Column

**Geneviève Wallen** is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer interested in issues of ethnocultural representational spaces in Canada. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogue, and alternative BIPOC historical timelines.

This summer, I spent time with the collection of interviews comprising _13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics_ (2002). Introduced to me by my predecessors, this publication was described as an exercise in archiving, historicizing, revising and reframing Canada’s artistic landscape from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Published by Artexte Editions, and edited by Richard Fung and Monika Kin Gagnon, this anthology focuses on how racialized artists, critics and curators mobilized against the homogeneity of the artistic fabric at that time. Fung and Gagnon’s 11 contributors—Cameron Bailey, Dana Claxton, Karma Clarke-Davis, Andrea Fatona, Sharon Fernandez, Gaylene Gould, Richard William Hill, Ken Lum, Scott Toguri McFarlane, Alanis Obomsawin and Kerri Sakamoto—were invited to contemplate issues related to cultural production, access, education, globalization, race politics, post-racial ideologies and neoliberalism. From interruptions within institutions—such as Hill’s curatorial and community work at the AGO, or Fernandez’s role as the equity coordinator at the Canada Council for the Arts—to collective enterprises like _FUSE_ magazine or The Pomelo Project, many policy moments, alternative platforms and projects conducive to intercommunal dialogues live herein. Contextualized and compartmentalized in six chapters (“Framings,” “Art or/+Politics,” “Into the Institution,” “Imaginative Geographies,” “(CAN) Asian Trajectories” and “Speculations”), the book traces a history that shaped the cultural climate not only at the beginning of the new millennium but also, as it turns out, the one in which I’m operating today.

Interestingly, _13 Conversations_ is sort of a sequel, or sister, publication to _Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art_ (2000)—also edited by Gagnon—a collection of essays that delves more specifically into significant developments in Canadian artistic politics during the 1980s and 1990s, including accounts of the critical role of Minquon Panchayat and their anti-racist interventions and mobilizations, the collapse of the first artist-run centre coalition (the Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres), as well as the creation of the Advisory Committee to the Canada Council for Racial Equality in the Arts. Gagnon writes in the introduction to _13 Conversations_ that after _Other Conundrums_, she was “suffering from a solitude of thought related to the very issues of race and culture \[that her\] book had engaged,” going on to say that “the present moment… is vexed by a strange brew of nostalgia, burn-out and a sense that we have somehow ‘moved on,’” _13 Conversations_ was instigated to continue generating more conversational pathways.

The book is premised on three questions posed by Gagnon: “How have cultural race politics arrived at the present moment, itself characterized by uneasy solitudes of thought? What might enable a more complex mapping of relations between this recent past and the dispersed present? And what might an analysis of this period enable for the future?” Each time I return to the interviews, I’m left with yet more questions about the ghosts that are still haunting and taunting us almost two decades later.

In the opening chapter, there is a fascinating and extensive meditation between Fung and Gagnon on their ambivalence about the term “identity politics.” On the one hand, it is a fixed, flattening label for a strain of cultural production, but, on the other hand, it is an ever-shifting term that keeps anti-racism efforts and various racial and ethnic realities connected to the history of race politics that fuelled the civil rights movements and First Nations’ claims for self-governance and land sovereignty in the 1960s and 1970s. The editors offer the term “cultural race politics” as a way to pull different perspectives on the stakes, limitations, fatigue, malaise, horizons, institutionalization and commodification of BIPOC visual languages. Setting the tone for the ensuing conversations, these linguistic gymnastics are attentive to how value, legitimacy, success and institutional support function as a digestive system for creative works made by under-represented communities, and provide insight about the aesthetics of cultural difference and various articulations of “otherness” as seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

My understanding is that the past’s exhaustion with “identity politics” in Canada’s early claims of multiculturalism was a gateway for the current climate and its conversations about the currency of trauma-based works. Limitations encountered in identity-based works evolved with the introduction of intersectional debates and a push for dialogues highlighting the complexity of personhood, which disrupted liberal ideals of a coherent public sphere. Platforms were created for stories involving trauma to unfold, which, in a short amount of time, created an institutional hunger for trauma-based work. The suffering of Black and Brown bodies thus became an agent in securing funding, now pigeonholing and paralyzing the creative energies of racialized practitioners. Vivek Shraya’s _Trauma Clown_ (2019) photographic series, made in collaboration with Zachary Ayotte, is a great entry point from which to delve into this timely malaise. Shraya wrote about the project earlier this year in _NOW_ magazine, the headline for which reads: “How did the suffering of marginalized artists become so marketable?” Dressed in peach regalia and wearing clown makeup, she draws from dramatic traditions to trace the evolution of her career in the arts, bringing forward a correlation between recent successes and her choice to share traumatic experiences of racism, homophobia and transphobia. From her early debut as the _Lovesick Clown_, who didn’t receive much attention, to the _Trauma Clown_ who is showered with praise and flowers (and who ultimately becomes _Your Clown_), Shraya highlights how works that were originally grounded in self- and collective care and healing are now considered as marketable for their entertainment value.

Another musing that feels especially salient, found across a few interviews, is about the pitfalls of an all-encompassing plea for BIPOC equity and access. Fatona, a curator, researcher and professor, eloquently highlights how in fighting against marginalization, there is a risk that one’s particular “culture and histories re-inscribes hierarchies within the framework of coalition building.” I found this relevant to the increase in anti-oppression training and awareness workshops of late; while such spaces provide platforms for mindful organizing, it is vital to recognize that each community has different needs and challenges, and that white supremacist values can permeate our relationships in multifaceted ways. Fatona reminds the reader to look at the ways in which racial hierarchies have been constructed to rank our worth and determine whose voices get heard. More than ever, individuals identifying under the BIPOC banner need to be self-reflective and accountable about how the oppressed can also become oppressors. This is one of many precious nuggets in the book that, in illustrating past events, have helped me understand the cultural climate that shapes my practice today.

As a Black woman, I aspire to generate a sustainable curatorial practice that binds past, present and future. Lately, I’ve been musing a lot about longevity  
as a manifestation of resistance. Longevity, to me, is holistic: it includes banishing the omnipresent burnout culture perpetuated in the arts and activism; creating a system in which one peaks in waves and at their own pace; cherishing reciprocal and intergenerational relationships; and, continuously introspecting of the past, treating memory as a knowledge. Today’s insistence on the importance of intergenerational dialogues reveals an urgency to examine, expose and act against the systems enabling institutional amnesia in the public sphere, which can negatively impact evolving politics of inclusion.

With this in mind, however, I would also speculate that the shared frustrations among “minoritized” cultural workers and artists, both in _13 Conversations_ and today, stem from a passed down duty to constantly keep pressure. It’s tiring, and it can grind movements into the ground. As universities, major public galleries, art festivals and biennials are co-opting and absorbing grassroots initiatives by hosting and facilitating difficult and complex conversations about ongoing colonial violence, territorial occupation, decolonial practices, Islamophobia and alternative futures, I can’t help but wonder how this moment will be packaged and conveyed to the next generation. Whose terms will this history be written on? After all, an acknowledgment of previous erasures does not guarantee that future erasures aren’t possible.

Writer

Déjà Vu

lg_144-WALLEN

md_144-WALLEN

sm_144-WALLEN

thumbnail_144-WALLEN

144-WALLEN

issue-144-p48-50.pdf

Academia

Publishing

Race

Geneviève Wallen discusses the contemporary relevance of the 2002 anthology _13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics_, edited by Richard Fung and Monika Kin Gagnon, and published by Artexte Editions. 

One Thing: 13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics

Chelsea Rozansky is a writer from Toronto. She was formerly the Writer in Residence at C Magazine.

The emphasis that Dr. Irene Gammel places on _every_. _single_. _word_. suggests that you ought to hang off each. Her 2002 biography of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the New York Dada artist whose probable hand in the authorship of Marcel Duchamp’s _Fountain_ (1917)—a controversial theory first proposed by Gammel, who is also responsible for publishing von Freytag-Loringhoven’s mostly forgotten body of poetry—sparked my own research on authorship, attribution and notability within _C Magazine_’s archives. Given that von Freytag-Loringhoven’s art is regularly concerned with sex, trash, fashion and scatology (_Fountain_ being a notable example), and that she is now regarded as a pioneering figure in performance art, I might have expected that her biographer would be similarly zany. When she spoke about von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gammel reminded me of a mystic: given to an air of kooky otherworldliness that historians, who live in the past, and mystics, who live in the future, both possess.

For reasons mostly to do with scholarly integrity, Gammel could not conclusively say that von Freytag-Loringhoven was the sole author behind _Fountain_. So, instead, she suggested that the object be regarded as a collaboration, both in its conception and in its mythologization after the fact. This proposition offers a helpful structure with which to reframe the larger project of history-making and -telling, one that disrupts dominant narratives, hierarchies and other power asymmetries. In Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he wrote that, “only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.” History can indeed be regarded as a project of selective citation. Most commonly, citation practices are, as noted by Sara Ahmed, “a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies”—in other words, a narrow genealogy that perpetuates limited canons. But at its best, citation might mean, as Gammel reminds us, paying tribute to what might otherwise easily fall into an invisible matrix of collaboration.

Over the past year, while saturating myself in the contents of _C Magazine_’s 35-year history, I homed in on mentions of assistants, collaborators and, largely, individuals alluded to through abstract acknowledgements of the collective labour credited to singly authored artists’ work. I’ve managed to connect with a small selection of these figures whose practices intersect with questions around citation, radical collaboration, determinants of so-called notability, drafting of new historical narratives, working in collectives and the attendant physical, intellectual and artistic labour that may go unrecognized therein. Many of them have formed initiatives that expressly exist to combat systematic silencing that places us at risk of collective forgetting.

  
To read the 2020 Writer in Residence Chelsea Rozansky’s essays in her _Shifting Spotlights_ series, please visit: 

[Shifting Spotlights: The Extended Introduction](https://cmagazine.com/issues/144/shifting-spotlights-the-extended-introduction)</p>

[Love as an Unbodied Archive: Interview with Niamh Dooley](https://cmagazine.com/issues/love-as-an-unbodied-archive-interview-with-niamh-dooley)

[Memorializing in Lower Case: Danilo McCallum](https://cmagazine.com/issues/memorializing-in-lower-case-danilo-mccallum)

[To Be Moved by the Intelligence of Our Processual Becoming: An Interview with Katrina Burch](https://cmagazine.com/issues/to-be-moved-by-the-intelligence-of-our-processual-becoming-an-in)

issue-144-p50-51.pdf

Representation

Memory

Writer in Residence Chelsea Rozansky introduces her C Magazine project _Shifting Spotlights_, a series of interviews though which she investigates authorship, attribution and notability.

Writer in Residence: Shifting Spotlights Introduction

Godfre Leung is a critic and curator.

His writing has recently appeared in _ArtAsiaPacific_ and _ReIssue_, and his recent exhibitions include “Offsite: Christopher K. Ho” (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2022) and “TJ Shin: The Vegetarian” (The Bows, 2022). He is the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəyə̓ m, Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

To my knowledge, the first time Douglas Crimp wrote publicly about his previous writing was in his article “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” published in _October_ in 1980\. Looking back at “Pictures,” from the same publication in the previous year, he admits: _In my attempt to continue the logic of the development I was outlining, I came eventually to a stumbling block…. I effected that transition with a kind of fudge, an epigraph quotation suspended between two sections of the text_.[^1] The quotation was from Henry James’ ghost story “The Jolly Corner” (1908): _The presence before him was a presence._

Douglas goes on to elaborate on that caesura by discussing Sherrie Levine’s photographs of other photographers’ photographs, writing: _The presence that such photographs have for us is the presence of déjà vu, nature as already having been seen, nature as representation_. He added to his theory of postmodernism — which, in “Pictures,” he had expressed in his now-endlessly quoted line _underneath a picture there is always another picture_ — a new, crucial inflection, something he was not yet ready to articulate when he wrote it the first time. The essay ends: _In our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost_.

●●●

Eventually, writing about his previous writing came to constitute a generative practice that dislodged criticism from its historical present (now the past) and held it up to the (new) present. In “The Photographic Activity,” he describes Levine’s photographs of Edward Weston’s photographs of his son, which themselves quote the classical sculptures of Praxiteles, known to us by Roman copies of the lost Greek originals. I’d like to take this _mise en abyme_ as an allegory for Douglas’ enterprise.

●●●

I first decided I wanted to pursue a graduate education in art history — and, furthermore, to do this at the University of Rochester, where Douglas taught — when I read the introduction to his first book, _On the Museum’s Ruins_ (1993). Douglas introduced the book’s stakes by way of a personal anecdote: when men he’d brought home for sex asked about the above-mentioned Levine photographs hanging on his bedroom wall, he’d fudge the truth — _they were pictures by a famous photographer of his son_ — because it was more expedient than explaining appropriation art. But denying the erotic subtext that Levine was responding to in the Weston photographs, he continues, also disavows her critique, which rested squarely on the line between art photography and child pornography. Douglas’ introduction identifies queer politics — wholly absent from the subsequent chapters, which were written five to 15 years earlier — as a concern that he now understood to be central to them. This realization was spurred on, he explains, by the condemnation in the Robert Mapplethorpe obscenity trial of the non-normative sexual subcultures depicted in Mapplethorpe’s photographs. The prosecution’s argument hinged on the guilt-by-association inferred by spurious allegations of child pornography. _Although it was a successful tactical maneuver for the purposes of the obscenity trial, the aesthetic-merit defense made no case at all for the rights of sexual minorities to self-representation_.

I was floored that this collection of essays that art students of a certain age remember as foundational and discipline-defining — including “On the Museum’s Ruins,” “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism” and “Redefining Site Specificity” — could not only be prefaced by an anecdote about the author’s late-night trysts but have their purchase on the world expanded by it.

●●●

The week before I met Douglas for the first time, I bought _Melancholia and Moralism_, his 2002 collection of writings on AIDS, and read it over two nights. In the introduction to that volume, Douglas examines the circumstances that had caused him to contract HIV. That italic is there because at the time of his seroconversion in 1995, Douglas was a longtime committed AIDS activist and world-renowned scholar on the epidemic. He had written art history’s most convincing account of the integration of art into life — his discussion of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ _Safer Sex Comix_ in “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” from his then-already legendary special issue of _October_, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism” (1987) — and that achievement was only a footnote to its more urgent obverse: that the Republican attack on art that we now call the “culture wars” was simultaneously an attack on lives.

The passage is profoundly vulnerable. Douglas articulates the book’s thesis — that any meaningful AIDS activism necessarily requires mourning — in relation to what he describes as his “midlife crisis.” The book identifies sex, and the homophobic repudiation thereof, as the prime agent in the loss of lives to the epidemic, and insists that sex therefore must be actively named and defended. _My youthful sexual confidence and sense of desirability waned_, he admits, before offering several inconclusive hypotheses on why or how that loss led him to risk his seroconversion. His other admission was that he didn’t really know. _All I know for sure is that feelings of loss pervaded my life_.

●●●

Douglas’ memoir _Before Pictures_ was published just less than three years before his passing in the summer of 2019, at the age of 74\. He had been working on it for as long as I’d known him. It was my great privilege to have observed Douglas writing his memoir about his first decade in New York during what was essentially the first decade of my career writing about art. I not only watched him write, I watched him write through his earlier writing and make new sense of things that, as he once pointed out to me — simultaneously an advisorly caveat and a humblebrag — _I wrote when I was probably younger than you are now_. 

In my first semester, Douglas was revising a lecture he had delivered at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that spring for an upcoming speaking engagement at the Hammer Museum. The essay, which became the first chapter of _Before Pictures_, was Douglas’ origin story, only it was actually two stories: his entry into the New York art world in 1968 as a curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim, and a short-lived earlier gig assisting Charles James in preparing the great fashion designer’s own memoir. There is a looseness to the way the two anecdotes fit together, and to how they each spin off into asides. There isn’t a thesis, per se — and, if I’m being honest, that threw me completely for a loop when I heard him deliver it to our department as a practice talk that fall — but the essay’s varied strands set up the memoir’s leitmotif: Douglas’ navigation between two worlds (straight / gay, professional / recreational, public / private) that, to use one of his favourite adverbs, _promiscuously_ intersected. 

There is, however, possibly another fudge. After recounting the first anecdote, he pauses to admit: _I’ve told this story so many times over the years that I no longer know how much of it is simplified in the interest of narrative design and how much is embellishment in the interest of amusement_.

●●●

The fudge, in his original sense of that word from “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” had become, by 2005, a structuring device in his writing. It allows him to write Daniel Buren, Charles James and Frank Lloyd Wright together in _Before Pictures_’ first chapter, and to place subsequent chapters on cruising at the abandoned Chelsea Piers, the architecture of the discotheque 12 West and the cheap seats at the New York City Ballet back-to-back-to-back. 

When I’ve cited the influence of Douglas on my writing in grant proposals, I say that I aspire to the achievement of _Before Pictures_, which wholly convinces the reader (that is, me) to want to experience the work of art through the author’s eyes. But this is maybe not quite the right way to put it. The ways that the things Douglas writes about abut each other create new architectures and geographies; if his entire oeuvre has strived to deprivilege origins and challenge authenticity in one way or another, I think the places he takes us to are not his worlds as he experienced them but actually somewhere just beyond the edges of his writerly imagination.

●●●

Early in my cohort’s methodology colloquium with Douglas, we were reading Frantz Fanon’s _Black Skin, White Masks_ (1952) and, in the exasperated way that is his alone, he expressed his frustration with parsing the passages where Fanon quotes at length from the poetry of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor and others. He said that he just had never understood poetry, which was a little like learning that Beethoven was deaf. A decade later, when my students would express their frustration with the seemingly paratactic section breaks in “On the Museum’s Ruins,” I’d tell them that the fudges — though that’s not the word I used — are the poetry of the argument.

●●●

Buried near the bottom of Douglas’ _New York Times_ obituary, after all his immense contributions: _In his final months he wanted to learn to appreciate poetry. His friends collected and compiled their favourite poems, from which they would read to him_.

[^1]: All quotations in this text are rendered in italics rather than quotation marks. This deviation from orthographic convention is in appreciation of the slipperiness of this text’s subject, and of the spectrality of his writing voice.

lg_144-LEUNG

md_144-LEUNG

sm_144-LEUNG

thumbnail_144-LEUNG

144-LEUNG

issue-144-p72-74.pdf

Poetry

Critic and curator Godfre Leung reflects on his relationship to Douglas Crimp, and Crimps’ relationship to his own writing practice.

Composition: Writing About Douglas Writing About Douglas Writing

lg_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

md_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

sm_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

thumbnail_9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

9CDBB205-2F31-444A-8683-80720CCF4E8A.jpeg

Editorial

Merray Gerges writes around art rather than about it. She studied art history at NSCAD and journalism at King’s University in Halifax, where she co-founded and co-edited CRIT, a free biannual criticism publication. She was editorial resident at Canadian Art in 2016, and assistant editor there from 2017 to 2019\. She is now editorial fellow at C Magazine. 

I began to formulate the questions and concerns that drive this issue when I went to a major biennial, in summer 2018, in which two thirds of the almost 50 artists were people of colour. The celebration of its unprecedented diversity epitomized the sentiment I’d been hearing echoed in Canada after sesquicentennial funding allowed for a seemingly unprecedented inclusion of BIPOC. I was reminded of a prescient quip by artist James Luna, when the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s invasion signaled a “gold rush” for Indigenous artists in 1992, that Paul Chaat Smith recalls: “\[Luna\] knew the sudden attention Indian artists were receiving wasn’t likely to last, and it didn’t.”[^1] Smith quotes Luna: “So when people call me I have to ask ‘Why didn’t you call me before? You’re calling me now, but will you call me in ’93?’” 

Later that summer when I was negotiating with a former employer for an unpaid sick leave to recover from job-induced PTSD and burnout, I had to wonder: What comes after these watershed moments, and how do they structurally take hold? How long could the effects of our work last if the people who are invested in doing it can’t last? I found myself having these conversations with BIPOC curators, critics and artists, who’ve invested in anti-racism activism in the Canadian art world since the ‘80s. Those surges in inclusivity that we’ve witnessed in the past few years are right on schedule in the cycle, many suspected; when the pendulum swings to one end it inevitably swings back to the other. 

After _artnet_ news published a report that found that “despite public perception, progress has in fact been quite limited” for women over the past decade, artist Adrian Piper called out[^2] the publication’s perpetuation of the art world’s pervasive ignorance that the report identifies, listing several significant moments in her career that the publication failed to report on. In a piece published in _C Magazine_’s last issue on “Ownership” titled “The Market Will Never Catch Up,” which questioned why the market in Canada left out the work of Black Canadian artists, the author initially wrote that Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas had been the only two Black women artists—designations that Piper has rejected— to have solo shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). I edited the sentence to include Sandra Brewster to that list, and thus erroneously insinuated that Brewster was the first Black Canadian woman artist to have a solo show at the AGO, when in fact, Brewster was the fourth. This fallacy discounted the work of those who came before her, and epitomizes the rush to proclaim “the first”—a desire to declare progress that is worth interrogating. Who does it serve? And if our predecessors have already done much of the work that we are now attempting but the lineages that connect us to it have been severed by amnesia—both intentional and unintentional, individual and institutional—how do we take stock of their work, to build on it? 

“Visibility comes with its own challenges… Part of that involves a particular refusal of the kinds of practices that try to create singularities and exemplars,” scholar and curator Andrea Fatona tells her former student, curator Liz Ikiriko. The lack of rigorous criticism acknowledging genealogies of Black Canadian cultural production means that “we’re always going to end up with a void in the historical record of what happened,” says Fatona, who curated an exhibition of Winsom’s—one of Brewster’s predecessors—at the AGO. 

But how many times must we repeat histories that are already documented yet perhaps deliberately disregarded? When Toronto artist, educator and activist Pamila Matharu was finally offered her first solo exhibition earlier this year, she centred a discarded archival tape of a 1993 panel at the AGO called “Identity in a Foreign Place.” She asks: “Are we going to end up in the garbage? Are we going to be lost in an archive?” With writer and _MOMUS_ publisher Sky Goodden, she discusses honouring her art ancestors, how her role as an educator is a déjà-vu resistance tactic, and the illness and burnout that this work brings. The concern with institutional amnesia is also at the heart of curator and scholar Rachelle Dickenson’s conversation with her mentor, curator and scholar Lee-Ann Martin. They discuss Martin’s role in the production of two pivotal documents—”The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native Art and Public Art Museums in Canada” and the “Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples”—that examined the systemic exclusion (or troubled inclusion) of Indigenous art three decades ago, and put forth recommendations to alleviate it. 

In their new, collaborative project _Trajet_, artists Dean Baldwin and Caroline Monnet honour the 11,000-year-old footprints made by Indigenous ancestors, which were uncovered in blue clay on the floor of Lake Ontario in 1908, and swiftly cemented over. In conversation with artist and technologist Aamna Muzaffar and writer, critic and editor, Jaclyn Bruneau, the artists discuss how several generations of Anishinaabe, Dene and Haudenosaunee Torontonians casting their prints in clay makes their predecessors’ presence tangible. Intergenerational witnessing has also been key to Jin-me Yoon’s performance and photo-based work for the past three decades, and writer Areum Kim reflects on its significance for her, personally, as a second-generation Korean settler. As both an artist and teacher, Yoon imagines intergenerational support systems that could facilitate solidarity between immigrant settlers and Indigenous people.

“Déjà Vu” suggests strategies that might be used to instil the memory of the artistic and activist work of those who have come before us, to both honour their contributions and avoid reinventing the wheel. Importantly, the contributors insist on evading the binary of “nothing’s changed” and “things are better!!! :)” both of which are simultaneously true and false. Instead of asking, “What can institutions do?”— which diffuses individual responsibility—this issue centres on what we, as members of institutions, can collectively do to transform them for ourselves.

[^1]: Paul Chaat Smith, “Luna remembers,” https://www.paulchaatsmith.com/luna-remembers.html
[^2]: Adrian Piper, “Artist Adrian Piper Responds to Our Special ‘Women’s Place in the Art World’ Report,” _artnet_ news, September 26, 2019\. https://news.artnet.  
com/opinion/womens-place-inthe-art-world-artist-adrian-piper-responds-to-our-special-report-1661554

issue-144-p14-16.pdf

History

Editorial Fellow Merray Gerges reflects on the the issue’s theme: “Déjà Vu”. When we find we are repeating history, what can we do as members of institutions to honour our past but avoid reinventing the wheel? 

Editorial: Déjà Vu

Feature

**Pamila Matharu** is an artist, educator and cultural producer living in Toronto. Her upcoming solo project debuts at A Space Gallery (Toronto) in spring of 2019.

> “The art and the culture of emergent groups who choose to find their affiliation through issues of race or gender or sexuality or AIDS, those groups and their art is labelled in the negative, belated sense, as some kind of medieval \[…\] culture of complaint. And this easy attribution of victimage is deeply troubling to me because it isn’t aware of the new \[…\] social sense of community as it emerges. It isn’t aware \[of how\] those kinds of communities are creating very particular notions of themselves.”  
>   
> Homi K. Bhabha, speaking to Jamelie Hassan and Monika Kin Gagnon at the AGO, as part of a public program series titled Locating Communities, on May 4, 1995.

In the middle of a protracted period of depression, and suffering from a sense of decades-long neglect by her local art community, Pamila Matharu, the Toronto-based cultural producer, curator, artist and public educator, came across two discarded video tapes in an overstock recycling shop that set in motion a sharp turn in her fate. This was in 2006 or ’07, and the tapes were both dated October 1993—and apparently the property of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Their labels advertised readings and panel discussions with a cache of cultural theorists and artists—most of whom Matharu had never heard of, but felt excited by their suggested race-related scope, and by their collective title: Identity in a Foreign Place. It would be 12 years before Matharu was able to see what these tapes contained—they were Hi8 videos requiring specialized technology to view—but also, Matharu needed a spur. Once she finally got it, though, she saw her own concerns and anxieties mirrored back to her. The tapes contained searing examinations of the very issues that were variously holding her back and pinning her down: performative allyship, cultural labour, burnout, neglect and ghettoization. These impatient conversations about “what needs to change?” had taken place more than 20 years earlier but, amazingly and dishearteningly, they were the very same ones Matharu was having now. 

Identity in a Foreign Place was, as it turns out, auxiliary programming for an AGO exhibition titled _Perspective ’93_. Matharu began to do her research and discovered a review of that exhibition by then-leading critic John Bentley Mays, published in _The Globe and Mail_ (“Flip Sides of the New Narcissism,” September 18, 1993). It was an irritable and dismissive review that pitted its two subject— Filipino-Canadian artist Lani Maestro and Canadian artist Micah Lexier—against each other, finding the first to be “whiny” in her exploration of trauma and cultural segregation (“for the past 25 years or so, schmoozy art teachers and critics have been flattering would-be artists with the lunatic idea that their routine heartbreaks, troubles and traumas of ‘identity formation’ are just so marvellously interesting”) and the second, Lexier, to be a “young Caravaggio.” Art historian and critic Clive Robertson would respond with a rebuking letter to the editor (September 21, 1993), skewering Mays for his bias and his outdated resistance to an apparent cultural expansion in the city’s streets and across its institutions’ programming. But the damage was done. Maestro never recovered from the effect of that early-career expulsion. 

Taking all of this into consideration—alongside an article that Matharu came across in _The New York Times_’ “Overlooked” section, which publishes obituaries for significant women that the newspaper’s obituaries had previously ignored, featuring her “art shero” Amrita Sher-Gil, a pioneering Indian artist who had died in 1941 due to complications from a failed abortion—Matharu endeavoured to make an exhibition that encircled these multiple generations of women, herself included, who had suffered from trauma and neglect, and had formed various rings in the tree of a halting cultural evolution. _One of These Things is Not Like the Other_ was exhibited at the historic artist-run centre A Space in the spring of 2019, and was curated by Vicky Moufawad-Paul. It traced the reality of marginalized women artists either burning out or stalling out, on a personal level or culturally, and seemed to demand real activation and discussion around the question of “what needs to change?” Matharu ensured that the exhibition held space for its responders (there was a salon for visitors to take care, read, collectivize and convene undocumented meetings). This, Matharu’s first solo show in Toronto after 25 years of teaching, volunteering and practice, was partly devoted to Sister Co-Resister, the collective she co-founded formerly known as Bonerkill, which focuses on feminist, collaborative artmaking, public pedagogy and trans-disciplinary exchange. _One of These Things_ would go on to attract a huge turnout, and be reviewed in _Hyperallergic_ and _Artforum_, among others. 

Between August and October 2019, I had several conversations with Matharu on the impact of her research, her negotiation of trauma and its materialization in her work, and her recent “induction” into the mainstream art community in Toronto and beyond. Inevitably, we circled back to the ever-renewing question, “what needs to change?”

**SKY GOODDEN**: I’d like you to tell the story of the show. Can you tell me about the circumstances, including coming across a thrown out video?

**PAMILA MATHARU**: I made an exhibition that mined material that was discarded from an archive, material that looks at gaps and erasures and bumps in the road for women. I found these two Hi8 videotapes at a refuse place called ArtsJunktion, this place where the overages of AGO materials end up—postcards, bookmarks, catalogues. It’s open to the public. The tapes were labelled IDENTITY IN A FOREIGN PLACE, OCT. 1ST AND 2ND, 1993, and the names of the speakers are listed. I found these tapes around 2006–07.

**SG**: I didn’t realize you’d found the tapes that long ago!

**PM**: Oh yeah—but, dude, when has anyone asked me to have a show?! _laughs_ I’ve been sitting on this archive, like, “One day I’ll have a show…” And then \[I thought\], “Shit, the one day isn’t coming.” It was a reality check, like “What am I doing?” I was almost cleaning out my spiritual house. It took getting ill to finally crack open this work.

**SG**: What’s the link there?

**PM**: I had those tapes for _12 years_. \[And then\] I get ill. But \[after a while\] my doctor’s like, “It’s time to get to work— I want you to do a half-hour a day.” And I did, and it hurt—it hurt my head. But I built incremental time over those two years. I go away and my psychiatrist gives me an assignment to do. I was coming out of a deep depression, and I reluctantly get on a plane in 2018\. I decide to go to Berlin for the first time, and see the Berlin Biennale. It blew me away, seeing work with found materials, latent archives, discursive work—interesting things both visually and on a somatic level. It gave me some ideas. I was feeling less fear. I come home. I found a service to convert the Hi8 tapes.

**SG**: How did you know there was something potent on these tapes, if you hadn’t been able to look at them yet?

**PM**: I just saw these \_names\_—Lakshmi Gill, M.G. Vassanji—which they misspelled! And Gino Chiellino, Zafer Şenocak— also misspelled—Antonino Mazza…

**SG**: You were tantalized.

**PM**: Yes, I was like, “Who are these people?” What I didn’t realize all those years, too, was that \[the tapes are\] labelled “masters.” They’re the original tapes! A friend had to point this out. I had been looking at them once a year and I hadn’t noticed. So, then I begin to sleuth the story. My first question was, “Why are these in the garbage?” My second question was, “Are we going to end up in the garbage? Are we going to be lost in an archive?” 

So, I made an appointment with the AGO Library and Archives, and I asked them a couple questions. They pull out the 1993 file; they’re like, “This event happened for _Perspective ’93_.” I know it’s 1993 and I’m not trying to lay blame, but there’s only so much you can really deduce out of a time period that is significantly talking about any representation of you as “third world.” \[It tells you\] you’re never gonna get a seat at the table; you’re never gonna get a platform because you’re already measured up to a standard, a dramatic standard; where \[could\] you see yourself in that? 

When I looked at that seven-and-a-half minutes that I used, I was like, “Why does this sound so familiar? Why does this story not change at all?” And when I finally make the connection to the tapes, I had a studio visit with Sara Angelucci and she said, “Do this: Just show the tapes and these articles. Hands down, this explains a lot.” I said “Okay, fine.” But soon after that, one year ago, I ran into the mid-career curator of a public gallery in the city, and they asked me what I’m doing in my residency for Gallery 44 from 2017–18, and said that they’re looking forward to seeing the show, ta-da-da. I tell them what I’ve found \[the AGO tapes; the John Bentley Mays review\], and their attitude was, “Yeah, so what? So what if you found this material? Things are changing.” I said, “Oh, do you really think they’re changing? Is that what you see? ’Cause you’re making the change?” And they said, “Yeah, I think I do a lot to make things equitable.” I said, “Okay”…

**SG**: This is a white curator?

**PM**: Yeah. And I didn’t want it to be about that. But, within the span of the summer months \[of 2018\], two curators queried \[what I’d found\]. I was like, “Why is it that equity is _my_ problem?” Right? Why isn’t everyone’s desire to see change _actually_ happen? To make it more of an even playing field? You understand what I mean? Case in point, that article \[“The Dominance of the White Male Critic”\] in the _Times_ about the lack of critics of colour. It’s not something that is a new argument. This is an argument that keeps happening over and over. When will that change? In a country like Canada, it’s a slow drip. It’s like the slowest drip.

**SG**: Ben Davis writes in one of his chapters for _9.5 Theses on Art and Class_ (2013) about how at some point we took our hand off the tiller, that we became quite self-satisfied around gender parity such that we stopped driving towards it. And if you take your hand off the tiller, there’s a natural correction that happens, and we return to seeing 85 percent men. It reminds us how we got back here. You can never get too comfortable with the advances that you’ve made.

**PM**: I don’t know how it is for you in arts publishing, but when I read the statistics on the top six or eight art periodicals \[“Visual Arts Journalism: Newsroom Pressure and Generational Change,” _Neiman Reports_, Harvard University, Spring 2019\], and all their art critics are white cis men, it’s very telling. When will we see change? And it informed things for me, as I made the show. I worried, “How will this be reviewed?” But then Kevin Ritchie from _NOW_ did a preview; and then Letticia Cosbert \[Miller\] from _Akimbo_; then Noor Bhangu in _Hyperallergic_; and then Gabby Moser in _Artforum_. So, look at the change from John to now, Clive to now. In some ways, though, I still worried, “Are they biased? Because they’re now at the table?”

**SG**: But biased towards or against what? I mean, bias is baked into criticism, on the level of subjectivity. It’s a given. And we shouldn’t be trying to pretend otherwise.

**PM**: True.

**SG**: In your framing of the show, you don’t explain much. And you held events that weren’t recorded. So, you’re working with archives, but resistant to making one. Is it a position of, “This isn’t for everyone?”

**PM**: Yes. And Vicky did address this with me. She said, “If you don’t archive this, you’re adding to the problem.” But I think about collectives like Black Artists Union, who want to make work, and show work, and have their audience participants be exclusively Black— because these institutions have historically failed them, or \[just\] brought them in for performative allyship. And they’re like, “No. We’re onto you.” So, they do a lot of things in private, as they should. 

**SG**: Well, yeah! Performative allyship at the level of institutional programming should be looked out for—but we should also be skeptical when it comes to institutions “responding.” Look at what happened at the Whitney Biennial in 2017\. A dollar short, a day late, in terms of responding to an outrage. Once the institution finally lifted a finger, it was along the lines of, “Here’s your mic, here’s your conference room, have at ’er.” It was superficial. The same thing happened quite recently with Mercer Union and the Nep Sidhu exhibition. It was 10 months before they addressed the community’s hurt and concern over the issues raised in the show, which, in their admission, “prompted recollections of personal and generational trauma.” The exhibition _Medicine for a Nightmare: they called, we responded_ had shown at two other institutions at that point. It’s like, “What’s that worth now?”

**PM**: Right. How do you go beyond that? My response \[to A Space’s invitation for a solo exhibition\] was to hold space. That’s what I did. I think what I arrived at in the last 10 minutes of my video, that panel with Homi Bhabha, Monika Kin Gagnon, Jamelie Hassan… In that talk, Jamelie says, “These institutions are for us. They’re our spaces.” And, by that, she means they’re publicly funded. But when I listened to Jamelie _also_ say, “This is a road we all take,” I knew that, as a preset, I was going to have to create a buy-in to a system that doesn’t listen. \[Because\] we’re all here doing this work of listening to communities, now, particularly through the Indigenous lens, but we’re not _actively_ listening. Everyone wants to consider reconciliation without telling the truth. \[But\] there’s no truth-telling without trust. So, this was a show about trust, and about cultural safety. Using that material, how was I going to visually demonstrate that this is how we feel around institutional harm? 

Sky, I knew that showing these documents would do nothing for the chattering classes. It’s what I do in the _counter_ response that matters. I knew: I don’t go in by myself, I go in with my community. And showing that collection \[of Sister Co-Resister\], I thought, if I’m coming into Canadian art history, I’m not coming in alone. I’m coming in with Amrit Brar _and_ I’m coming in with Sarindar Dhaliwal. Because there’s a 40-year difference between them. And I’m in the middle. _There’s_ art history. 

So, I had a second therapist when I was really, really struggling. And she said, “I want you to write a letter to an ancestor who you think will understand your struggle.” And I said, “Can it be to an art ancestor?” She said, “Yes.” And that’s how I came up with _Dear Amrita: How can I forget history when I was just starting to remember?_ (2019). The moment I started to write her, my brain opened up. I felt taller, I felt like I was moving better. This was the conversation I was waiting to have. In a sense, I was creating a theoretical salon, by talking to her. I thought of how she was pushed out of the Paris salons. What does an artist really truly need to thrive? Community. Audience, of course. And, if they’re good at it, the market. I had two of three.

**SG**: I love it. It’s like the inverse of a memory palace. Put the things back in rather than name the things that are missing.

**PM**: Yes!

**SG**: In your role as an educator, do you see your teaching as a \_déjà-vu\_-resisting tactic? We’ve been in mind of what hasn’t changed as we’ve been talking, but I wonder what you do about it on the other end—how do you help ensure that things do change? Or can you?

**PM**: In public education, I’m decentering myself every day in the classroom. I’m there—the foundation, the grounding. I’m there. But I’m not at the centre. I’m part foster parent, part referee, part punching bag when they’re deregulated… I’m the rails. Fifteen years ago, when I was about to begin teaching, people were like “you’re out of your mind. Why would you go do this?” But did it ever teach me how to re-enter the art world.

**SG**: How so?

**PM**: Because I saw developmentally what happens when you are missing pieces. We don’t come out of art school starting on the same level. There’s a slim chance you have personal resources, but if you’re working class, or broke, you’re going to figure it out. By hook or by crook, you’re going to figure it out—get a waitressing job or get more credentialled. We know how we get to where we go. But what happens when you’re Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, struggling with mental health, struggling with adverse childhood experiences like divorce, parents killing themselves, parent gone missing, parent abandonment… that all impacts the adult artist in ways I never understood. But teaching taught me that. 

And that’s why I started Bonerkill. I thought I had nothing to lose. I made it for my racialized female students who kept starting an art practice and then coming back to me and saying they’re dropping out. “I’m dropping out of OCAD,” “I’m dropping out of Ryerson,” “I’m dropping out of …” I was like, “Why, why, why? What has changed about the academy?” 

So, I started Bonerkill to show some reciprocity, to say, “This is how you become an artist.” And this is where the self-care and aesthetics of care come in. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to go through some serious change. But this is going to be so life-affirming. It’ll be so validating.” This is where I realized where the gap is—when artists like me or people who have had similar experiences don’t successfully enter the art world, or market, or create audiences, or don’t know how to be in community… So, how do we build the building blocks? 

Now, when \[my former students\] come back and say “hey, I got this, I got that,” it does feel nice to realize you had a part to play in it. I ran into a former student recently who reminded me that I said to him, “You’re the best artwork you’ll ever make.” And every time I want to give up, I think of that. And, you know… the art world doesn’t give you that. And I’d forgotten I ever said it. More recently, I was invited to this reading group. And these three people came up to me—out of eight—and said, “We came to see your show! We loved it!” And then I thought, “Oh! I guess this is the fan-girl moment. Oh boy! I guess I did something.” And now I get to talk about it. Again and again. _laughs_

Artist

sm_144-GOODDEN/MATHARU

thumbnail_144-GOODDEN/MATHARU

144-GOODDEN/MATHARU

issue-144-p16-22.pdf

Found a

Video

The discovery of archival tapes discarded in an overstock recycling shop precipitated Pamila Matharu’s exhibition _One of These Things is Not Like the Other_ at A Space in Spring of 2019\. In an interview with Sky Goodden, Matharu discusses the danger of letting history repeat itself, and honouring her art ancestors as a type of Déjà-vu resistance.

Communing with (Art) Ancestors

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

Aamna Muzaffar collaborates on space, text, and moving image projects with artists and arts organizations as an independent creative director and technical supervisor. Based in Toronto, she is the Assistant Curator at Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art.

> _Perhaps history is not about the past. At least, not primarily. Perhaps it is first of all about the future. This may be exactly what makes history political. For whoever owns history owns the future._   
> —Jan Verwoert[^1]

In July 2019, artists Dean Baldwin and Caroline (Coco) Monnet circulated invitations to a “performance-not-performance” at Maker Technical Sculpture Services where the first stage in the fabrication of a new public artwork would be witnessed in intimate company. This collaborative project, _Trajet_, memorializes the footsteps found on the floor of Lake Ontario in 1908 that evidenced Indigenous habitation dating to 11,000 BP. Having been cemented over and destroyed—a powerful indication of cultural attitudes of the time—only descriptions and a crude rendering remain in the municipal archives of T:karonto/Toronto. 

At its simplest, _Trajet_ is the effort of making visible something that had been submerged, both literally and in cultural consciousness. Destined to be installed on the Leslie Spit—a headland off the shoreline comprising materials displaced by the city’s subway construction—the substantial bronze sculpture will facilitate the restoration of memory and the co-creation of future histories. “For Toronto, a city where history is rarely prized and more typically trampled, the Leslie Spit both allegorizes this truth and insists on a preservation,” reads the invitation. 

In a twist almost stranger than fiction, shortly after this interview was conducted in October 2019, we were informed that the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority is considering revising the permanent location of the work on Leslie Spit, citing a recent coastal review indicating the rising water levels of Lake Ontario and the interventions needed to avoid inevitable transformational damage to the shoreline.

> **JACLYN BRUNEAU AND AAMNA MUZAFFAR: How did each of you find your respective ways to this story from 1908, and how did you decide to pursue this story together?** 

**DEAN BALDWIN**: Coco and I met about five to six years ago via a mutual friend. We spent a freezing cold day in February serving Montrealers hot mulled wine from a snowbank next to a bus stop on Sherbrooke Street and we’ve been hanging out in snowbanks ever since. I thought of her practice when an occasion arose to make this piece somewhat related to another work I had been focused on. 

In 2017, I started a public art commission for the City of Toronto TTC \[Toronto Transit Commission\] barns at the corner of Lakeshore and Leslie, which function as a gateway to the Leslie Spit and Tommy Thompson Park. That project will be a large kooky assembly of typical construction materials found on the spit; rusted metal I-beams, rebar and concrete, bricks and cinder blocks—materials the city had in abundance when they dug the tunnels for the subway system in the ’50s. Numerous buildings were razed, and the massive amount of demolition rubble needed to go somewhere. As the city also wanted to create an outer headland to protect the inner harbour, it was decided all this refuse should be dumped into the lake. In an ironic twist, the decades since have seen a natural resurgence in the area, which is now a protected environmental habitat for various migratory waterfowl and such. 

Within this public art site, there was a small annex of sidewalk across the street, which was a separate city ward and a percentage of the commission was to be allocated there. In my research of the TTC—its trajectories of transportation of people around the city, the reclaimed land of the spit and the shifting shoreline of the lake—I came across this story from the _Toronto Telegram_, which is archived on microfiche at York University, where a construction crew had discovered and then destroyed a set of footprints dated to 11,000 years ago in a layer of blue clay when the shoreline of the lake was some distance past the islands due to a glacier changing the outflow of water in the lake. I made the suggestion to the city that because they were responsible for destroying these footprints—early evidence of local habitation—perhaps they should endeavour to put them back. As this story wasn’t mine to tell alone, I called up Caroline to see what she thought.

**CAROLINE MONNET**: When Dean brought this story to me, it seemed such an important part of history and an important, exciting project that I felt a responsibility to jump on board. I felt that if I didn’t say “yes” to this idea, that it would maybe not be done. I wanted to be part of this moment in history. You don’t see these kinds of projects come along every day. When they appear, you simply have to do it. 

> At the time, I was working on a piece for the Toronto Biennial of Art about waterways, and relationships to the water. So, it felt like _Trajet_ came at a very particular time, when I was already thinking about the history of the Leslie Spit and my relationship, as an Anishinaabekwe, to the City of Toronto, and how my ancestors had a connection to the place. 

**DB**: I also found 1908 to be personally important, as my earliest ancestor to Toronto—maternal great-grandfather Tow “George” Lew—settled here after taking a boat from Hong Kong in 1913\. He, along with the rest of us since, clearly benefitted from the municipal waterworks that were installed overtop these footprints, which gives the story two chapters: the presence of the initial inhabitants being part one, and the acts of destruction for the purposes of settlement being part two. The erasure of this history is a trauma that Caroline and I are partners in; perhaps this project was one way to overcome it. 

**CM**: Our first collaboration…

**DB**: After this, we go back to hot wine in the snowbank. _laughs_

> **Dean, your practice has long been invested in conviviality, gathering, exuberance, joy and the elaborate assembling of circumstances that might more easily enable or invite those states. Caroline, we’re also thinking about your film _Creatura Dada_ (2014) in the way it engages these ideas. We’re curious to hear both of your reflections on _Trajet_ in relation to the art of social assembly.** 

**DB**: Often my work seeks to unbalance certain power structures as they present themselves as status symbols. Examples would be the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art project that was a yacht club for people without yachts _(Q.W.Y.C. (Queen West Yacht Club)_, 2015), or a lobster restaurant in a river, which serves an invasive species of crawfish instead (_Restaurant the River_, 2015). I’m always doing these projects, which are posh- or aristocratic-flavoured scenarios, but done down low and on the cheap, unexclusive. I am always thinking about ways that I can upend such situations and, in this case, we are looking at a history of monuments that are status symbols the municipality puts in place to enforce a mythos of who has influence and power over whom else.

**CM**: I have always been interested in documenting specific moments in time and marking history. In _Creatura Dada_, I invited a group of Francophone Indigenous women to come together in one space, and documented their meeting as an important moment in history. I’ve always tried to bring positive images of Indigenous representation out into the world, whether in film or installation works. _Trajet_ feels extremely positive from an Indigenous standpoint, especially with regards to monuments in Canada.

> **Eurocentric traditions of monument-making rely on the specificity of proper names and distinct historical events. In contrast, this public sculpture sustains the suggestive anonymity of the referenced figures while making connection with the living. Can you talk about the process of researching, reaching out to and being in dialogue with the Anishinaabe, Dene and Haudenosaunee descendants whose footsteps animate the work?**

**DB**: One possibility was that we could carve an exact replica of the original drawing \[of the footprints\] but this felt way wrong. We wanted to find a group of the “closest living relatives” to help carry the weight of this event, to extend invitations to Indigenous Torontonians and see what their responses would be to the possible recreation of these footprints, where we would make them from scratch.

**CM**: It was clear that we had to work closely with the Indigenous community of Toronto; not being from the city, we had to reach out to people who know the Indigenous communities there and could help us form the appropriate group of walkers. We needed all generations, people from all walks of life that, together, would give a good representation of what a contemporary Indigenous reality is in Toronto. It was important that we asked ourselves who was going to walk. After much thinking, we decided it could not just be one nation; it had to reflect the reality of Toronto now.

**DB**: Once we had gathered the group of interested walkers, we had a funny… well, the conversation veered immediately toward moccasins, as the note in the newspaper drawing indicated that the original group was wearing moccasins. So, the question that came back to us from the walkers was: “Do we wear our own moccasins? Will the moccasins get ruined by the process at the foundry?” We reached out to Sage Paul, the director of Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto and a designer with experience in traditional tanning and hides. We shared the story with her and it was like an archeological fashion detective novel, where she responded with a design for an early type of hide-wrap moccasin— very simple, elegant even.

**CM**: Because it was done on such short notice, the making of the moccasins became a beautiful communal effort with several women helping, which made the community involvement bigger. \[It\] grew the circle bigger. From the beginning, we were hoping to involve as many people as possible so that the Indigenous community in Toronto would feel that this piece was made for them, by them and with them.

**DB**: On a logistical level, definitely unique in monument-making, we needed to get the shoe sizes of all of the walkers to the moccasin makers— Dehmin Cleland and Rosary Spence—in order for them to individually custom tailor wrap moccasins for the day of the inscribing… While wearing them, Leslie McCue told me they were “Soooooooooo comfortable.” _laughs_

> **This project seems to straddle multiple epistemologies of memorialization: that of the bronze-cast medallion affixed by its own weight and permanence to the earth; and, the ephemeral events that bookend the project, which invite a relational mode of knowledge creation through a call to witness. Can you talk about what led you to approach making the work in this way?** 

**CM**: We always referred to the participants as walkers and witnesses. We felt we were doing something important, something that came with a sense of responsibility. It became a memorial event, where together we were also working on building a monument. It needed people to bear witness, as a testament to its significance on a much bigger level than ourselves.

**DB**: It was the only way we could do it. The bronze is a direct reference to the typical vocabulary of municipal sculptures—usually a colossal bronze dude on a horse, elevated and aggrandized—whereas here, relating back to the shoe sizes, the subjects are presented in 1:1 scale, which is human and humble. Neither of us had ever made a bronze sculpture before, let alone one that was almost 1,000 pounds while, at the same time, relinquishing control of the inscription to this group of walkers, who would be doing it in real time, onetime-only, with no do-overs. _laughs_ The consequences felt pretty high, but the method felt right.

**CM**: We knew we were making a piece of history and we didn’t want to keep it for ourselves, to do it in the studio by ourselves, so we opened it up to others. We celebrated with food, with drinks, with live music from Lacey Hill; it was a real happening and you just had to be there. There was a great level of responsibility carried by all the walkers and the witnesses alike, not only because it was one-time-only, but because they were carrying the weight of history. They realized the meaning behind it and what it was representing: it’s a testament of survival. It means that despite the chaos of Indigenous erasure, we can bring our history back up. We are saying that we are still present, that we have always been present, that we have been on this land since the glacial period. We are countering some of the scientific research and proving what our elders and ancestors have been saying for centuries. We are validating Indigenous knowledge and history.

> **The welcome offered by Elder Pauline Shirt for the making of the clay impression set a ceremonial tone that generated the event’s resounding affect. How did you envision the role of the host at this event? And, Dean, in what ways is _Trajet_ distinct in this register among your other endeavours?**

**DB**: On the surface, distinct, but on point in other ways. I usually employ humour and whimsy to couch specific aims. But in every situation, there is a large and difficult task to overcome, after which communal celebrations ensue. As for the role of host, I hope guests have some agency; no one really likes a host who forces everyone to have a good time. To that end, we really wanted to hand everything over to Elder Shirt to lead as she felt fit.

**CM**: \[Elder Shirt\] took it upon herself to make it ceremonial. I think we were both surprised how quickly that shift of energy happened. We always knew it was something important but she very naturally brought it to the next level, and drew out its significance.

**DB**: One thing we didn’t expect: the scene at Maker Sculpture originally had the witnesses gathered in one area with the clay pad opposite, but Elder Shirt immediately cajoled everyone into a large circle, which implicated everybody in what was going on, and broke down that false wall of audience and performer. We all held shared responsibility to the event.

**CM**: By following traditional protocols to honour the walkers, Elder Shirt legitimized our process of making the sculpture. The ceremonial aspects of the event solidified our collective feeling of responsibility and inscribed _Trajet_ as a monument that stands in direct opposition to all the colonial statues present in Canada.

**DB**: Yeah, it was heavy. Of course, as we all gathered around this circle, it got lighter, since we were all able to carry it together. Then, afterwards, it became celebratory: there was a sigh of relief, some buffalo yelps, laughter and mingling…

**CM**: _laughs_ Awesome.

> **Caroline, you encouraged participants to take varied paths across the clay, offering a gentle choreography for their natural gait that kept the inscription from becoming overdetermined. There seems to be something about kinship in this: the creation of a proof of relation with the understanding that any such act is more suggestive than diagrammatic. Can you talk about the creation of trace and how you think about its power of suggestion?**

**CM**: We did a rehearsal beforehand, which the witnesses didn’t see, but everyone had the opportunity to feel comfortable in the task they were taking. I gave a few directions about pacing, how to walk, how to avoid overstepping anyone’s footprints while still keeping it as natural as possible, how to clear the mind while doing it, to think positive thoughts and consider what they were bringing into the piece. In rehearsal, we had the walkers dip their feet in water and walk across paper so they could see where their trace would land and what the overall piece would look like. I guided them by giving a few indications here and there. But also, I wanted them to own the piece as much as possible. We never wanted the work to be an exact replica of the drawing from 1908, but more of a lived experience that is rooted in the present, something that is alive and will be carried into future generations. 

We were really touched when Skye Paul walked across the clay carrying her baby, Townes, and holding her five year-old son Lucien’s hand. Though the baby is not actually represented as a set of footprints, he and his generation are present in the piece, and I think that is something very poetic and beautiful.

> **Caroline, you suggested in another interview that collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people may be valuable in approaching reconciliatory efforts—saying, “while we need to acknowledge the chaos of our past, it’s essential we move on to constructive relationships.” Can you say a bit more about your thinking around these kinds of collaborations, now that this project is nearing its conclusion?**

**CM**: I have always valued the power of collaboration. It’s been an essential part of my creative process and often at the root of many projects. I was incredibly touched that Dean would think of me to participate in this colossal sculpture. I stand behind what I said about the need to acknowledge the chaos of our past, but to focus on constructive relationships. Dean is very sensitive to Indigenous issues in the country and has a proper understanding of what is needed to approach Indigenous narratives in the proper way. I think _Trajet_ is a clear example that we can work together, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, towards a common goal: restoring proper narratives.

[^1]: Jan Verwoert, “On Future Histories—And the Generational Contract with the No Longer and Not Yet Living And the Pan-Demonium of Irreverent Styles of Nostalgia,” Questioning History—Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2008).

lg_144-BRUNEAU&

md_144-BRUNEAU&

sm_144-BRUNEAU&

thumbnail_144-BRUNEAU&

144-BRUNEAU&

issue-144-p23-30.pdf

Indigenous

Sculpture

Collaboration

Jaclyn Bruneau and Aamna Muzaffar interview Montreal-based artists Dean Baldwin and Caroline Monnet about their collaboration on the project “Trajet,” a sculptural work designated to be installed on Toronto’s Leslie Split. “Trajet” is based on footprints left in blue clay evidencing Indigenous habitation dating to 11, 000 BP, found and destroyed in 1908.

Trajet: An Interview with Dean Baldwin and Caroline Monnet

Areum Kim is a Korean-born writer and curator based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Alta. on Treaty 7\. Currently Kim is invested in possibilities of decolonization within un- translatable and ungraspable languages. Kim is currently the Director at Stride Gallery.

Our bus drove us through the active construction site for the Southwest Calgary Ring Road before it pulled into the remains of a movie set simulating a bombed Belgian city. The set is located on a former military training site, which the Department of National Defence leased from the Tsuut’ina First Nation for military training from 1901 to 1996.[^1] Part of this land was used for the production of the film _Passchendaele_ (2008), about a white Canadian soldier in World War I. While the rest of the 380-acre plot is still embedded with unexploded landmines left behind by the military, this small section was cleaned up for the film shoot. The ruins lured me in, and I could see the exposed core material of these buildings—weathered Styrofoam— underneath the dilapidated layers of paint and decoration. Fake rubble was strewn about the site amid the real rubble left behind by military training; from afar, their origins were indistinguishable. Here, the residues of cultural and military production collapsed into each another. 

We were here to participate in a film shoot for artist Jin-me Yoon’s new body of work, which has been in the making for two years in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 Territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Stoney Nakoda and Tsuut’ina First Nation. Jin-me is a Korean-born, Vancouver based artist working and living on the unceded and occupied territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy ̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ílwətaɬ (TsleilWaututh) Nations. Jin-me’s artistic practice is recognized for her early photo-based works that deconstructed the dominant discourse of citizenship, nationhood, gender and race. This new body of work unfolds as a continuation of the artist’s ongoing inquiries into the intersections of tourism, militarism and colonialism, and positioning the body—with all its interconnected histories and memories—within specific places where these three notions converge. 

Because Jin-me wanted to move beyond superficial relationships with the people who would appear in her film, so the people in front of her lens would be more than mere subjects or actors, she facilitated a series of workshops in Calgary in August 2019 called _Relation Making in the Context of Racism and Settler-Colonialism_, supported by Mountain Standard Time Performative Art and TRUCK Contemporary Art, as part of the film’s production. These workshops, which I participated in, set out to deepen our understanding of racism and settler-colonialism—since both are rooted in personal experience—by sharing our burdens through the practice of deep listening. The artist facilitated a group of people through a process to form a space we carved out together, and into which each person carried their unique history and identity. The workshop exemplified Jin-me’s investment in relation-making within her practice. For the artist, relation-making is “ongoing work that requires being self-aware of one’s place in the world, as a part of nature in the fullest sense, in relation to others in complex ways, both past and present.”[^2] Jin-me brings this openness into her art-making process, and extended an invitation to the participants in her film to be similarly open. 

On the film set, we entered into the presence of several sets of elders. The workshop was led by Jin-me’s sister, Jin-sun Yoon. Jin-sun’s background is in community organizing and activism; she works specifically with mental health; human rights; at-risk youth; and racialized, queer and Indigenous individuals and communities. She led us through a process based on collective healing and deep listening, in which people were asked to introduce themselves through their ancestry and their relationship to the land they live on. We began by first listening to Glenna Cardinal, a Tsuut’ina artist whose family was instrumental in Jin-me’s process of making work in Tsuut’ina. Afterwards, Glenna’s mother, Ethel Jacobs; Glenna’s son, artist, Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse; Glenna’s daughter, Cateri Cardinal; and Glenna’s aunt, Marie Dodginghorse all generously confided in us their intimacy with the land. Honouring the closeness of Cardinal’s family and their profound connection to their land was vital grounding for Jin me, and it became important to us as well, as we looked forward to the film shoot that would unfold on Tsuut’ina lands.

Following the workshop by her sister, Jin-me gave us pieces of rubble made of Styrofoam and concrete for us to pass among ourselves in an open circle. These objects, which carried an unexpected weight, would become performative elements for her new work. The elders witnessed as we passed the synthetic rocks in a procession, a simple gesture that Jin-me conceived of—one that is grounded in being present and mindful of the land we stand on, and the space we hold together on it. The rubble represented a fragment of Jin-me’s childhood in Korea, where debris was a prominent visual reality in the wake of the Korean War, while connecting us to the rubble-scattered plot of land in Tsuut’ina where these interstices of histories and memories collide. In this open circle, through our now-established shared friendship, we could momentarily exist in the possibility of expansion through one another. Though this engaged, intentional process may not appear in the final film, it was crucial for me, at least, for us to work together towards the hopeful outcome of heightened awareness and appreciation of each another’s complex histories—a kind of solidarity located in this intimate process of artmaking.

Jin-me’s desire to make work in and about Tsuut’ina as a non-Indigenous artist raised questions for me around why and how the artist was entering and talking about space that is not ancestrally hers. It is, at face value, a difficult domain—one that most of us hesitate to enter. When I asked Jin-me how she approaches the land of other people and their history, she said that, first and foremost, she does not attempt to tell their story on their behalf. Her entry point to the site in Tsuut’ina is located in her own relationship to colonialism and war, from which she draws out the sedimented layers of shared histories. At the same time, it is crucial for the artist to foreground her research and process with respectful listening to long histories and individual stories.[^3] Instead of withdrawing from addressing the place merely because it is not hers, Jin-me attempts here to address the interconnectivity among the Korean and Tsuut’ina peoples and lands. She carefully begins from her own position, bolstered by long-term relationships and friendships she has established in the place where she’s making work. Her methodology often resists the figure of an artist parachuting into a place, projecting their work onto it, then leaving—instead Jin-me works with intimate knowledge that can only be cultivated through time. In the film, the boundaries between different identities—Indigenous or variously racialized, Generation X or Millennial, etc.—recede, and we are able to come to a specific, particular understanding of the land. 

Solidarity through intergenerationality is a gesture to uncover and carry forward the past and future, and it has been a key theme in Jin-me’s recent works. In the video work _Long View_ (2017), the artist’s parents and children are seen digging a hole and creating a mound on Long Beach, located in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve between Tofino and Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. As the waves break and the horizon extends into a vast grey plane, Jin-me’s family members occasionally stop digging and look out towards the sea, on whose other side lies the Korean coast. The mound remains like a soft monument, and a figure clad in black jumps into the hole they’ve dug. This opens up a chaotic, blurry scene achieved by the artist’s experimental use of a hand-held camera. Montaged with archival footage of soldiers, the work switches to an introspective space that connects the two places—Korean and Indigenous lands between generations, between parallel histories of militarism and colonialism. As the traditional territory of the Nuučaanu̓ł peoples, this part of Vancouver Island is also a site of extensive military history as a Pacific frontier and strategic post. On Radar Hill, also located in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, a radar station scanned for oncoming air strikes during World War II and the Cold War; nearby, a Korean War monument commemorates a war-forged bond between Canada and Korea.[^4] The two lands on each side of the Pacific and the connections between them are channelled through the people in the video who each bear the weight of their respective generations. As a first-generation Korean settler myself, this work speaks to me in a profound way because it imagines a shared future founded in reconciling with how Korea’s past pushed out our predecessors while attempting moments of solidarity, connection and deep respect towards the Indigenous lands and acknowledging our own role in Canada’s still-ongoing colonial history.

Here, I’d like take a moment to honour the beginnings of Jin-me’s significant career. In her earlier photo-based, site-specific performance work, she questioned Canada’s so-called terms of inclusion, and settler-nationalism. Canonical works like _Souvenirs of the Self_ (1991) and _A Group of Sixty-Seven_ (1996–7), for example, directly addressed questions of place for racialized immigrants within a dominant culture and white nationalism by making the marginalized presence of Korean people visible. In _Souvenirs of the Self_, the artist poses in famous tourist spots in Banff National Park, where tourism has been one of the earliest and most active forces of ongoing colonialism and white identity-formation in Canada’s West.

In _A Group of Sixty-Seven_, 67 people from Vancouver’s Korean community pose against the backdrop of celebrated paintings by Lawren Harris and Emily Carr. Participants face the camera on one side, and turn their backs on the other. These photographs juxtaposed Korean people from the peripheries with paintings depicting the visual iconography of the stolen lands—the Group of Seven’s depiction of Banff National Park, for example—that white settler Canada claims as its pride and joy. Jin-me recounts to me how these works were pigeonholed into the discourse of “identity politics” only because she placed Korean subjects in front of the camera, while critics avoided addressing the work’s formalist qualities. The artist finds pigeonholing to be lazy and reductive, especially when her photo-based works collate complex topics of citizenship, memory, place, colonialism and history, using photography both as a direct tool and as a critique of the image-making devices through which the dominant culture self-images/imagines itself. 

Decades later, I look at her work and see how the bodies that appear in front of her lens have become more active agents that carry out acts in a place. Through her earlier work—positioning her body and those of other Koreans in proximity to the images of stolen land that have been key to settler Canada’s nation-building project— to undo and deconstruct the tightly formulated idea of dominant Canadian identity, Jin-me developed a foundation for bringing together images of variously racialized and Indigenous peoples. As agents, the subjects who appear in her recent work are playing, embodying and experiencing joy, rather than always working to dismantle oppressive systems. This idea was realized for me as we neared the end of the film shoot. After we carried the rocks in a circle, we re-entered the ruins and scoured the lands to pick out our own “musical instrument.” After careful, aesthetic deliberation, we all had a satisfying instrument in our hands, and we sat down amid the tall grass and crumbling Styrofoam walls. One by one, we started to make sounds with our instruments, tuned into one another, the tight blue sky, scratchy grass and all that we’d shared together over the weekend. The somewhat absurdist jangling and banging of plastic, metal, terracotta things, rocks and plant life echoed among us. It was a light-hearted exercise in improvising and responding to each other. In this space of spirited play that Jin-me had set up for us, I felt an intense joy about what we had shared, the friendships we had formed and now the music of detritus we were playing. The space for our noisy play felt like a gift.

I asked Jin-me what intergenerational support systems mean to her. In response, she said: “As I approach my _Hwangap_,[^5] I truly understand the role of the elder. Elders hold and contain and support the next generations while bridging ancestors. This idea of ancestors can include our art-making ancestors—the artists we have been inspired by that continue to talk to us, long after their death. While we respect difference, we also are deeply interconnected and flow from each other, gaining energy and spirit to continue on, making worlds to come.”[^6] I acknowledge this gift from Jin-me, a whole lunar cycle’s worth of work, art-making and thought, as we make worlds to come.

[^1]: “Military returns land near Calgary to First Nation” CBC, Jul 31, 2006\. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/military-returnsland-near-calgary-to-firstnation-1.583703
[^2]: Jin-me Yoon, email conversation with the author, October 14, 2019.
[^3]: Jin-me Yoon, interview with the author, September 7, 2019.
[^4]: “Harper Government commemorates the Battle of Kapyong at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve” News Release. Government of Canada, April 24, 2015\. https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2015/04/harper-government-commemorates-battle-kapyong-pacific-rim-national-park-reserve.html
[^5]: Hwangap is a Korean word used to describe celebrating one’s 60th birthday. It’s significant because turning 60 represents the completion of a full cycle of the lunar calendar and marks one’s transition onto the next cycle with wisdom and renewed energy.
[^6]: Jin-me Yoon, email conversation with the author, October 14, 2019.

lg_144-KIM

md_144-KIM

sm_144-KIM

thumbnail_144-KIM

144-KIM

issue-144-p30-36.pdf

Film

Participation

Areum Kim writes on her participation in Vancouver-based artist Jim-me Yoon’s film. By facilitating a dialogue between herself and the films’ participants, Yoon demonstrates a model of exchange exemplary of her practice of exploring intergenerational witnessing, interconnected histories, and deconstructing nationhood.

We Relate, Therefore We Are: Relation-Making in Jin-me Yoon's Practice

Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an Associate Professor at OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of artworks produced by “other” Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities.

Liz Ikiriko is an artist, photo editor and independent curator. Her knowledge as a researcher, writer, photog- rapher, teacher and mother inform her practice, which  
is focused on experiential, embodied experiences that utilize widely accessible platforms to share moments of vulnerability and care for all of us on the margins. She holds an MFA in criticism and curatorial practice from OCAD University (2019).

In 2014, Andrea Fatona initiated The State of Blackness conference to congregate artists, curators, academics and students around the conditions of the production, presentation and dissemination of Black art in Canada. Using the conference as a catalyst to continue a public discourse and to create an archive of Black artistic production, The State of Blackness has continued in various forms. Fatona remains a guiding voice and devoted advocate for practising care through considered critique, while she supports her students and mentees in producing the in-depth scholarship and criticism that was significantly lacking in Canada.

Fatona heads the Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University, with decades of scholarship on the contemporary art of the Black diaspora. When I joined the program in 2016, I was certain there was no other person I would want to study under. But, due to circumstances beyond our control, our work together was quite limited at the time. While notions of urgency can force all of us to move too quickly, and can limit the required depth of research and discourse, within marginalized communities this notion of urgency can be particularly challenging, as the time of the beacons of our communities is in constant demand.

This sense of urgency again came into play in the time carved out for our interview, and by addressing this, I hope to present this engagement as the unfolding of a longer discussion that needs continuation. In order to halt a cycle of erasure that is prevalent in Canada, intersections like this one must be seen as contributing to a rich pool of Black creative production that has existed long before us, across regions, and which will continue to develop into our varied futures.

Taking The State of Blackness as our starting point, five years after Fatona initiated it, we sat down to discuss the role of criticism, institutional archives and mentorship in preserving the feats of Black survival in our daily lives.  
   
**LIZ IKIRIKO**: Andrea, you continued The State of Blackness as a database project, which completed its first stage in December 2017, after the conference in February 2014\. How has this long-term project progressed through the years and where does the research stand now?

**ANDREA FATONA**: The State of Blackness conference project is really important to me, because at that time, in 2014, in both spaces of academia and in the art world, I found myself realizing that we were very absent from the conversation as Black cultural producers, and visually from who’s being presented within these spaces. The first phase of The State of Blackness database was a mapping project to see what was out there in terms of media arts. I collaborated with Vtape and a graduate of OCAD, Elisha Lim, to go through Vtape’s archive— both their tapes and discursive materials—to get a sense of what’s happened across the country, because Vtape is a national and international distributor, and to set up a centralized space for access to both media arts and visual arts, as well as curatorial work. In my PhD research, I found that a Black arts movement—and I’m going to keep calling it that—began to flourish, in which a number of curatorial projects took place that were quite interesting and different for their times, yet they haven’t been fully written about, and they haven’t been fully documented. I’m interested in revisiting those moments as a way to understand the kinds of practices that have brought us to the now and what we’re doing—not only in terms of artistic production, but \[also to examine\] how Black artistic production has actually influenced the development of \[current\] Black curatorial practice.  
   
**LI**: What were those specific time periods during which you saw a shift?

**AF**: I would say that by the mid-’90s there was a real proliferation of artworks— media artworks, visual artworks—and I attribute that to an increase in funding \[brought about by\] different shifts in policies, specifically the \[Canadian\] Multiculturalism Act and how it brought to the fore the lack of funding of artists of colour and Indigenous artists. There was a lot of fomentation and push from the community to open up funding to those artists that ultimately enabled a number of works to be produced. But, like I said at that time— and I think even now—our works aren’t being critically engaged enough; there’s very little critical writing from mainstream publishing venues.

**LI**: I’m thinking about similarities now with Canada’s 150th anniversary, in terms of surges of funding, and how it enabled this artistic insurgence. I’m curious how that continues—what are the legacies that come from that? Especially if there isn’t writing around it, because it wasn’t supported past that moment.

**AF**: There _are_ legacies that follow from these kinds of insurgencies—and I think we see it today as well—but I don’t think they end up serving the potential or the possibilities of what we think should happen. And so I’ll rephrase that: I have to say that erasure continues today, even though in a way there are these blips in time where the work \[we are doing\] is visible. I can give some examples. I just did an exhibition of Winsom’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and there hasn’t been much written about it. I think it requires a deep drilling down in the creation of critical discursive materials that will stand and that will circulate, to allow these works to actually reside within the discussion around Canadian art and Black Canadian art. Without the critical engagement with the work, when the work doesn’t quite find its place in the archives, it seems to come and go. The rest of the art world doesn’t seem to understand that there’s a range of Black art production and curation in Canada, and tends to default \[to\] the one internationally known name. But it hit me as well that, in Canada, we don’t even know, as Black artists and cultural producers, who we all are. And so, there’s an erasure in this space called Canada that just continues to reproduce itself elsewhere, and this notion of producing a singularity around Blackness and who produces \[it\] continues to persist. Usually one person rises to the top and that person becomes the representative of who’s here. 

**LI**: It’s a systemic idea that there’s only room for one person to rise to the top—and it’s so hard to shake that. But removing that sense of competition—because there is always room for more—is something that I think is so necessary.

**AF**: That’s part of our work as folks trying to find other ways to speak ourselves into being, to make ourselves not just visible. Visibility comes with its own challenges. So how do we actually write ourselves, act ourselves, create ourselves into being? Part of that involves a particular refusal of the kinds of practices that try to create singularities and exemplars. I feel as if we need to actually unmask these practices as they present themselves to us. We need to point out and refuse the notion that only one designated Black person is able to speak on behalf of us all. We need to refuse the idea that our works can only be read and spoken about from perspectives that flatten who we are. I think this is what was being done back in the ’80s and the ’90s that created a huge fissure. People were participating. People were speaking really loudly about what they needed to refuse and what needed to shift, and deep political engagement occurred in tandem with artistic production and dissemination. However, we have not been able to sustain our own spaces; institutions and the stewards of contemporary art in this country continue to construct the spaces that then we have to contort ourselves to fit into. By creating our own spaces, we can address the diversity in our Blackness, to open up the possibilities to be seen and appreciated, but also to challenge one another. Conflict is okay—I believe we can find something new through the quarrels that we have with each other. I’m not sure new things can emerge without that friction, and it feels like we’ve been sidestepping that friction for years. There’s very little space for genuine critique, for disagreement, without being thrown off the island. To me, that’s a very sad state of where  
we’ve come to.  
   
**LI**: You’re wanting to move forward— not necessarily towards conflict for conflict’s sake but towards real discourse, which \[involves\] the removal of a singular voice, or singular vision of how things should go.

**AF**: I’ve been on this for a while: constant celebration seems to be the only space that we can allow ourselves. But I feel like the other side of creation—which involves feedback and critique—has fallen away in a huge way. It’s perhaps too that a number of the venues that those critiques took place in are no longer around, like _FUSE_ magazine, which had a particular inflection around art intersecting with politics. The venues have changed and that actually circumscribes the critique that takes place. I also think that we need to produce more writers, more critics, and we also need to imagine and come up with something that pushes—\_really\_ pushes—against the boundaries and borders of what we’ve come to know as art criticism. I don’t totally know what that looks like, but I know that it’s possible. And I know that it probably has much more potential for positioning Black cultural production.  
   
**LI**: Have you read Jessica Lynne? She’s written about the role of the Black feminist in art criticism.[^1] For her, her role as an art critic is to care for the work, while identifying ways that the work can be supported by true critique.

**AF**: Exactly. It _is_ about caring about the work, caring about interpreting it and its context, as a way to allow people to see the work’s possibilities, but also to allow people to understand the limitations of the work in the context of its presentation. What’s important for me is also making sure that as we write our opinions, we are really aware of the genealogies that have come before—the histories of the kinds of discussion about particular works and their \[historical\] contexts—so that we ourselves can push the conversations further. I feel that’s what’s missing sometimes: a deep care for the histories of the discourses that have brought the work to where it is now.  
   
**LI**: So, we’re not reinventing the wheel every generation—which is so painful. That’s something that has come up a lot lately… It feels right now like things are changing, but that there’s this disconnect between generations before, which \[indicates\] that there are ways that writing and art are produced in what is considered a void, without references to what’s come before.

**AF**: I blame that on institutions, and the \[nature of the\] discourse around the work. Yes, there’s a current moment of proliferation of Black art all over the place—at the Royal Ontario Museum, the AGO— but it doesn’t seem to me that institutions are also making sure that when this work is done that there is actually structural change and policy change within those institutions, to allow for our work to actually have longevity and to reside in some critical context. If there’s no writing as there would be for other kinds of exhibitions, and if there’s no conversation from folks in the field who come from these communities, I think we’re always going to end up with a void in the historical record of what happened, and the impact of what happened then gets lost.  
   
**LI**: That brings me to archives. You produced the documentary _Hogan’s Alley_ with Cornelia Wyngaarden in 1994, which presented an interview with a Black queer woman living in Vancouver, her family history and the history of Black folks in the city. At a time when the importance of archives and addressing disregarded histories is prevalent, what’s the value of grassroots, personal storytelling that lives outside of the establishment?

**AF**: I think that the big “A” archive exists to overshadow the little “a” archive, which, for me, is the archive that I know and touch and feel, and most of us do through stories at your dining table, through photographs that you go through with your family. For me, as a Black person coming \[from\] transatlantic slave histories, I often see the little “a” archive stories get repressed, \[which mirrors how\] we have been socialized to repress our engagements with each other—the real us. For me, the little “a” archive, and recouping that archive, is about giving agency to the everyday. We live everyday lives that are quite robust, and quite involved in rejecting the hegemonic ways of the world. Those little “a” stories and storytelling bring that back to the fore. We live our lives as humans in a world that tries to tell us that we’re not human. And when you hear those stories, and for me when I speak to anyone in terms of Blackness, about the everydayness of life, our heroism and our ability to circumvent, to come up with ways that are outside of what’s expected of us—that becomes a motivation to continue. That’s why it’s important that we tell our own stories.

**LI**: Though you have been one of many public advocates for the acknowledgment of our varied stories to be told, you still remain one of the very few Black curators and professors working in contemporary art—both as a curator and as a professor—in Toronto and in Canada. But numerous articles recently have high-lighted this strain on marginalized professionals that become sole beacons of support to countless marginalized students or mentees, which I know is your experience because I happen to be one of those students that was vying for as much of your time as possible. What are your strategies of being able to support, and care for, an onslaught of people wanting your time? How do you manage that demand?

**AF**: That’s a huge question. In order for the work that I want to see out there, and that my communities want to see, we have to become credentialized. To make sure that we will continue to centre Blackness, I have to work very hard to make sure that folks who want to be credentialized become credentialized, because the space of academia, like the space of the art gallery, has its gate- keepers. They have particular notions of who belongs in these spaces, and what can be said in these spaces, and for me it’s important to open that up, to make sure that what Black folks need to say can become speakable within both of these sites. But what’s also been really important to me in the work I do, particularly since I came to OCAD, is to have a community of folks outside of the arts whom I am accountable to and who hold me accountable, so that I still grasp the material realities of life, so that I don’t go off into the rarefied space that both academia and the arts can take. A lot of my care—and really what matters is a particular type of deep care—and support comes from folks who are interested in supporting the arts, who understand the role of the arts in my life, and in their lives, but who don’t exist in the arts. Their perspectives give me balance, and hold me down to always make sure that I’m real in terms of my desire for things, meaning that I don’t end up being seduced by the notion of singularity either. They remind me that \[this work is\] not just for some of us—it’s for all of us—which means that I have to really work hard on trying to care from my heart and not trying to care from my head.

**LI**: Is your holistic and inquisitive approach something you developed through mentorship? And what’s the role of mentorship in your own practice now?

**AF**: I feel that I’m always a student; I’m always learning. I also feel that my experience of academia and learning within the context of an educational institution is very close to my present. I remember it. I remember it because I know how I felt responsible for my own education and knowledge acquisition. I sought out people to mentor me—one of my first mentors was Cornelia Wyngaarden; Rinaldo Walcott was my supervisor; and Monika Kin Gagnon brought me into artist-run culture as an administrator, and the list goes on and on and on. I wouldn’t be here without all of those folks, not to mention the folks in the Black community and in Vancouver who took me under their wing. So now in my own work, I try to replicate those practices of mentorship because, for me, mentorship is a way of sharing power. Mentorship is a way of allowing folks to become their best selves. I can actually provide a pathway for them, so they can flourish however they see fit. I’m not interested in people becoming like me; I’m more interested in facilitating people to get on their own path, through things like co-curating exhibitions with them, helping a recent graduate to get their first exhibition, being a reader for their writing before it goes out in public, working with people whose work I believe in. Because I don’t see education as having changed a hell of a lot from when I was there \[as a student\], I feel as if I have a very deep embodied memory of that experience, and I know these are the same things my students are grappling with. There’s a connection with that, and I will never ever lose that connection, because I think it’s important if we’re going to stay alive in these places. You need someone to be able to see you.

[^1]: “I write to place care around the practices of \[B\]lack women artists. Their work. Their archives. Their fullness. Criticism is a way of showing up. It is a way of placing intellectual frameworks around the gestures and processes of artists.” Jessica Lynne, “Criticism is Not Static: a \[B\]lack feminist perspective.” https://www.artagencypart- ners.com/hidden-narratives/

lg_144-FATONA/IKIRIKO

md_144-FATONA/IKIRIKO

sm_144-FATONA/IKIRIKO

thumbnail_144-FATONA/IKIRIKO

144-FATONA/IKIRIKO

issue-144-p36-40.pdf

Dialogue

Education

Five years after the inaugural The State of Blackness conference, Andrea Fatona, in conversation with Liz Ikiriko, elucidates the role of criticism, institutional archives, and mentorship in supporting the longevity of Black cultural production in Canada.

Speaking Ourselves Into Being

Rachelle Dickenson is a British, Irish, Metis curator and PhD candidate at Carleton University.

Lee-Ann Martin is a Mohawk independent curator and scholar. She was the Curator of Contemporary Indigenous Art at the Canadian Museum of History and Head Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Martin’s most recent projects include Resilience (2018), https://resilienceproject.ca

lg_144-DICKENSON/MARTIN

md_144-DICKENSON/MARTIN

sm_144-DICKENSON/MARTIN

thumbnail_144-DICKENSON/MARTIN

144-DICKENSON/MARTIN

issue-144-p40-44.pdf

Curatorial practice

Rachelle Dickenson discusses intergenerational shifts in Indigenous curatorial practices in an interview with curator and scholar Lee-Ann Martin. Martin reflects on the near 30 years proceeding the 1991 publication of _The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native art and Public Museums in Canada,_ and what has and has not changed during that time.

Turning the Page on the Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, 30 Years On

> _One might… speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all \[people\] had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by \[humankind\], and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance._  
> —Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923)

Take the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, for example. Hailed by her contemporaries as “the first American Dada artist,” Freytag-Loringhoven was born in Germany in 1874, and eventually wound up in Greenwich Village.[^1] She was a performance artist, a sculptor, a painter and a poet, yet in Georges Hugnet’s canonized theoretical work, “The Dada Spirit in Painting,” Freytag-Loringhoven was only mentioned once, as: “the portrait of a Dadaist whimsy…dressed in rags picked up here and there, decked out with impossible objects suspended from chains, swishing long trains.”[^2] Framed as a fleeting image, without mention of her work. She lived and died in poverty, and in subsequent discourse, she and her work were scarcely mentioned at all. 

As Benjamin wrote of written history’s important but nonetheless troubled role in shaping the “afterlife” of artworks, “The history of the great works of art tells us about their descent from prior models, their realization in the age of the artist, and what in principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations,” adding, “Where the last manifests itself, it is called fame.” Compare, then, Freytag-Loringhoven’s framing in history to that of her famous contemporary Marcel Duchamp. The “afterlife” of Duchamp’s _Fountain_ (1917), a porcelain urinal with the inscription “R. Mutt,” is historicized as the birth of Conceptual Art, which, as we know, challenges the very meaning of authorship. With that in mind, it is particularly tragic to consider, as literary historian Dr. Irene Gammel proposed in 2002, that Freytag-Loringhoven was probably the artist responsible for _Fountain_. 

The Baroness, going under the _nom de plume_ Richard Mutt—which sounds to the German ear like _armut_, meaning “poverty”—was in Philadelphia in 1917, the year of _Fountain_’s rejection from the Society of Independent Artists’ (SIA) salon in New York. In a letter to his sister, painter Suzanne Duchamp, dated April 11, 1917, Duchamp wrote: “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. It was not at all indecent—no reason for refusing it.” Because the point of the exhibition was to showcase all submitted work, and because Duchamp was a board member and thus might have influenced the board’s debate over whether _Fountain_ was art, the “R. Mutt” inscription was later interpreted as an attempt to sneak past the panel anonymously in order to challenge its members to consider the art/not-art question without the bias of a famous name—rather than as the result of a collaboration with the Baroness, whose adoption of a masculine pen name also stemmed from a problem of public recognition, but indeed the opposite of Duchamp’s. 

That the Baroness was responsible for _Fountain_ is a theory further corroborated by photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a fellow member of the SIA board, who recalls that a young woman brought a urinal on a pedestal to the salon. The Tate Modern, which has one of the 17 replica _Fountains_ in their collection, regards Stieglitz’s account as a testament to Duchamp’s success at hiding his identity. The Tate, citing art historian Dr. William Camfield, the authority on Duchamp, further splits hairs about Marcel’s letter to Suzanne, stressing that the word “sent,” not “made,” is evidence that Duchamp is not attributing _Fountain_’s authorship to the woman, but merely shooting the shit about its messenger.[^3] (I’d venture to say that this claim can be refuted by saying “readymade” out loud.) 

The Baroness did a similar iconoclastic found-object/trash as _objet d’art_ with other pieces before _Fountain: Enduring Ornament_ (1914) was a rusty metal ring; _Cathedral_ (1918) was a piece of splintered wood; and, a drainpipe, _God_ (1917), was made the same year as Fountain, and wrongly misattributed to photographer Morton Schamberg (who took a picture of the sculpture) until recent scholarship corrected the mix-up. In the nearly two decades since Freytag-Loringhoven’s contributions were written into history, historians have begun to play a chicken versus egg game with _Fountain_ and _God_: the latter is usually written about as a response to Duchamp, sometimes given the swishy integrity of “a readymade in the spirit of,” to quote the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a photograph of the work is catalogued as a collaboration with Schamberg. Elsewhere, it’s discussed as a petty copycat, the product of an unrequited crush.[^4] Champions of the Baroness might just call them works in a series.

After returning to Berlin and spending some time at an inpatient psychiatric hospital where she wrote drafts of the memoir that comprises much of our knowledge about her, the Baroness died in 1927 by gas asphyxiation. Whether or not this was intentional is debated, but she did write a suicide letter to her friend and editor, modernist author Djuna Barnes, regarding her memoir/book of poetry, which she hoped would see publication: “Djuna—it is _desperately_ necessary for me,” Freytag-Loringhoven wrote.[^5] However, her writing remained unpublished until 2011, when it was brought to light thanks to the work of Gammel, her biographer. The Baroness’s corpse, in a stunningly poetic, if grotesque, mirror of her body of artistic work, remains lost. 

Meanwhile, the original _Fountain_ disappeared after the SIA salon (a fabulous theory is that it was literally thrown in the trash) but was reclaimed as a treasured work in the ’50s—20 years after Freytag-Loringhoven’s death.[^6] Duchamp authorized production of 17 replicas, personally autographing some of them, and started preaching about the philosophy of the readymade. When asked about the original’s inscription, Duchamp explained that “Mutt” is a play on “Mott,” as in J.L. Mott Iron Works, the Fifth Avenue plumbing supply store in New York City where he said he bought the urinal, although, according to Gammel’s research, there’s no record of that model in the store’s catalogue.

—————

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven suffered from what, in scientific research, is called the Matilda Effect. Margaret K. Rossiter presented this theory in her 1993 paper, “The Matilda Effect in Science,” responding to Robert K. Merton’s “The Matthew Effect in Science” (1968).[^7] Merton had pointed out a phenomenon where the work of junior researchers practising under an established scientist, is credited to their more esteemed colleague because the older scientist’s name is already recognizable. Thus the “have-nots of scientific history” are not credited for their contributions, Rossiter summates.[^8] She took Merton’s idea a step further by suggesting that cultural and systemic marginalization also impact attribution and recognition, specifically when women collaborate with men. Rossiter named her research after Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19th-century feminist activist and critic of female underrepresentation in the history of technology, from New York, but cites a number of other “Matildas” in science, including Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, and Lise Meitner, who worked with Otto Hahn for decades to discover nuclear fission, though he alone received the Nobel Prize. (Apparently, this happens disproportionately often when married couples work together.)

While Freytag-Loringhoven’s head-over-heels love for Duchamp was left totally unrequited, there are indications that she inspired his work, which I presume was like salt on her wounds. Duchamp and Man Ray’s first movie, _The Baroness Shaves her Pubic Hair_ (1921), starred the Baroness; most of the footage is lost, but one can imagine. Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s drag persona was modelled in the Baroness’s image, a gesture perhaps flattering, so far as imitation goes, but apropos of her performance art, appropriative. Duchamp’s fame, which was arguably at least partially indebted to the Baroness, plus his indifference to her affection, inspired scornful, pained and desperately felt art and poetry. Her painting _Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I By You—Faithless Bernice!_ (1924) was made in Berlin after leaving Greenwich Village and sent to photographer Berenice Abbott. It depicts a urinal smoking a pipe and leaking onto a pile of soiled books, while, on the left side, a booted foot exits the frame: perhaps a snapshot of how Freytag-Loringhoven viewed her relationship to Duchamp at that time.

In her poetry and letters, Freytag-Loringhoven referred to Duchamp as “M’ars,” a conjugation of “my arse.” Her identification with M’ars in these texts is so great, often saying that she is him, which scholars had long noted as artistic affinity for Duchamp, but after reading Gammel’s theory, sound more like attempts at reclaiming stolen identity. Consider this letter Freytag-Loringhoven wrote to the editors of _The Little Review_: “M’ars came to this _country_ \[America\]—protected—carried by fame—to use his plumbing fixtures—mechanical comforts… He merely amuses himself. But—I am he—not yet having attained his height—I have to fight.”[^9] Fame, according to Hannah Arendt, is one of the only defenses against the precarity of statelessness, the migrant’s tenuous existence between the securities of citizenship.[^10]

Despite Freytag-Loringhoven’s, in her own words, “unfitness to deal with the world—  _unprotected_” while she was alive, and because of her unprotectedness from disappearing into the folds of history, she is emblematic of Benjamin’s hope for “messianic” redemption.[^11] This belief in a saviour that is yet to come, which borrows from Jewish theology, is woven into his Marxist thinking—both Marxism and Jewish Messianism draw their energy from the belief in a future emancipation—and compels Benjamin to conduct history through a lens which he calls “historical materialism.”[^12] Religious inspirations aside, the historical materialist approach means attempting to excavate a “true picture of the past” by necessarily focusing on the stories of those who have been suppressed, rather than citing those which are already documented.[^13] “Only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments,” he writes.[^14] Here, one might consider Sarah Ahmed’s critique of citation as a “reproductive technology,” wherein dominant narratives are forever restated.[^15] “There are no mysteries of power, for power lies always on the surface” writes Agata Bielik-Robson, one of the foremost contemporary scholars on Benjamin’s messianic inspirations. “What is truly cryptic, always-in-the-hiding, is only the _promise_: the nothingness of _not-yet_.”[^16]

Because Duchamp is carried by fame, both as a protection in his life, and in his afterlife as a canonized historical figure, focusing on his legacy cannot contribute to the project of history, according to Benjamin’s conception of it. Insofar as he is written on the surface, Duchamp’s life cannot reveal to us what Freytag-Loringhoven’s can. The Baroness has hovered in the margins of history, but is now offered a chance for redemption, if only in memory, since forgetting always implies the possibility of remembering. While Duchamp was protected in his life by a Modernist discourse that privileged male figures, Freytag-Loringhoven suffered inside the same paradigm, which could not recognize her. Benjamin’s historical materialist approaches the past by acknowledging those anonymous figures who, rendered unimportant in their life (often by structural inequities), are most at risk of disappearing in their afterlives. As Bielik-Robson explains, we ought to tell stories of the past with the responsibility of knowing they’re incomplete, that they inevitably point “toward something we forgot, but were not supposed to have forgotten.”[^17] 

—————

We’re now left with fragments, which is more than what can be said for the majority of those omitted from history. What we know of the Baroness and her art is in large part due to Gammel’s work. Then we have her memoir, and images of her flickering through the works of her contemporaries: in Duchamp’s drag persona, in Man Ray’s movies and photographs, and as a fragmented image in Barnes’s autobiographic fiction _Nightwood_ (1936) as Robin Vote—a composite of sculptor Thelma Wood, whom Barnes loved, and Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom she began a long-distance relationship with around the same time Barnes’s relationship with Wood was in decline. Vote floats around the periphery of the novel, hooking up, ghosting and generally drifting in and out of others’ lives as they sit around waxing philosophical. “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again,” writes Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”[^18] These fragments offer an opportunity for Benjamin’s historian, who, as Bielik-Robson writes “never tires of searching attentively for signs and traces of redemption that did _not_ take place, and precisely because of that, can only be read through signs and traces.”[^19] 

—————

My research with _C Magazine_ began with a pedagogical reading of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Inspired by the tragedy of the Baroness’s story, and the sad but hopeful investigative project of Benjamin’s text, I wondered how to work through _C_’s history without simply reproducing it (and its attendant blind spots). My goal was to uncover and profile those who had not yet been spotlighted in the magazine’s pages, but were footnoted—artistic practitioners mentioned as collaborators, colleagues, assistants, muses and other sources of support and inspiration. While Rossiter centres her account of Matildas on the marginalization of women, and the Baroness is certainly emblematic of a patriarchal tradition of suppression and misattribution, I widened the scope of my research to consider other systemic forms of marginalization that have left certain people out of the archives, invoking Benjamin’s call to “brush history against the grain.”[^20] Providing myself with this methodological framework, I ended up finding artists, writers and thinkers who raise nuanced questions that are less about misattribution, and more about what constitutes notability, or whose projects have the explicit mandate of historicizing marginalized figures, or who choose to work collectively (toward a dissolution of solo authorship), and who attempt to account for such collective labour in written discourse, as is crucial for the encoding of history.

 
This text is part of _Shifting Spotlights_ , a series of essays by 2020 Writer in Residence Chelsea Rozansky. [Learn more about  _Shifting Spotlights_](https://cmagazine.com/programs/c-writer-in-residence) or read the whole series:

[Love as an Unbodied Archive: Interview with Niamh Dooley](https://cmagazine.com/issues/love-as-an-unbodied-archive-interview-with-niamh-dooley)

[Memorializing in Lower Case: Danilo McCallum](https://cmagazine.com/issues/memorializing-in-lower-case-danilo-mccallum)

[To Be Moved by the Intelligence of Our Processual Becoming: An Interview with Katrina Burch](https://cmagazine.com/issues/to-be-moved-by-the-intelligence-of-our-processual-becoming-an-in)

[^1]: Amelia Jones, “‘Women’ in Dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie,” in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 156.
[^2]: Marisa Januzzi, “Dada Through the Looking Glass, or: Mina Loy’s Objective,” in Women in Dada, 594.
[^3]: Sophie Howarth and Jennifer Mundy, “Marcel Duchamp: Fountain – Summary,” Tate (2015); www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573
[^4]: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “God by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg”; www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/261000
[^5]: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, eds. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), xiii.
[^6]: Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity―A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
[^7]: Margaret W. Rossiter, “The Matilda Effect in Science,” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 2 (May 1993): 325–341.
[^8]: _Ibid._ 
[^9]: Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa.
[^10]: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1948).
[^11]: Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. 
[^12]: Hannah Arendt and trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 254–255.
[^13]: _Ibid._ 
[^14]: _Ibid._ 
[^15]: Sarah Ahmed, “Making Feminist Points,” feminist killjoys (September 11, 2013); https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
[^16]: Agata Bielik-Robson, “Mysteries of The Promise: Negative Theology in Benjamin and Scholem” in Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity ed. Michael Fagenblat, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 275..
[^17]: Bielik-Robson, “Mysteries of The Promise: Negative Theology in Benjamin and Scholem, 272”.
[^18]: Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.
[^19]: Agata Bielik-Robson, “Walter Benjamin: All Shades of Gnosis,” in Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Zizek, ed. Philip Goodchild and Hollis Phelps (London: Routledge, 2017), 124.
[^20]: Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.

Writer in Residence Chelsea Rozansky introduces her project _Shifting Spotlights_, in an extended introduction to her series of interviews, through which she investigates authorship, attribution and notability.

Shifting Spotlights—The Extended Introduction

Letter

##### Hi,

The latest issue fondly reminded me of José Saramago’s words in the short story “The Tale of the Unknown Island” (1997): “Liking is probably the best form of ownership,” he wrote, “and ownership the worst form of liking.” Despite the danger of dismissing the phrase as an all-too-easy chiasmus, I believe it illuminates a little-acknowledged truth in our world.

Marie Fraser’s piece on acquiring a Tino Sehgal work in C143 problematizes the relation of ownership to its (non)lasting temporality. The author emphasizes new ways to think the possibility of ownership as pure trust and intersubjective connection, in the absence of all tangible attribution of matter, rights or meaning. Shockingly, the artist’s endeavour disowns even the seemingly indispensable foreknowledge of the thing to be owned.

In the light of these new findings, for me it becomes apparent that authentic ownership is, indeed, mutual and immaterial. It springs from a dialogic exchange that shapes both the owner and the owned, to the point their co-dependent roles become interchangeable. This conception of ownership is less a matter of holding property (of any kind) and is instead an affective engagement that troubles—if not effaces in its entirety—the constructed power dynamics at work between the owner (usually endowed with authority and agency) and the owned (usually deemed weak and passive).

I own what owns me.

##### Alexandra Irimia

##### Dear C,

Listening to the radio this morning, I learned that yesterday, Twitter banned political advertising, prompting pressure for other social media platforms to follow suit. The radio commentator made the point that it will prove difficult to distinguish what ads are and are not political. For instance, would Trump Hotels be allowed to publish an ad, the commentator asked. And, is it not politically-weighted to publish an advertisement for a clothing brand that uses sweatshop labour, while elbowing out activist groups lobbying for labour rights, she offered. The commentator ultimately decided that Twitter’s new policy would only endorse corporate consumption at the expense of grassroots political organizing, and that social media companies are better off regulating directed advertising specifically, which uses our expressed political ideologies and social interests to push product.

I’m hung up on Elisha Lim’s piece in C143, “Identity Politics Economics.” It has been heartening to put a name to the sense of disease I, and others, feel about social media platforms functioning as our go-to political arena. Lim offers an equally helpful and horrifying framework for our paradigm: no longer are we merely _engaged_ in identity politics—a term which, at this point, is often met with ennui, ambivalence and cynicism—but are now _subjugated to_ identity economics, a supra-determining system of algorithms that type and isolate us through our political leanings in order to sell us product more specifically and more astutely. Lim’s piece makes clear that more than any political power, we are governed by a regime of technology. I wanted to point out to the radio commentator this morning that a free market for political advertising will not work in our favour either, since even if ads that may embolden activism were permitted, clicking on them still just makes us better consumers.

I am reminded of a quotation from the feminist art collective Laboria Cuboniks’ “Xenofeminist Manifesto,” (which I first encountered through an article by Esmé Hogeveen in C132): “Technology isn’t inherently progressive.” It isn’t even inherently neutral. In this Foucauldian new world, our selves are ordered, regulated and controlled precisely by our good faith in standing up for ourselves. All we do is opt in. Thank you Lim for this sobering article.

##### Chelsea Rozansky

##### Dear C Mag,

Did you ever see the 2015 film _The Big Short_? Something drew me back towards this film after reading your latest issue, “Ownership.” The market, which rears its abstract head a good few times throughout the issue, is most likely the obvious point of departure in my attempt to understand this connection. In the movie, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Brad Pitt—in their portrayal of real life opportunists—try to short (bet against) the pre-2008 housing market, in order to make money back when the market might crash. They have arrived at the belief that the housing market as a whole is propped up by stocks lacking any accountability or integrity. Rather than falling into a critical elongation in the attempt to understand credit default swaps myself, and then trying to re-explain them here, I would rather cut to the chase. The moral of the film is that we (mis)place our full trust in these systems at large—financial, political, social, ecological—to sustain a sense of permanence.

Nevertheless, there is something to be said for extracting value from such lacks of accountability in those systems. Is this not exactly what the work of Tino Sehgal does? It is not my intention or interest here to claim that artists have the moral responsibility or obligation to guide us out of sins against ourselves and our planet (if anything, I would claim the opposite). However, I will say that there is a certain perspective that an artwork can allow us to position ourselves from; an interruption that enables us to see something for what it is. It is no coincidence then that Sehgal appears in your issue. By “problematizing the collection” in selling his work to the museum, he is shorting the collection itself, making visible the conditions of how an artwork comes to be valued. This interruption of the acquisition process exposes these conditions of exchange as a series of unwritten rules, unspoken presumptions and unfounded trust. If we can profit from exploiting these flawed ecologies as a way of illuminating its problems, then why not? If we are to continue to shift perspectives on how we condition ourselves in this world, perhaps we are to follow in the footsteps of real life opportunists, including Sehgal.

##### Jack McCombe

issue-144-p12-14.pdf

This issue’s column focuses on three letters reflecting on issue 143 “Ownership”.

Letters

lg_144

md_144

sm_144

thumbnail_144

Editorial Fellow

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Emily McKibbon is Associate Director and Senior Curator at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, ON.

‘Take a long pole and “sound” the spot,’ I add. ‘Because there’s no way of telling it’s a grave, except that it’s sunken.’”[^1] 

So begins Alice Walker’s directions to “the monument man” at the Merritt Monument Company in Fort Pierce, Fl., in 1973\. Walker, then 29, had travelled to South Florida to find what remained of Zora Neale Hurston, who was buried in an unmarked grave in an untended cemetery after her death at a state welfare home in 1963\. That same day, Walker ordered a gravestone to mark the place of Hurston’s rest, newly rediscovered amongst waist-high weeds and wildflowers. Walker wants to buy Hurston the premium “Ebony Mist” option, but settles for a plain, grey marker: “It is pale and ordinary, not at all like Zora,” she reflects. But when the transaction is over, she still asks that they send her a photograph of the stone once it’s installed.

“I visited this painting at the Musée d’Orsay,” Erika wrote me on September 9, 2018, on the back of a postcard printed with an image of Gustave Courbet’s _L’Atelier du peintre_ (1854–1855). “I spent a lot of time with Jeanne,” she continues. “Tomorrow I am going to walk by her home. It’s amazing how visible she is in the painting once you see her!” Printed at a meagre four by six inches, I myself can’t see the erased Jeanne where I know she once stood, leaning over the open pages of a book held by a seated Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Painted over at Baudelaire’s request, this trace is one of the few records of Jeanne Duval (c.1820–c.1862), a Haitian woman with whom he shared 20 years of his life and to whom he owes the  
inspiration for _Les Fleurs du mal_ (1857). 

And why is Erika looking for Jeanne, seeking her in paintings by Courbet and Manet, a photograph by Nadar, and outside the house where Baudelaire installed her, at 6 rue de la Femme sans Teste, Paris? “For years I have been on a path of thinking about Western and European art history and locating the Black body within that history. In a way I’ve been collecting evidence of a presence,”[^2] she notes. This presence, in Erika’s practice, is not wholly evidentiary but also relational; hers is “a compulsion to exist with, NOT to uncover or to reveal—to be with.”[^3] 

When we seek a relation, we tend to not only uncover, but also activate the creeping rootstock of relating. In the marginalia of _arriver avant moi devant moi_ (which roughly translates to: “to arrive before me, in front of me”), Erika invokes the artists Maud Salter (1960–2008) and Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934), both of whom created work about, towards and around Jeanne. Erika sees them—and Walker too—as fellow seekers, with whom she shares a motivation to sense and feel backwards.[^4] “I’m drawn to her—to them,”[^5] she writes.

In the last image, the artist extends her left hand, palm up, to the room that the mirror reveals. Her right hand holds a permanent marker that has careened across her open left palm and onto the page below, extending her lifeline towards the past and all the pain and potential it holds. “There are times—and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them—when normal responses of grief, horror and so on, do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels,” Alice Walker tells us of her own ancestral encounter. “It is only later, when pain is not so direct a threat to one’s own existence that what was learned in that moment of comical lunacy is understood. Such moments rob us of both youth and vitality. But perhaps they are also times when greater disciplines are born.”[^6]

[^1]: Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Ms., 1975, 86\. <https://www.allisonbolah.com/site%5Fresources/reading%5Flist/Walker%5FIn%5FSearch%5Fof%5FZora.pdf>
[^2]: Quoted in unpublished correspondence between Erika DeFreitas and Chris Cozier, 2019.
[^3]: Erika DeFreitas, arriver avant moi devant moi 04 (2019)
[^4]: Tellingly, Erika finished this project in Orlando: “My hope  
was that if I got the work completed early, I would travel  
to visit Zora’s gravesite.” Correspondence with the author, 2019.
[^5]: Erika DeFreitas, arriver Avant moi devant moi 07 (2019)
[^6]: Alice Walker, “In Search of  
Zora Neale Hurston,” 89.

lg_144-DEFREITAS

md_144-DEFREITAS

sm_144-DEFREITAS

thumbnail_144-DEFREITAS

144-DEFREITAS

issue-144-p0-6.pdf

Art History

Accompanying text by Emily McKibbon for Erika DeFreitas’ artist project _arriver avant moi devant moi_ which collects, locates and surveys evidence of the presence of the Black body in Western and European art history. 

arriver avant moi devant moi by Erika DeFreitas: Text 

​​​​​Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing, and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy, and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. 

Erika DeFreitas’ artist project _arriver avant moi devant moi,_ collects, locates and surveys evidence of the presence of the Black body in Western and European art history. Accompanying text by Emily McKibbon.

arriver avant moi devant moi

Review

Fabien Maltais-Bayda works around dance and performance. His writing can be found in _C Magazine, Canadian Art, Canadian Theatre Review, The Dance Current, Esse_, and _Momus_. He has also written for the anthology _Curating Live Arts_ (Berghahn Books, 2018), and for publications from the Art Gallery of York University and Blackwood Gallery. Fabien is currently a PhD student at the University of Chicago and a non-fiction staff member at the _Chicago Review_.

Many performers wore gloves—textural beige, with satiny red palms and extra-long, tubular fingers— at the opening reception of k.g. Guttman’s _Visiting Hours_. In one moment, Guttman stood behind a simple chair, caressing its back with spindly, softly probing digits. Another afternoon at Gallery TPW, Johanna Householder wordlessly prompted me to don a pair myself, before indicating an envelope to open. Householder, one of seven artists who performed _Visiting Hours_ during the exhibition’s run, was leading me through an interaction with dance artist and scholar Seika Boye’s _an image I re(turn) to_ (1955/2019). Inside the envelope, and grasped after a few poking tries, I found an image, printed on paper, and redacted in black. After examining, and clumsily replacing the document, I selected a book from a shelf to which Householder had led me. We proceeded to read a few paragraphs from Fred Moten’s _Black and Blur_ (2017). As the exhibition’s program notes detail, the obscured image tucked in the envelope was a reproduced cropping of a larger 1955 photograph showing “an interracial street dance in Toronto.” Part of a private archival collection, and thus unavailable for public display, the picture is one that Boye has viewed and reviewed repeatedly in the context of her research.

Asking what it means, or how it feels, to visit an image, _Visiting Hours_ brought together six offerings from collaborators like Boye, which became foci for a series of performative explorations generated by the show’s ensemble of seven performers. During TPW’s opening hours, each spectator entering the gallery was met by one of the performers, and guided through a series of gestures, actions and propositions with which to view the works. Importantly, each performative episode was arranged not only around an image, but also, more specically, around an image that documents a previous performance. In our encounter with Joshua Vettivelu’s _Fort/Da!_ (2015–ongoing), this intermediality shows up in a collection of large coloured squares, like giant paint chips, which the performers use in a viewing exercise conducted on the sidewalk outside the gallery. These swatches are actually blown-up pixels from a photograph of Vettivelu’s extemporaneous performance series in which they toss rocks into bodies of water they meet. So, while Guttman deploys choreography to ask what it is to visit an image, she simultaneously volleys a series of questions about what it is to image performance, how the image might carry performance’s histories, and what aesthetic and conceptual possibilities lie in iterative processes of viewing.

Of course, images, and especially photographs, are often tasked with carrying choreography into history; what remains in the archive of much dance and performance are the photos taken. Throughout the artist talks presented alongside _Visiting Hours_, questions around the contributed works’ archival character were raised repeatedly. Yet, with the exception of Boye’s contribution, these images are all relatively recent. If there is an archive here, it’s a relatively new one—still in the very soft stages of forming. As such, the exhibition feels less concerned with presenting historical images than with the arguably more compelling task of imagining a historical present, through performance across time.

Scholar Rebecca Schneider uses the phrase “architectures of access” to describe the infrastructures through which bodies interact with archival material: “books, bookcases, glass display cases, or even the request desk at an archive.” In a thoughtful turn,  
the gloves we wear to engage with Boye’s _an image I re(turn) to_ become articles of inaccess. They muddle our dexterity, calling new attention to the gestures required to get at an image; and finally, the document we do reach keeps that image out of view, problematizing visual access by raising questions around consent and positionality. Meanwhile, the green-screen set-up for Matthew-Robin Nye’s _Refugia_ (2016) serves as architecture for some spectral access, allowing artists and visitors alike to be seen entering a projected space of previous performing.

The exhibition’s performance situations diffract spectatorship, across material, memory and movement. For Francisco-Fernando Granados’ _towards a minor abstraction_ (Translation) (2016–2018), we look at abstract drawings held in our hands, close our eyes and imagine their not-quite-grasped outlines, then watch a performer dance the drawings in the space before us. Holding, picturing, viewing, our bodies are as much architectures of access for the images in the exhibition as are the more mechanical accoutrements it employs: a pulley system or a frame mounted on backpack straps. Schneider’s observation that archival contents “necessarily meet bodies and engage in the repetition and revision, the citing and becoming that is also choreography” resonates here.

With an ongoing resurgence of interest in choreography among galleries and museums, a few problems persist. As many writers, including Claire Bishop, have noted, the integrity and impact of dance works can suffer when dropped into the white cube without attention paid to the form’s demands. What is more, visual art spaces are rarely equipped to care for dancing bodies. In contrast, the deep consideration that undergirds Guttman’s practice not only creates a comfortable home for moving bodies in the gallery, but also proposes a model for exhibiting dance and performance in such a space; it’s a framework concerned with specificity and responsiveness. Guttman’s approach, as with other successful exhibitions that present choreography—and all its complexities—in the gallery, is intermedial. In _Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy_ (2014), performers learned the choreographer’s oeuvre by, among other things, studying frequently disseminated photographs of his works. For Derek Liddington’s _the body will always bend before it breaks, the tower will always break before it bends_ (2017), the artist used performance stills from two 1928 Ballets Russes works as starting points for a series of experiments that spanned painting, textile, sculpture, dance and video. Similarly, _Visiting Hours_ embraces the ways in which performance can move among and between media; this intermediality is essential to the remarkable flexibility and multivalence of the viewing experiences offered.

One of the fundamental questions that exhibition spaces pose to choreography is: what happens to spectatorship when performance is rendered visitable? In other words, what happens when the dynamics of watching choreography shift from the delimited space-time of a theatre, to the unconstrained come-and-go of a gallery? In a sense, Guttman has turned this query back towards the material entities that make up that space’s more usual inhabitants: objects and images. Visiting images is nothing new; in fact, it’s the fundamental practice upon which galleries and museums operate. And yet, by thinking with choreography, a relative medial newcomer to being visited, Guttman renegotiates this form of encounter. _Visiting Hours_ re-figures the actions, expectations and interactions that constitute the art viewer’s visit, revealing, by contrast, the staleness of rote visiting experiences.

The exhibition participates, then, in artistic genealogies that seek to parse, complicate and expand the field of spectatorship. Where the novelty of Guttman’s intervention is especially felt is its investment in the somatic contingency and choreographic potential of the visit—not just the visit to, but also the visit with, and, importantly, the visit with again. _Visiting Hours_ encourages us to put to use what its title denotes. It asks us to return, extending an oddly gloved hand, to look again and look anew.

lg_144-MALTAIS-BAYDA

md_144-MALTAIS-BAYDA

sm_144-MALTAIS-BAYDA

thumbnail_144-MALTAIS-BAYDA

144-MALTAIS-BAYDA

issue-144-p55-56.pdf

Fabien Maltais-Bayda reviews k.g. Guttman’s exhibition, _Visiting Hours_, performed by k.g. Guttman, Ahlam Hassan, Johanna Householder, Kelly Keenan, Mikiki, Shahir Omar-Qrishnaswamy and Bee Pallomina, with contributions by lo bil, Seika Boye, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Jessica Karuhanga, Matthew- Robin Nye and Joshua Vettivelu at Gallery TPW, Toronto. (June 29 – August 3, 2019).

k.g. Guttman: Visiting Hours

Saelan Twerdy is a writer, editor, and cultural worker based in  
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. He is the Managing Editor of RACAR, the  
official journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada, and currently works as a Student Librarian at Concordia University Webster Library.

The most remarkable thing about this generally remarkable anthology of writings by Ken Lum is that it took so long for such a book to appear. In one of the essays collected here, Lum’s now-classic “Canadian Cultural Policy: A Problem of Metaphysics” of 1999, he laments “the complete absence of any book that critically and theoretically addresses in a historically comprehensive manner developments in Canadian art over the last thirty years.” _Everything is Relevant_ is not exactly that book, but it does cover 27 years of an artist’s writing life and, now that it exists, I wonder how we managed to get by without it. Of course, quite a few of these texts were already part of the public record, but it is a credit to the nascent Concordia University Press that they saw the need for such a collection and made it one of their very first releases. (It is also the first publication in a series called Text/Context: Writings by Canadian Artists, which aims to collate published and unpublished writings that are not easily accessible.)

The texts included are highly diverse. Along with a thoughtful introductory essay by Kitty Scott, there is documentation from Lum’s _Carnegie Library Project_ (1999), catalogue essays written about other artists, texts for exhibitions curated or co-curated by Lum (including the 2005 Sharjah Biennial and _Shanghai Modern_, 1919–1945, from the same year), exhibition reviews, critical essays written for magazines and web platforms, academic art history articles (including his first editorial for _Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art_, which he co-founded), statements on art prizes and art education, and lectures, as well as diaristic pieces and other personal reflections. Some of these texts were previously unpublished; many would have been difficult to find. There are, notably, no interviews. While Lum often writes about his life experiences, ideas and opinions, few of the included texts focus directly on Lum’s own artworks. Furthermore, of the 18 colour plates in the book, only three depict works by the artist. Rather, Lum is constantly looking outward. As the title suggests, this is a book about life, and on what terms (and whose) life enters into art, and vice versa.

The book is divided into three sections (each covering a decade), which roughly correspond to Lum’s emergent period as a writer (though he was already active as an artist throughout the 1980s), focused largely on Vancouver and the Canadian scene; his mature period, in which he became a highly successful international artist commenting on the global art world; and his most recent phase as a professor based in Philadelphia, in which his writings on his adopted home city, Canada–US relations and public art are often more reflective and sometimes less pointed than his earlier texts.

Certain themes recur regularly throughout his writing. On many occasions, Lum refers to a period of personal crisis in which he felt great disillusionment with the hollowness and exclusivity of the official art world. In a text titled “Something’s Missing” (2006), arguably the heart of this collection, he writes: “I had a choice: I could either stop being an artist or I could enlarge my frame of understanding of art by looking away from what I was accustomed to.” This moment spurred Lum to expand his activities, and he initiated a period of active writing and curatorial and pedagogical work that led him to teach and travel in Martinique, West Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He became a real-time documenter of the globalizing, post-colonial art world of the late 1990s and 2000s, in which the nomadism of artists was widely touted by curators—a development that Lum viewed with a critical eye as he witnessed the global circulation of rapacious capital and its dispossessions alongside the utopian promises of cosmopolitanism.

Always attentive to issues of difference and institutional power, Lum is unfailingly critical in his rigorously materialist approach to whatever issues, places and artworks he encounters. He often refers to his childhood (he was raised in East Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona neighbourhoods by working-class Hong Kong immigrant parents) and his background as a scientist—a bread-winning but unfulfilling career he gave up to take a chance on art—to raise the question of who has the power to articulate their experiences and on what terms those experiences are validated. Whether in Saskatoon, Hong Kong, Philadelphia or Delhi, Lum exhibits an inexhaustible curiosity about wherever he happens to be, never failing to notice neglected or troubled histories and usually brandishing encyclopedic local knowledge. He consistently calls upon readers to challenge the centre–periphery binary and to seek bottom-up, many-to-many connections among so-called “peripheral” art communities. As the book progresses, urban history, public space, memorials and monuments increasingly become the focus of Lum’s thinking—a reflection of his recent work with Monument Lab, which he co-founded in Philadelphia in 2012.

Lum’s erudition is powerful but never pretentious: he cites the canon of critical theory, cultural studies and postcolonial scholarship with great facility and familiarity, never succumbing to obscurantism— though, in his most institutionalized roles he does occasionally fall victim to the clichés of curatorial language. His text for the Sharjah Biennial is, unlike most of this book, a somewhat dated and standard piece of art writing, though his “Surprising Sharjah” diary, written for _Canadian Art_, is much more rewarding and revealing. For example, it finds him lamenting that he may not be cut out to be a curator: “I realized how much crap a curator has to endure from artists,” he sympathetically muses. Meanwhile, he takes note of the conditions for Indian guest workers, the consensus and conformity of the biennial format, the “Donald Trump-esque architecture” of Dubai and the proximity of the war raging in Iraq.

Inevitably, Lum’s writings will be compared to those of Jeff Wall, whose _Selected Essays and Interviews_ were published by MoMA in 2007\. Wall’s writings are more narrowly focused on art-historical questions and, even when written about his Vancouver peers or his conceptual forebears, primarily served the purpose of elucidating and justifying his own practice of photoconceptualism, setting the terms for the reception of what became known as the Vancouver School. Lum, by contrast, conspicuously avoids saying anything about this designator or any of the associated artists, among whom he is often included- though his commitment to the critical and even utopian impulses of first-wave conceptual art is frequently evident. Several times, Lum mentions the first art class he took at Simon Fraser University, but he neglects to inform the reader that Wall was his teacher; Kitty Scott mentions it in her introduction. One could speculate that the disillusionment to which Lum refers—which particularly afflicted him in the late 1990s—was associated with the way his work and that of his peers was packaged and circulated during their rise to prominence.

Nevertheless, his dissatisfaction has been highly productive. This book is a record of Lum’s perpetual challenge to how art is defined and a testament to his unflagging search for meaning beyond what the art world is able to contain. Anyone who finds “something missing” in contemporary art, who also feels that the field of art today continues to be painfully limited in ways that are socially and economically determined, will find much to stir them in this inspiring and necessary anthology, which is sure to become an indispensable document.

lg_144-TWERDY

md_144-TWERDY

sm_144-TWERDY

thumbnail_144-TWERDY

144-TWERDY

issue-144-p56-58.pdf

Saelan Twerdy reviews the anthology _Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018_ (2020) by Ken Lum, published by Concordia University Press.

Ken Lum: Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018

**D’Arcy Blake** is a Canadian-American writer and artist.

Virgil Abloh is primarily known for his work as a fashion designer. He ascended to major prominence after founding the luxury streetwear brand Off-White in 2012, and was appointed artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton in 2018\. In addition to surveying Abloh’s work in fashion, graphic design, furniture design and music, his retrospective at the MCA Chicago introduces us to Virgil Abloh the Contemporary Artist. Barring the entrance to Abloh’s show are the sort of retractable-belt stanchions used by airports and movie theatres to control crowds. Visitors must pass between the orange and white striped belts, which resemble construction zone CAUTION tape bearing the exhibition’s title: “\_Figures of Speech\_.” By combining motifs of working-class labour with the limited-access exclusivity of a cordoned entrance queue, the gesture foreshadows a body of work that, like Robin Hood in reverse, has no qualms with taking the image of the poor and selling it to the rich.

While this is the first museum exhibition for Abloh, exhibiting fashion has certainly become a trend among art institutions. In 2018 alone, MoMA, LA MoCA, the Whitney, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Met, to name just a few, all had major exhibitions dedicated to the subject. And although this recent surge in the popularity of clothing in the art museum questions, once again, the limits of what can be defined as art, a more pertinent question could be asked. To what extent is the enormous gravitational pull of celebrity culture and its glitzy spectacle steering the focus of today’s art museums towards blockbuster exhibitions that will assuredly gain more media attention and visitor attendance, not because of the quality of the art, but because they resonate more broadly with the impulses of mass consumer culture? The MCA’s validation of designer streetwear as museum-quality artwork collapses a necessary distance between the now-aging notion of art as a critical voice and the corporations and markets that seek to earn profit off of those voices. Moreover, it presents a host of opportunities to instrumentalize any social issue that can be made fashionable.

In the first room, a cluster of banker’s boxes labelled 2010–2011 VIRGIL ABLOH OFFICIAL FILES (_In Conversation with Shayne_, 2019) is stacked with calculated haphazardness. A few of their lids, perched wilfully askew, reveal cellophane-wrapped garments that are branded HOOD BY AIR (another luxury street-wear brand with which Abloh is associated). Hanging on the wall opposite, a photo by fashion photographer Juergen Teller pictures Abloh amid a _mise en scène_ of objects that clumsily allude to his rise to prominence in the fashion world, including a Louis Vuitton tool box and an inflatable T-Rex. In the image, Abloh wears a hoodie silkscreened with the phrase R. MUTT 1917—the signature that Marcel Duchamp inscribed on _Fountain_ (1917), the urinal-made-artwork that is generally credited for exploding the formal limitations of modernism. But the conspicuous homage does more than merely pay respects to one of modern art’s giants. Abloh equates his own achievements, which at times bridge several sectors of the culture industry, to the seismic shift Duchamp represents. Considering Abloh’s preoccupation with labelling things (another of Off-White’s signatures is imprinting their product’s descriptions between quotation marks on the garment itself), the designer seems to be labelling himself as “R. Mutt.”

Despite the self-aggrandizing material one finds in the first room alone, what we see might, in fact, indicate that a transformation of Duchampian proportion has begun to take hold of the institutional art world. The once-sturdy barriers between separate industries have been eroded to the point that merchandise and culture have become superimposed. This is evident in the adjacent room’s display, which features three clothing racks from Off-White’s runway collections, looking as much like a museum of contemporary art as it does a salesfloor at Nordstrom. The text on the rack holding his 2018 “Temperature” collection states that Abloh “drew on nautical themes and used materials from emergency and rescue professions, explaining that he felt a personal responsibility to respond to the \[Syrian refugee\] crisis.” It so happens that his response was to make clothing items that retail for upwards of $1,000 a piece. From a curatorial standpoint, Abloh’s feeble gesture of humanitarianism seems to function as a self-assuaging veneer of altruism. It affords the museum a virtuous appearance while avoiding the risk of partisanism that real activism holds, which could potentially alienate benefactors and visitors alike.

Beyond a free-standing, human-sized replica of Kanye West’s 2013 album _Yeezus_ (Abloh was, at that time, assistant creative director of West’s creative content company DONDA), a black hall is hung with advertising photos for Abloh’s fist Louis Vuitton collection. Pictured against a stark white background, a selectively desaturated group of Black toddlers models bright, primary-coloured handbags. The accompanying wall text asserts that Abloh wanted to use the advertising campaign to “focus on the theme of boyhood” and goes on to state his belief in posing children of colour at “the center stage in the future of luxury.” But while the arresting images do, on the surface, seem to fly in the face of typical luxury marketing, and might indeed challenge our expectations of who should be modelling designer accessories, they belie the fact that under Abloh’s creative direction, racialized bodies are being used to advertise handbags with price tags of over $5,000\. On the far wall of the same room, a black painting bears the white logo of Cotton Incorporated, the marketing and research association for American cotton growers. A seemingly unintentional sense of irony hovers around this obvious reference to slavery in America: it simultaneously recalls the horrors of slavery and represents America’s deification of the commodities that emerged from it—including the industry in which Abloh has built a substantial empire.

Apart from simply pointing to the deep contradictions of American consumer culture, these works highlight the growing confusion between virtue and profit, instrumentalization and inclusivity, progress and regress, that ascends the rungs of the art institution. Could it be that this entire exhibition is a massive PR opportunity—simultaneously an advertisement for the supposed progressivism of the MCA Chicago and for Abloh’s commercial exploits? Should the marketability and mass appeal of art come at the expense of its critical value? It seems today that, within art institutions, consumerist ideals have begun to outweigh the issues of identity, critical thought and social movement that have been intertwined with art for the past half-century. In this process, an increasing emphasis is placed on art that spans the various realms of the culture industry, of which visual art is just one part. But with this transformation, dilemmas arise in determining the appropriate arenas for art, cultural critique and consumption. Abloh’s exhibition reveals the difficulty our time will have in parsing the boundaries between art and product, and determining where each belongs.

lg_144-BLAKE

md_144-BLAKE

sm_144-BLAKE

thumbnail_144-BLAKE

144-BLAKE

issue-144-p58-60.pdf

D’Arcy Blake reviews Virgil Abloh’s exhibition, _Figures of Speech_ at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (June 10 – September 29, 2019).

Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech

Laura Demers is an artist and writer based in Toronto. Her writings have been published in Public Parking and Prefix Photo, among others. She is currently the TD Curator of Education and Outreach Fellow at The Power Plant.

Jean-Paul Kelly is known for harnessing the malleability of what he’s called “documentary substance,” in terms of its implicit, suggested and potential narratives. His most recent solo exhibition’s central work, a three-channel video titled _That ends that matter_ (2016–2019), places in proximity: a montage of mostly photojournalistic documents manipulated by Kelly’s hands, a synced animation of patterns and shapes echoing each of his gestures and a dramatized re-enactment of a court hearing witnessed by the artist.

In the darkened main room of Centre Vox, a succession of challenging photographs unravels on a small screen: snapshots of violent altercations between police and protesters, wounded civilians and silhouettes of criminally accused individuals concealing their faces during trials. More than once, I unwittingly averted my gaze as they appeared, one after the next, with overwhelming bluntness. Subtle references to the court case of whistleblower Chelsea Manning are embedded here too—particularly those pertaining to her unbearable living conditions while incarcerated and, due to her military affiliation, the denial of her hormone replacement therapy in the early stages of her transition. Interspersed with stills from Jean Genet’s avant-garde erotic film _Un chant d’amour_ (1950) and gay pornographic materials, this montage produces oscillating feelings of lust, empathy and dread, a mixture of sentiments rarely felt together, let alone in formal gallery settings.

During a Vdrome interview, Kelly elaborates on his own rapport with the pictures he collects, which range indiscriminately from the widely disseminated to the somewhat taboo: “Within those \[images\] are things that I can’t deal with, or that seduce me, or that I can’t compartmentalize in some way.” In the montage, Kelly intervenes with the printed photographs by gently stroking their surfaces, sometimes wiping the tear gas from protesters’ eyes with his fingers, sometimes tracing the contours of an exposed inner thigh and groin. I let my gaze be guided by his touch, and through these interpretive, agential gestures, I begin to read in Kelly’s selection of images a new, rather intimate narrative.

Come to think of it, the exhibition’s title, _A sensation best described by another_, hints at the act of reading-through, which characterizes much of Kelly’s work. On one hand, the phrase suggests a kind of lived experience that is only definable through an intermediary, through _an other_ with whom a sensation was shared. Yet the title also denotes a sort of synesthetic experience, whereby an ineffable sensorial impression is made perceptible as a result of its translation—into another sensation or otherwise. A few steps away from the video montage, Kelly’s tactile cues are synchronously transposed into geometrical shapes and projected onto a wall, as though another kind of legibility could be gleaned from the process of abstracting; as though each image, once stripped of its representational content, could somehow better attest to a feeling.

The animation, I soon found out, draws inspiration from the oeuvre of American abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly, who, after a brief stint in the army, became the subject of an intrusive FBI investigation that eventually prohibited him, based on his sexual orientation, from further professional involvement with the US government. The report from this investigation lies on a table behind a velvet curtain, in a binder filled with dating app selfies of queer men who have strategically blurred their own identities in order to avoid similar scrutiny. Either taken at an oblique angle or with facial traits cropped out, each man is made to be unrecognizable. Again, in an abstracting gesture, another kind of experience—that of institutional violence—becomes legible.

In the adjoining room, a third channel features a re-enactment of a court hearing, of which the essential contextualizing details remain obscure. Kelly often visited the City of London Magistrates’ Court during his residency at the Delfina Foundation. In the UK, laws restrict all visual documentation of events that take place within the circumscribed space of the courtroom. Thus, the so-called accuracy of official court drawings is inherently contingent upon the subjectivity, memory and note-taking abilities of the reporting sketch artist. In an interview with _Elephant Magazine_, Kelly recalls his own note-taking as dependant on idiosyncratic analogies: “when describing the finishes and fixtures \[of the room\] I would make associations with textures, colours, and shapes that were within things in my own house.” The scene is therefore filtered through the lens of Kelly’s own biases, resulting in a retelling that is highly suffused with partiality.

In fact, the artist plays up his bias with great poetic freedom. The gaze and the politics of sight within the justice system are dramatized in such a way that tensions are made tangible. “Now I’m going to switch on some noise so that we can discuss some matters privately,” a woman’s voice announces. Anxious glances are exchanged by the cast of witnesses, defendants, judges and jury members. The dull sound of a white noise machine suddenly envelops the room, granting select interlocutors (their roles indeterminate, since none of the actors’ roles are ever quite concretized) a thin veil of privacy as they converse. Meanwhile, a young man taps his finger on the desk—a symptom of palpable unease—while he awaits his turn to speak. Under this blanket of silence, the actors furtively glance in our direction one by one, acknowledging the cinematic apparatus, and our voyeuristic presence by proxy.

In this implicatory act of bearing witness, I was reminded that images are often made to bear witness in our place. With _A sensation best described by another_, Kelly challenges the claims that visual documents impose epistemological notions of truth, and instead underlines other registers—affective or sensorial—by which they may reveal underlying structures and narratives. “Thank you. That ends that matter,” the woman’s voice declares, bringing me back to the present moment and away from the endless possible readings-through that Jean-Paul Kelly’s work incites.

lg_144-DEMERS

md_144-DEMERS

sm_144-DEMERS

thumbnail_144-DEMERS

144-DEMERS

issue-144-p60-61.pdf

Laura Demers reviews Jean-Paul Kelly’s exhibition _A sensation best described by another_ at Centre Vox, Montreal (June 15 – July 13, 2019).

Jean-Paul Kelly: A sensation best described by another

Lauren Fournier is a writer, artist, and curator. Her book _Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism_ is forthcoming through The MIT Press (2021).

Based in New York City, Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic whose writings have been credited with launching a “second wave” in trans studies. _Females: A Concern_ is her first book-length work, which provides readings of contemporary culture— both popular and niche—through female-ness. Only here, “female” refers to self-negation—a state “against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels.”

While Chu is the book’s author, she has effectively summoned the late Valerie Solanas as a guide. This small book began as an essay on Solanas’ _Up Your Ass_ (1965), an experimental play about a young misanthropic sex worker named Bongi Perez that would not be produced until 2000—well after Solanas’ impoverished death and her posthumous mythologization as radical, as violent. Chu wields the parodic play’s plot, characters and themes as an intertextual ally for her own 21st-century thesis about gender and power. There is a suffused sense of the parafictional, with Chu’s writing moving between the historical and the imaginary, the factual and fictional. Hers is a somewhat comic parafiction, one that is as serious as any well-crafted and considered joke; early in the book she pauses to give the reader insight into her method— that she sets out to “commit to a bit” and to “play it straight… A _bit_ may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real” (my emphasis).

She incisively reads movies like _Fight Club_, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s porn-soaked _Don Jon_ and _The Matrix_. Chu inverts the alt-right Men’s Rights Activists’ (MRA) appropriation of the “red pill” metaphor— where one rejects feminism by “choosing the red pill” instead of the supposedly status quo path of progressive feminist change. Reading through a trans lens this “red pill” meme (that has come to stand in metonymically for the MRA), Chu looks to the original source text of _The Matrix_ and its creation by trans directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski to make the convincing case that, “back in the nineties, prescription estrogen was, in fact, red.” So, to take the red pill here is actually to become _female_.

This incisiveness extends to Chu’s readings of art historical works, too; the same year Solanas wrote _Up Your Ass_, Yoko Ono famously performed her _Cut Piece_ (1965) at Carnegie Hall. Solanas, the crass archangel guiding the book, isn’t its only spectre; there’s also the persistent, haunting threat of misogyny—embodied both by the alt-right, beta-male Reddit threads of today and behaviours like that of the young man who, with a sadistic, shit-eating grin, cuts off Ono’s bra straps—to the artist’s clear, yet consenting, disapproval.

Chu’s shit-disturbing style of conceptualizing present-day gender politics has put her on the map. Her _n+1_ essay “On Liking Women” takes Solanas’s _SCUM Manifesto_ as the grounds for a theory of trans-sexuality as separatism. And just as Chu’s embracing of the word “transsexual” seems curiously anachronistic—even trollish—so too does her use of “female” as self-negation. Yet far from new, the premise of female-ness as self-negation is found across modern and contemporary art, philosophy and literature. From turn-of-the-century psychoanalysis to postwar art house cinema, the cool expression of female-ness as passivity has continued to find life within experimental scenes: “Ever realize that in ‘masculine’ there’s ‘mask’, and in ‘feminine’ there’s nothing?” (a classic nouvelle-vague exchange in Godard’s _Masculin Féminin_ \[1966\]). It’s a sentiment expressed throughout late 20th-century feminist literature, too; in her foreword to Chris Kraus’ _I Love Dick_ (1997), Eileen Myles writes: “I just knew in a quiet way I was ruined. If I agreed to be female.” In this way, _Females: A Concern_ feels like familiar territory, comfortably at home in the loud lineage of iconoclastic 1990s–2000s theory coming out of presses like Semiotext(e). Written by the anonymous, France-based collective Tiqqun, _Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl_ (1999) takes female-ness-specifically young female-ness— as a garbage dump for everything reprehensible about late capitalist culture. (Their thesis is summed up in such manifesto-esque statements as: “The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.”)

Each chapter of Chu’s book is a succinct and somewhat self-contained vignette that connects to the others through Solanas citations—the epigraphs for each chapter are utterances from characters in Solanas’ play. There are thematic resonances with the genre of post-porn, post-punk gender-fuckery _à la_ European artists and writers like Paul B. Preciado (_Testo yonqui_) and Virginie Despentes (_Baise-Moi_). Early on in the book, Chu describes a porno in which “a female teacher uses a quotation from the _SCUM Manifesto_ to seduce two female students, turning them into lesbians,” saying that this “made instant, perfect sense” because “It’s what Valerie did to me.” Being done to— this passive and defining status of female-hood—is an oblique way into conversations around failure and “loser” culture. It is one that remains, even in contrast to the theoretical writings of queers like Jack Halberstam, disorientingly ambivalent when it comes down to the physical politics of what Chu is saying. The accelerationist thrust of her speedy treatise is embodied most succinctly in the case of millennial comedian Jamie Loftus, who she describes as “butt-chugging” David Foster Wallace’s famed tome Infinite Jest in a hyper-physical act of critiquing alt-macho intellectual-fetish culture. Is accelerationism the millennial equivalent of mid-century Warholian apathy? Both seem coolly irresponsible, products of their own time.

The writing in _Females_ is sharp, with nary a word out of place. But it’s in the logic of larger argument on female-ness as self-negation that she, at points, begins to lose me. Whether it’s true, for example, that “pussy envy” is more accurately descriptive of our psychoanalytic drives than the Freudian “penis envy”—that “deep down, no one wants \[power\] at all”—is an intriguing proposition, one that is strangely novel in conversations about gender and agency but also one that slips through your hands when you try to grasp it. This is the case with many of Chu’s hypotheses in the book, which are perversely essentialist. Her stance on sissy porn as “a parodic expression of the alt-right’s most repressed sexual fantasies” is entertaining, for example, but begins to break down when she connects it to a larger, more literal and autobiographically tied argument that everyone wants to be female—in the sense, here, of having a “pussy.” I can only assume this is all part of the joke—the “bit” that Chu has committed to—but how seriously should we take it?

The book is most potent when taken as a thought experiment in theorizing the limits of the possibilities of queer theory. At times it is confounding, like reading Language poetry where the intent is less about some kind of semantic “meaning” as it is a materialist, theoretical play. Its strength, in my view, lies in Chu’s paying due attention to Solanas and her complexities as a 20th-century writer, thinker and activist who exceeds the categories that tend to define her (like “radical feminist”). Solanas, perhaps herself un-nuanced, deserves just this kind of careful, nuanced reading. Chu’s structuring of the book is also effective—an almost formalist sense of structural autonomy from the book’s opening through its end. Her own _autos_ emerges most clearly in the conclusion—to potent effect. Andrea was once named “Andy,” and just as Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, so too did Chu, in a sense, shoot Andy when she transitioned MtF. It’s a connection that, in the context of Chu’s larger, parafictional provocation, makes a certain amount of sense: in 1967, when Solanas was “frequenting the Factory, trying to cajole Andy Warhol into directing and producing _Up Your Ass_,” Warhol told her that he thought “there were only boys” before he met Valerie—that he thought “there was only one sex.” With _Females_, Chu re-animates Solanas and these historical scenes, writing a world that is an inversion of the Warholian worldview and is, therefore, \_very Solanas\_—a world where “there are only girls.” And, maybe for this reason, it is also fated for misunderstanding.

lg_144-FOURNIER

md_144-FOURNIER

sm_144-FOURNIER

thumbnail_144-FOURNIER

144-FOURNIER

issue-144-p61-63.pdf

Lauren Fournier reviews the book _Females: A Concern_ (2019) by Andrea Long Chu, published by Verso.

Andrea Long Chu: Females: A Concern

**Madeline Bogoch** is a writer and film programmer based in Winnipeg (Treaty 1 territory), and her work has been published in _C Magazine_, _Peripheral Review_, _Galleries West_, and other publications. Madeline is the Manager of Media Collections at Video Pool Media Arts Centre, and Senior Programmer for the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (WUFF).

_To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance_.   
—Jean Genet, _The Thief’s Journal_ (1949)

Karen Asher’s _Blanket_ (2015), a photo from her 2016 exhibition _The Full Catastrophe_ at Ace Art artist-run centre in Winnipeg, features a topless model whose entire head is obscured by a duvet, which they hold in place with their arms stretched overhead. The image is at once raw and composed, private and performative, concealed and exposed, and it is in Asher’s ability to navigate the tension between such contradictions that her style as an artist emerges. Having established her practice as a photographer, Asher’s recent exhibition _Class_ represents the artist’s first foray into video and installation. The gallery space has been drastically altered to reflect a composite conjuration of clubs and bars that played host to Asher’s formative years; pleather furniture, checkered linoleum, disco balls and a neon sign contribute to this elaborate reconstruction, materializing as equal parts gauche and glam. Embracing a self-aware engagement with the gaudy, Asher explores the metrics of good and bad taste, and examines the relationship between class and aesthetics, particularly how these significations have been disrupted by the tendency of subcultures to re-author their own semiotics of style. _Class_ demonstrates and wields this capacity, harnessing the material trappings of tastelessness to great effect, and demonstrating through them the capacity of style as a vehicle of subversion.

The focal point of the installation is a large projection of Asher’s video, around which the furnishings are oriented. Throughout the film, silk-clad subjects frolic around the bright red set, dancing, stretching, embracing and even assembling into a conga line at one point. The choreography of the video shifts alongside Asher’s eclectic soundtrack, from upbeat, disco dance numbers to abstract, ambient tableaus, during which the correlation to Asher’s photographic work is most clearly visible. In one of these slower moments, a topless performer arranges a bundle of tinsel over her head, striking a distinct resemblance to the model of _Blanket_. But whereas the partial visibility of the subject in the photograph suggests intrusion into a private moment, the elaborate _mise en scène_ of the installation invites viewers to become inhabitants rather than voyeurs. Asher has often chosen to work with those she knows well, and her intimacy with the cast allows a tenderness to flourish. Even in the midst of bold physical exposure, the autonomy of the performers is evident, and it is clear that the desires enacted are entirely their own. Like any great night, the film eventually winds down: the friends and lovers slumber and slow dance, evoking the ecstatic bliss and exhaustion experienced at the culmination of a party. In the dreamy, surreal settings of _Class_, there is an essence of authenticity and spontaneity generated by Asher’s ability to negotiate the contradicting aesthetic terrain between banality and eccentricity.

Complementing the installation are a selection of glossy, large-scale photographs of dancers in pose— some clad in aerobics-esque bodysuits, others balletic and poised—casually propped up against the walls. In contrast to her usual mode of exhibiting photographs, these images appear to serve more as ornament than as works in their own right—ornament that goes a long way to reinforce the atmosphere Asher has cultivated. Discussing her rationale to display these images as such, Asher recalled an early conversation she had with the show’s curator, Jenifer Papararo, during which she prompted Asher to take the photographs off the wall. The resulting work charts distinctly new territory, gracefully translating Asher’s idiosyncratic style to film and installation, while retaining a vestige of the aesthetics ubiquitous to more ad hoc modes, like party pics, band shoots and zine culture.

Facing the entrance of the show is a neon sign displaying CLASSY, written in cursive text, though the “y” flickers, causing an alternation between the words “class” and “classy.” The unpredictable addition and subtraction of this suffix raises questions of agency: class is an imposed social stratification, whereas what is deemed “classy” largely remains subjective and self-determined (although the latter is often a product of the former). _Class_ dwells in this dynamic, mobilizing offbeat expressions of style to critique cultural hegemony and the arbitration of taste. Though the exhibition’s title treads into loaded territory, a concomitant political weight is never directly addressed in the show; instead, Asher chooses to approach the concept obliquely, through an unbridled celebration of style as a method of repossessing social appraisal.

In the exhibition essay for _Full Catastrophe_, writer Colin Smith noted the overlap of Asher’s brazen edge and vintage eccentricity with camp, but went on to remark that “her sincerity runs interference” on her qualifying camp merits—a sentiment that remains true here. While the overlaps are hard to ignore, ultimately camp seems reductive considering the earnestness of Asher’s labour of love between collaborators, memories and materials, which delivers an overwhelming affect of warmth to the space. Through this wholehearted approach, _Class_ liberates its tacky furnishings from their sub-prime status, animating them with a sense of disobedience and grandeur. More than nostalgia, Asher seems interested in the creative liberty of challenging and remaking meaning. In defiance of what’s left of the mutual exclusivity between so-called high and low culture, _Class_ invites viewers to indulge in these contradictions, which is perhaps Asher’s way of advocating for pleasure over conceit, and sincerity over irony, thus fulfilling Genet’s estimation of elegance.

lg_144-BOGOCH

md_144-BOGOCH

sm_144-BOGOCH

thumbnail_144-BOGOCH

144-BOGOCH

Madeline Bogoch reviews Karen Asher’s exhibition _Class_ at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (April 27 – June 30, 2019).

Karen Asher: Class

Fan Wu is currently seeking synthesis between _qi_, Daoist energy cosmology, and _libido_, Freudian erotic drive. He loves to be in touch: write to him at fanwu4u@gmail.com.

Western ideology fetishizes originality. We slaver after the figure of the genius; we relish the ego of the Artist made manifest in the proper name. The Artist is trailed by their original works, works that orbit the Artist as the Artist’s canon. More often than not, exhibitions revolve around individuals who are given title credit for their work, as if each piece were Athena sprung from the skull of a virtuosic Zeus. But what lies between individualistic original creation (which turns the artist into a derivative of God) and the blatant, appropriative rip-off (which we rightfully decry)?

In his concise, reductive, yet compelling booklet _Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese_ (2017), Byung-Chul Han outlines the primacy of the _copy_ over the original in Chinese art forms ranging from poetry to painting. A painter who paints the classic image of a plum tree’s bough-in-blossom with more nuance, flourish and mastery than their predecessor receives as much—if not more—acclaim; “originality,” here, is manifest as the commitment to repetition of a traditional form with a _slight but crucial difference_ that results in a nearly identical work. Value is displaced from genius invention to cyclical perfectibility. _Shanzhai_ (the transliteration of 山寨 from Chinese, which means “mountain stronghold”) is a term that refers to imitation or counterfeit goods, often blatantly ripping off famous brands.

Shanzhai Lyric is a “poetic research and archival unit” that explores the aesthetic politics of bootleg tees around the world. (I adore their Instagram @shanzhai\_lyric, which regularly features public submissions of the funniest finds.) Their show _LOOSELY ASSEMBLED CYCLE 3: J’ai besoin d’a Of North 1986_ at SBC Gallery is another spin of the dizzy wheel that mutually entangles notions of original versus copy. The exhibition’s name was lifted from a T-shirt found in Asia and stitches French and English together via a senseless seam, somehow metaphorizing intra-Canadian relations in its bilingual invocation of “the North.” Displayed on various coat hangers were a collection of garments collected since 2015 that flaunted the astonishing, jagged beauty of the imperfect copy:

_die_

_to save humanity,_

_or to increase your vanity?_

_your vanity? to save humanity or to increase_

_do that die_  
_humanity, or to increase_

_only one man could_

When I was a teen, I would laugh at those T-shirts in Pacific Mall in Markham, Ont., that didn’t seem aware of their own nonsensicality. Kowtowing to ideals of grammar, semantics and “correct” English—no doubt partially an inherited insecurity from my immigrant history—I dismissed these tees as gibberish to better cement myself in my self-image as enlightened Westerner. It’s only recently, after having learned ways of finding a sublime beauty outside the confines of “genius” human intention, that I became prepared to receive the message of Shanzhai Lyric: a redemption of the wreckage of global cultural capital in the form of this bootlegged proliferation, despite that it had never, itself, asked to be redeemed.

The lyrics of Shanzhai Lyric resemble neural network-generated poetry, or the paratactic works of New York School poets, most famously John Ashbery. They’re like Gertrude Stein’s hypno-repetitive poetics wrung through a luxury streetwear capitalist discourse machine. Their pleasures lie in the relinquishment of agency over language, letting the accident of translation take over. Meaning’s suspended and we’re offered ambiguity in its stead, in a playground that splits the difference between existential reflection and Carrollesque nonsense.

The above quote, “die / to save humanity,” is a masterwork of sharp turns and repetition. In one burst of verse, it asks all the harsh questions of death: Is euthanasia necessary for the perpetuation of the human species? Can death be an act of vanity, a final immolating blaze of self-glorification? The T-shirt ends in the mouth of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but as though amidst a meshwork of glitch, half-sentences cutting themselves off and forgetting their own momentum.

Delivered from the threat of having an “author” whose intention shadows the work (no matter how loudly we proclaim their death), these tees release me into the free roam of interpretation.

STARING AT

THE EMPTY PAGE BEFORE ME ALL THE YEARS OF 

WRECKAGE RUNNING THROUGH MY HEAD PATTERNS

OF MY LIFE I THOUGH

ADORNED ME

Included in _J’ai Besoin d’a Of North 1986_ is Shanzhai Lyric’s ongoing project _The Endless Garment_ (2015- ongoing), a long poem comprised of a continually unfolding sequence of texts found on T-shirts. The garment’s endlessness is a parallel to capitalism’s impermanent infinity, an exercise in human selection and curatorial agency amidst the incessant proliferation of language, wearable language and language that slips off the back of sense-making. This iteration was housed within an installation titled _The Incomplete Poem_ (2019), developed in concert with common room—a collaborative architectural practice with a publishing imprint and exhibition space, based in New York City and Brussels.

Adding to an ongoing archive of reference materials provided by the artists in LOOSELY ASSEMBLED‘s previous two cycles, _J’ai Besoin d’a Of North 1986_ also included a selection of essay excerpts, photocopies and books by writers such as Glissant, Apter and Halberstam. Indeed Shanzhai Lyric connects (their project) proliferatively to strands of theory: from accidental ideology to queer failure to glossolalia to global capital. But my feeling is that these lyrics need no other power than themselves: their janky beauty testifies to the vital originality of the copy and to the fireworks of possibility intrinsic to the English language beneath its mundane colonial lacquer.

IDEAL IS THE BEACON

WITHOUT IDEALTH

ERE IS NO SECU

REDIRECTION

WITHOUT

DIREC

TIO

N

CHOP YOUR OWN 

WOOD

AND IT WI LL WARM YOU 

Be careful Free shipping can be found at EMPTIE My legacy stopped This is my life I love him so much. Copyright law; Fabrics in the textile industry. The way of life that we think is abandoned. We lost our veto for attention. The effects of “beauty” and “health” affect my body. My ideas the wave of the Taipei night market seem to be the symbol of God that sustains my success, albeit a little too far.

So there are liars who see true beauty. Ezra Libra translates standard paper into the Chinese version of the 20th century, but Chinese “don’t know” and make their own translations. With all these misunderstandings and errors, the best translation will come in the target language and teach you how to communicate. Psychological capitalism unfolds in strange and complex costumes: here’s your free choice. Relief finally. Eager to repeat this day I hope so…

Fan Wu reviews Shanzhai Lyric’s exhibition _LOOSELY ASSEMBLED CYCLE 3: J’ai besoin d’a Of North 1986_ at SBC Gallery, Montreal (May 25 – August 2, 2019).

Header

C Mag

Issue 144

Déjà Vu

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Déjà Vu

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Communing with (Art) Ancestors

Trajet: An Interview with Dean Baldwin and Caroline Monnet

We Relate, Therefore We Are: Relation-Making in Jin-me Yoon's Practice

Speaking Ourselves Into Being

Turning the Page on the Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion, 30 Years On

Shifting Spotlights—The Extended Introduction

Artist Projects

arriver avant moi devant moi by Erika DeFreitas: Text

arriver avant moi devant moi

Columns

One Thing: 13 Conversations About Art and Cultural Race Politics

Writer in Residence: Shifting Spotlights Introduction

Composition: Writing About Douglas Writing About Douglas Writing

Reviews

k.g. Guttman: Visiting Hours

Ken Lum: Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018

Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech

Jean-Paul Kelly: A sensation best described by another

Andrea Long Chu: Females: A Concern

Karen Asher: Class

Shanzhai Lyric: LOOSELY ASSEMBLED CYCLE 3: J'ai besoin d'a Of North 1986

David Hammons: Ornette Coleman: Harmolodic Thinker

Elvia Wilk: Oval

Developing Historical Negatives: Deanna Bowen, Morris Lum, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Krista Belle Stewart, Hajra Waheed