History is Not the Past

By Jorge Alberto Perez

For The Camera Club of New York

For Nona Faustine the restitution of her sense of wholeness as an African American woman and artist manifests in the guise of a restoration of the past, emphasis on guise.  Although we see her marching up the steps of City Hall in Manhattan with nothing on but her white Sunday shoes and a pair of shackles in her left hand…she is not really trying to restore anything. It took me a while to realize it.

Her on-going photography and installation project Reconstructions is precisely that – reconstructions that attempt to replace something that was lost in the history of Blacks in America.  This should not be confused with an attempt to relive the past through reenactment. Faustine’s images are more are like markers that indicate a place, an institution, an event or a person so that with her presence on that spot she does not merely remember them for the sake of remembering, she rewrites a new history for them. There on the steps of City Hall’s Renaissance Revival facade that abuts a slave burial ground or standing on her soap box at the intersection of Water and Wall Streets where a market once trafficked in humans, she is the fearless daughter of them all, the new Venus of Willendorf reborn to reconstruct a history, the ultimate act of fecundity.

Faustine easily acknowledges the impossibility of getting at what is essential with this task she has set for herself, because to reconstruct a history is an altogether different action than to restore one. Hers is not an attempt to historicize the present but to re-write the past. She did the research, discovered who bought and sold black slaves in colonial New York, and where, and how they were transported in and out of the city. But there is no Aushwitz or Treblinka for the victims of slavery in America despite the common knowledge that an estimated 10-12 million Africans died in the Middle Passage alone, and countless others succumbed to starvation, physical abuse and disease once on these shores. In a way the images function as memorials that she makes herself, one at a time, with her body, the naked truth of its blackness braced against a cold city, reconstructing a narrative where the enslaved has dignity and is not afraid.

http://nonafaustine.virb.com/home

www.jorgealbertoperez.com 

TABLEAU VIVANT, PETIT MORT

By Jorge Alberto Perez

For The Camera Club of New York

Ali Van enters first, slides her shoes off and glides onto the carpet.  She sits like a geisha, legs to the side crossed at the ankles, back perfectly erect.  There is something utterly feminine in her body language, beguiling in both senses of the word and though she may appear demure, she is in total control.  This is her orgasm after all.  Hers to do with as she pleases.

Three men appear from different directions and also approach the large square of gray carpet that dominates the 3rd floor space at the Fisher-Landau Center for Art where Van has positioned herself. She holds an i-something in her hand from which a splitter dangles with three bobbing receptors. The men also remove their shoes and sit as if in a dojo, seiza style.  Despite the strong sense of ceremony, and the fact that we the spectators are here to experience a performance, nothing feels overt.  The lights do not dim, but they feel as though they did, no more or less noise permeates the space as the foursome sit to face each other, but the present silence becomes more distinct. These are the elusive factors that matter to Van, a 2013 MFA candidate at Columbia University, near-invisible markers of time that she, with her subtle curating of objects, and now performance, weaves into highly dispassionate deeply personal work.

The men unravel earphones and each in turn inserts the male prong into one of the female receptacles.  They close their eyes and she looks intently at each of them, her acolytes who have dutifully come for her today.  Van presses play and manipulates the volume on her device and the men are seen to listen, wrinkles between closed eyes. A long and narrow groove in one, a short deeper trench in another, a gentle pulling inward of the eyes in the third.  Though we can assume they are listening to the same sounds, each man appears to respond differently to what he hears by his outward expressions.  It happens slowly, and builds on itself.  They are climbing the same ladder, they help each other, though they don’t seem aware of it.  One man is all breath, shallow and superficial. The next is a low moan, a growl that rumbles in the chest.  The third is higher pitched ecstatic releases. Together this chorus performs a unique rendition of what can only be the complex aural orchestrations of the female orgasm.  But not just any, it is hers, the action, the reaction and the reenactment. Possibly her most personal experience repackaged as a product for consumption.

From one vantage point Van has an open computer on a mid-century desk playing a clearly dated video of a brain surgery.  When I  first saw the video the week before this performance I thought it was a document of a wartime operating theater.  It seemed so improvised and shoddy.  Later I learned it was her father’s footage, who, wanting to see the operation for himself was only able to experience it when mediated by the camera.  Today it waxed sexual.  The wet, bloody sulci of the brain being probed gently by anonymous hands whilst in the room a trio of breathy moans burst like smoke-filled bubbles.  As in most of Van’s art, the tidy compartmentalization of individual elements create untidy relationships in her tableau, discordant notes that when experienced together somehow create an unforeseeable 3rd thing.

This reenactment of her onanistic behavior slowly becomes unhinged somewhere between a science experiment and a defiant stance against male domination as the pitch slouches toward release.  It is a petit mort syncopated both in duration and stress to better understand what it is not rather than what it is. Likewise, the fragments of other objects mostly in the periphery of the rug speak to the partiality of any experience, whether intentionally mediated or not. What tooth is this?  Is it a human incisor or that of a wild animal?  It bothers me to not know. The bag of what I think are desiccated figs, might be tangerines. A mound of lint from a dryer with a streak of pink in it begs to reveal something.  A framed image of a foggy field is the 25-year-old blotter from her father’s desk.  Every object asks a question, a single compulsive question.  There are many objects, and if you let them they will haunt you.  For a moment, however, they are held at bay, as most mundane matters are when we succumb to corporeal needs.

After reaching a pitch, a height, a precarious angle from which one can only fall, the breaths, growls and moans come together again in silence.  The men emerge from behind shutters, looking guilty despite their best efforts; is that a self-congratulatory grin?  We all smile, there is relief in the air. Almost in ostensible synchrony the men unplug and wind their now flaccid wires back into tidy little squares.  Van stands and proceeds to the edge of the carpet where she puts her shoes back on and walks away.  The men follow her example.  We are left to our own devices.

http://cameraclubny.org/ccny_blog/

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

BEING AND TIME

By Jorge Alberto Perez

For The Camera Club of New York

Without the help of a plot but with the rhythmic coaxing of a 12-string guitar, the one hour and one minute film “Street” by James Nares is absolutely hypnotic. Like Christian Marclay’s art-world sensation last year, (“The Clock”) “Street” has an addictive quality about it that makes you question the notion of time at a fundamental experiential level. With the former, one felt the anticipation of moving forward in time while engaged in the present moment’s deciphering of the rapid succession of filmic and cultural references of the past. In the latter, however, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 27, one is mesmerized by the uncanny qualities of New York City’s street life when suspended somewhere between still and moving images where being and time collide to disrupt the present. In “Street” the minute details of life in the public sphere are able to take center stage as impressive open-ended arias in an epic opera of expressions, movement and vibrations. What normally escapes us unnoticed suddenly acquires magical qualities that seduce us with ease into a world that is at once familiar and alien. The ostensible simplicity of the premise (recording street scenes from a slowly moving car) produces a disproportionate amount of poetic results. It does what language cannot – allowing us a sensation of floating, the suspension of both time and the laws that govern the motion of objects in space, while making us witness to unexpected beauty.

The tradition of documenting street life has a long history in both photography and film and the deployment of a new technology for an artistic endeavor often yields an off-spring of surprising uncanniness. It has long been the task of the artist to reveal what is not known or unknowable in general, but more so when the subject matter is of quotidian life on the streets of the metropolis. Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est” and Dziga Vertov’s “Man with a Moving Camera” especially come to mind. In Nares’ hands, however, the final result of a high-definition slow-motion camera (so slow that at times the only movement appears to be from the apparatus itself) turns the pedestrian world of pedestrians into a meditation on humanity suspended in fragments of time that can only be described as sublime. But the work also speaks to the illusory quality of time itself, for although we might feel freed from its constraints momentarily, it is an invisible vise that tightens around us. With more time to see what might otherwise be missed we have even more information to sort through, most of which can no longer be easily categorized as we are untethered from meaning. Time dutifully slips through our fingers with same same ease as always but with the added effect of revealing some of its secrets. The film, like a mirroring mise-en-abyme, tunnels ever deeper away from the present the longer we look, and thus our own sense of “real time” is displaced. Moments that unfold with such graceful care are layered with multiple meanings and though we may search for their origin or terminus where we think we might understand what we are seeing, it usually eludes us as we are distracted with the rarefied truth of actuality. An expression that starts off like a grimace ends up in a smile, a cigarette flying through the air is less a moment about littering and more a meditation on gravity. The crumpled posture of a woman elicits sympathy until we notice she is trying to take a picture and is merely holding the camera in an awkward position. Rain drops harden into diamonds before bouncing off umbrellas, bejeweling headlights. An ordinary pigeon endowed with the majesty of an eagle maneuvers in order to land. Lights everywhere pulsate with the universal Qi.

Everything is authentic in this state of expanding time. Even when the camera is acknowledged by the subject, the fourth wall does not crumble. On the contrary, it is a revelation of authenticity when a vibration of strength penetrates us with eye-contact. A direct look is all-at-once dangerous, playful, unnerving and spiritual. We are privy to a coded conversation at a level we forget we are capable of understanding. If for no other reason I would sit through the film again to experience those moments of contact with these strangers, not to mention the elegant upward floating sparrows next to a sign that reads “play here” or the seemingly improbable physics of bipedal locomotion or the elegant ripples of the breeze on a young woman’s dress. To sense the joy that can be derived from the smallest expression, the tiniest gesture, the subtlest vibration in a democracy of meaning is a special achievement in a work of art. We are reminded that everything arises in relation to everything else.

In “Street” people stand on corners like a Greek chorus – each face the unique mask of an individual describing a state of universal experience. Sadly I was forced to draw comparisons with the myriad street scenes of Boston we have recently also been exposed to. Whereas the notion of the interconnectedness of humanity was already present in this work, it became inescapable that the sinister and dangerous qualities of the social sphere are also embedded in Nares’ work. And to that I can only say that the revelatory moments feel all the more precious when reminded of the fragility of the fabric that binds it all together.

The only thing I knew about James Nares prior to seeing “Street” was his large-brush paintings, often achieved with a single stroke while he is suspended by a harness above the canvas cirque-du-soleil style. The sense of ease and floating translates directly from his method of marking the canvas to a dynamic suspension of pigment that is both cascading and frozen. The theme of a suspension of movement, and thus time, may or may not be an intentional thread between these disparate works, but it certainly appears so in this 61 minute film – 60 minutes plus one more, spilling over and out of the neat container of time.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2013/street

http://cameraclubny.org/ccny_blog/

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

THE FEELING OF PRESENCE, MAYBE

By Jorge Alberto Perez

For The Camera Club of New York

Okay. So we all know by now that images cannot be trusted. Since Plato, the image (mimesis), indeed representation itself, has been associated with deception. It is certainly true that images today cannot be trusted to be accurate versions of what is real or represented – ‘likeness’ opting for the approximation clause inherent in the definition of image-making. And once tampered with and altered, these representations are more than twice removed from what it represents. And though we are generally savvy enough to discern how far from real images are in the spectrum of truth, in the age of photoshop and digital reproducibility, our suspicions are subordinated to the vast volume of images, gifs and videos with which we are confronted daily. Today, whatever might still be considered an emphatic expression of fact re-presented in visual terms floats in our collective willing suspension of disbelief. We grow unaccustomed to believing our eyes – even in the presence of the real, in real time…

On Saturday March 23rd I encountered an art work entitled “The Maybe” at MoMA. What I encountered, actually, was the crowd that had encountered the art work. Second order observation. Immediately past the entrance where the ticket-takers scan you in, in the most transitional space in the building, an unmoving crowd had surrounded an object, a thing, a glass case on a metal stand. It was tall enough for viewers to easily peer into it. it contained a simple pallet, a pillow, a glass water decanter with a drinking glass top, a pair of eyeglasses and a presumably sleeping Tilda Swinton. The wall tag read: “The Maybe, 1995/2013, Living Artist, Glass, Steel, Mattress, Pillow, Linen, Water and Spectacles.” Like most of those who had gathered to see the contents of the glass box, I did not expect to find a living person, much less the enigmatic, androgynous beauty that is Swinton. In fact, at first my brain did this thing, a kind of processing hiccup, a glitch between the eyes and the brain. I saw the form of a person to be sure, from the back at first, so still that I was convinced it was a very realistically rendered figure. From the front, however, where most people chose to stand, what I thought I was seeing and what I was in fact seeing were separated by a gap wide enough to make me feel light-headed. Why on earth would a sleeping person be inside a glass box that has no clear way to get in or out, and be on display in the most awkward location thinkable? I stood still, as one does at the scene of an accident, to see something horrible, the confirmation that your senses are in revolt. The murmurings of the crowd faded away as my reptilian brain scanned the body for signs of life. She was dressed gender-neutral, neither too cool, or dated or brand-specific – in a loose summer linen shirt of faded baby blue, sensible sneakers, and modestly proportioned jeans. From most angles you could not tell if it was a man or woman. I looked to her abdomen, shying away from her face which was so close (and too real?) that it made me feel uncomfortable, like a voyeur, or worse. Her breathing was so shallow, that I had to look elsewhere for proof, because I was still doubting what I was seeing, mistrusting my eyes to tell me some truth. Swinton was asking me to be present. To watch her ‘perform’ sleeping. To be accountable for my presence. To take stock of nuance despite the fog of doubt, despite the carnivalesque din. Finally with patience I saw her eyes move inside their hiding place. She was dreaming. Now I push the maybe aside and I see she is alive, not a waxen figure or an image of deceptive realness. Now I see something that is true and must take in the consequences of what I know. Contrived or not, this is a kind of intimacy.

A torrent of unanswerable questions inundates me. How, and why, but also really how? Seriously, and the glass, no way in or out… Why should I ever need to be so close to her luminescent pale face, lightly reflective with the oiliness of the unadorned, unattended visage of sleep? From the crowd I hear, “I saw her fingers move.” Indeed they did twitch. It was such a tiny gesture, so small and concise, easy to miss, and yet there we were, about fifty of us, slowing ourselves down long enough to notice it, to see it and to know what it means, but not to know what it means to see it. I am the voyeur. I am a man and I am watching her sleep, at her most vulnerable. I feel implicated in the male gaze. She has deferred her power and it unsettles me, dislodging violent thoughts. The metal stand feels too tall to be stable, the glass too transparent to be unbreakable. I want to beat on the glass and break her out. There is an implied panic at looking at a constrained person, because despite the ostensible serenity I suddenly realize her tranquil expression is portentous of a disturbance. So much can go wrong. The sleeping beauty box becomes a prison cell. I notice she has no belt. I feel the crowd inching forward, muttering, sniggering, disdainful. I smell someone’s sour breath and awaken as if from the hypnosis of the maybe-maybe-not-pendulum that momentarily dispossessed me of myself. I am suddenly afraid of the crowd, afraid for her safety. I don’t want her to awaken afraid, confused, her own consciousness hiccuping its way into focus. I want her to open her eyes, look right at me to acknowledge that I am her hero and close them so quickly we may all doubt what we saw.

I am also thinking… I have trouble sleeping, falling asleep, staying asleep. Too much light, not enough air circulating, too hot too cold, too restrained, not cozy enough – all these things awaken me. So it is no wonder that I marvel at Swinton’s uninterrupted REM and wonder if ‘maybe’ she took a little something. Maybe not, but c’mon – MAYBE. This change of tone reminds me of what most of the reactions to Swinton at MoMA were like out in the twittering, texting, interneting world. Jerry Saltz seemed to have a meltdown on vulture.com and joked that celebrity art is like a crystal meth addiction to the museum, and that when it is not too busy perpetuating the guru status of some (read Marina Abromovich) it was turning itself into a circus. Why “The Maybe” was the tipping point for his disdain, only Malcom Gladwell may know. Snoozefest-cum-spectacle pretty much sums up his response. But it is unfair to gloss over it with such nonchalance even from a self-described sourpuss. At least the work was an opportunity for him to frame his contempt for the direction museums are moving in; and so the performance suddenly became institutional critique, among other things. Most other reports used puns to summarize Swinton. Sleeping on the Job. The Art of Napping. Strangest Celeb Hobby. Etc. And a few mentions of Sleeping Beauty. Interestingly, one of constraints for this performance is that it is not scheduled into MOMA’s ever-growing dance card. The element of surprise is inherent to the piece. If she is Sleeping Beauty, she is not waiting for the prince to appear unannounced. Like in Anne Sexton’s “Transformations” the fairytale is upended. This is no ordinary Briar Rose. And not only can one not plan to see the work, as one could for “The Artist is Present” – it migrates within the museum interacting with other artworks. These “rules” literally unplug the work from any predictability, even of meaning. Maybe the work is a reminder to look to see, to know, to think, to trust yourself to be the author of meaning in the present as you experience it. Maybe the work is not even about Tilda Swinton at all, it just happens to be by her. Barthes would be pleased.

http://cameraclubny.org/ccny_blog/

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

UNDOING THE COMMODITY OF IMAGES

By Jorge Alberto Perez

I was walking along the edge of the pile.  One of the piles.  An alley between piles actually.  Random images cut form their context, haphazardly thrown together waiting for new meaning to grant them authority over me, over you, once again.  An operating theater, with more patients than I know what to do with, piled, plied, no anesthesia.  I walk like a geisha, crushing nothing underfoot but then I sit like a circus bear, no, a fat Olmec baby, yes.  Finger in mouth, looking around – hungry to devour another image. Don’t see it?  Ok, I’ll wait until you google-image-it.  Let’s proceed.

The work above is composed of 5 pictures or sections of images.  It is a Frankenstein amalgam of visual information that tells a story of unknown purpose.  It comes to life as an old brand new thing, or a brand new old thing.  It has no master.  It defies even me, but especially its original intentions.  Extraplanetary? Perhaps.  A nightmare?  Maybe.  It is not so much barricaded from meaning as much as it is a tunnel between meanings, the gutter between the piled garbage of a previous purpose, discontinued, out-of-print.  It is not truthful, but it poses questions about truth.  Frankly, it’s a relief.  I have set something free.  I just hope I don’t get sued.  But if any press is good press, well, I will google “copyright lawyer” just in case.

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

TAKE ONE

By Jorge Alberto Perez

Meta-cinema-verite’ is a genre all its own and one that William Greaves appears to have created in his 1968 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.  Like a dog chasing its own tail, the film moves in a circle of tensions between the unclear intentions a director filming actors’ auditions and the disgruntled musing of the crew filming itself beyond his watch.  Initially the number of cameras at work is unclear and peripheral action appears to carry the same weight as what might traditionally be considered “worth” capturing.  This antagonism between the auteur and the creative collective is the unifying theme throughout the film.

Filmed at a time when the counter-culture was gaining momentum, Greaves appears to have put his finger precisely on the complex multi-layered pulse of the moment.  Without referring directly to race, we sense that there is a question here only lightly addressed.  As an African-American in charge of the crew shooting in a public place, we see a rare instance of the black intellectual artist at work.  This is a subject that will require further historical examination in order to fully contextualize his role as part of a movement to remove race altogether from the discussion.  When the policeman arrives in Central Park, for example, and asks to see the permits, there is a sense of suspicion that permeates the discussion but that is not referred to.  Likewise, when one of the couples portrayed auditioning is comprised of a black woman and a white man, it is not up for discussion.  In this way Greaves leaves the questions of race to be dealt with privately by the viewer.

Within the film that often moves wantonly between locations and actions associated with the “other” film that may or may not ever be fully realized, we meet actors, passersby, members of the crew, all in fleeting glimpses within the larger frame of “movie-making.”  At times the screen is split and we see ostensibly unrelated actions simultaneously.  This technique works surprisingly well since we are never sure where our emotional allegiances should be placed and every nuance seems loaded with meaning.  After oscillating between the various sections of work pertaining directly and indirectly to the film being made, we realize that questioning the structure of what constitutes a film is the film.  Secondary questions arise naturally.  Who is the author?  Where is meaning to be found?

We are given hints that Greaves meta-narrative was intentional all along.  One crew was told to shoot the auditioning actors and the fascinating process of tempering their personalities, while another crew was directed to film the crew filming the actors and a third crew appears to have been instructed to film anything else happening in the periphery of the film.  Combining all this footage into a loose but elegant form is where we see a masterful vision at play.  Greaves also made complex use of the subject of sexuality in the script rehearsed by the actors.  We are inadvertently forced to consider one actor’s musings on how to play the bisexual character: as a butch fag or a faggy fag.   And Greaves even limns himself as the chauvinist director talking about the bouncing tits of a woman astride a horse in full gallop.  We never fully know if he is the agent provocateur or merely being himself.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is unstable and fluid in both form and meaning, and interestingly questions itself from within this chaotic form.  It is Brechtian but in a more expressionistic way.  It is a film experiment that questions the way it contains chaos and as such should be required viewing for anyone interested in the evolution of cinema.

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

ON DUST AND BRAVURA

By Jorge Alberto Perez

For a long time I didn’t want to talk about 9-eleven.

(I am thinking) “Dust seems too obvious a reference.”

I saw it make frightful masks of many faces on that day, inhaled my fair share of the stuff in the days to follow.

 

Maybe that is why I ignored that room.  I didn’t even notice the figure on the bench.  I just kept on moving.  I didn’t hear the music either; and the empty bulletin boards did not even register.  I just avoided it all much the same way other reminders of 9-eleven get ignored.  I needed a less direct path to approach Roger Hiorns’, Untitled, 2008 (atomized passenger aircraft engine), Harold Mendez’ Better off then than when life was babble? & Nothing prevents Anything, both from 2007 and George Segal’s Woman on Park Bench, 1998.  I needed to come at it obliquely.  To sneak up on it, rather than let it engulf me, the quick-sand memory of it.  And so I did.  Without being aware of it.

 

From the second gallery on the North side one can enter the larger central space from a vantage point that feels considerably less confrontational.  And perhaps by not having to deal with facing the large open space head on my mind was more willing to suspend judgement if for only a few minutes.  Suddenly the pile of powder shifted from its aerial view topography to a mirror image of itself carving downward cavernously.  And so it oscillated for me almost at my command, from a pile to a pit and back.  It had the uncanny effect of displacing not only one’s sense of depth, but also distance and proportion.   Standing at its edge, where carbon black veins trace their way in and around the undulations of what once was an airplane engine I begin to really examine the material and to resist an urge to touch it, much in the same way one is both curious of and repelled by Aunt Alice’s ashes in the urn on the mantel.  Which brings me to what I believe to be at the heart of this work.

 

An airplane engine is a large solid piece of machinery.  It has substantial physical weight and presence as an object that when intact can refer to the trust we have in science and the industry that responsibly manufactures it so that a plane can accelerate enough to experience lift, keep momentum in the air and land safely.  It is not in any way ephemeral.  And yet, this engine is a granulated mass; and though reduced to particulate matter, it is not dispersed.  Like a cremated person, it is transformed.  If an engine, an airplane engine, can be atomized, what of us?  We can only draw ourselves nearer to a question of mortality.  By being a witness to this material death of an airplane, we stand at the edge of the gaping hungry mouth of wanton destruction, or at the mound beneath which the dead are carelessly buried.  We are at the death pit at Bergen-Belsen, or in Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur.  We are at the breach between chaos and death, where 9-eleven resides for most of us.

 

Flanking the ashes and the dust of Hiorns’ work are two blank bulletin boards best seen from across the room in order to appreciate the transformation of what they are upon approach: white fields punctuated by what is not there.  No messages, no images remain, only the staples and and small corners of paper that indicate a previous use or purpose.  They are rendered useless.  There is nothing more to say.  The missing are presumed dead and the home-made posters have been removed.  This is a natural course of thinking.  In the absence of printed material that would give purpose to this normally utilitarian object, it comes to life in the popular memory of how any message board in New York City ten years ago became an outcry of loss, a temporary monument to lost souls.  The blankness speaks to the futility of language and image, both rendered meaningless in the wake of indescribable events.

 

Punctuating the other end of this central space is Segal’s sculpture of a woman on a park bench.  She is contemplative before the messiness of pulverization.  Her legs are crossed, one hand on her knee.  Her energetic focus is both inward and outward.  One foot touches the floor, one floats.  She is both present and far away.  Gravity keeps her in place, but she is a white shadow on a black bench.  Something has transpired in this room that has turned her into an outline, a ghost.  From the main entrance she is not immediately perceptible.   She is an objective witness, resigned to experience the brutal truth of demise but is not emotionally invested.  Her presence comforts us.  There is something plain about her, something ordinary.  And yet it is hard to ignore how much she appears like a figure from Pompeii in this context.  Frozen in a quotidian moment that would normally never be remembered, much less immortalized as a statue, she is embalmed by the dust, trapped inside its thick layers of toxicity.

 

This triangulation of art that feels somehow logical in the illogic of 9-eleven is ruptured by the aspirational music of John Williams.  What once may have represented American bravura, now sounds ironic and sad, a musical placebo at best.  At first I was offended by the obviousness of the Williams orchestrations, but as I walked around the room talking in all the works as anchors of meaning in that particular space, the music became muddy and even irrelevant.  It became clear that it had passed into the realm of American nostalgia, no longer able to define the emotions of today’s popular culture, it is now a melancholic drunk version of who we once were as a nation.

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

 

PIGMENTOCRACY AND THE CALENDAR GIRL

By Jorge Alberto Perez

For ARC Magazine

There is hair between beauty and love.

Let me clarify – these are subject headings on the website of Essence Magazine and “Hair” is right in between the two biggies for any popular culture, lifestyle guide – “Beauty” and “Love.”  The other categories are things like celebrity, fashion, point-of-view and photos.  Hair is the only body part.

The featured photo slide-show in “Hair” today, the day I am writing these lines, is titled “Looking Good” and is subtitled “Hot Hair: 100 Best Summertime Styles.”  Of those 100 hairstyles, only two are Afros and a paltry 5 more are naturally curly hair.  The rest, the other 93, have been altered – relaxed, straightened, permed, hot-combed, flat-ironed…

Such is the currency of African-textured hair – definitely under-represented, culturally devalued, and almost universally negated.

This year the surgeon general Regina Benjamin called for hairstylists to come up with do’s (as opposed to don’ts) for African-American women that are easier to exercise with.  It turns out that since they have invested money and lots of time to relax, perm, hot-comb, and flat-iron their naturally curly locks into straight and silky hair, women choose to not exercise so as to not mess up their hair.  So the surgeon general is talking about hair as a detriment to women’s’ health.  And not women in general, but women of color.  Studies show that fifty percent of African-American women over 20 are overweight or obese and thus suffer from the myriad diseases associated with those conditions.

You may be asking what all this has to do with Art?  After all, you are reading it in an art magazine, one without a “hair” section.  For it to make sense I have to go back to June when I went to the Museo del Barrio’s 6th Biennial exhibit of the “most innovative, cutting-edge art created by Latino, Caribbean, and Latin American artists currently working in the greater New York area” (quoted from the press release) where there is a lot of new but somewhat predictable Latino art on view – much of it colorful, visually bold, fun, urban, street-savvy.  You might think you have seen a lot of it before, until you see the work of Firelei Baez.

From across the gallery I see, what are those? Stains?  Brown stains on a white background?  How many?  28…29…30…31 perfect squares about 14” across.  I don’t approach yet.  The monochromatic paintings are a whisper in a cacophony of color and texture.  For that reason alone one is drawn to them.  They seem amorphous and I think of Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings of the 1950’s.  Thin boundary-lines of pigment delineating muted watered-down brown hues against a white background…and I must admit I am smitten by the layout.  A calendar grid, yes, that’s what it is, but a calendar of what?  My eyes follow the borders of the paper-bag brown stains, darting from one to the other and suddenly I see it.  They are silhouettes.  A woman’s head, her hair spilling and spinning in many directions.  Every “day” the shape is different.  I step closer and realize the paintings are starting back at me.  Realistically rendered eyes float in the abstracted shapes of the face, head and hair, suddenly piercing through the surface of the painting.  I am transfixed, like when you accidentally look at the ubiquitous security camera eye-balls in every/any store, building, elevator, and you get that jolt of, what is it?  Fear or self-consciousness?  When you know someone, something, is looking back at you, evaluating your behavior.   The 31 pairs of eyes are upon me.  I feel scrutinized, inspected, examined, evaluated.  Wow, didn’t expect that visceral, recoiling sensation.

That was the first time I saw Baez’ work and I was hit over the head with it.  On the one hand I already found a certain peace in the multiple paintings in almost identical tones of that distinctive brown, curiously soothing.  But once I was aware that each shape was a person and that she had eyes, the power shifted away from me.  Despite being reduced to a single tone of color without the topography of a face, this person stared right back at me defiantly.  I was no longer a consumer taking stock of what I get about a work of art, scrutinizing, inspecting and evaluating… until that strange thing happens when you feel furtive glances looking back.  Are the eyes blinking?  It is impossible to see them all at once.

The work is titled “Can I Pass?  Introducing the paper bag to the fan test.”  Cryptic I know, but bear with me.  Firelei is the child of Dominican and Haitian heritage.  She grew up first in the rural countryside of the Dominican Republic and later in the American South.  In each place she learned where she fit into the spectrum of skin color and how it parlayed into her social status in any number of loose or rigid group structures.  She learned also of some archaic racial “tests” that helped determine if a person, (read: woman) is racially “impure.”  The “avanico” or “fan test” specifically addressed the question of hair.  When fanned, European/white hair will flow back.  African-textured hair will not.  The discovery of “blackness” by this means was grounds for legally justifying a divorce in the eyes of the law in the Dominican Republic.  The idea seems absurd now, but it wasn’t that long ago that it was an actual scientific-ish stunt upon which lives turned.  The “paper bag test” is even more nefarious as it arises from within the African-American community as an evaluation used for social stratification within organizations, mostly sororities and fraternities.  This is the pigmentocracy – where the status hierarchy of a group is based on the lightness or darkness the skin.  A particular brand of intra-racism that alters notions of beauty and (self)-love for generations to come.

With her “Can I pass?…” piece Baez is, on one level, making a pretty straightforward commentary on historical practices concerning visual markers of race.  She wakes up, prepares herself to meet the faces that she meets, goes out into the world and upon returning home she snaps a picture or two to capture the shape and texture of her hair, and settles into the meditative act of painting as accurately as possible merely two aspects of herself – one signifier of race and one of race and gender.  She works to match color of her skin as a single field that outlines the shape of her head.  Can she pass for white on that or any given day were she to need to?  If darker than a paper bag she will not.  And what of her hair?  Would the fan test prove that her hair wouldn’t flow back?  We can just look at the silhouettes and judge for ourselves which days she may have.  According to Baez, this idea of hair flowing ‘naturally’ is still a standard held in most Dominican beauty salons and is part of the disguise women of color have learned to wear.

On a deeper level, however, we are confronted with what could be Baez’ struggle to occupy space physically, culturally, and even emotionally and the tensions generated between the willful abstraction of her self-portrait versus reduced representations of the signifiers of beauty or lack of it, in the dominant culture.  Is it her absence or presence that she is questioning every day in this calendar system of painting?  She is certainly reduced, redacted even, but is she documenting her silence or her expression?  Her goal is to perform this act of painting as document for a year to further complicate the discrepancy between the signifier and the signified.

Were her eyes not painted with such attention to detail I might be inclined to say the calendar of skin color and hair silhouette is a retreat into victimhood.  But those eyes…  The eyes are empowered to penetrate.  They look out and condemn the viewer to the same level of scrutiny Baez herself is subjected to.  They are defiant, but often also cold and indifferent.  This is the expression with which she looks into the mirror to qualify an element of humanity in an otherwise scientific document.  We become stand-ins for Baez herself and are suddenly privy to what it feels like to judge yourself according to physical standards that are contrary to your own genetics.  In this way, the internalization of color/race consciousness is transmitted very powerfully and pulls forward the lineage of other artists like Ellen Gallagher, Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker.  Like them Baez openly challenges the cultural punishments attached to women of color, whether self-perpetuated or not.  But she also takes exception to the strict morality associated with the control required by the patriarchal society – a control of uniform standards of beauty that supposedly, if we are to believe the advertisements, will beget love.  Baez also seems to refute the myth of the sexualized, wild-haired Latin Medusa with the same brush strokes.  She inhabits the possibility of change in her eyes, the possibility of subverting these social and cultural structures through a systematic documentation of these two physical attributes that manage to not define her.   Because no matter what, it is the vibrancy of soul in her eyes that we are drawn to in these 31 paintings and both the subject and viewer are redeemed.

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

AUTO-SCOPOPHILIA

By Jorge Alberto Perez

The apotheosis of Nan Goldin has now officially taken place and in the current show Scopophilia at Matthew Marks Gallery she traces the visual lineage of her ascent for the members of her cult.  The exhibition is comprised of framed single images, photo-diptychs, grids and a video piece, all of which speak in the same visual language of pairing detail shots from classic sculptures and European paintings from the Louvre with images from her archive, some dating back to the 1990s.

 

The highlight of the exhibit is a kind of “amphitheater” in the back of the gallery into which one steps to be stared down by most of the inhabitants of the space, a pantheon of portraits, Goldin’s friends mostly as well as characters from paintings at the Louvre.  This is the strongest piece of the show, taken as a whole.  The semi-circular room is painted light mustard and as a result feels warm and intimate compared to the other spaces in the gallery and draws one in with more gravitational pull because of this combination of shape and color.  Whether the reference is the Roman Senate or a Greek amphitheater, we are the center of the action, we activate the space.  Along the first row of “spectators” are portraits of Goldin’s friends all of whom stare deftly into the camera and therefore at us, as we stand in the arena of viewership.  Above and behind the first row of portraits is another row of photos sampled from a variety of paintings from the collection of the Louvre.  These images are smaller and set higher on the wall thereby creating the illusion of depth and distance. This row of spectators are thematically less engaged with our presence.  Few look through to us.  This disengagement reads as a self-absorbed sensuality especially in contrast to the first row portraits, or a submission to a hierarchy of pleasures, among which looking at us beyond the third wall may or may may not be included.  This tension between the two kinds of work heightens the awkwardness of the viewer/spectator caught in the center of all these parabolas of seeing and being seen.

 

The sense of collaborating with the artwork is oddly thrilling.  The nuances of expression become enhanced as we scrutinize those who scrutinize us as well as try to discern what the painters of the source material for the other images may have intended.  In subtle ways, the full range of human emotions can be found here.  Since we are in a gallery, however, where we know the works are for sale, we cannot help but to think that this effective presentation will not be possible in most collectors’ homes.  The least interesting aspect of this and the entire body of work for that matter, is the force-fed parallels of theme and composition between the portraits taken by Goldin and their found equivalents from the Louvre.  The underdeveloped comparisons are facile and come across as painfully obvious, making one wonder if Goldin could be so self-absorbed not to notice the project’s conceptual anemic skein.

 

In the rest of the exhibit, the hinge-less “diptychs” come closest to conveying some of what transpires in the back, but barely.  At least there is a sense of circularity with just two images in dialogue.  This is not the case with the visual chatter of the gridded chromogenic prints whose scattered conversations keep one’s focus from landing onto any significant meaning.  Here the classical images from the history of European painting fall flat in contrast to Goldin’s photographs.  In fact, it is in this mail room letterbox format where we see how presumptuous the work actually is.  Goldin has offered herself as proof of continuing the timeless images of romance and sensuality in her often hard-edged and gritty style, but instead of posing complex questions we see a magazine or fashion mood-board recording the speculative answer to what might sell next season.

 

Rounding out the exhibit and forcing it into an emotionally specific marketing campaign, the video installation takes up about one third of the actual gallery space and weighs even more heavily with its burdensome messaging.  Narrated with what seemed to be Goldin’s own raspy uninflected voice, the moody piano music sounds nearly parodic.  But it is the retelling of the tales of Narcissus ,Tiresias, Cupid and Psyche that seemed absurd while images flicker past in they style of a slide-show.  What we get is that Goldin loves seeing her images over and over, scopophilically we assume, in this improvised scaffolding of a theme.  It is here where we realize the exhibit indeed falls short of the complexity implied by the room with the mustard walls.  In that iteration the complexity of the project is at its best, somewhat open-ended as to its allusions and yet more systematic and specific in presentation.  The rest of this solo show ends up coming across as either unthoughtful or maudlin, both laced with a dose of self-centeredness that is ultimately off-putting.  Goldin, the demiurge, has attempted to fashion a sensible world out of her recycled images in light of the supposed eternal themes expressed by the sourced sculptures and paintings from the Louvre, but the comparisons rely to heavily on mirroring poses and colors rather than seeking the higher truths in any kind of abstraction.

www.jorgealbertoperez.com

ON HOPE AND WISHES

By Jorge Alberto Perez

Every time I look at the work “From Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried” by Carrie Mae Weems,I read the text aloud, always more than once.  I believe it is meant to be spoken.  These are words that with their accompanying images, give voice to the “types” who remained silent far too long, captured, in both image and in fact.  For me, the effect of looking at the series while reading is nothing short of a Barthesian “punctum.”  It is as much an homage to self-respect as it an excoriation of history.

 

When I first encountered this work I heard the artist speaking about her process in using these appropriated images, one of which (the man with scars on his back) Harvard University controls the copyright to.  She was threatened with a lawsuit over her appropriation of the image with the text  “black and tanned your whipped wind of change howled low blowing itself-ha-smack into the middle of Ellington’s orchestra Billie heard it too and cried strange fruit tears.”  Weems opened a dialogue about the ethics of the images of slaves taken without consent and whose descendants still remained uncompensated, were they ever to be found.  Harvard did not back down initially with these arguments, so Weems agreed to be sued.  She told them plainly that it might be a discussion better suited for a public forum even if it were a court of law.  Harvard relented and Weems proceeded with this thirty image project.

 

Re-photographing all the nineteenth and twentieth century photographs and processing them as red and black chromogenic color prints, she then matted them with black circular cut-outs and sand-blasted text on the glass.  Facing in as book-ends and providing the meta-context of the “contained” images are two indigo-hued prints of an African woman in native dress.  Her demeanor is nothing less than regal, though one still wonders of the influence and effect the presence of the curiosity-seeking cameraman cum anthropologist might have had on her.  The two photographs facing the “evidence” Weems has curated, create a framework and provide a voice of the ancestors, those who were never enslaved, never uprooted, empowered at the very least by remaining unconquered, but who now empathize from a distance with a maternal dignity.  She says, “from here I saw what happened.”  She pauses, reflects for an interval as long as several generations, and then conclude, “…and I cried.”

 

Behind the glass, whose surfaced has been “depleted” to reveal the text, surrounded by funereal victorian-esque circular black mats and frames, the photographs float in a red limbo; suspended behind layers of racism, xenophobia and prejudice.  The images seem submerged in blood-stained water.  It is a suffocating effect.  As a counterpoint to the density of images, the text floats on the outermost surface.  With it Weems manages to remind us of the tenacity of the human spirit but as told by a voice, wise but unable to avoid the “ha” that escapes it, almost unwillingly, upon hearing the ironies of its own story.  One photograph, however, remains silent, a young black girl in a white dress holding flowers.  She gives us pause, both in the narrative and visually.  Her silence is the loudest voice of all.   It is a bracing tonic served to the viewer, hard to swallow but cathartic.  It is hope, humble and inexorable.

(From Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems, 1995-96)

http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/from-here.html

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