I first met Nikima Jagudajev at Café Fiat on Mott Street in New York City. We were meeting at the recommendation of a choreographer friend, who knew we were both in New York that spring. We talked for a while and I was struck by a combination of two things: intelligence and a quality of vulnerability or sensitivity that made it instantly possible for us to talk as if we’d been talking for a few years. The connections came very quickly and within short order I invited her to take part in a piece I was doing at the Whitney Biennial, for which I needed “caretakers” to help take care of a grove of trees inside the museum, and also interact with visitors. Nikima not only ended up taking part but was there during the formation of the piece, giving various dramaturgical and practical advice, finding a friend to construct elements. She also contributed her personal diary to the piece (each caretaker placed certain of their own possessions with the trees), which Jerry Saltz spent a good hour reading at the press preview, which was a little weird but also unsurprising. She has a way of engaging with the world that seems to break down certain kinds of barriers between intellection and affection.
By that time I had seen her work too, at Judson Church, a piece called Fast Food. Walking in, there was a rich dynamic of presence and absence with respect to the situation. The stage was no longer the focus—instead, there were pockets of activity and the entire space felt like a composition. On one side of the large room, a line of people demarcated the space, waiting for bloody marys (in the church…). On another side, Nikima and other dancers were spread out on a picnic cloth, with food and clearly in a social situation as if on a raft of park. On the stage a dancer executed a rhythmic and sinuous choreographic phrase that kept repeating, never dominating but creating a hypnotic effect. To the side a video played an astronomical-seeming image of rippling light, water by moonlight on the surface of a lake. And when I turned around, a final surprise: a group of dancers on a high balcony meant for lighting or technicians. Right away, I felt the power of her situation, proposing varying forms and strengths of engagement, focus, and activation, an invitation to be with, an “intra-action.”
Later, Nikima developed this expansive framework of a piece further at LUMA Westbau in Zurich, and this time I was part of it, at her invitation, serving hot dogs with many condiments. Then it evolved further as part of my Weekend Guests program at the Whitney and later in Shanghai at the Rockbund Art Museum, and at the Villa Empain in Brussels. At all of these, I witnessed the subtle combination of atmosphere and alternately lightening and darkening presence, that make up her “socialities” as she calls them, the word suggesting the more comprehensive situational emergence of her works than a focus on a presentation in front of you. If stage performance is a 2D one-screen video game like Pong or Ms. PacMan, Nikima’s works are not left-to-right scrolling games but more like first person hypnotic explorations of worlds. They are scores for not only movement, but for relations.
Unlike video games, Nikima’s works also consistently provide food or drink. She offers food within the context of her work as an object of proposed intimacy, an access point through which visitors can become integrated into the ecosystem. The protocol of eating food offered in a public space or during a public event is a collectively understood and shared form of social behavior, one that many people partake in without second thought. However, the food or drink that is placed within the context of her work is not there to quench one’s thirst but rather offers a shared social code inviting strangers to become part of the landscape; an object of engagement that proposes relations of unpredictable encounters.
The food is not only there to be consumed but it also holds its own weight, accompanying and contaminating the different elements, carrying animist generosity.
When I asked Nikima what it is like to dance in her work she compared it with a psychedelic drug trip, an altered state. The choreographed dance sequences—as a kind of portal into some other realm—are danced for hours. The sequences are structured recursively. The choreography consistently folds back in on itself creating something new and complex, like a snowflake.
As the sequences are danced, a transformation happens from dancer dancing the dance to dance being danced with the body as a medium. This kind of revelatory dancing asks for an immediate co-presence with the dance, the space, the environment, the people; a receptivity of all things, perhaps a meditation. Such work is draining, but draining in a way that removes inhibition, and proposes heightened sensitivity and attentiveness.
There is always that moment in a mushroom trip, after many wide eyed hours when eating food becomes a thought to reckon with. The way food operates within Nikima’s work is also a way of grounding oneself, coming back to earth, to the materiality of our being. It helps Nikima’s work engage in a play between the ethereal and the earthly: dances that are in the body, bodies that are no longer in control, but rather danced by the dance.
Last year, we collaborated again, this time in Long Island in a barn, on a piece called Holobio. It was a combination of natural elements, food in the form of a hot sauce made from peppers picked from a nearby farm, and a new score that could be done by dancers and non-dancers alike, that itself passed from everyday movement into choreography so evanescently as to make it impossible to tell the two apart, a tai chi of two lovers or friends interacting. And in another room she staged a found choreography, a slow dance, that was suggested to visitors, along with a piano being played a mantra-like verse from Natalie Imbruglia’s anthemic, affective Torn. Once again an autonomous zone was constructed for visitors to wander through, and this time to be part of in a dialogical fashion, watching and then hugging, and being together with, others. Here the seamlessness of an affective fabric becomes more consistent than the type of experience, whether watching or doing.
As Nikima’s interests continue to develop, she has become interested in meditation and in kung fu. There is a driving force animating her works that relates to universal connectivity. Rather than making critiques, as so many practitioners do in our moment, she constructs proposals. I believe we share an interest in works that are not purely or even primarily visual, but experiential and visceral. She recently wrote me about a new project, Crown Shy, explaining it was “a proposal for alchemy, dissolving the distinction between inside and out… No differentiation between consciousness and action; between our affect and us.” It’s a good way to describe the effect of her work on the spatial and the emotional, the visual and the affective aspects of experience.
CONTAMINATION:
ON NIKIMA JAGUDAJEV
Text by Asad Raza
https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/4.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2..jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/3-1.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/5-1.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Dentist-0498.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/P5190114.jpg
Any mutant super-organism, if still an organism, will at one point feel fragile and vulnerable. At the core of all our added plug-on and -ins, hormone treatments and designer drugs, lies a coil of eternal humanity, common to all living creatures: the need to care and be taken care of.
This is where Jesse Darling’s practice comes in. Their sculptures are staunch and opaque, escaping art’s usual representational regime in favor of the ambiguity of things—objects and bodies alike. Indeed, they are not realist but ferociously real, stripped bare of any speculative or allegorical varnish. Take, for instance, this plastic school chair striving to stand upright on its meter-long, wobbly-looking legs. You might have seen it at the current 58th Venice Art Biennale, together with other, similar ones that make up the work March of the Valedictorians (2016). To us, this chair looks exhausted and miserable. Sure, we might identify ourselves with this banal plastic thing, a fitting stand-in for our own condition as a faceless, exhausted body amidst a grey mass of disposable human capital. As an artwork however, this group of chairs does not represent or perform anything else beyond their own, tragicomical failure to be a “normal chair.” They do, however, ask for their specific condition to be acknowledged: some brutally banal, aesthetically uninteresting plastic chairs, that nonetheless possess a right to be present, and to be noticed.
“Objects are bodily and complicated,” wrote Jesse Darling in an email exchange we had two years ago. At the time, they had just opened their solo-show Armes Blanches at Galerie Sultana in Paris. From an earlier digital and immaterial media practice, they had started to fully embrace a practice as a sculptor. Objects’ stubborn being-in-the-world, they explained in the email, had a lot to do with this shift. This was the practice that seemed the most fitting to the central preoccupation of their practice: making room for the radical Otherness of all bodies, of any bodies. Born in 1981, the British artist started art school as they were turning 30. After graduating from Central Saint Martins and Slade School of Fine Art in London, they made a name for themselves from within the media-structure, and media-hungry art world, of the early 2010s. Through video, social media, poetry, essays, lectures, they already endeavored to carve out a space for intimacy and plurality from within a corporate ecology offering little or no hope for radical alternatives—IKEA and Batman provided themes for some of the early shows.
In a 2012 interview on Rhizome.org, they assessed: “I believe very strongly in contingency—or otherwise, [potential-] failure-as-process.”
The aforementioned gallery shows were both held in 2016: The Great Near at Arcadia Missa in London and Atrophilia with Phoebe Collings-James at Company Gallery in New York. At Company Gallery, a lion sat perched on its pedestal. We see only its head, which is protruding from under a red cap, while the body is sketched as a mere pair of dangling, empty sweatshirt arms. This piece is more figurative than their later ones and displays more sculptural savoir-faire. But the tape patching up the lion’s blue head already signs it as one by Jesse Darling. Again, this detail signals that it is as much this individual object (a sculpture) that is hurt than the character it represents (a lion). By turning to a space-based practice, Jesse Darling both anticipated and accompanied a turn that saw artists abandon the ethereal digital enthusiasm of the beginning of the decade. In his 1988 essay The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard could still ask whether thought could “go on without a body,” and fantasizing about a future where thought and body would be dissociated according to a hardware/software model. Thirty years later, we seem to rediscover bodies anew. They appear as a nodal point where economic, political, scientific and ideological fluxes materialize.
“I do see the sculptures as mortal and vulnerable, just as we all are […]. This is a politics of care as well as a way to remember that nothing is too big to fail,” wrote Jesse Darling in the same conversation. At Galerie Sultana, the works testified to a lighter sculptural practice, a cocoon exquis combination of various daily-life materials closer to assemblage than sculpture as such. Some of those materials were found: plastic bags, work gloves, various medical supplies, sometimes flowers left to wither. Others had been slightly tweaked and repurposed. Welded steel structures held various objects: a found plastic bag, a work glove, a molded, silicon corset, several recurring pink jesmonite fetuses (or were they aliens? cancerous growths?), as well as stern Commedia dell’Arte masks. Quite clearly, identity was here posited as socially produced, be it through archetypal political roles (the masks) or gender stereotypes (born an indistinct cell-mass, you are made to fit into a bra or a glove, be it through a medicinal straightjacket). There as well, the material presence of the works alone, porous, transient and detumescent, was enough to convey as a bundle of sensations the themes delineated by each more referential element.
Emphasizing presence over reference opens up an alternative to the two of the main caricatures often found in more representational strategies. On the one hand, there is the posthuman messianism of the 2010s. On the other, its current counterpart, with its procession of zombies and mutants, coated with a glamorous apocalypticism. Both submit to the trend of inventing radically new bodies. Jesse Darling’s object-as-bodies and bodies-as-objects present us with nothing that is essentially new. Caring, being in pain, looking for intimacy, expressing vulnerability, has not yet been technologically overcome. Jesse Darling’s bodies are not mutant. They are fundamentally Other, not fitting in, painfully trying to cope with a daily life where instead of questioning the superstructure, one turns to self-enhancement techniques to stay always on, always flexible, always vertical. While different bodies, visibly so, are slowly reclaiming a space in the public sphere, it might be non-productive bodies that remain most excluded, also from representational strategies. Disabled bodies, injured bodies, fragile bodies, dissenting bodies. Crevé, the artist’s solo show last spring at Triangle France at La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille specifically took up this subject. There, nothing was standing upright. Stranded steel paper planes covered the floor, while flowers trapped in glass-cases were left to wither under public scrutiny.
Two years ago, Jesse Darling became ill from a neurological disease that left them paralyzed on one side and in great pain for over a year. The French word crevé, which translates as “punctured” or “exhausted,” came from this experience. So did their first major institutional solo show, The Ballad of Saint Jerome at Tate Britain in London last autumn, built around the biblical myth of Saint Jerome who tamed a lion when he understood it was wounded and needed help, and that it was not a dangerous beast to be tamed. There as well, the works invent new, futuristic bodies. They refused the imperative to adapt or disappear. Twisted museum cabinets perched on metal legs, crutches bent under their own weight, anthropomorphic lions equipped with a medical kit: absurd and poignant at the same time, they shun interpretation. “Are they going to stay there, set down, left in utter neglect, abandoned?,” asked Jacques Derrida in his 1978 essay Restitutions of Truth to Size, addressing the interpretations made about Vincent Van Gogh’s painting (A Pair of Shoes, 1886). To him, trying to “render them to their rightful owner,” that is, guessing to whom they belonged, and whether the owner was a farmer’s wife (Martin Heidegger) or the artist himself (Meyer Schapiro). Those shoes are essentially offered to us as “detached from naked feet and from their subject of reattachment.” Neither gendered nor useful, they exist as objects. And as bodies: a product of culture, yet vulnerable and complicated.
JESSE DARLING (b. 1981, Oxford, UK). Their recent projects include: Transcorporealities, Ludwig Museum, Cologne; 58th Venice Biennale; Crevé, Triangle France – Astérides, Marseille; The Ballad of St Jerome, Art Now, Tate Britain, London; A Cris Ouverts, Biennale d’art contemporain, Rennes. Jesse Darling has received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, The Serpentine Gallery and Volksbuhne Berlin among others.
INGRID LUQUET-GAD is an art critic. Based in Paris, she is the Arts editor of Les Inrockuptibles. Her research focuses on contemporary individualization processes and technologies of the self.
JESSE DARLING
by Ingrid Luquet-Gad
CURA.32
THE OCTOBER ISSUE
https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/16_10_28_Atrophilia_0140.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/16_10_28_Atrophilia_0136.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/AM-Frieze-7.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/GSul-2017-Jesse-Darling-001.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Jesse-Darling-The-Great-Near-Arcadia-Missa-26.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Jesse-Darling-Prototype-2018-2019.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/jesse-darling.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/our-lady-saint-jerome.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/TBA_1615.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Triangle-2019-Jesse-Darling-039.jpg
Miriam Laura Leonardi’s work has some of the aerial qualities of a skywalk between tall buildings. She is part of a striking generation of emerging feminist Swiss artists, who regularly re-enact, re-perform and reconstitute historical works with dry wit and spare aesthetics.
It’s present in the sculptural work Tonsure Nuova (2018), which features 12 midnight-blue Alice bands lined up neatly on a plexiglass cylinder, each with a single black star affixed to it at a cute angle. It’s the kind of accessory that an 10-year old girl might wear, yet the bands are rigidly lined up in precise display that summons both the store window display of a global brand and the rigid seriality connected with conceptual art. This work’s roots can be traced to a photograph of the back of Marcel Duchamp’s head taken in 1921 by Man Ray, revealing a tonsure in the shape of a shooting star that has been shaved into the back of Duchamp’s head. This particular image was taken up by Carol Rama in 2002, in a work on paper on which the image of Duchamp’s starry head appears in the top right-hand corner. Rama extracted the star shape from the image to create a repeated motif, drawing a shower of comets that travel across the paper towards Duchamp, colored black and blue. It is Rama’s serial stars on which Leonardi has modeled her Tonsure Nuova accessory, a way to wear both Duchamp and Rama as a style and a reference.
The work wryly suggests certain ‘accessorizing’ strategies of artists who wear references to others, ‘on their sleeve.’ Tonsure Nuova, which featured in the artist’s recent exhibition, Oh, là, là, là, Cookies, at LA project space Bel Ami, is a form of third-tier object, in that it rests on at least two other strata of practice—both that of a male iconoclastic insider who ushered in appropriation and use of found objects that are here applied, and that of a self-taught female outlier who is being celebrated posthumously for the rawness of her imagination and vision. In presenting such layering through the production of a wearable multiple, Leonardi appears to have something to say about repetition and multiplication of concepts as distributable products in favor of unique objects or images. It’s a locus of interest for the artist which suggests a tacit reversal of Pop or Pictures Generation strategies of mass appeal, in favor of a coded conduct which trades in hermetic and specialized symbols among a localized group. Art produces a community of viewers, who are increasingly interested in purchasing souvenirs and insignia.
This strategy also appeared in the same exhibition in Leonardi’s modification of a triangular cushion glimpsed in a Lawrence Weiner video from 2002, Deep Blue Sky / Light Blue Sky. The cushion carries a simple ‘girl-scout’ style emblem of a burning campfire, framed by the name of the group (Camp Fire Girls). Leonardi has previously remade the cushion, replacing the word ‘Camp,’ which is illegible in the video due to cropping, with ‘Water,’ creating a trio of elements—FIRE, WATER, GIRLS—that splinters the phrase into three entities which could be considered an index of sculptural elements as they might be seen in Weiner’s work, which consists of: ‘language + the material referred to.’ In 2016 she created an animation of a cartoonish leg having this same triangular logo tattooed onto it, and for the Bel Ami exhibition she created her modified version of the insignia as 100 wearable patches, again summoning the symbol as conceptual décor or knowledge signaling.
It’s important to note that there is barely a person alive who would be able to decode or even recognize such arcane references to works such as these without guidance or accompanying material, despite the fact that they refer to works by canonical artists. And to add that the acknowledgment of a certain impossibility to read such work without help is not self-evident—in art it is customary to conceal any gaps in knowledge, assuming that if we didn’t know, then we should have. In its willingness to engage with the power of the niche symbol as souvenir or as social communication, Leonardi’s work shows contemporary art to be the elaborate club that it is, in which a variety of underground or specialist signs are traded and exchanged among a group of insiders.
For another recent two-person exhibition, Contiene Lengua (Contains Language, with Víctor del Moral) at Aguirre in Mexico City, Leonardi dramatized the existence of such social codes and cliques, creating paper frames printed with lettering around each of the doorways in the gallery’s exhibition spaces. These titled the area beyond each threshold as a different kind of club for different social types. A black-and-white striped frame around a cream-colored door heralded the entrance to THE ANGST CLUB, another in the same monochrome palette around a doorless frame between gallery spaces announced the passageway to the ONLY YOU CAN COMMENT CLUB, whilst another rainbow frame simply read THE CLUB CLUB CLUB CLUB. Simply by walking through a passage, our membership status is changed, and we are initiated into an ambient participation in identity codes designated by space.
Leonardi’s approach to her own social life as an artist examines such laws through more intimate means. In a series of short video portraits of a number of female friends, the artist undertakes a task with her subject. In Bleta (2015) she goes hunting with the artist Bleta Jahai, examining each part of a deer’s innards and organs with their hands after its stomach is slit open. An ominously fragment of piano from Bruno Alexiu’s 2009 score for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished film, Inferno (1964), loops over the footage, accentuating the sense that we are witnessing an initiation rite with ambivalent consequences. In the more light-hearted Michèle (2019), Leonardi and the artist Michèle Graf each play one hand of Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic The Entertainer, a piece taught to both women by their fathers. When two separate hands explore warm flesh or play an old tune together, they create a subtle awareness of female artists and their late arrival to an old game. In response, a subjectivity splits in two, a bifurcation that paradoxically binds the women to each other as they play simultaneous roles of artists and subjects. In these works Leonardi’s camera is always focused on her partner in crime, as though searching for proof that they are aware of the rite that has just taken place: that they creating rituals in order to reveal the network to which they already belong.
MIRIAM LAURA LEONARDI (b. 1985, Lörrach, Germany) lives and works in Zurich. She has presented solo exhibitions at: Bel Ami, Los Angeles; Fri-Art, Kunsthalle Fribourg; Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich; Marbriers 4, Geneva; Plymouth Rock, Zurich. Her group exhibitions include: Istituto Svizzero, Rome; Swiss Art Award, Basel; Artgenève, Geneva; TG Gallery, London; Kunsthalle St.Gallen; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, among others.
LAURA MCLEAN-FERRIS is Curator of Swiss Institute, New York, and a writer who regularly contributes to books and art publications.
CREDITS
Courtesy the artist, Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Bel Ami, Los Angeles and Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich
MIRIAM LAURA LEONARDI
by Laura McLean Ferris
CURA.31
GRRRL POWER
https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/01-HEADER-copia.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_bauchladen-lll.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_help-in-the-search-invite.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_L2.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_pair-of-shoes-35.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_tonsure-nuova-detail.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_we-dont-need-another-hero-detail.jpg,https://curamagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/mll_yeah.jpg