CURA.

Hans Ulrich Obrist  How did you come to art in the first place? I saw an interview online where you said that at age 30 you were a housewife and you had a sudden epiphany. Can you tell me more about that?

Barbara Hammer Yes, my epiphany. I think there were multiple epiphanies like there are multiple orgasms. I had been married for 9 years and I felt there was something inside me that wasn’t expressed. So I began to make Super-8 films, to do installations. We had built our own house in the woods: I’m of the generation that was part of the Black Panther movement, the feminist movement, the lesbian movement, and the hippie movement.

HUO So, you designed your own house?

BH Yeah, we did. We drew our own plans. The guy I married was working class. I said I’ll marry you if we go around the world, I was just straight out of getting a BA in Psychology at UCLA. So we got a Lambretta, we picked it up in Milan and drove around the world in one year. Then we came back, bought the land and did the plans, got them approved and built the house ourselves. I had a big studio downstairs that I painted in at the time, then I decided I would apprentice myself to William Morehouse, who started the Graduate Art Institute program at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had seen a poster of his, it was very sexual, and I thought I wanted to study with him. So he helped me identify myself as an artist. After one semester I took a room of my own, I stretched white paper around the whole room and started painting. He was a second generation abstract expressionist, he thought that I should find my way to make a mark, so I made my marks. He also told me how hard it was to be an artist, but I still continued and I divorced my husband. At the time I used to read the biographies of male artists.

HUO Vincent Van Gogh?

BH Van Gogh and Gauguin. That gave me the incentive to leave my life, and take a risk and move out into the world. At the same time, I came out as a lesbian after I left my husband. I took off for Europe with my girlfriend and I lived in Germany for a year, in Ludwigsburg, where I was an English teacher for the American Army. We lived there and bought BMW motorcycles, flew them back on an Army plane and drove across the United States. Then I enrolled in San Francisco State University, with the 10,000 dollars my mother left me when she died. I decided to go into film, as I was interested in the courses in philosophy, theories of filmmaking, as well as script-writing. After one semester, I decided that was really my way, especially after I had seen Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.

HUO Maya Deren was an inspiration?

BH During the film history classes, we three feminist students sat together and watched films and there was never a film by a woman. We were always saying ‘what about Pudovkin’s wife?; who is Eisenstein’s mother?; who are the women in these men’s lives?.’ Then finally, one short film came on the screen: it was different than anything I had seen. That was Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, 1945. What I saw was cinema made from emotions, from the inside out, rather than intellectual or narrative cinema. I felt a connection with that emotional approach to imagery. I decided there was a blank screen in terms of women and lesbian cinema. So, I decided to fill that space.

HUO Do you still show these films?

BH I still show them. I also have Super-8 films that I did while I was married. I showed them in the retrospective at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. They are being digitized right now, there’s probably a hundred films now.

HUO Wow! Can you describe a little of the films you made in parallel with school? You made thirteen films in a very short time. How did that happen?

BH I think art is energy, it’s my definition of art. I had a lot of energy breaking out of a traditional role, finding a new sense of freedom. I needed to express a lot of things that had never been shown: lesbian sexuality, menstruation, comedies of super-dykes taking over San Francisco, ‘psychosynthesis.’

HUO Can you tell me more about ‘psychosynthesis’?

BH It means putting together your different psyches into one. The synthesis of your psyches. I learned that through therapy sessions: my therapist asked me to lie down on the floor, turn on the tape recorder, close my eyes and open the door. Out of the door came a baby, a witch, an athlete, an artist.

HUO We are many!

BH We are many. I did three very personal films X, Psychosynthesis, and I Was/I Am: this is my second 16mm film where I change from a tiara-wearing princess into a motorcycle dyke and I take a key out of my mouth, referencing Maya Deren; on the motorcycle seat there’s a sliced pumpkin with a gun inside. These are all quick actions. I learnt how to edit by studying the theories of Eisenstein.

HUO So, Eisenstein was another hero, besides Maya Deren. What did you learn from him?

BH I learned editing techniques of disjunction, how every edit creates an emotional shock in the viewer’s psyche and it makes them feel alive. That’s what I wanted, an active audience. I also learned about perspective and scale. At that time narrative cinema, for the most part, was so linear and boring to me, and I thought that his early writing as well as his films really confronted that.

HUO So, your idea of active cinema came out of Eisenstein?

BH I think the editing aspect of it. The other aspect of active cinema for me is to get the audience out of their seats. So, I take a portable projector or even a 16mm and I roll it around the room and then I have a rotary projector table, so I could use the architecture of the space for the screens.

HUO So, when did you use the notion of active cinema for the first time?

BH In 1979.

HUO With which piece?

BH It’s called Available Space. It’s a 16mm film shot in eight sections of images with 10 seconds of black in between which gives me time to roll the projector to a new space. It’s about a woman feeling confined by architecture and the rectangular film frame and screen. The images show a woman, it’s me, pushing the frame of the film, trying to expand it. Then at the very end there is an image of me, re-photographed, projected onto a white paper screen.

HUO And then you go through the paper?

BH And then I go through it. I did it at the Turbine Hall, at the Tate, within the retrospective Stuart Comer curated. In the Turbine Hall there’s a lot of space, I could even run with the projector, the audience had to move.

HUO Any part of architecture can basically become part of the work: the ceiling, the vaults, the corners, the waves…

BH Yes. The first time I did it was at 80 Langton, New Langton Arts in San Francisco. I wielded the projector to the door and projected outside onto a garage door across the street. One time I projected on snow, out of a window. I thought traditional narrative cinema was an escapist cinema. I wanted the audience to be politically motivated and my idea was that if you get up and move you have more blood running through your system.
More energy.

HUO You mentioned Eisenstein’s writing and I know you are also writing a lot. Can you tell me about your texts?

BH A lot of them went to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Yale.

HUO Your handwritten work?

BH My handwritten work. Three boxes of journals that I kept up until the ’90s. I write mostly now about living with illness and health issues. I wrote a lot in the late ’60s and early ’70s, never correcting, never re-reading, writing about my life, my coming out, my struggles as a filmmaker, and the first thirty pages of that is called My Life as Henry Miller. They were published within the book Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life. I think there’s also a novel in there. There’s also something Frieze published at the last Frieze fair in London which was early lesbian aesthetic, where I’m influenced by the cultural movement going on in the Bay Area, talking about the mother as a muse, circle forms for women to use… I was trying to break out of that rectangular frame, so the circle was another way to show films: I started projecting onto inflated weather balloons.

HUO Wow.

BH It’s beautiful. I did that at the Tate and I most recently did it at the Exploratorium last February. I put two performances together and two films, Available Space and sometimes we also project a film called Bent Time, in which I walked across the United States taking a frame of film for every step, in high-energy locations, and then through editing, making them into a circle. I had read that time bends at the edge of the universe, so I used a 9mm lens, that actually bent the image. There’s a score by Pauline Oliveros.

HUO So your writing is mostly unpublished, right? Only one book was published, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life (2009), The Feminist Press, City University of New York.

BH Yes.

HUO Was that a kind of manifesto?

BH It is, it moves through decades so you could see a changing aesthetic and a changing philosophy. The first thirty pages are fictive writing but based on my life. Then we go into different essays I’ve written over the years for film or feminist publications, Millennium Film Journal, Sinister Wisdom or Heresies. There are also new chapters like a piece on censorship, and about my interest in mortality issues.

HUO Doris Lessing defined autobiography as an interim report. She once told me a great thing about unrealized projects, which I was very fascinated by. She told me that unrealized projects are not only the projects which we couldn’t carry out due to lack of money or censorship, but also the projects we didn’t dare to do. There’s a certain degree of self-censorship in all of us. What are your unrealized projects, projects that were too big, too expensive, too ambitious, something you didn’t dare to do?

BH Well, putting my naked nude cancer-stricken hairless body on the screen during a very bad year of chemotherapy and looking at that now in my edit, I think that is the scariest thing I could ever have done and performed. But there are also unrealized projects. One of them was unrealized because I didn’t have money. I think it was a good project, a script called Nothing Could Be Worse than Two Dykes in Menopause: it’s about a younger woman wanting to be an older woman and to join an older woman’s group. I got to do 17 minutes of the piece, but I didn’t really have the money to go forward.
Another unrealized project is called Dune Shack: I lived in a dune shack in Cape Cod about ten years ago for a month without any electricity. I was working with miniatures at the time, miniature toys, winding them up, putting leaves on them and filming. I never could find a justification for finishing it, because I didn’t have political content for it.
The third unrealized project is from 1975: I drove my motorcycle to Guatemala by myself and with my wind-up Bolex where I went to a village that had a big market that indigenous people came to. I filmed that and my idea was always, and still is, to go back and try to find the same location. I would film in the same locations and the film would investigate the commercial economy that I suppose will be reflected dramatically in the images. The commercialization of Latin American economies would be my research project.

HUO So, to go back to Guatemala. That’s the third unrealized project.

BH That’s the third. There’s a few digital projects that are unfinished, one of them is an AIDS conference for deaf people that was held in San Francisco in 1996 and I have ten tapes. It was filmed in a traditional documentary style. My idea is to find a deaf filmmaker to finish the project.

HUO Can you tell me about technology?

BH If there’s a new technology I want to learn it, I want access to it. Now when you see this piece that we’ve edited and I’ve made about mortality, you’ll see how far I’ve pushed the program of FinalCut Pro: you’ll see the complicated images, the projections on my body, digitized images of a skeleton, x-rays of the human body, a CAT scan projected on my head… I was sick, that whole year. I’m in an experimental trial now with immunotherapy and I have stable disease now!

HUO But now you’re feeling better?

BH Oh yes, I’m better. I have more fat on me, I have hair, color.

HUO In the ’90s you went back to the roots with your trilogy, which is composed of the films Nitrate Kisses, Tender Fictions and History Lessons.

BH Nitrate Kisses was my move into the essay documentary from this more experimental work. I decided to be intellectually active, to stimulate people’s brains. I began to use gay and lesbian material which was left out of history, by making a film about these absences: that was Nitrate Kisses, I shot in Super-8 while traveling in Germany, Berlin and Paris, looking for spaces like Mulackstraße in the former East Berlin and meeting the wonderful trans-woman, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf that Rosa von Praunheim made a film of the same year. It was followed by Tender Fictions, which became a critique of autobiography, and then by History Lessons which is a trip.

HUO That’s a comedy.

BH Yeah. It’s all made of lesbian material that was made by men, before the beginning of the feminist movement in the ’70s. I took that material and re-edited it and changed some of the voices. For example, I have Eleanor Roosevelt welcome the audience to the ‘first ever lesbian conference.’

HUO I am really interested in the idea of mentorship. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote Letters to a Young Poet, which is a masterpiece. You also wanted to help the younger generation. That’s a whole other experiment which started after the trilogy.

BH Yes, I love that book. My first concrete move towards mentoring was running by chance into a young woman who was working in a technical laboratory, she showed me a contact printer that she was in charge of and she was working in 35mm, 70mm. I asked to see her films and I suggested we make a film together, so Gina Carducci and I made Generations (2009). We shot with our Bolexes, we went to Coney Island and worked on the idea of youth and age coming together. When we finished shooting, eight or nine months later, I saw that real mentoring was giving the younger artist the chance to fly free and find her own voice. So I said let’s divide the footage, and we edited it without seeing each other. She edited it in 16mm, I edited it in digital files and then we married each other’s footage without cross-editing at all.

HUO Speaking more generally now, in 2017, what would be your advice to a young artist and filmmaker today?

BH To believe in yourself. Don’t listen to anybody else, follow your own intuition, intuition can be just a little spark, try it out. Don’t think about fame, don’t think about the gallery system in the art world, I didn’t. Finally it found me later in life. Have friends in the art world, that’s just happening for me now too. Don’t spend money on cars and homes, you don’t need that. If you’re really satisfied by making your work and that really fills you up, you don’t need the other things that culture tells you to need. Enjoy, don’t do it unless it’s pleasurable, we only have one life and it’s short, so pleasure yourself. Not every aspect of your work is going to be pleasurable, but the main one, if you love to edit, love to shoot, make that the primary focus, if you love the way paint absorbs into soft paper, let that happen, let it flow.

HUO Beautiful, that’s a great list.

BH Thank you.

 

CREDITS:
All images Courtesy: the artist and Company Gallery, New York

BARBARA HAMMER
IN CONVERSATION WITH
HANS ULRICH OBRIST

CURA.27

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Under Cinema, Wu Tsang’s show currently on view at FACT in Liverpool, derives its title from being located in the sub-structure underneath the gallery’s main cinema. Spatially, the setting corresponds to the queer subcultures and nightlife-scapes that Tsang incorporates in her films, sculptures and performances and often translates into intimate scenographies. At the same time, the title captures how Tsang’s video works transform the cinematic gaze and modes of visual and narrative representation established under the confines of cinematic tradition.

The way Tsang presents her films often invites viewers to become part of the image field, for instance by sitting in the folds of a curtain while watching Duilian (2016). During the 2016 Berlin Biennale viewers watched the film amidst an alcove of fabrics Tsang built for the occasion. At the Whitney Biennial 2012 in New York, a recreated dressing room of the Latinx club “The Silver Platter” in LA became the screening site for her film Wildness. The dressing room immersed the viewers in the surroundings they were simultaneously watching, all the while reflecting their images back at them through the mirrors lining the walls.

Tsang’s strategies of expanding the fourth wall confront the viewer with the gaze the camera casts on protagonists, but also with their own involvement in cinematic situations and the roles these usually prescribe.

Aside from such immersive settings, Tsang’s approach to film-making can be described as a kind of production-drag: narratives are developed and then turned on their heads, magical realism is woven together with documentary elements, the frame is constantly disassembled and put back together in an entirely new dress.

In the film Mishima in Mexico (2012), Tsang and Alexandro Segade are shown adapting Yukio Mishima’s novel Thirst for Love (1950). We see actors who are developing scenes who become characters who become actors again—only to switch back and forth between each other’s roles. As Tsang and Segade move freely between multiple frames, figures, identities and geographies, the viewers adapt and grow vis-à-vis these strategies of queer assemblage. They, too, are required to shift shape, realizing that they, too, move in and out of multiple selves—and not just while watching the film. The self—not as singular and identifiable, but as multiple, as constantly moving and always in connection to others.

Dance and sound as forms of interaction factor prominently in Tsang’s recent works. A long-standing collaborator is scholar and poet Fred Moten. Their sculptural performance Gravitational Feel (2016), a rope-curtain interacting with the spectator’s movement through sound, adds a tactile dimension to the encounter. Viewers find themselves inside a field of “vibrant matter” that is also a “feel.” A “feel” that is strangely familiar, generating sensations similar to watching the waves move in Duilian. In Tsang’s and Moten’s field of feelings, visuality reveals itself as a multi-sensory form of perception. Like the ropes one brushes through, the waves one sees on the screen create a sense of movement, proximity and touch. Similarly, Gravitational Feel elicits a proprioceptive response that may or may not involve direct physical touch.

The fields of vision that Tsang creates with her collaborators suggest that immersive art cannot be premised on a simplistic split between ‘immaterial seeing’ and ‘material touching.’ This goes not just for the body-human, but also for the body-camera. In the film We hold where study (2017), it joins the dancing pairs boychild and Josh Johnson, as well as Ligia Lewis and Jonathan Gonzalez, as a fifth dancer. The screen splits into two overlapping projections and, swirling through a field of grass lined with mirrors, it is the camera that is reflected back on itself.

If dance is a mode to get out from behind the confines of image-making and pre-scribed identity, Tsang takes it even a step further. Her cinematic performances allow the technological devices to leave their designated posts, breaking open the way they are supposed to be handled. Under Wu Tsang’s expanded cinema, beneath her cinematic sensibility, lies a mobile multiverse of kinaesthesia.

 

CREDITS
Wildness, 2012
Under Cinema, 2017
All Images: Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Wu Tsang, Portrait Photo: Inès Manai

WU TSANG

by Noemi Y. Molitor

CURA.27

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Martine Syms: conceptual entrepreneur. The tagline for Syms’ (b. 1988) website gives some idea of the multiplicity of this Los Angeles-born and based artist’s output. Since she graduated in 2007 with a BFA in Film, Video and New Media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Syms has co-directed the project space and bookstore Golden Age, designed a website for fashion retailer Nasty Gal, devised a branding strategy for the nonprofit organization Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange and founded Dominica publishing, an imprint “dedicated to exploring blackness as a topic, reference, and marker, and audience in visual culture.”

In demand and, clearly, prolific, Syms’ rise has been nothing short of meteoric. In the last two years, she has been included in Manifesta 11, Made in L.A.: a, the, though, only at the Hammer Museum, the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, has been represented by Bridget Donahue, the much admired New York gallery, and had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This year, Syms will have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for which she is producing her first feature length film Incense, Sweaters, and Ice. Not bad going for an artist still shy of 30. But why exactly has Syms achieved such stratospheric success so early on in her career?

One of Syms’ principal concerns is with the ways in which black subjectivity is mediated in popular culture. Her work draws on Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory,’ asserting that mass media produces a collective memory which has a lasting and meaningful impact on public consciousness and identity.(1) Syms focuses in particular on the appropriation and depiction of blackness on television, in movies and online. The misconceptions that often arise from these stereotypes help perpetuate the ignorance, fear and plain old racism that proliferate in the ‘real’ world, and have surely contributed to the circumstances in which someone like Donald Trump can become leader of the United States—a man who appears to believe that all black people are on speaking terms with one another.(2)

Syms’ interrogation of these cultural norms feels especially pertinent, given the recent awakening to racial inequity in mainstream American media: from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ incendiary articles on reparations for The Atlantic to the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement on the streets and playing fields of the country. Fact & Trouble at the ICA reflected on the gap between public perceptions of blackness and lived experience. Here Syms created an immersive installation of images of black men, women and children which were culled home movies, online GIFs, advertisements, YouTube videos and surveillance footage. While Syms’ work is timely, she does not respond directly to news events in an overtly political manner, instead pursuing a more subtle and nuanced investigation, one which is as likely to draw on queer theory and the writings of black intellectuals as cartoons and television footage.

The flexible and responsive way in which Syms works—creating installations and photographs, publishing books, shooting films and presenting lectures—is also particularly suited to this moment. Syms makes online work in the hope that a more diverse audience can access these subjects—not only the rarified demographic of gallery-goers. While some of these early projects have a one-liner, throwaway feel—listing all of the things she’d ever googled for Everything I’ve Ever Wanted To Know or recreating a Geocities website in Black Culture in America—in recent years, Syms’ practice has become ever more sophisticated and ambitious, dense and complex.

Littered with the tools of broadcast media—light stands, color filters, video stills, screens and cue cards—Syms’ work suggests the potential to capture, frame and represent potential subjects. Videos like She Mad: Laughing Gas employ sophisticated production techniques, co-opting the tropes of the sitcom, including speedy plotting, close-ups and a Brady Bunch-style four-way split-screen. This dizzying, highly entertaining video is positioned as a single episode of a fictive television sitcom called She Mad, in which the central character also goes by the name of Martine Syms. She can be seen making a tragicomic visit to the dentist, undergoing anesthesia before the dentist realizes that the patient’s insurance will not cover the procedure and sends her on her way. Disorienting excerpts from America’s Next Top Model, The Wire and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air are intercut with footage of Syms, drugged to the hilt, navigating the Los Angeles public transit system before finally making it home and collapsing on her sofa.

She Mad: Laughing Gas not only explores how the circulation of particular images can make beliefs visible (and entrench them), it also generates an alternative by representing people of color in ways previously deemed unconventional. In A Pilot for Nowhere, Syms—in voiceover—makes clear that she wants to broadcast a version of the world that is not currently available onscreen: her L.A., with its subway entrances, clogged freeways and Koreatown bars, its colorful and diverse characters. In the video essay Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2013), Syms proclaims her stance on the production of black identity, explaining that she is interested in changing the discourse of the world around us, not in trying to escape to build an alternative reality. The new representations that she introduces embrace the multiplicity, variability and specificity of individual experience, attempting to disseminate a new value system, one that speaks to a broad audience and has the capacity to change the world.(3) In her work, Syms outlines nothing less than a new framework for future cultural production, something we could all use in these divided times.

 

1) The British historian Mary Beard touched on this subject in a recent talk about the ways in which women in power are described in mainstream media. One newspaper headline quoted by Beard described the ‘power grab’ that women were making as they were appointed to prominent roles, from Head of BBC to the Bishop of London, as if this were a coordinated invasion, rather than the ascendance of qualified people to appropriate positions. She noted how such references serve to further entrench the idea that ambitious women are unnatural.

2) In a frankly bizarre press conference on February 16, April Ryan, a black journalist, asked Trump whether he would invite the Congressional Black Caucus to his meetings on urban policy, to which he responded “Well, I would. Tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours? Set up a meeting.” This gaffe was a revealing insight into the ways in which the nation’s president views 12.3% of his people.

3) This brings to mind a recent survey of audiences and film casts by Darnell Hunt, Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and Professor of Sociology at UCLA. This found that diversity in film and television results in higher ratings and, ultimately, more revenue. The recent critical and commercial success of shows like Atlanta and Insecure, or the Oscar-winning sensation Moonlight, bears this out.

MARTINE SYMS
by Ciara Moloney

CURA. 25

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Listening to a reading by Maggie Nelson at the Los Angeles Public Library recently jogged my memory to recall my (pubescent) longing for my own hands to feel like the hands of another—to be simultaneously both myself and someone else. In the text Nelson recollects her own coming of age, her wish to grind, and her love for Prince and his epic 1984 song Darling Nikki in the haze circle of her father’s death.

I knew a girl named Nikki I guess you could say she was a sex fiend, / I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine, / She said how’d you like to waste some time and I could not resist when I saw little Nikki grind. (…)
Prince, Darling Nikki, 1984

Nelson describes Prince’s signature move when performing the song, making his hand look like the hand of another, slowly and seductively creeping down the side of his face—a move that electrified a generation and that would be imitated in front of bedroom mirrors and on dance floors for decades to come. Nelson sees the hand as Nikki’s hand and writes: “It’s Nikki’s hand, it’s one’s own self-pleasuring hand, it’s creepy, one’s own body made other. It’s self-seduction, a magic trick. It’s the masturbatory dream, that one’s hand could feel the way the hand of another feels on you.”¹ Making oneself a stranger is not merely a tactic to get rid of oneself, much more it marks the desire for a relationship with the aspects of one’s identity that lie outside of our immediate reach. Curiously, it appears that sometimes we may well need another to enter into this relationship, to reach the other within us.

In a recent body of work the artist Eliza Douglas produced paintings of hands and feet in various engagements and styles and with varying accoutrements. Douglas, an American artist born in 1984, who is currently studying at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, only recently came to painting. After stints as a musician and social worker in New York, she left the city in a state of crisis, to make art. The anxieties about the audacity of being/becoming an artist were overwhelming and in an interview with the poet Eileen Myles, Douglas writes: “Since I was taking this plunge, which felt suicidal, I figured I might as well go all the way and be a painter. Along with its weighty history, painting is particularly polarizing. Choosing painting was the ultimate way of exposing myself. It felt like a region in which there would be no buffer, nothing to hide behind.”² And yet it appears that there was the need for an interlocutor to create the conversation Douglas wanted to have with herself and her art. Resultantly she introduced other painters into her process and asked them to reproduce her hands and later feet in a naturalistic style and in erratic constellations on large canvases that left a gaping white space where the connecting tissue of the missing body would have been. Douglas then paints in varying styles and techniques the physical connections, often through harsh gestural brush strokes and marks reducing whatever may be connecting the extremities to gooey stick figures without heads or torsos.

The carefully crafted reproductions of the artist’s extremities are reworked by her own (hand), allowing for a curious self-portrait, a doubling of the subject and its maker in both style and content. At times the hands present in the paintings multiply suggestive of several people or multi-armed creatures. In others paintings the connecting brushwork reaches outside of the canvas, almost as if Douglas wanted to reinstate the empty canvas as a stand in for her missing body. Douglas also invites another form of reading that succeeds the gestural expression through the selective inclusion of accessories and pieces of clothing. There is a dimension of personal style visible in the paintings that stand out in the large blank space around them. Sport socks, denim shirts and white Dr. Martens lace-up boots speak to a fashion that is datable and rooted in a sensibility for what is current and that enhances the attitude that is evident in the gestures depicted.

The gesture to give away a part of one’s process and then to re-engage with the estranged severed bits is reminiscent of Prince’s stranger hand. Douglas’ paintings are made strange through the outsourced depiction of her limbs. The painted line crumbles once returned to Douglas’ hand, the detailed depictions fray, patterns become patches, skin and fabric are stretched into strokes. The quickly drawn connecting lines, dripping strokes, and patchy Impressionist brushwork speak of a dissolution that is held together by expression and speed. Myles described the works as letter-like and sporty and I concur that there is a communicative athleticism to them. The lines are decisive in their negotiation of the empty canvas, suggestive of an emphatic signalling and dynamic body language. “Who runs may read,” said Brion Gysin, and maybe it is the poetic dynamic that comes with fragmentation and speed that Douglas is after, the speed of the mechanical reproduction versus the handmade, which favors acceleration over intactness. Her interest in poetry becomes further apparent in the choice of her titles, titles such as The Cool Light of Dawn, I Really Mean It and Sparks Upon Your Face all stem from poems by the American poet Dorothea Lasky.

The channeling of oneself through another is a common trope, especially in poetry. Poets like Jack Spicer, Sylvia Plath and, above all, James Merrill employed strategies such as the use of chance, found language and Ouija boards to receive signals from beyond themselves and channel those into their work. Yet in addition to the reach outside of herself Douglas’ use of the hand as a gestural device also suggests an interest in the communicative potential in painting outside of the written word. I am reminded of the Italian artist Ketty La Rocca and her use of hands as part of a search for a language that avoided the clichés-ridden and male-dominated power structures that traditional letter-based language transports. La Rocca saw language as something that was both alien and hostile to women, using her art to form alternatives that would allow for a more authentic form of communication. Hands and gestures appear removed from the body in front of a black background and invite a reading of the patterns and symbols in the work with the use of one’s internal tools. La Rocca’s work suggests an internal set of signals that have the potential to communicate through the use of hands. She relies on a form of communication based on physical expression, the attempt to make sense of the body and its raw communicative potential, an aspiration that is also appears to be at play in Douglas’ gestural parsing.

So when Nelson slithers on her mirror in imitation of Prince she is grasping for the same conversational potential between what we know about ourselves and the unknown within us that appears to be at the center of Douglas’s painting—one’s hand as the other.

1. https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud/eileen-myles-and-maggie-nelson-why-we-write.
2. E. Douglas in E. Myles, “Eliza Douglas. A History of Longing,” Mousse Magazine, #55, October-November 2016

 

ELIZA DOUGLAS
ONE’S HAND AS THE OTHER

by Anna Gritz

CURA.25

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Visitors walking on the High Line in these summer months find a somewhat unusual object that stops their walk in the park: it is a large aquarium, about 3 meters long, sharp on the horizon, overlapping the view of the Hudson River in one of the most scenic spots of the famous promenade at the level of the 14^th Street. This is the work by Max Hooper Schneider, Section of Intertidal Landscape (Hair Metastasis), a new sculpture commissioned by High Line Art, the High Line’s public art program.

Upon carefully observing this strange ecosystem, the visitor realizes that, instead of containing the usual tropical fish found in fish tanks displayed in thousands of restaurants and waiting rooms in dentist’s offices, this diorama is full of strange floating shapes that interweave and sway like algae or exotic aquatic plants. Hooper Schneider’s algae, however, have a glossy, silky quality and twirl in a spiral like the curls of a complex rococo hairstyle: in fact, these mysterious aquatic creatures are sculptures made with synthetic and human wigs and hair, which the artist has been collecting for years in the neighborhood where he has his studio in Los Angeles, just a few steps away from dozens of factories and laboratories where wigs and hair extensions are made.

The bottom of the aquarium is covered in what look like geological formations from another era: the ruins of a future apocalypse that has produced a new post-human age—all in all, an era not too different from ours. Encrusted in crystals and minerals on the bottom of the aquarium, there are several overlapping layers of scrap and metal wreckages, including old used batteries, rusty razor blades, the tips of a fork, scissors, scalpels and other medical instruments on which colored resins and other artificial concretions have been laid. The game of lights and colors recall a stained glass window of a cathedral, but here the marquetry of shapes appears miniaturized, like the pulsing cells on a microscope slide. Or, more prosaically, this buildup of items recalls the collection of some patient archaeologist-wannabe bricoleur.

This description perfectly fits Hooper Schneider himself too—one of the most interesting artists to emerge from the Los Angeles scene in recent years.

Looking like Michael Jay Fox in Back to the Future—ripped leather jacket, tight jeans, basketball sneakers and all—Hooper Schneider plays with the stereotypes of the crazy scientist and the eternal amateurish sci-fi fan, creating works and assemblages in which there are mixed references to Land Art and to supermarkets displays, overlaid with memories of a restless metalhead teenager and the jargon of biology and landscape architecture scholars, two of the disciplines in which Hooper Schneider graduated at Harvard.

This unlikely mix—which recalls the sculptures’ very concentration of heterogeneous materials—casts its roots in a very American tradition, in which the strict geometry of minimalist sculpture opens up to include much more sordid materials, from Robert Smithson’s non-sites to Jeff Koons’s Equilibrium Tank showcases, in which saline solutions keep basketballs in suspension. Paul Thek’s so-called “relics” are not too far off either—small showcases where the American artist placed his wax sculptures which mimicked decomposing flesh. Even Joseph Cornell’s miniature theatres don’t appear too far away from Hooper Schneider’s chamber landscapes, in which Cornell’s Victorian memories are replaced with memories from some sort of night of the living dead.

Like Romero’s famous film, Hooper Schneider’s sculptures evoke the imminent end of the society of affluence, and it is definitely not by chance that among the artist’s unrealized projects there is a gigantic environmental intervention aimed at transforming a shopping mall into a ruin in which flora and fauna slowly reclaim the spaces that man had tried to seize from the control of nature.

It is exactly due to these end-of-the-world visions that the observation of Hooper Schneider’s sculpture on the High Line offers other interesting keys to interpretation. Not only is High Line itself an industrial ruin—a finding of the first technological revolution, that of the steam train and engine, transformed into a perfect public space for the latest revolution, that of immaterial and digital communication—but it is also a unique observation point from which to contemplate the transformations of the city of New York, a model of urban and anthropological mutations worthy of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In this scenario, Hooper Schneider’s sculpture evokes at once biological and industrial processes, correspondences and differences between nature and culture, similarities between artificial concretions and geological sedimentation.

One of the most frequent comments from viewers of Hooper Schneider’s sculpture on the High Line is that the aquarium is somehow connected with the waters of the Hudson River and functions as either a cleaning system or a proof of the level of pollution of the waterway that separates New York City from New Jersey. In either case, Hooper Schneider’s work seems to connect immediately with the discussions—heated more than ever in the Trump era—on the state of global contamination and overheating. This is perhaps one of the most unusual aspects of Hooper Schneider’s work: its ability to connect with current events and even topics usually handled in politics, activating a personal reaction from the viewer, even when involving objects or situations that are not immediately understandable. But this, after all, is the typical function of science fiction literature and utopian thinking, i.e. to create extreme situations through which art may teach us to live with tragedy and the impossible.

CREDITS
Section of Intertidal Landscape (Hair Metastasis), 2017
Part of Mutations, a High Line Commission (April 2017-March 2018)
Photo: Timothy Schenck Courtesy: Friends of the High Line

 

MAX HOOPER SCHNEIDER
Section of Intertidal Landscape (Hair Metastasis)

by Cecilia Alemani

CURA. #26

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