their writings express a deep mistrust of, or a call for the abolition of, colonial language, in particular of gendered binaries, which they argue further centralize colonial hierarchies and patriarchal social structures. Writing from multiple cities across the US and London, UK, _LIES_ is run by a queer, feminist collective, one which they stress is in continuous tension and reconciliation. As such, their struggles do not always intersect and their opinions sometimes diverge.

Part of the publication’s solidarity stems from a desire to circulate information. _LIES_ is published to continue discussions of issues of violence and oppression, to introduce people and new ideas to one another. The other unifying attribute is its dedication to autonomous feminist practice. While their identities may not always align, _LIES_ contributors emphasize that their autonomy is consolidated by their shared experiences under oppressive systems of power and with patriarchal violence.

_LIES_ is a vivid example of how textual practices, such as journalistic publications, function within the constraints of oppressive language. Textual practices are experiments in navigating language, but paradoxically the processes often require language that has oppressed or has inflicted violence on those attempting to use it. Such contradictions are deep wounds to bear for those who experience violence and oppression, and deeper wounds still to heal without having the words that describe your experience in the world. As _LIES_ demonstrates, out of their struggles came survival; out of oppression came autonomy.

Unlike _Volume I, Volume II_ does not have thematic sections of writing. Instead, the journal flows through 22 essays and poems, interspersed with illustrations. _Volume II_ maintains, however, a similar thematic overtone to the previous issue, including essays from trans and Latina prostitutes, Black and Indigenous women and non-binary individuals. The issue opens with the essay “Against Gender, Against Society” by Black critical theorist nila nokizaru. nokizaru is critical of the limitations of gender categories, arguing that gender is inherently violent and restrictive, a form of imperial oppression that threatens with heteronormative assimilation and thus, erasure. In their anarchist fashion, nokizaru explores the dangerous constraints gender imposes on individuals, positing that a complete abolition of gender is not only revolutionary, but also necessary.

In “Inversion and Invisibility: Black Women, Black Masculinity, and Anti-Black- ness,” Black feminist theorist LaKeyma King discusses the pitfalls of intersectionality. She argues that while intersectionality has been useful to “orient many theoretical efforts to reconcile anti-racism and anti-sexism,” these efforts often result in a narrow focus on one issue, with the negation of the other. She then disseminates theories on the feminizing of Black men and the espousing of Black women from femininity. Calling for theoretical writing on violence against Black women to also inversely discuss the violent circumstances that Black men experience, King’s criticism demands a vital reconsideration of intersectional feminist theory.

Disseminating gender and race, and their implicitly violent consequences, the _LIES_ writers craft a manifesto of alternative methods of fighting patriarchal power and oppression, as in Sepand Mashiahof’s essay, “Shout to Cissy Girls,” a call to cis women to stand alongside trans women. Mashiahof implores, “We need to share the tools that we’ve gathered for our survival.” Seeking common ground between gendered bodies may be a stronger strategy against a common systemic oppressor than fighting amongst ourselves. Her words are a powerful call to action.

One of the more prominent poems is “Grateful,” by Monica Stevens, which evokes a trans prostitute’s experience with drugs and trauma, and speaks of a strong will to survive and persevere. _LIES_ aims to find a balance between theoretical and lyrical writing so incorporating poems like Stevens’ provides an effective form of mediation between the two.

Furthering the discussion of gendered inequality, Jack Frost and Eli Long explore gender-related subjugation and erotic desire in “Notes on the Erotic in the Capitalist Mode of Production.” They posit that feminized labour, compounded by the dominance of heterosexuality, is often inherently eroticized, and becomes increasingly complicated when “… _all_ \[sic\] erotic relations reproduce capitalist – and hence, hierarchized, racialized, and gendered – social relations.” They parallel LaKeyma King’s argument that qualifying bodies as ‘feminine’ is not tied to gender; it is ‘feminized’ bodies that experience violence, i.e., are emasculated. Frost and Long reason that it is feminized bodies – of many genders – that perform the erotic for a predominantly cis-male clientele. They then call for the inclusion and emphasis of feminized voices in politicized discussions of eroticized labour.

L. Cornum’s essay on colonial violence in Canada and the US discusses the materialist nature in which Native women’s bodies bear the burden of representation of their people’s lands, and thus, their conquest. Her essay is an in-depth and provoking analysis of how Native women’s bodies suffer violence as the means to colonial domination, and how women-led moments like Idle No More should prioritize, “The goal of ending violence against women into demands for tribal sovereignty.”

Through a collection of voices, _LIES_ pursues a distinct practice of feminist criticism, crafting revolution with words that have been reclaimed, repurposed, or done away with. The contributors to _Volume II_ trace their feminisms from the dissolution of gender to the struggles augmented by racial or economic affiliation. Their writing uses academic language and inquisition, but resists the pedagogical insistence that theory is law. Each essay incorporates diverse perspectives and considerations, while simultaneously questioning the very terminology that has been employed. Their autonomy is not anarchic; it is essential. Their words are not for everyone, but neither have they written a book only for themselves.

issue-133-p69-71.pdf

This review, written by Whitney Brennan, discusses the second (2015) issue of feminist material journal LIES, which is run by a queer feminist collective based out of cities in the US and London, UK.

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Issue 133