Life Overcomes Art and Art Perverts Life: An Interview with Antoine d'Agata / NOTOFU Magazine

Equal parts addict, biographer, humanist and savant, Antoine d’Agata is a resilient artist who resists falling hostage to any one medium through an evolving practice that dilutes the distinction between living and making. His emotive body of work spans over a quarter-century and actively uproots firm classification within the art historical cannon. Rather, D’Agata’s striking photographs, films and publications eek out an altogether new ecosystem for self expression that is forever nourished by his rare curiosity, unhindered pursuit of adrenaline, and willingness to go where traditional documentarian methodologies dare not tread.

In D’Agata’s artist statement, he illuminates the categorical limits of photography and outlines the strong ethics that shape how he employs it. “Instead of reducing photography to the sole capacity of recording reality, I take responsibility for the position I assume. Rejecting voyeuristic or sociological standpoints, the images ensure art and action are inseparable in the frantic search for the feeling of being alive, of being part of life. In this fragile attempt, the image is defined both through and within the act that engenders it. It’s not my insight into the world that matters but my most intimate rapport with that world."

This world that he references and inhabits is most authentically characterized by the people that comprise it—sex workers, drug addicts and, in more general terms, those whose reality is directly and complexly tied to their own bodies. While D’Agata immerses himself within these subcultures, absorbing and incubating contagions without hesitation, his participation is a reasoned choice, bound on all sides by his lifelong commitment to adulterating the physical and cerebral divide. It is important to note that these are not anonymous encounters documented in his works, and are rather moments of solidarity and respect that aim to capture those rare and waning twinklings of humanity. D’Agata is most invested in this aspect of photography that necessitates his presence, and is very vocal about outlining his agency and responsibility in these situations of his own making.

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Antoine upon his return from Cambodia where he was shooting Oscurana, a film on his relationship to methamphetamines and damaged territories that have survived the hardship of war and communism. I spoke with him about truth, death, and love, and asked him to unpack the role sex, drugs and art play in reaching utopia.

N: In your artist statement, you assert, “life overcomes art, and art perverts life.” Can you elaborate on what this means, both in your personal experience and for the field of contemporary art? How do sex, drugs and itinerancy help you to overcome art, and why does it need overcoming?

A: I always refused to play the game of art. I see the artist’s posture as fake, as hypocritical and cynical. My sanity has always been based on my capacity to go back to my very basic needs, habits, and addictions. Vice is redemption to me. It is some type of insurance to never give up, to never give in. I was a punk long before I “became” an artist and I’ll still be one long after nobody bothers looking at my images anymore. Art to me has never just been a way to give shape to a vision, a perspective on the world. It’s always been a method to push things further, to structure my struggle with things and beings, to embrace fear and time, to feel alive, to absorb life, to let life absorb me, enter me, to fade into life.

Right now, I am waiting for the meth to slowly evaporate from my blood, from my flesh, from my brain, and I struggle to keep some kind of sanity, of distance, of lucidity. But even this state of confusion, this banal nightmare is more precious than health, more rewarding than safety. Pain is a privilege; I use the excessive scenario I describe as an incentive to survive, to never give in to the temptation of comfort. To never feel numb again. The art world doesn’t mean anything to me, but I try to adopt the intransigence and dark beauty of that impossible position towards my own existence, and in all circumstances, that position, fatal but gorgeous, where all acts answer the necessity of merging fear with desire. Of using pain, ecstasy and violence as sensorial and existential means, of recognizing addiction and promiscuity as the most adequate social postures, of seeing, and evil as an antidote to the slow death of the consumer.

N: In what context do you most desire your work to be consumed? I know you have published numerous books and I wonder if the intimacy of physically encountering your work is an intended outcome, as opposed to the sterility and forced distance of the white cube?

A: These days, it all feels like a compromise. I wish I could just get on with my life and not exhibit or publish, but I am condemned to find an impossible balance between life and giving an account of my acts. This impossible point is what I pursue and I’ll use anything that can help me to fit the purity of experience and logics of ideology into each one of my actions. Books, exhibitions, drugs, encounters are all just tools to me. Without any hierarchy, without any craftsmanship, without any illusion.

N: In more recent years, you have opened up your practice to include film. What are the limitations of photography as a visual language? What flexibility has film provided you, and how has it changed your relationship to the subjects or situations in front of the camera?

A: The last few years, I have not known what to do with photography. It became too simple, too easy, and too obvious. Film brings me back to dealing with reality, in its more imperfect and more frustrating aspects. While filming, I have to take into account the intensity and truth of situations. Filming generates a language dependent upon truth, while photography fast becomes a game, a lie made out of shades and shapes. I create my own destiny through stimulation of the senses, through excess, and try to develop a language that is appropriate to describe the process. Film became a more meaningful way to speak about what I go through, a more powerful means to challenge the truth and intensity of relationships doomed to nothingness, that I relentlessly nourish to transform into some degenerated form of love. Photography is more of a solitary practice.

Filming is more of a common language developed trough the generous and prolific affirmation of existence imposed by the girls themselves. They share more, embracing fully the excitement, nervousness and danger of facing a more straightforward and honest live camera. Most of all, they accept the challenge of speaking up to the camera, of revealing unveiled aspects of their mental and emotional states, of their relation to me, to men, to the violence of the world. Filming proves itself a fuller and purer experience of sharing bits and pieces of life, but the technical and financial pressure is great; the economy of working with film, the necessity to fund projects, to work with a team of people more qualified than I’ll ever be with cinematographic techniques makes it an almost impossible task.

N: I have often heard your work described of as dark or violent, which to me are terms that lack granularity. What do darkness and violence mean to you and what other words might you use to describe your work?

A: To reinvent a very ordinary destiny, I was bound to lose control, to throw myself into the unknown, into the obscure margins of city life. Considering the logic of my research, this loss into darkness was probably essential and I ended up learning from, loving, desiring, and respecting the beings that inhabit those dark territories. The darkness you speak about, I see as a luminous, generous, dignified land. The women I photograph are saints, heroes, myths, whatever you want to call them. But they are the only beings I can think of who live their life to the extent of their humanity. They are the last human beings in a world of cowards and cynics. This is what darkness is made from...sparkles of life in a world of illusions. 

Its possible I’ve never been as close as I am now to what I consider a decent way of living, by my own rules and standards, and among people I consider my own. But plunging into the raw flesh of humanity means intelligence will progressively vanish, and the intuitive violence of the animalistic necessity to survive, to sense, to exist will slowly take over. My images are generated by an overwhelming and omnipresent violence, but this violence is never aimed at the women I photograph. It is a violence that, even though it often harms its own authors, exists only as an antidote and a response to the economical and institutional violence against the invisible community of those who have nothing. The work is deeply political…photography is only a matter of gestures, not the art of the gaze, but the art of position, of action, of life. This untenable position I am seeking to stand for is my statement, my credo, my standard, my logic and my method.  

N: In your artist statement you assert, “Bestiality is the ultimate rampart against the anesthesia of senses and the mindset of a society that defines objects and people as commodity.” How do your encounters with the women you photograph subvert the acts of commodification, fetishization and objectification that so often riddle the traditions of portraiture or reportage?

A: I have never shown any pretense to any kind of purity or perfection. But I don’t see the beings I photograph as subjects, models, victims or citizens. I desire them, I love them, I let them hurt me, and I let them seek revenge if they are too far lost in their own pain to recognize me as a possible ally. I know the tragedy of their existence, the depth of the horror they experience on any given day. I tell them how much I expect from them and how much I am willing to give in return, and none of them should have any reason to follow me, or let me follow them, but they do, almost always, because in that horrifying world ruled by strength and profit, humanity is the last secret key to solidarity, compassion, and comradeship—all ridiculous or forbidden words.

To say it in an ugly way, I photograph prostitutes who are far gone, who because of AIDS, addiction or alienation are out of reach from the desires of common men, from commerce of the flesh, from social mainstream communication…we communicate on the single ground of common addictions. Junky solidarity, that’s what saves me from becoming a photographing asshole…

N: You’ve also said, “Adrenaline and pheromones are remedies to social lies in the void left behind by the standardization of consciousness.” Am I right in asserting that adrenaline and pheromones have become lifelong obsessions for you? What lesser-known obsessions do you have and how does photography help you to explore those?

A: My one and only obsession is to make the best out of my existence. To keep struggling to be alive, to not surrender to fear, to keep searching for every unknown way to experience the nonsense of life through my own senses, to keep being excited and scared, to keep taking risks, to keep provoking encounters which force me to choose a political and intimate position, to keep inventing my own life as I would write fiction, and to live up—through gestures—to my words and beliefs.

My own private obsessions, desires, background and traumas don’t mean much to me…At least, I try to ignore them and live up to the pain of the ones who accept me into their world. That’s my way of being social…No narcissism, no self-indulgence, no interest in my own little burdens. In that way, I live a very militant, or sacerdotal life…I see my practice as a very demanding choice, which basically comes down to being a mere sacrifice. But sacrificing oneself for what you believe in is more than foolish or terrorist logic; it is what I see as living in a dignified way, as trying to be a decent human being.

N: Let’s move on to your private life, if that is something you own or believe in. In many ways, you embody the term global citizen and have made numerous countries your home, including England, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Japan and Mexico. How does traveling—possibly even escapism—inspire or affect your practice? Which places have you lived in or traveled to recently, and what about them was most attractive to you?

A: I haven’t had a base for nine years. I live in hotels. Faced with the difficulty of financially surviving, the physical exhaustion, I remain a nomad. Of course I am conscious that part of this capacity to move through the world’s circles and borders comes from the incapacity to confront more stable paths, spaces or relationships. I became a handicapped person in many ways but, even though it differentiates me from the people I photograph, this can be very painful. I chose to preserve and nourish my freedom…I paid the high price over the years for this liberty to draw my own destiny, and I won’t give it up for anything I can think of. I just sometimes choose to take more time, to take more care, to accept the responsibilities generated by friendship, or simply to loose myself deeper in some more somber or more exalting addiction.

The place dearest to my heart these days remains Phnom Penh. There I no longer feel like a stranger, and I immerse myself deeper into the violence of the world, drawing the force to continue from the shared experience of a desperate desire. There I find a fragile solace for the slow decrease of my strength to act. The acute awareness of still being alive. I improvise my life, which gradually resembles an exercise in overtaking art, or the fulfillment of an ancient utopia; the abolition of speech in favor of what is lived.

N: How did your time living in New York and studying photography at ICP in the mid-nineties evolve or change your practice? And whom did you meet there—aside from mentors Nan Goldin and Larry Clark—that changed the way you saw the world?

A: To me, New York was a break, a breath…the city gave me the strength and energy to keep going. Living there gave me the opportunity to see the beast from within, to understand, or at least feel, its intimate logics, its emotional and cultural background. To live within a society that I condemn as a political entity and negative economic force has proved useful over the years, in expanding my understanding of cruelty, banality, naivety and cynicism. I understood that good sentiments hardly, if ever, translate into meaningful actions. I understood that comfort is the worst possible way of life. I understood that fearless desire generates armies of morons, and that fear without desire gives birth to generations of slaves. I understood that you couldn’t listen to your heart, mind or body and have to venture deep inside the dark territories of instinct.

I chose the dark side of things, resisted the refined temptations of economical and moral well-being and doing good. I renewed my old allegiance to the world of misfits, outcasts and degenerates…I kept exploring social territories humanly damaged by the economical process that allows American society to feed and reproduce itself over the condemnation of entire rejected or negated communities.

N: And then you took a break from photography. What did you get up to next?

A: I studied photography when I was thirty and stopped photographing when I was thirty-two. Then, I was working long shifts to raise two baby girls born in 1994 and 1995. I started to photograph again when I was thirty-six or thirty-seven. Two daughters were born since, but I never stopped shooting after that.

N: What role have your four daughters played in your life? You mention in past interviews needing a tether to reality at times to achieve balance, and that proximity to war has served as one form of therapy for you in this way. Do your daughters also help to ground you?

A: They do. They are part of this fragile balance, even though they should not be. I should be the one providing them with arms and ammunitions. But they know I live by my own rules. They know it’s a loosing deal for all of us, as a family. I believe they understand, in some strange way, and respect my intimate agenda. I am forever indebted to them.

N: Do you believe in love? I guess I’m not after a definition of romantic love here, but rather a description of the possible forms with which it manifests in your life.

A: I could say that the only form of love I consider valid is whatever subtle mix of lust and understanding two or more people share in any given moment, that doesn't need or require any type of payment, consolation, compensation, or reward of any type, be it financial, social, intellectual or emotional. But love is the opposite of all proposed definitions; it is something that won’t make sense, but sticks to you and to others, something you can’t get rid of, against all odds and logic. Love is most beautiful when it doesn’t make sense…So let’s not try to make sense out of it…

N: And what about death? Do you think the act of aging and nearing a more finite definition of death will slow you down in any way? Or do you perceive of death the same way you do other obstacles to self and consciousness, as something to be confronted head on?

A: Photographing, as any other human activity, only makes sense when confronted with the threat of death, or at least its presence or ineluctability. Life then definitely takes on more weight, more responsibility. Provoking other experiences, other intensities, confronting my doubts and my contradictions, documenting the slow decay of the body with the little time left is what I am busy with these days, photographing less and less, struggling more and more. A loose journey, a slow kind of agony exhibited for all to see, a form of true liberty.

I observe the fading breath, the nervous system's shut down, the weakening of the organs. While fewer pictures are taken, while the takes become sparser, more painful, I’m aware I’ve never felt so peaceful. I am slowly becoming at peace with others, and with myself while struggling to keep the risks high, the fear intense, and the desire genuine, without feeling ashamed anymore of being compassionate. While the flesh little by little dissolves in the shadow of death, the soul becomes brave, because it was made not to fear, not to ignore, not to forget, not to shy away from that absurd void surrounding us.

N: And what or whom do you think awaits you in the afterlife? Does your constant pursuit of utopia here on earth in some way acknowledge that there are mental and physical limits to enlightenment?

A: I never wished or believed to trespass any limits by my own. It is all about the limits. It is not about getting anywhere. It is about not giving up trying. There is nowhere to get to, no secret to unveil, no magic territory to walk through but the territory of our own fear. It’s all about walking straight, about wanting to feel the pain until the very last minute, refusing wrong ways of escape, inglorious aesthesis, lame defeat of the soul through ideology and religion, shameful comfort of the senses, or the hypnotic efficiency of the spectacle. It’s all about reinventing one’s own destiny every day, beyond reason…

---

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d'Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. During his time in New York, in 1991-92, D'Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005. In 2004 D'Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World's Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo. Since 2005 Antoine d'Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.

Published in NOTOFU Magazine, Winter 2015 Issue

Remembering Gilda Snowden (1954–2014) / Studio Magazine

A celebrated artist, educator and lifelong supporter of the arts in her native Detroit, Gilda Snowden lived a full life committed to investigating the cultural identity of the art world at large. Known for her robust, figurative paintings and enthusiastic approach to arts education, Snowden taught painting at the College for Creative Studies (CCS) for over thirty years, and inspired many young artists who’ve gone on to become Museum family. In celebration of her legacy, Snowden’s husband, students and colleagues describe her magnificent energy.

William G. Boswell

I married Gilda Snowden in 1987 after a six year courtship. She didn’t take my name because hers was already a recognized name in the art community in Detroit and she was blessed with a healthy ego. I always thought her art was truly original and many times stunningly exquisite. I always hoped she liked my poetry as much. The highest compliment she paid me was that her father told her “don’t ever marry someone who’s not as smart as you”, and then she married me. Our life was a joy of wit and friendly arguments. I watched her style evolve over the years from construction pieces coated with encaustic in earthy reds, browns and black up to the last of her paintings, a six by twelve foot landscape of brilliant colors of acrylic that she called a double tornado. I also watched her interaction with her colleagues, her art community and her students. I had never seen anyone write so many letters of recommendation. She constantly informed others about grants, upcoming shows, fellowships and awards and encouraged them to try. At a recent student show that was a tribute to her, I cried when I read the sincere expressions of her student’s praises of her encouragement, teaching style and mentoring. As one said “it won’t be the same”. One of the most instructive things said to me by an artist colleague was “she brought people together.” Gilda was connected to every art organization I had heard of, and I’m sure some more I didn’t, but she was always connecting people in the Detroit art community with people and art organizations in and beyond Detroit. Gilda and I had a daughter, Katherine Snowden Boswell, who was and is the center of our lives, but Gilda’s love included us all. 

William G. Boswell is a published poet and has worked at the Detroit Repertory Theatre for fifty years as an actor, director and drama instructor.

Kevin Beasley

Gilda was a believer in the struggles of artists and deeply understood what it means to support those who embark on this journey. Her studio practice was fierce and her intensity rubbed off on those around her. Gilda’s contagious laughter still rings vividly in my head and reminds me that to maintain an art practice, one must be open in life—that one can be kind, jubilant, smart, generous and respectful without sacrificing the rigor and criticality of one’s work. Through these lessons one not only discovered what it meant to be a perseverant artist, but to be a person living at their greatest capacity.

Kevin Beasley was a 2013–14 artist in residence at the Studio Museum and received his MFA from Yale University and BFA from CSS.

Chido Johnson

Detroit’s postindustrial landscape has fueled artists for decades in their attempts to grasp its brutal reality: a physical decay commonly fetishized into ruin porn. The recent resurgence of social practice in Detroit shifted the large subject of our gaze from its landscape to its people. In the midst of these experiences, one Detroit artist looked beyond the gray, foggy environment and saw strong colors. Gilda’s vibrant paintings grow as layers upon layers of color are pushed, pulled, mixed, poured and shaped. This is how Gilda nourished us and illuminated the brilliant color in our lives. She affected many far beyond Detroit with her great modesty and humility. 

Chido Johnson is an associate professor and the section chair of sculpture at CSS.

Sabrina Nelson

Edith Warton writes, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Gilda was a master in creating a life of making and giving. As a student of hers in the late 1980s, I was lost navigating the maze of art school and art making in the historically white, male-dominated field. I was upset that, by senior year, I had yet to learn about any black artists. Gilda encouraged me to acquire and share the knowledge I sought, and empowered me to develop the class, “How Come Ain’t No Brother’s On The Wall?” the first of its type in the department.

Detroit-based artist Sabrina Nelson is a graduate of CCS and teaches at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum.

Shani Peters

I had the great fortune and misfortune of meeting Gilda for the first time in 2013—fortunate for the opportunity to experience her curiosity, generosity and humility firsthand, and unfortunate because that opportunity was so short-lived. She sat casually among her students as I prepared for the guest lecture I was to give, thinking to myself, “Could that possibly be the acclaimed Art-God-Mother I’d heard so much about?” There was no fanfare, or air of someone waiting to be impressed. Instead, I found radiated enthusiasm, warmth and love. These qualities were evident in her character and in her work. That’s the kind of life that lives on and on.

Shani Peters is a Harlem-based artist who completed her BA at Michigan State University and her MFA at the City College of New York. 

Published in Studio Magazine, Winter 2015 Issue.

That Which Sings and Contemplates in You / The Studio Museum in Harlem 2013-14 Artists-in-residence exhibition catalogue

Abigail DeVille, Negation: Dusk to Dust, 2013

Building upon the Big Bang theory as a cosmological model for the origins of the universe, Abigail DeVille further explores the interconnectivity of matter and the spatiotemporal confines that limit our understandings of the physical world. DeVille straddles the fertile expanse between archeology and futurology, excavating the ephemera of pasts buried or forgotten to resituate them within new contexts. DeVille’s site-specific works recycle the histories inscribed on our sociocultural detritus to discuss the human condition and the future of modern society. Her immersive, bricolage installations are all at once Gibran’s streams and banks, sites of progressive movement and respites for meditation.

DeVille’s unique aesthetic visualizes elements of Afrofuturism and gives shape to contemporary discourse surrounding notions of race, space and place. Channeling the poetic curiosity that drives Octavia Butler’s literary observations of society and culture, and the soul animating the musical riffs of George Clinton and Sun Ra, DeVille’s itinerant works sing as much as they contemplate. Works like Harlem Flag (2014) —pieced together from discarded clothing, collected debris, and local heirlooms—deconstruct issues affecting people of color, historically and today right here in Harlem. DeVille uses rubbings of local streets to create the rich texture of the flag’s fabric, and mines Harlem’s collective memory to unearth the relics of shared importance that adorn it.

By staging familiar objects in new settings, DeVille forces us to confront the stereotypes, behaviors, and memories we attach to concrete forms. Furthermore, she stages this confrontation within a greater unraveling of mainstream aesthetics, inviting beauty to shine through in the sheer essence of materials, scavenged from dusty attics, trash heaps and wastelands. DeVille’s Street Work (2014)  is a series of public sculptures assembled from discarded materials that evolve in reaction to the community’s engagement with them, embodying the transmutation that some theorists assert occurs through sheer observation of the material world. Deville agrees, saying, “Everything is connected. In Quantum Mechanics, the observation of a subatomic particle changes it. You can never really be sure if it even existed before you looked at it. Since you looked, you actually interfered with whatever was before. We affect everything around us just by how we see it or what we believe. In drawing, cutting and smashing materials to an altered state, I hope to talk to a larger question of time, the time we live in and reoccurring societal problems, all the way back to the beginning of everything.”  Through characterizing the spatial and temporal links that bind subjects and objects in eternal rotation, DeVille’s works investigate how human attention and behavior can change the universe on a spectrum of scales.

Through shifting perspectives and positioning viewers as co-authors to her own observations of the physical world, DeVille paves the way for a new genre of storytelling and model for engaging the collective imagination. Science Fiction writer David Wyatt asserts, “Speculative fiction is a term which includes all literature that takes place in a universe slightly different from our own. In all its forms, it gives authors the ability to ask relevant questions about one’s own society in a way that would prove provocative in more mainstream forms…it is a literature of freedom, freedom for the author to lose the chains of conventional thought, and freedom for the reader to lose themselves in discovery.”  Speculative fiction challenges the status quo and democratizes access to free thinking, opening up inquisitive space in which cultural critics such as DeVille can investigate the social responsibilities that parallel this autonomy. In said space, DeVille challenges the legitimacy of the histories we’ve been taught and asserts that all facts are fiction and the only truth lies in the lifecycles of objects.

It is in DeVille’s handling of her own personal history that this suspension of disbelief materializes and we are able to witness the interconnectivity of all matter in human terms. She recalls, “In 2009, I discovered through Google and interlibrary loan that my maternal grandfather, Francisco Antonio Cruz, had written multiple books of poetry before his death. In translating his poetry, I found that he was writing about the infinite and the cosmos, a discovery that happened after I had already begun thinking about the structure of my work in relation to supernovae and black holes. When I was a child, my parents said that I drew pictures with my finger in the air and I never told them what I was drawing. I was drawing my grandfather’s face, invisible pictures of a man deeply concerned with the infinite. I was animating an unspoken history of my own.”  What resonates here is the presence of forces beyond human cognition, memory and language that bind us to the otherworldly; DeVille’s shared theology with a man she’d barely met and could only describe through gesture, is only comprehensible in a world where all matter is finite and the lifecycle of this matter is dynamic and limitless.

Inspired greatly by her grandmother—a dynamic fixture of her Bronx neighborhood known for collecting and transforming neighbors’ discarded belongings—DeVille translates the act of collecting into not only a tool of sociocultural archiving, but also one of self discovery and explorations of otherness. Traveling through the dark wormholes forged in DeVille’s works, we are first introduced to the versions of our past selves we know all too well and called to atone for the attitudes and behaviors that have come to define us as a society. Once we’ve come to terms with our incalculable position along the vast timeline between creation and extinction, we are drawn deeper still, past the familiar, to a light on the other side that reflects the future selves we have yet to meet. — Nico Wheadon

Published in The 2013-14 Artists-in-Residence Exhibition Catalogue, Summer 2014 Issue

Material Histories exhibition on view at The Studio Museum in Harlem, 17 July – 26 October, 2014

Find the digital issue here

"Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch it’s flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness, and knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space." — Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Siah Armajani, An Ingenious World : Parasol Unit for Contemporary Art / Distorted Magazine

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure. – John Dewey

Siah Armajani: NOAA Bridge, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, Seattle, 1982. Painted wood, wood, 23.5 x 30.5 x 87 cm. Courtesy of Rudolf Zwirner

Siah Armajani—who immigrated to America from a politically volatile Iran in 1960—is a celebrated, conceptual sculptor best known for his public works that highlight democracy’s role in bridging our shared, lived experience. For Armajani, all art is public art—or for the people—and his works refuse complacency in addressing the physical and philosophical divides that weaken modern society. Describing himself as an artist whose medium is equal parts, wood, metal, philosophy and poetry, Armajani’s architecturally-scaled sculptures resist reduction within the field of modern art or architecture, and tackle social and cultural concerns as wide-reaching as the materials he employs. Driven particularly by his own Persian heritage, his ever-expanding knowledge of philosophy and his life-long appreciation of poetry and literature, Armajani is fearless in his want to foreground the gaps between our mediated existence in the physical world and our cultural, social and emotional needs.

Parasol unit —where Armajani currently exhibits a survey of works including models, sculptures, early drawings and a site-specific reading room—has achieved no small feat in presenting the gallery-sized works of an artist whose signature ingredient is civic context. What emerges from this dichotomy is the philanthropic impulse driving Armajani, and the exhibition excels in communicating the cerebral dexterity of this thought-provoking cultural leader who has pioneered a visual way of thinking that extends far beyond the walls of the institution. Armajani cites his literary hero John Dewey in discussing the critical context of his works: “Culture is detectable geographically and the idea of region should be understood as a term of value.” Armajani also believes that an artist’s work has an autonomous force of location and that public art is the logical extension of human movement and is thus predisposed to politics.

This personal philosophy and emphasis on site and passage as dynamic political concepts are most evident in Armajani’s bridges. In 1988, he was commissioned by Walker Art Center, his local museum in Minnesota, to design the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge that literally bridges the anonymity of downtown life with Loring Park, an inclusive site of social, cultural and political gathering. In the project, Armajani not only fuses multiple aspects of American design within a single structure, but he too fuses historical references with their influence on modern concerns, evident here in the color scheme which echoes the infamous home of founding father Thomas Jefferson. And amidst all the structural glory and ingenuity of the bridge lies the literary subtext that is present in all of his works, a poem.

And now I cannot remember how I would
have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.
- John Ashbery

Parasol unit curator Ziba Ardalan does not force a chronology upon Armajani’s life and output as a maker, and rather gives visitors insight into how diverse his influences as a thinker are and how these influences effect his artistic process. The top floor of the exhibition showcases nearly 80 of the artist’s own models, constructed from base materials such as wood, metal, copper and straw, which pay homage to the poets and writers who have inspired him greatly. What is interesting here is that—unlike his large-scale, public works, constructed by the bureaucratic union of engineers, architects and city departments—the models bear his own fingerprint and are reduced in form so that the purity of concept is able to shine through. 

Armajani’s model for Exile Dreaming of Adorno (2010) draws parallels between his own experience with the political and emotional condition of living in exile and that of German philosopher Theodor Adorno who famously said, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” Fallujah (2004)—which in its final form was a large-scale, two-story structure perched on its edge encasing relics from a life turned upside down by war—is presented here as a palm-sized model in plastic, wood, metal and paint. Amazingly, despite its scale, the model holds no less conceptual weight in confronting the atrocious pitfalls of democracy that happened in the city of Fallujah during the Iraq war.

All of Armajani’s works—from models to bridges to philosophical reading rooms to the 1996 Olympic Torch—resist ornamentation for ornamentation’s sake and instead gather their visual and representational identity from the socializations that necessitate their use. The exhibition’s title, An Ingenious World, articulates Armajani’s emphasis on social utility and his desire to bring people together to witness and discuss our ever-changing world. 

Published in Distorted, November 2013 Issue

Exhibition on view at Parasol unit, foundation for contemporary art, 18 September – 15 December 2013

Implausible Imposters : Ceri Hand Gallery / Distorted Magazine

Implausible Imposters’ anecdotal roots plunge deep into contemporary debates on authenticity and invite visitors to co-author a great deal of the exhibition’s substance and meaning. The DIY aesthetic of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s homemade Play-Doh and synthetic hair sculptures introduces visitors to the space and foregrounds the central theme binding these works - things are only what you make of them. Behind these rudimental yet philosophical shrines to human transience, three amoebic drawings hang with disparate text that confounds the possibility for a linear narrative. Instead, loose associations are born from these building blocks, but discarded almost instantly, allowing new ones to form. 

Like Giraudeau, Grant Foster and Jonathan Baldock repurpose familiar materials to narrative ends that ignore their utilitarian function. Foster’s looming heads on stakes evoke the biblical narrative, yet rework the spirituality that emanates from this origin myth. Baldock’s floor sculpture uses similar materials, yet combines them in a way that recalls childhood innocence and the relation of said virtue to themes of punishment, embodied by his garish synthetic hair whips.
 
The show stopping piece is Bedwyr Williams’ video Diminuendo. He combines incredibly poignant character descriptions—delivered in his own haunting voice—with images so objective yet nostalgic that the imagination floods in to fill the gaps between what is seen and what is heard. Again, employing origin myths as a point of departure, Williams begins his piece by asking – What came first, the chicken or that egg smell? The piece progresses through a series of vignettes, describing a motley cast of conflicted characters—a guilt ridden painter/decorator, a deluded photographer and a doomed heroine. This work oozes originality and somehow—in spite of it’s heavily detailed descriptions—leaves ample space for the visitor to envision, fear and love the ways by which these fictional narratives could exist, not only in the dark world Williams has created but also in their own reality.

Similarly, Mel Brimfield’s The Love Lives of the Artists series is acutely rooted in a fiction whose self-awareness and self-denial is so strong that the allegory is able to perpetuate itself almost undetected. Implausible Imposters is more an animated experiment in oral tradition than a thematic group exhibition on inanimateness. The show collates an impressive array of narrative- and fiction-based works that reaffirm the power of the imagination. Collectively these works are impressive in their fight against objectification and actually disprove the exhibition’s title, as these artists make the implausible plausible and show that even stand-ins for representation are both valuable and viable in their own right. 

Published in Distorted, July 2013 Issue

Exhibition on view at Ceri Hand Gallery, 12 July - 10 August 2013

The Spirit of Utopia : Whitechapel Gallery/ Distorted Magazine

The Spirit of Utopia is just that, an exhibition of works by ten arts practitioners that harness the spirit of an idealized future rather than presenting concrete interpretations of what it could actually look like. Visitors are instantly submersed within a laboratorial setting—everything is white and organic. Large greenhouses inhabit the left side of the living, breathing space, while clinic rooms manned by ‘therapists’ line the right. Wayward Plants’ accompanying text explains that what you are seeing are future plants resulting from human collaboration with moon farmers, biodynamic farming, and improbable botany. Three women sat life-drawing the piece, and a glance at their sketchpads showed detailed illustrations of the fictional narrative that exists between these plants on earth and their conceptual roots in outer space. Nearby, a pair sat throwing clay on a wheel encircled by curious school kids

Can I go next? 

Where do these bowls go when they’re finished?
 

This led to a lively discussion about participation and consumption in the collaborative labour economy inspired by polymath Theaster Gates. Another intriguing aspect to this piece is the large sketch hung on the adjacent wall, which shows the work as process and includes questions about the wastage and future use of the materials. Spelling mistakes within the diagrams hint at the importance of free-thinking in imagining utopia. 
 
In Pedro Reyes’ Sanatorium —a transient clinic claiming to heal through alternative psychotherapies—self-reflection is invited via guided sessions that target and release negativity. One space houses a vaccine against violence, where you enter a dark room, scribble aggression on a balloon, then pop it. The Goodoo room claims to achieve the opposite of Voodoo —pins pierce dolls with constructive intentions. In City Leaks, visitors read out the secrets of strangers to neutralize collective fears. What is confusing here is the disconnect between the participatory intentions of the piece and its conflicting atmosphere and accompanying literature; DO NOT DISTURB signs hang outside each of the therapy rooms and visitors must book appointments for distant timeslots, making engagement both stressful and reliant on dictation. The piece is further conflicted by obsessing on the negative albeit through positive objectives.
 
The exhibition excels in the upstairs galleries, with accessible works that don’t sacrifice conceptual weight. Claire Pentecost’s soil apothecary unites soil contributions from local farmers, earthworms, and discussions with DIY biologists, chefs and worm curators to survey a widened definition of health and the future. Works by Yto Barrada are firmly rooted in historical narratives rather than hypothetical ones, imbuing her work with a viability and sustainability that other artists in the exhibition lack. Her didactic works—which map cultural progression and regression—chime with the moral slant of the exhibition and affirm that an integral part to imagining the future is acknowledging the past. Peter Liversridge presents typewritten framed project proposals as art, handing the responsibility for driving change back to the institution, acknowledging the limits to imagination and the power structures at play. The Spirit of Utopia makes some thought provoking if not proven claims and possesses a vitality that is rare in an exhibition of this scale. 

Published in Distorted, July 2013 Issue

Exhibition on view at Whitechapel Gallery, 4 July - 5 September 2013

Alternative Guide to the Universe : Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre / Distorted Magazine

Lee Godie, Lee and Cameo on a chair… (early to mid 1970s), © the artist, Courtesy Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection

Calling on makers whose practice straddles institutionalism and the art historical canon, Alternative Guide to the Universe is an inquisitive group exhibition that surveys the many nuances that bind the human experience. Showcasing multimedia works by fringe artists, scientists, architects, inventors and engineers, the Hayward Gallery has amalgamated a bold constellation of representations, wherein the paranormal is foregrounded, demystified and celebrated through a language all its own.

What propels these outsider works into critical discussion is the tenacity of their makers in translating the enigmatic into something uniquely tangible and life affirming, in spite of all odds. Having overcome numerous personal obstacles—such as mental and physical illness, institutional rejection, homelessness, illiteracy, World Wars, mental breakdowns and delayed self-discovery—this group is fearless in offering not only visions but also utopian blueprints for what the world we inhabit could look like. Add to this the fact that these substantial works have been created by those with little to no formal training or background in the arts, and it becomes clear that the magic at work here is rooted in a freedom of expression afforded by living, working and dreaming in tangent to the mainstream. 

From Alfred Jensen's immense apocalyptic number paintings in the first hall to Lee Godie's charmingly intimate self-portraits of alter egos in the last, the exhibition drives itself forward through an unspoken energy that visibly resonates within each visitor to the space. Perhaps it is partly the playful nature of the works themselves, rendered most compellingly in Bodys Isek Kingelez's brightly coloured architectural models for future buildings made from Lipton tea bags, cans of Beck's and other salvaged recyclables. Or maybe it is the sense of complete submersion and submission that occurs when enveloped by Marcel Storr’s soaring, post-nuclear Parisian cathedrals, whose inherent luminosity and verticality propel the viewer into a meditation that leaves worldly concerns exactly where Storr has left them, as tiny dots at the bottom of the bigger picture. Whatever it is, each work in this exhibition resonates an authenticity, vitality and spirituality that can only come from a maker living his work. The sense of curiosity and possibility that these works evoke becomes a contagion that lingers in visitors long after departing this alternative universe and stepping back onto solid ground. --Nico Wheadon

Published in Distorted, June 2013 Issue

Exhibition on view at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, 11 June – 26 August 2013

Art of Change, New Directions from China : Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre / ArtVoices MAgazine

Art of Change: New Directions From China is less a retrospective of Chinese art post-Deng Xiaoping than it is a bold staging of interventions that inserts nine artists—and the conceptual approach they represent—into discourse surrounding the politics of socio-cultural innovation as it relates to visual culture. Artists Chen Zhen, Yingmei Duan, Gu Dexin, Liang Shaoji, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Wang Jianwei, Xu Zhen and MadeIn Company co-inhabit Southbank’s Hayward Gallery through live elements and ephemera that employ Eastern philosophies as a point of departure for discussing both historic and emergent traditions. What is compelling here is not only how change is rendered—the show’s visual coherence is inspired, evidenced most compellingly in living works by Duan, Shaoji and Zhen—but also where. Each artist creates a unique sensory environment in which to experience his or her interpretation of transformation on levels that surpass the purely visual. In these microcosms, creation is understood as an ongoing process that perpetually effects and is affected by a diversity of change, and meaning is enhanced through—yet not reliant on—cultural artifacts and art objects.

Upon entering the gallery, the visitor is first confronted by a sculptural assemblage of abandoned fitness machines, whose phantom-like motion is controllable by remote control. In a nearby corner, concrete dregs from an interactive sculpture reside in unassuming piles on the floor. At this point, all the wall text contextualizing the dense theme of the exhibition seems a bit overstated in relation to the utilitarian essence of this first encounter. The gallery then leads up a level to the work of Yingmei Duan, where a woman “sleeps” on a shelf located just above eye level. She is completely motionless, aside from her eyelids that shutter with every creaky step of the visitor toward her. In an adjoining room, a large white box consumes the center of the floor—with the occasional odd object thrown up almost imperceptibly over its lid—yet looses attention to a surreally small door in the corner that leads to a Narnia-like haven. Inside, a woman sits on a log enshrouded by brambles and a sonic woodlands landscape, as she hands out written directives for how she wishes observers to engage with the world they help to create. 

By now, the visitor has become increasingly aware of his or her own body in relation to both the physical and conceptual spaces these works consume. En route to the next gallery, a woman in pajamas follows directly behind the visitor at a short, finite distance that is felt and heard rather than readily observed. Her sensed departure before the stairs makes the descent upon Xu Zhen’s In Just a Blink of an Eye all the more surreal. In the center of the room, a figure appears to be caught mid-fall, in a precarious posture that suggests some sort of sculptural ingenuity. It is only upon nearing the figure that signs of human life abound—blinking eyes, a visible heartbeat and a chest that rises and falls—however it take minutes, if not the full half-hour the piece is “performed” for, to consign the incomprehensible physics of the piece to the right side of the brain and appreciate the enchantment of the spectacle with the left. Borrowing from the density of energy held within this singular posture, the next gallery expands on this temporal aspect of change, where works by Liang Shaoji repurpose the cocooning activity of silkworms to discuss metamorphosis as it relates to the senses. Shaoji’s meditative works—whose construction and consumption involves a patience and attention deeply rooted in the foundations of Eastern philosophy—mentally prepare the visitor for the ascent into an altogether different facet of the exhibition upstairs. 

Here, artworks leave the primarily interactive and settle into an art-viewing paradigm that is more comprehensible within a contemporary art cannon. Although these pieces do not respire in the poignant ways that those did on the first floor, their materials are no less animate, even if rendered through the more conventional mediums of sculpture and photography. A colony of large beetles, a life-sized rhinoceros, a pillar of human lard and a plinth holding a slab of decomposing beef occupy the remaining galleries and infuse them with a distinctive breed—and scent—of vitality. Add to this a series of videos and photographs that document other living systems out of sync with their instinctual contexts, and it becomes clear that the later half of the exhibition is no less concerned with producing rupture in the conformist ways we perceive and experience the quotidian. Investigating these spiritual and bodily connections through a lens that is more inquisitive than prescriptive, these multimedia works reflect on the evolving role cultural innovation plays in influencing certain socializations.

Where this site-responsive exhibition—and curator Stephanie Rosenthal—excels is in the balanced and evocative choreography of diverse energies, both present and imagined, evolving and fastened to tradition. Perhaps this is achieved through challenging the understood dynamics and limitations of 2-D, 3-D and 4-D works; Rosenthal has selected living art that is primarily still and inert art that resonates life force through the organic materials that comprise it. In any case, what is left after this centrifugal experience is the impression that the scope of the exhibition extends far beyond the soft architectures that contain it and into the psyche of those who engage it. 

Published in ARTVOICES, December 2012 Issue

Exhibition on view at  at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, 7 September – 9 December 2012