https://thomasjlax.com Thomas J Lax Tue, 30 May 2023 15:42:09 +0000 https://thomasjlax.com en https://thomasjlax.com/Home Mon, 21 Jan 2019 04:35:05 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Home <img width="1543" height="1018" width_o="1543" height_o="1018" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eb09683d0bfb990a89705d9a767f90806bd9285a1794b46525816f5685a4b9cf/thomaswebsitepic.png" data-mid="33253481" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eb09683d0bfb990a89705d9a767f90806bd9285a1794b46525816f5685a4b9cf/thomaswebsitepic.png" />Courtesy of New York Public Library’s Picture Collection. https://thomasjlax.com/Info Mon, 21 Jan 2019 04:41:13 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Info Thomas J. Lax aka T. Lax is a curator and writer who supports artistic process and enjoys working with others. Most recently, they organized&nbsp;Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid (Nov. 2025), an exhibition of artworks selected from MoMA’s collection by the L.A.-based artist; and&nbsp;Jonathan Berger: Studio Residency (2025), a time-based exhibition that puts the notion of “radical diasporism” into practice. Previously, with Connie Butler and Kari Rittenbach, they co-organized&nbsp;Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon (2023), a major exhibition about the path-making choreographer at MoMA PS1. At MoMA, T. organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) about the gallery, founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 where “blackness existed in the presence of black folks rather than in the absence of whiteness.” In 2019, T. worked with colleagues across MoMA on a major rehang of its collection, celebrated as an “integrated presence of difference itself”; in 2018, T. co-organized the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph, historicizing the emergence of postmodern dance in the early 1960s within avant-garde jazz, high camp, and eco-critical improvisations. T.’s other collaboratively-organized exhibitions include the Projects Series for emerging artists; Unfinished Conversations, inspired by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall;&nbsp;and the contemporary art survey exhibition at MoMA PS1,&nbsp;Greater New York. Previously, they worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years organizing When The Stars Begin To Fall: Imagination and the American South and participating in the landmark “f show” contemporary art series. T. is a contributor to publications including Artforum, Frieze&nbsp;October,&nbsp;T Magazine,&nbsp;The Nation, and Vanity Fair, among others. They are on the board of Danspace Project and Wendy’s Subway and have been on the advisory committees of the 2023 São Paulo Art Biennial, Contemporary And, The Laundromat Project, Participant Inc., Prospect.5 New Orleans, and Recess Assembly. A native New Yorker, T. holds degrees in Africana Studies and Art History from Brown and Columbia Universities respectively and is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU where they are working on a project about dependency. They were a 2024 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. In 2020, they received the inaugural Cisneros Research Grant, traveling to Brazil to research contemporary black art. Also in 2020, they received the Noah Davis Prize from The Underground Museum in Los Angeles alongside Candice Hopkins and Jamillah James.&nbsp;In 2015, they were awarded the Menil Collection’s Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.︎ https://thomasjlax.com/Just-Above-Midtown-Up-in-the-Air Tue, 30 May 2023 15:42:09 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Just-Above-Midtown-Up-in-the-Air <img width="511" height="648" width_o="511" height_o="648" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ec35a1cde10fc120adeae3faa2802b8266c22e534bc7dafd0095a477120722b/Lax_JustAboveMidtown_UpintheAir_MoMA.jpg" data-mid="180433907" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/511/i/9ec35a1cde10fc120adeae3faa2802b8266c22e534bc7dafd0095a477120722b/Lax_JustAboveMidtown_UpintheAir_MoMA.jpg" /> https://thomasjlax.com/Allow-Me-to-Begin-Again Mon, 21 Jan 2019 05:09:41 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Allow-Me-to-Begin-Again Allow Me to Begin AgainJudson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (ed. Sarah Resnick) MoMA, 2018Much has been written about Judson Dance Theater;1 yet the choreographers, composers, filmmakers, and artists who came together in the early 1960s at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park never wrote a definitive statement declaring their collective intentions. Unlike earlier groups of artists associated with Europe’s early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, the various makers who performed at the first Concert of Dance on July 6, 1962, had neither a unified aesthetic nor a political program, functioning without a designated leader. Their story is one of mutual refusal. After being turned down from the annual Young Choreographer Concert at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA,2 three choreographers—Ruth Emerson, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer—and their teacher, Robert Ellis Dunn, auditioned late one afternoon for Al Carmines, a Protestant minister who had been recently appointed head of cultural programming at Judson Church. Carmines approved, and their first public performance was attended by more than three hundred people. Dance critic Jill Johnston, writing in the Village Voice, celebrated the fourteen choreographers and seventeen performers who participated in the “democratic evening of dance” and suggested that the “young talents . . . could make the present of modern dance more exciting than it’s been for twenty years.”3 Despite the historical terms in which Judson was heralded by critics, its protagonists were more self-effacing. In a press release issued several months after the July concert, an unsigned statement matter-of-factly telegraphed the group’s ambitions: “These concerts [were] initiated at the church . . . with the aim of periodically presenting the work of dancers, composers, and various non-dancers working with ideas related to dance. It is hoped that the contents of this series will not so much reflect a single point of view as convey a spirit of inquiry into the nature of new possibilities.”4 To collaborate, to inquire rather than take a position—such was the spirit of this interdisciplinary group of trained and amateur dancers who came together to experiment and show their work. However, it was not long before the participants began to signal the group’s impending end.5 A consistent chronicler of the group’s work, Rainer wrote that following some “splinter concerts,” Judson participants began “to drop out . . . a natural outgrowth of particular aesthetic and social alignments that were both complicated and schism-making.”6 Robert Morris—a sculptor and performer, as well as Rainer’s partner at the time—reviewed a February 1966 concert featuring David Gordon, Paxton, and Rainer, noting that they were already re-presenting their own work. He self-consciously linked this recurrence to historic avant-gardes: “Every movement in art in this century has been characteristically brief. . . . In each of these movements . . . ‘open’ positions were very early closed out. What follows after the primary positions have been filled is, of course, tradition.”7 For Morris, Judson’s moment in the early 1960s was of historic consequence precisely because of its brevity.Finitude is a funny kind of distinction, mostly because Judson never really ended. It never formally disbanded because it had never codified itself as an organization or described itself as a collective to begin with. Today the term Judson acts as a stand-in for some of the hallmarks of postmodern dance: the use of so-called ordinary movement, those gestures more common to everyday life than to dance studios, as well as composition strategies thought to favor spontaneity, such as allowing a situation, an environment, or a dancer’s interpretation of a set of instructions to determine a work’s structure and content. These tenets continue to inform much of contemporary dance as well as contemporary art. However, Judson is but one origin story for the belief in contemporary art and performance that mundane, everyday action and speech are meaningful and that art is made as much at the places where people gather as in the isolated space of a studio; that assembly and the disagreements that ensue are as much art’s means as its ends. And, like all origin stories, Judson’s legacy is hazy and contestable, despite the real effects it has had for artists and choreographers working in its wake.If what today we call “Judson” began as a short-lived moment of creative inspiration in the early 1960s, what were the conditions that allowed this historical moment to emerge? Johnston—who, in addition to reviewing Judson concerts for the Voice, organized several events with the Judson artists and made lecture-performances— rallied against the force of origin narratives in a 1965 article aptly called “Untitled”: “There’s only one genealogy. It takes place in our dreams. Every specific genealogy is a fiction.”8 The essay you are reading, an introduction to the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, is one such fiction; it traces the workshops in which the ideas that would lead to Judson were developed and accounts for those forms of aesthetic and social experimentation that occurred simultaneously and in close proximity. This fiction, unlike earlier art-historical considerations, does not emphasize how the group influenced a generation of male Minimalist sculptors concerned with, for example, drawing analogies between the mass and gravitational pull of an art object and those of a human body.9 Rather, this introduction, much like the exhibition it accompanies, situates Judson in the late 1950s and early 1960s—in the workshop model that was part of the traveling culture that migrated from Europe to the United States during and after World War II; in the experiments in cross-medium collaboration that were reemerging in the visual arts, music, and poetry; and, finally, in the antagonisms and attachments that formed between a group of artists who would work together over a period of some years. Later, in the mid-1960s and ’70s, many of these figures would associate themselves with the second-wave feminist, anti–Vietnam War, gay and lesbian pride, and Black Power movements—aspirational efforts that differently claimed the intimacy of everyday life as a contestable political space, and which are still being struggled over in our time. (#MeToo and Black Lives Matter, to name just two of today’s most vibrant forms of contemporary political organizing, have demonstrated the ways that collective actions can respond to violations that occur behind closed doors or on the street.) By situating my genealogy in the period immediately before these broad social changes, I mean to ask: how did a subset of cultural practices, which would become formative for an overlapping group of artists, offer an opportunity to experiment with this fraught question of personal and collective identification that has so fueled the political gestures of subsequent social and artistic movements? The workshop . . . was really a sort of utopian thing that had to fall apart. —Robert Ellis Dunn By using a rehearsal format for their weekly meetings, the Judson members implicitly recalled another set of workshops led by choreographer, dancer, and teacher Anna Halprin (then Ann) at her home in northern California. Halprin had trained as a dancer in Madison at the University of Wisconsin with Margaret H’Doubler, a former gym teacher, whose pedagogy focused on how&nbsp;the skeletal structure affects the body’s movement rather than on formal dance technique. Anna’s students, some of whom would go on to join Judson, gathered on the Dance Deck built by her husband, Lawrence, a landscape architect and former student of Bauhaus founding director Walter Gropius. The Halprins borrowed the workshop idea from Gropius, who as a teacher found workshops a valuable way to bring together artistic practices across disciplines.Anna began teaching two-week workshops on her Dance Deck in the summer of 1954; in August 1960, eighteen participants, including Trisha Brown, Ruth Emerson, Forti, and Rainer, arrived for what would be a historically influential exchange. Anna used improvisation to explore each person’s capability for movement invention; she did not teach specific techniques or movement patterns.10 The workshops linked improvisation to observation, borrowing prompts from the immediate surroundings: ants scurrying along an anthill; water running in a creek; trees swaying or standing stalwart.11 Ecological phenomena were considered both social and aesthetic forms that could be witnessed and then imitated. Anna also used improvisation to repattern habitual bodily responses to choreographic input. She might, for example, show her students a limb on the model skeleton in her studio and then ask them to move as they paid attention to the effect of gravity on that part of the body.12 The simple tasks she assigned, such as running in a circle with a branch, encouraged her students to observe the particular kinesthetic shifts that transpired while handling various objects from nature.13 Anna’s workshops also hosted poets and musicians so that language and sound began to play an increasingly important role in their explorations. “We began to allow the voice to become an integral part of movement,” Halprin recalls, “where breathing became sound or some heightened feeling stimulated certain associative responses and a word came, or a sound, or a shout. Freeassociation became an important part of the work. We began to deal with ourselves as people, not dancers.”14&nbsp;Forti, Rainer, and others who attended the workshop used their voice as an instrument, externalizing internal bodily functions like breathing or associative thinking by making them audible. They spoke aloud text plucked from dialogue they had overheard or had themselves participated in, leaving behind its narrative context. They vocalized emotion with nonlinguistic noises—sound fragments borrowed from animals or technological devices.Composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley served as musical directors for Anna’s workshops from 1959 through 1960. As her collaborators, they became important channels for the dispersal of her ideas. On the first day of the 1960 workshop, Young presented his “Lecture 1960” on the Dance Deck over a threehour period. The lecture consisted of reflections on the activities of his artist friends and their use of sounds like clapping and chatter to make music, which he presented in a randomized order. He also premiered new textbased work, including the first of his Compositions 1960. These scores—or notations for performances—ask the performer to accomplish tasks at once mundane and whimsical, such as building a fire in front of an audience without standing between fire and audience, or turning a butterfly loose in the performance area and allowing it to fly away. The first example emphasizes that the performer is herself an observer, nearly indistinct from the audience; the second underscores the permeable boundary between the stage and the reality it constructs and by which it, too, is constructed. That summer, Young continued developing these works, combining instruction-based, quasiconceptual exercises while engaging with the natural world, a reformulation of Anna’s ethos.Young’s presence pushed Anna’s workshops toward composer John Cage’s interest in chance operations, juxtaposing material drawn from wildly different parts of the observable world. When, back on the East Coast in fall 1960, Dunn—accompanist to Merce Cunningham, who was Cage’s artistic and life partner— announced a composition class in Cunningham’s dance studio, five students signed up, including Forti, Paxton, and Rainer;15 it was Cage, Dunn’s former teacher at the New School in New York, who had urged him to teach the course. Although Dunn was not a choreographer, he had taught percussion composition for dance accompaniment at Boston Conservatory under choreographer Mary Wigman. At the time, Robert was married to Judith Dunn, a Cunningham dancer who assisted and subsequently taught the class with her husband. The Dunns offered four courses between 1960 and 1962 and a fifth in 1964, each of which included ten to twelve sessions roughly two and a half hours in length. They charged twelve to fifteen dollars for the entire course, a fee that could be waived. The Dunns’ class was informed by Cage’s interest in structure—the successive parts of a composition—and his emphasis on observation and discussion over evaluation. Robert often borrowed theologian Thomas Aquinas’s remark that “each angel is one of a species” to encourage students to focus on watching and describing their peers’ work rather than simply approving or disapproving of it.16 He brought in musical scores as prompts for various assignments, including the gnomic “Trois gymnopédies” by early-twentieth-century composer Erik Satie. Students were asked to make dances that corresponded to the number of measures in the music— its “time-structure” or “number structure”—without taking the melody or its affective qualities into account, ideas then associated with modern dance choreographers like Martha Graham and José Limón. The Dunns gave other assignments that used time-based structures, sometimes inscrutably: Make a five-minute dance in half an hour.17 Do something that’s nothing special.18 These koanlike instructions were part of Robert’s intention to make his class “a clearing,” or a “space of nothing,” and reflected the effect of Zen Buddhism on his teaching method, introduced to the Dunns, Cage, and others in their downtown cohort through the writings of teacher and monk Shunryū Suzuki.19 Indeterminacy, or the ability of a composition to be performed in substantially different ways, was likewise important in the Dunns’ workshops—again, due to the influence of Cage.20 The chance-based composition strategies Cage advocated generated incongruities deserving of slapstick antics—imagine, for example, juxtaposing “percussive” with “ankle,” as did one assignment that randomly combined movement qualities and body parts. Chance-based practices also encouraged the performers to de-emphasize artistic intent—a form of self-abnegation drawn from Zen Buddhism—eliciting unexpected forms of collaboration. For example, the Dunns sometimes asked the participants to score a movement sequence and pass the score to a partner, who would interpret both her own score and the one she was given, yielding four distinct phrases. These phrases would be further adapted by other members of the workshop.21 The variability in how a dance was interpreted suggested that the contribution of the interpreter was on a par with that of the author. While the workshops encouraged participants to examine their preconceived notions of taste and to give up some authorial control, stylistic tendencies nevertheless emerged. Robert recalled a division between what he identified as two antagonistic traditions: architecture and camp.22 While Dunn himself aligned with the former, James Waring, who taught many of the same students in his composition classes at the Living Theatre in 1959 and 1960, was associated with camp—a coded, knowit-when-you-exhibit-it term that cultural critic Susan Sontag used in her influential 1964 essay to describe a “sensibility . . . of artifice and exaggeration . . . of failed seriousness.”23 Unlike Dunn, Waring spent years formally training as a dancer. He studied ballet at both San Francisco Ballet School and the School of American Ballet in New York and took classes with Anna Halprin at the Halprin-Lathrop studio in San Francisco with choreographer and teacher Welland Lathrop. “Everything changes all the time,”24 Waring frequently told his students. His theatrical compositions encompassed this sense of flux by juxtaposing various incongruous genres with one another, including vaudeville and classical ballet. They featured simultaneous, idiosyncratic events moving independently of each other. In a Village Voice review, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg described Waring’s 1958 Dances before the Wall as “rather like the parts of a snake or scorpion cut in pieces scattering in different directions, but all pieces of one life: uncanny.”25 Waring’s works were all-inclusive, combining costumes, music, and flyers he designed into his theatrical collages. Waring also included non-dancers in his work. As Rainer observed, “His company was full of misfits—they were too short or too fat or too uncoordinated or too mannered or too inexperienced by any other standards.”26Waring’s classes at the Living Theatre, located at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, in the same building as Dunn’s, were fonts of interdisciplinary exchange.27 The group spent no small amount of time talking. Gordon, who regularly attended the classes, recalls how Waring’s evening classes “always began or ended with Jimmy sitting in a chair wearing a too big sweater, sniffling comments on what was going on around town.”28 The classes spilled over into his life and work. He invited several of his students to be in his work or to present their own at the Living Theatre, including Gordon, Gordon’s wife and Cunningham dancer Valda Setterfield, Rainer, Childs, Hay, and Fred Herko.29 This model of support was an extension of Dance Associates, the member organization he cofounded in 1951 (dubbing it “Dance Eclectics”) with dancer and archivist David Vaughan for their friends, including Edward Denby, Aileen Passloff, and Paul Taylor, to provide them with an annual performance venue. If Halprin offered improvisation as a tool to repattern trained bodily responses, and the Dunns—via Cage—offered scores and chance composition as alternative modes of authorship, Waring offered a form of mutual aid that brought dancers, theater folk, visual artists, and ordinary people into close proximity. In the classroom, students given the same assignments responded in unique ways. Both organizing and disorienting, these composition classes foregrounded environment and sensory experience as the primary source of artistic identity and collective attachment. By summer 1962, the Dunns’ classes had grown so large that the end-of-semester performance was too big to fit in Cunningham’s loft. After the group was refused by the Young Choreographers Concert, Carmines agreed to host the group at Judson Memorial Church. Robert created a program for the first concert, encouraging the choreographers and dancers to adopt the same casual, unselfconscious sensibility in the church as they had in the loft: “The early concerts that we had at Judson had this wonderful feeling of space and of involvement with the audience because the dancers were not trying to mock up a . . . stage in a church. It was the area it was.”30 The ensemble: the social situation in which we find ourselves. —Al Carmines When Robert Dunn described the early concerts at Judson Memorial Church as having treated the church as the “area it was,” what did he mean by this? The church had long committed itself to nonreligious forms of support for congregants and community members alike through the Judson Clinic, founded in 1920 to serve Italian American immigrants in the tenements south of Washington Square, as well as the Student Co-op, which housed students from small towns in the South and Midwest.31 After World War II, the church’s leadership continued their engagement with the surrounding community: Robert (Bob) Spike, who became the church’s senior minister in 1949, opened up the building’s basketball court to public use and established Judson House, an interracial dormitory.32 Howard Moody, who became reverend in 1957, oversaw the Village Aid and Service Center, one of the first drug-treatment facilities that offered counseling and services to narcotics users in 1960. He defended folk singers, who had played informally at the church during Sunday gatherings since the 1940s, when they were banned from Washington Square Park by the parks commissioner in 1961. And, in 1967, he established the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a network of ministers and rabbis to counsel and refer pregnant women to safe, low-cost abortion providers before the procedure was legalized. At Moody’s ordainment, his professor at Yale Divinity School Kenneth Underwood had summarized this social approach to theology when he invited his students “to remember that the fundamental symbol of Protestantism is not the pulpit, where ideas are delivered by a pastor . . . [but] a communion table.”33 As the church expanded its engagement with its constituency, its commitment to local artists grew too.&nbsp;In 1959, an associate minister, Bernard “Bud” Scott, invited several artists, including Marcus Ratliff (who was living at Judson House at the time), Tom Wesselmann, and Jim Dine, to turn the basement of Judson House into a one-thousand-square-foot studio and exhibition space—what would become the Judson Gallery. Artist Claes Oldenburg organized exhibitions and Happenings in the space from 1959 to 1960, while Allan Kaprow did the same from 1960 to 1962.34 When Carmines replaced Scott as the head of cultural programming in 1961, he founded Judson Poets’ Theater, an alternative to off-Broadway performance spaces, before welcoming Dunn’s workshop into the church. Carmines, who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, was also a composer, actor, singer, and director and understood the parallels between the new arts and new theology. Acknowledging what the church had learned from Judson, he affirmed their mutual commitment to “the ensemble: the social situation in which we find ourselves.”35 For Carmines, it was the importance of the group that linked new dance to new theology. If for new theology the emphasis on the ensemble was sited in worship, for the new dance the interest in the ensemble can be traced—at least as one example—to Forti and her 1960–61 Dance Constructions. On May 26 and 27, 1961, Forti presented Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things at Yoko Ono’s loft at 112 Chambers Street in New York. The evenings were organized by Young and included Paxton, Rainer, and Morris, who manufactured the first sculptures used in the performances.36 Young, who had seen Forti perform a suite of dances the previous year as part of one of Kaprow’s Happenings at Reuben Gallery, asked Forti to expand on these dances for the concerts.37 The movements in each of Forti’s nine works were generated by manipulating and moving objects or by following a set of rules that frequently pushed the performers to their physical limits.38 Each work was shown in a distinct area of Ono’s loft, often more than one at a time, much like a group of sculptures that the audience could move around to view from all sides. Forti’s choice of materials—unadorned planks and hanging ropes—provided a material trace of the loft in which they were shown. And by titling her works Dance Constructions, Forti further joined movement with sculpture, a signal to her public that she was working across different mediums and that what she made should be interpreted according to the logic of this blurring.39 Forti’s concert made forceful, sometimes paradoxical claims about the heterogeneous character of social interaction. Rainer recalls, “The evening began with Herding. All of us performers herded the audience from one end of the huge loft to the other several times. This unusual relation to spectators seemed whimsical and good-natured in its unassuming demonstration of limited power. . . . No one protested.”40 While the performers entered the space as audience members dressed in street clothes, Forti quickly established who was in control. See Saw created a more intimate display of power and play. Morris and Rainer stood on opposite sides of a seesaw that they had assembled in real time by placing a long wooden plank on top of a sawhorse. When the work is restaged today, Forti asks that the two performers be selected in such a way that their pairing can “reflect domestic life.”41 As the performers stand on the plywood and try to maintain equilibrium, they inevitably shift up and down: a physical manifestation of the oscillations that occur between two friends, artistic collaborators, or lovers. Huddle, another work shown that night, bears its own social implications. The only “construction” that doesn’t exist in a solid sense, but that can be reconstituted at any time, Huddle consists of a group of six to nine people who bond together in a tight mass while standing, then take turns climbing over the top of their self-made structure. The work lasted ten minutes. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has said Huddle calls to mind “a slow-motion depiction of teeming insects, like swarming bees, a fulminating energy knot that has been decelerated as if for the viewer to inspect it.”42 Like a herd, Forti’s Huddle evidenced the various ways people act when assembled into a group: cooperative, recalcitrant, animalistic.* While Forti’s Dance Constructions implied that social interactions are marked by power, activist and writer Jane Jacobs simultaneously developed a language to describe the tensions in the burgeoning and contested notion of “downtown” in US cities. In prose that unintentionally echoed the Judson artists’ juxtaposition of traditional form with pedestrian movement, Jacobs described what she called an “intricate sidewalk ballet” in her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Calling sidewalks the art form of the city, she likened their use to a “dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”43 This vibrant celebration of Jacobs’s Hudson Street in the West Village was a poetic protest against contemporaneous forms of “progressive” city planning, most notoriously embodied by public official Robert Moses. Known as “the Highwayman,” Moses sought to turn the city into a dense web of highways. In the early 1950s, he proposed a plan to build a fortyeight-foot, four-lane road or tunnel through Washington Square Park directly in front of Judson Memorial Church.44 The plan would have made the sidewalks associated with the street culture of the city’s working poor and people of color inaccessible. Sidewalks were also, according to Jacobs, what made the city both creative and safe.45 In response to Moses’s proposal, Jacobs cofounded the Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square Park to Traffic, an alliance of community groups and local families, to thwart Moses’s efforts. The group found success in 1963 when public buses were rerouted away from the park and pedestrians were given free reign over it.46 This decade-plus fight for public space occurred immediately in front of Judson Church; in their use of “pedestrian” techniques like walking and running, Judson choreographers were unwittingly inverting Jacob’s articulation of everyday movement as dance, turning a contested physical gesture into aesthetic form.The forces of racial segregation that were gathering immediately outside of Judson Church and throughout&nbsp;the city informed the terms of social inclusion at Judson Dance Theater. Judson was predominantly made up of white artists, but black culture nevertheless persisted in its sanctuary. Reflecting on the early years of his collaboration with Judith Dunn at Judson and elsewhere, trumpet player and jazz composer Bill Dixon noted that although he was never treated rudely by the postmodern dance scene in New York, he did experience subliminal racism: “Something wasn’t right,” he reflected to scholar and dancer Danielle Goldman on his time at Judson. “Judson Church was a long five miles away from the work I was doing up at 91st street,” the site of his 1964 October Revolution in Jazz at the Cellar Café.47 While Dixon was one of the few figures of African descent in the milieu, black dance and music were not absent from Judson. Rainer, Forti, and Nancy Meehan—who had met at Martha Graham’s school—made improvisations together in 1960 while playing a solo piano record by Thelonious Monk and music by Miles Davis in a rented rehearsal space at Dance Players on Sixth Avenue.48 In addition to her reviews of downtown performances, Johnston celebrated choreographer Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece Revelations when it was performed in 1961.49 Closer to the Judson sphere, the Floating Bear—a mimeographed semimonthly “newsletter” of new poetry, art reviews, and gossip established in 1961 and sent by mail to a designated readership—was edited by the poets Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (who would change his name to Amiri Baraka in 1965, after Malcolm X’s assassination). Produced every other Sunday at Jones’s family’s Fourth Street apartment, it was an all-out collaboration: Waring typed, jazz composer Cecil Taylor ran the mimeograph machine, and Herko and di Prima collated the pages, with everyone pitching in to address the envelopes.50 Even if at the Judson Concerts of Dance there were few performers of color onstage, the behind-the-scenes work at adjacent sites of collective publication like the Floating Bear included a broader chorus of “everyday people.”51 Black people—or at least black men—participated in these new forms of communing and criticizing, but perhaps in such a way that elicited Dixon’s sense of estrangement.The interracial, sexually frank writing published in Floating Bear made it both an object of state repression— in 1961, Jones was arrested by two postal inspectors and a federal agent for sending obscene materials through the mail—and a rag for some of the earliest and freshest critical writing around Judson Dance Theater. In di Prima’s review of the first Concert of Dance, she described Herko’s Like Most People, in which Herko performed inside a Mexican hammock with brightly colored stripes to Taylor’s “exciting playing on piano.”52 Two years later, Warhol star Gerard Malanga’s memorial poem to Herko would appear following the dancer’s suicide.53 In one particularly trenchant repartee between Waring and poet and essayist Diane Wakoski, he responded to her criticism that Rainer lacked originality because of the influence of Forti and Halprin on her work: “The idea of ‘originality’ as a criterion of value is a relatively modern one, and one which inevitably is doomed to fade again from fashion.”54 Waring understood that it was precisely Rainer’s continuous relation to her teachers and peers—their shared interest in compositions made from incommensurable associations and their mutual interest in rendering repetition as a value in itself—that made her dances vital and worthy of love. Social bonds induced gossip and shade; but they also were the font of the work. The editors of the Floating Bear would extend the same discerning frankness to the writing they published elsewhere. Jones, for example, wrote about the work of his Floating Bear colleague Taylor among his various considerations of black avant-garde music, later collected in his volume Black Music (1967). In Taylor’s music, Jones found much to be supportive of. In his review of the 1962 album Into the Hot, Jones wrote that Taylor’s contributions “redemonstrate that the gifted jazz soloist, even the innovator, can function on a highly creative level in the context of formal composition.”55 He painted the musician as innovative improviser and constructivist composer, virtuoso soloist, and band leader, who was capable of building “a whole, integrated structure,” in which cacophony and dissonance proliferated. (Taylor’s social experiments in music extended beyond human sound to what he called “other musics”: the grass and trees, for example, on the other side of Boston’s railroad tracks where he studied at the New England Conservatory.56) And yet these affirmations were offset by Jones’s marked ambivalence, what poet and critic Fred Moten has described as “veiled and submerged distancings, critiques, outings.”57 Indeed, some of Jones’s prose included coded stereotypes about queer black men. He described Taylor’s use of the waltz “This Nearly Was Mine,” sung by a wealthy French planter living in Polynesia in the musical South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein—who were consistently interested in portraying cross-racial sexual encounters—as “under ordinary circumstances . . . one of the most terrifyingly maudlin pop tunes of our time.”58 Jones’s description suggests that Taylor had managed to redeem himself from what in other circumstances was “mere” sentimentality. Elsewhere he celebrated Taylor as “always hotter, sassier and newer than” Third Stream music—a backhanded compliment, as this other synthesis of jazz and classical music had fallen out of Jones’s favor.59 (The sassy italics are Jones’s.) Sexuality, like race, was a coded key for inclusion.Taylor and Jones are just two figures peripherally associated with Judson; but Jones’s criticism, while built out of mutual respect, is nevertheless symptomatic of conflicts that undergirded Judson’s overall reception—sexual identity among them. Art historian Michael Fried, in his disparaging assessment of Minimalist art, “Art and Objecthood,” expressed his own distance from queerness in his take on the larger Judson group. In the essay, Fried argues feverishly against Minimalist art’s theatricality—its emphasis on the spectator’s encounter—as well as what he calls its “literal biomorphism,” by which he means the way these art objects remind of him of real humans. Yet Fried makes his own slippery conflations between objects and people when he criticizes artworks of a “general and perversive condition” as “artificial,” “superfluous,” “hidden,” “degenerate,” “aggressive,” “corrupted or perverted by theater”— adjectives used to stereotype people who might have also been pejoratively called “queer” at the time.60 Fried ended up on the wrong side of art history, and while his essay is today something of a punching bag for art historians and critics, one can still trace the soul-shaking effects of the work he witnessed: repulsion is a lasting archive. Fried was a frequent visitor to Judson Dance Theater, which informed his take on the Minimalist art he wrote about; in his repressed discourse, he expressed his latent fear of the queer sexualities he first sensed in the makers and then projected onto their artworks.In recoiling from the personal, extra-aesthetic dimensions of the work they were describing, both Jones and Fried were alluding to what Jill Johnston once referred to, in her description of the work of Lucinda Childs, her romantic partner in the mid-1960s, as “something outside the closed and completed work as a component within the work”—or, to put it another way, process.61 For the artists at Judson, process often pointed to the sweaty, knotted labor that making art necessitates. We see this in Morris’s Site, of 1964, in which the artist, wearing a white painter’s uniform and work gloves, a soundtrack of jackhammers in the background, reveals a nude Carolee Schneemann standing in for the sex worker Édouard Manet presented in his painting Olympia (1863). And we see it in Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 “Corridor Solo,” which would be recycled the same year in her Parts of Some Sextets, a dance about sleeping, in which ten dancers variously stack, unstack, and carry twelve store-bought mattresses as Rainer reads from her journals: “Those familiar beds. Those unfamiliar beds. Those one night beds. Those beds on the way somewhere in the night. How many sleepings like that?”62 In placing the middleof-the-night work it took to make art center stage, these artists were not only self-reflexively shoring up the material conditions of artistic production and aestheticizing a variety of kinds of labor; they were also putting the intimate flotsam and jetsam of their daily lives onstage as part of what it meant to make art. When Paxton and Rauschenberg, who were living together, tumbled in tandem and touched and carried each other in both Paxton’s 1964 Jag vil gärna telefonera (I Would Like to Make a Phone Call) and Rauschenberg’s 1965 Spring Training, weren’t they also presenting a pared-down summation of the common actions that occur between two lovers? When Andy Warhol filmed Johnston and Herko smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and vamping for the camera on a rooftop in Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963), wasn’t he also capturing the boredom and excess that the workaday city can produce for two romantic friends? These works were not autobiographical, but they did implicate the specific people that made them. In doing so, these artists suggested that art and writing mattered outside of the history of a specific, rarefied discipline. It could mean something within the context of a neighborhood block (Hudson Street, in the case of Jacobs); or the place where a work was made (a bathtub, for David Gordon’s Mannequin Dance, of 1962). Art making leaves traces. Attention to self-reflexivity and an unconscious manifestation of the substructural relations of production were not only modernist and Marxist holdovers concurrently being played out on the national and world stages; they were also realities being framed and worked through by an entangled group of individuals in a changing city. The context that made up the city’s domestic spaces—that two men could live with one another; that a married couple could easily get divorced; that former industrial spaces could be used for groups of people to live and work; that a woman could live with another woman or live alone—were transmuted into the art language these artists made together. In an exhibition catalogue this museum published in 1959, Rauschenberg famously said that he tried to “act in the gap between [art and life]”;63 but what is often unacknowledged in this formulation is the way that art, like life, is processual, alienating, or half-grasped. Across various overlapping circles downtown, sites of collaboration shaped the content and structure of the work being produced. For many artists, and the communities in which they lived, ensembles sustained their work, offering creative support and blurring distinctions between artist and participant. Group dynamics also brought out forms of racial and sexual exclusion, reflecting rather than transcending the shape of New York’s social map at the time. Choreographers, poets, musicians, theater producers, and filmmakers working in the early 1960s not only made work together; they also pictured the steadfast and divisive social relations that informed their work as the work itself. Whether at a performance or out on the street, being alone could become an occasion for becoming part of an integrated structure, even if its totality remained unseen. There is something inchoately queer in the primacy of physical proximity and the simultaneously connective and disorienting experience of touch, if we understand queerness to be “a matter of a world you inhabit, not something you simply are,” as art historian Douglas Crimp has described it.64 Whatever the nonnormative practices of its individual members, many of whom would not identify their artistic self with a sexual identity either then, or ever, it was the world out into which Judson emerged that we might today call queer—contingent, emergent, able to be named only in retrospect. Judson was but one group of young and lithe dancers and non-dancers who aimed to reuse ordinary gestures, but in its attention to engaging the erotics of the everyday, it underscored the immediate world as a locus of the artistic imaginary. This idea that the stuff of daily life could be the raw material for art would prove indispensable not only for subsequent political formations, particularly those under the influence of feminism, but also for cultural organizations that formed under new names: Grand Union, Lesbian Nation, Contact Improvisation, and the Collective for Living Cinema were some of the ways those who appeared in the Concerts of Dance would reorganize themselves. This same notion was also important for artworks such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) or Cecil Taylor’s album Unit Structures (1966). Judson thus contributed to making a language for ongoing experiments with dismantling male-dominated capitalist institutions, as well as for experiments supporting the black radical aesthetic tradition and human interactions with the natural world that we might call the domesticated sublime—creative traditions whose vibrancy calls to us today.65 The legacy of those who gathered for a brief period in the early 1960s at Judson Memorial Church lives in the recurrence and incompleteness of their dissonant ensemble. NOTES 1. These works include, among others, Don McDonagh, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (New York: Outerbridge &amp; Dienstfrey, 1970); Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me (New York: E. P. Dutton &amp; Co., 1971); Judson Dance Theater (1962–1966), eds. Wendy Perron and Daniel J. Cameron (Bennington: Bennington College, 1982), exh. cat.; Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983); Ramsay Burt, Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Judy Hussie-Taylor, Judson Now (New York: Danspace Project, 2012). 2. At a later date they learned that a jury member had complained they all “look alike.” See Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 88–89. 3. Johnston, “I Dance: Democracy,” Village Voice, August 23, 1962. 4. Press release for “A Concert of Dance #3,” January 30, 1963, Judson Memorial Church Archive, MSS 094, 3;32, Fales Library &amp; Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 5. After the first two years of concerts, the workshop ceased and Carmines took on the responsibility of choosing the choreographers and dates. Al Carmines, “In the Congregation of Art” [1967–68], Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 7. 6. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–73 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 9. 7. Robert Morris, “I Dance,” Village Voice, February 3, 1966. 8. Johnston, “Untitled,” in Marmalade Me, 18. 9. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 10. Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 11. Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974) 12. Janice Ross, “Atomizing Cause and Effect: Ann Halprin’s 1960s Summer Dance Workshops,” Art Journal 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 66. 13. Rainer and Ann Halprin, “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965): 142–67. 14. Ibid., 144. 15. The other two students were Paulus Berensohn, who would go onto live in the mountains of North Carolina working as a self-described amateur craft artist and passionate deep ecologist, and Marni Mahaffay. Perron, “Introduction,” Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 2. 16. Cate Deicher, [no title], Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 2. 17. Anita Feldman, “Robert Dunn: His Background and His Developing Teachings” (unpublished paper, 1979, 3–4, Vita, 1980), as cited in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 7. 18. Yvonne Rainer, [no title], Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 10. 19. Steve Paxton similarly recalls that “he allowed us to ramble, argue and turn the class away from his direction. He proposed, and waited. He wanted us to fill in the blanks—and looking back, I suspect we were those blanks.” Paxton, “RE Dunn,” Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 15. 20. James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 21. Nancy Zendora, “A Magician in the Classroom,” Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 3. 22. McDonagh, The Rise and Fall, 51. The Dunn epigraph is also from this volume. See Dunn quoted on page 59. 23. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). 24. Aileen Passloff, oral history interview conducted by Ana Janevski and Thomas J. Lax, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 22, 2018. 25. Allen Ginsberg, “James Waring &amp; Co.,” Village Voice, December 17, 1958. 26. Rainer, Work, 6. 27. The Living Theatre was the experimental theater named after the living room in which its husband-and-wife founders, painter Julian Beck and actress Judith Malina, began producing their plays in 1947. 28. David Gordon, [no title], Movement Research Performance Journal 14 (Spring 1997): 19. 29. Waring drew on a variety of movement styles from Japanese Noh theater to camp and baroque genres found in vaudeville, commedia dell’arte, and silent films. 30. Robert Dunn quoted in McDonagh, The Rise and Fall, 52. 31. Conceived by Dr. Edward Judson in 1888 to honor his father, Reverend Adoniram Judson, the church was envisioned to provide religious instruction and a variety of social services to the neighborhood’s growing population of Italian immigrants. 32. Spike left Judson Church to become the executive director of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, which played an important role in the Civil Rights movement. He was brutally killed in 1966, targeted, many believe, for his bisexuality. 33. Howard Moody, A Voice in the Village: A Journey of a Pastor and a People (self-published with Xlibris, 2009), 15. 34. These include Claes Oldenburg’s The Street (1960), a three-dimensional mural in the shape of a city block made of found objects including cardboard, paper, newspaper, and wood and outlined in black paint. 35. Al Carmines, “The Judson Dance Theater, and the Avant-Garde Dance,” lecture given at the Lincoln Center Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, New York, 1968, Dance Audio Archive, MGZTL 4-4, reel 1, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Carmines affirmed that these seemingly disparate disciplines shared much in common, including their devotion to the immediate, everyday stuff of life. He also pointed to their shared emphasis on groups over individuals, a move away from psychological preoccupations such as individual morality, whether in relation to an individual worshipper or to a character in a play. The epigraph on page 19 is from this source. 36. These include Ruth Allphon and Marni Mahaffay. In 1960, Forti had performed with Patty Mucha. 37. Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in 1959 at Reuben Gallery in New York has been recognized for juxtaposing artistic activities, like playing violin and painting, with domestic actions, like sweeping the floor or squeezing oranges. These activities took place in separate spaces simultaneously, so that viewers were able to grasp the work only as a partial, mediated experience. 38. These were Roller Boxes (formerly Rollers), See Saw, Huddle, Slant Board, Hangers, Platforms, Accompaniment for La Monte’s “2 sounds” and La Monte’s “2 sounds,” Censor, and From Instructions. 39. Forti’s inspiration and process were similarly task oriented. She first conceptualized the works as drawings, which she used as directions for Morris. 40. Forti in Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Salzburg: Museum der Moderne, 2015), 71. 41. Forti’s Dance Constructions acquisition papers, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 42. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo,” October 152 (Spring 2015): 38. 43. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 50. 44. Robert Moses, “Statement of Robert Moses Regarding Washington Square,” Village Voice, January 1, 1958. 45. Jacobs, The Death and Life, 50. 46. Embracing the post-World War II consumerism that set automobile assembly-line production into high gear, Moses proposed the widening or construction of no less than two hundred miles of roads at a time when two-thirds of New Yorkers did not own cars. His various proposed projects also included the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a ten-line elevated highway along the island’s southeast, which was protested in and near Greenwich Village and ultimately defeated. See Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). 47. Bill Dixon quoted in Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 62. 48. Handwritten account of dance improvisation sessions, dated May 23, 1960, in Yvonne Rainer’s notebooks c. 1960–62, Yvonne Rainer Papers, 2006.M.24., 1;2, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Accessed online in an audiorecording read by Rainer at http://www.getty.edu/research/ exhibitions_events/exhibitions/rainer/ 49. In Johnston’s review of Revelations performed at the West Side YMCA, she wrote, “If that kind of thing were available every Sunday in the neighborhood, I could be a holy roller, definitely.” Johnston, “Mr. Ailey,” Village Voice, December 21, 1961. 50. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 55. 51. Thanks to choreographer, artist, and writer Will Rawls for this reflection. 52. Diane di Prima, “A Concert of Dance: Judson Memorial Church, Friday, 6 July 1962,” Floating Bear, no. 21 (August 1962): 239. 53. Gerard Malanga, “Rollerskate,” Floating Bear, no. 29 (March 1964): 358. 54. James Waring, “To the Floating Bear,” Floating Bear, no. 23 (September 1962): 263. 55. LeRoi Jones, “Present Perfect (Cecil Taylor)” [1962], in Black Music (New York: William Morrow &amp; Company, 1968), 97. 56. Les grandes répétitions, “Cecil Taylor à Paris,” dir. Gérard Patris, featuring Cecil Taylor, Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons, and Alan Silva (Paris: Office national de radiodiffusion télévision française, 1968). Accessed online at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Rh0MUuHJRcQ. 57. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 161. Jones and Taylor had been close in the late 1950s and early 1960s, until Jones brought poet Allen Ginsberg to Taylor’s East Village apartment. Ginsberg asked Taylor to write music for a reading of his poem Howl; Taylor—feeling loyal to the black Beat poet Bob Kaufman and thinking him unfairly overshadowed by Ginsberg—declined. As they were leaving, Jones disapproved with a remark he knew would have been cutting for Taylor: “The problem with our jazz musicians is that they’re not literate.” See Adam Shatz, “The World of Cecil Taylor,” New York Review of Books, May 16, 2018, http://www.nybooks. com/daily/2018/05/16/the-world-of-cecil-taylor. 58. Jones, “The World of Cecil Taylor” [1962], in Black Music, 101. 59. Jones, “The Changing Same (R&amp;B and New Black Music)” [1966], in Black Music, 174. 60. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12–23. 61. Johnston, Marmalade Me, 69. 62. Rainer, Work, 318. 63. Robert Rauschenberg quoted in Sixteen Americans, ed. Dorothy C. Miller, with statements by the artists and others (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 58. 64. Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11. 65. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (January 1996): 7–28. Thanks to Myles Lennon for this reflection. * Here as everywhere, my critical syntax is indebted to Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten. Thanks also to Sarah Resnick for sharpening my prose. https://thomasjlax.com/What-Would-a-Monument-to-Ending-Sexual-Assault-Look-Like Mon, 21 Jan 2019 14:42:46 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/What-Would-a-Monument-to-Ending-Sexual-Assault-Look-Like What Would a Monument to Ending Sexual Assault Look Like?A Questionnaire on Monuments (ed. Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, Carrie Lambert-Beatty)&nbsp; October No 165, 2018What would a monument to ending sexual assault look like? How do histories of sexual violence (sidebar: Is there a kind of violence that isn’t sexual?) already live in public memorials everywhere around us? How do artists reroute and reassign value to these signposts of death and terror in order to create a visual language and material culture adapted to the demands of mourning and grief by cannibalizing the effects of loss lived every day? When choreographer, artist, and amateur ethnographer Ralph Lemon was traveling across the American South visiting sites of mass protest and of unmarked lynchings for his work Come Home Charley Patton (2004), he created miniature vignettes that he left behind in his motel rooms—captured in photographs and published in his book of the same name. In one, a mass-produced white debutante figurine in a gown whose head has been removed or decapitated sits beside a stuffed duck or goose on a rock; both are placed on a carpet of Cocoa Puffs. In another, a green toy soldier lays head down beside a mound of Froot Loops. Lemon describes these as “counter-memorials”—scenes whose relationship to&nbsp;American history is at once literal and meaningless, irreverent and carefully staged. Sitting without a plaque, caption, or audience, except maybe for the motel cleaning people who might stumble upon it, these unseen still lifes are the inversion of the spectacular scenes of historical trauma and violence the artist also visited. The ineffable murmurs in what is withheld in these two counter-memorials mirror the excesses of the overstated expectations of, for example, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, 1965. Both refuse to fully picture a referent: They obscure the knowability of trauma. And in doing so, they mark an absence, a hollow space, a hole that the audience experiences as a feeling of nothingness, a loss that is everywhere present in the ground of American history. Geo Wyeth’s 2014 Quartered is an approximately thirty-minute video that brings together experimental approaches to documentary film with 1970s black feminist Southern literature and musical theater. The video is the result of two research trips Wyeth took to Heath Springs, South Carolina, where he was drawn toward what local residents call “sensitivities” or “witches.” There, the artist investigated the legacy of his great-great-great-grandfather: James Marion Sims, a nineteenth-century gynecologist noted for gruesome surgical experimentations on enslaved African-American women. Trained as a musician and songwriter, Wyeth researched his ancestral origins in a purposefully thwarted attempt to reconcile his experience as a biracial, transgender man who is—according to him—often mistaken as white. The video presents the artist as both the omniscient, Robert Stack–like narrator as well as the Shard of Light, a mythological figure who uses the pronoun she/her and wears a gold lamé skirt, a black wig, and a gold Eye of Providence. The Shard travels between various times and places and has suffered an unknown trauma at the hands of Sims, who is both her father and lover. As she inhabits the landscape where Sims lived and worked, she meanders through the rural town and builds bombs. As she meets with seers who recount past traumas through a lo-fi vocoder—“a very heavy presence,” “a horrible scent in the building,” “the impression of a hanging”—the video culminates with the Shard performing a wordless song in a parking lot at an electric piano that names the trauma only through the melodic calls the artist makes for a resolution that will not come. At once a memorial to the victims of Sims’s experiments and a riposte to Sims himself, Wyeth’s video and performance limn what in the exhibition catalogue for&nbsp;When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, Jamillah James has called “the personal and mythological; the everyday and the uncanny; queer optimism, futurity and the historic; and self-determination and the biological, even when visiting those spaces reveals embedded trauma or violence.” Lemon’s counter-memorials and Wyeth’s sensitivities or witches suggest that despite the totalizing force of the genre, monuments—or rather acts of memorialization—can nevertheless hold out the possibility of recurrence necessary for meaningful redress. These forms of history-making already exist in our ordinary intimate lives, they point out. While distinct from a statist public culture that attempts to guarantee the safeguarding of official history—a plaque to Bloody Sunday, or James Marion Sims’s statue in Central Park, for example—these seemingly small and ephemeral acts of custodianship are social, shared acts of remembrance and recollection that burrow through lore, hearsay, and vernacular culture. What these two artists share is an Afro-futurist (another sidebar: The term is redundant, but worth each inflection, much like a double negative) form of monumentalization. This cosmic invocation isn’t simply a nod to Lemon costuming his performers in space suits or Wyeth dressing himself in gold lamé. Each has made a speculative monument—a spectral monument to a historic wrong that is imagined for a future made available and manifest in the here and now. As a result, the forms of public embodiment typically assumed to inhere within the genre of the monument—the nation-state, a heroic individual—are diffused across a messy assemblage of entangled people living their lives through routine, sometimes indecipherable gestures. https://thomasjlax.com/Lyle-Ashton-Harris-Child-of-the-90s Mon, 21 Jan 2019 04:33:55 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Lyle-Ashton-Harris-Child-of-the-90s Lyle Ashton Harris: Child of the 90sLyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs&nbsp;(ed. Johanna Burton) Aperture, 2017The legal pad placed on a green doily on a kitchen table in Lyle’s photograph reads “Things To Do.” The things listed below collapse the professional with the personal and include: grant applications and reminders; bills and reimbursements; appointments to be scheduled; and errands as imperatives. Sitting alongside a roll of undeveloped film and a drinking glass partially filled with cloudy liquid, this profile of the artist’s ambitions is at once particular and recognizable, part of the viewer’s collective memory, even. Like the rest of Lyle’s Ektachrome Archive of 35 mm photographs shot in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the galleries, nightclubs, and bedrooms of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Rome, this to-do list is a snapshot of the moment when it was taken and a reminder for the artist’s future. It holds an implicit belief that lists can make things happen and that images can create habits. While I was not there looking through Lyle’s lens, my most lasting childhood memories also revolve around list-making and projected images. One of my primal scenes is centered on my parents’ bedroom, where we would watch Bette Davis and Joan Crawford feud via our VCR and through our box television. Part of this family ritual included my dad’s reference-checking in his bedside copy of the Hollywood almanac and piles of crumpled up legal-pad paper on which he made notes. Laundry lists don’t always resemble family trees, but when I look at the Ektachrome Archive, I see a register of dads. There are the white dads who take road trips to Roman ruins (Tommy Gear) and the black dads who vacation at the Inkwell in Martha’s Vineyard (the poet David Mills) and live with their wives in Sugar Hill (Clarence Otis Jr. and Jacqueline Bradley). There are the trade dads who cruise-stare in your studio and the boy dads who slumber after fucking. There are the nice dads who recur—in multiple beds and at sun-drenched LA breakfast tables. Intellectual dads like Cornel West lecture at the Studio Museum, while Stuart Hall sits relaxed and engaged over a meal. Art dads like Robert Rauschenberg, who also used photography as a structural suture, and James Van Der Zee, who made an album of another elite black village, appear unwittingly in Lyle’s archive: dads are perhaps best understood as a proxy for the authority to make meaning. If a search for fathers holds out the sense of longing that gives the archive its pulse, Lyle renders himself most visible through images of women: butches and femmes, high and low, and the viewers who are invited to look at them. bell (hooks), Cathy (Opie), and Nan (Goldin) are constants: self-reflexive big-ups for the archive’s ideology, ethos, style. Lyle and his photo-sister Iké Udé celebrate birthdays, drink espressos, and read magazines in round-framed sunglasses, bloodred lipsticks, and dangling cigarettes that annotate their ’90s glamour. Of course, the person who is always there— caught informally in her home, adorned in a fur hat; on the verge of sleep, at the edge of her couch; at Aquinnah’s red rocks, in her bright bathing suit and braids—is Mother. Rudean Leinaeng appears in the archive, but she is more than a witness; she is its accomplice. Looking after these transparencies in their interregnum between memento and art, she was there all along. Mother’s there next to Marlon Riggs as Jean Riggs, sitting solemnly in the backseat of a town car or hearse, next to her mother and with her arm around her son and her hand in his. There She is in Essex Hemphill’s 1986 cruising manifesto, “In the Life,” when he wrote to Her: “If one of these thick-lipped, wet, black nights, while I’m out walking, I find freedom in this village. If I can take it with my tribe I’ll bring you here.” Lyle’s pictured his village; She can testify whether freedom’s been found. https://thomasjlax.com/Searching-for-Iemanja Mon, 21 Jan 2019 04:46:33 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Searching-for-Iemanja Searching for IemanjáMoMA Magazine (ed. Leah Dickerman, Alex Halberstadt, Prudence Peiffer) 2020 Over six weeks at the beginning of 2020, I traveled across Brazil, where I met artists and cultural leaders who told me how ingrained political dynamics appeared in their everyday lives. A former slavocracy with a large population and a tradition of ingesting other cultures into its own, Brazil bears an uncanny resemblance to my own place of origin. Writing today from New York City, where I was born and continue to stay, the stakes of comparative thinking about how history reappears in the art of the present feel increasingly urgent. The US and Brazil have reported the highest case rates and deaths from COVID-19 in the world, an expression of the forms of governance that make Black people vulnerable to premature death in both countries. Against this backdrop of loss and grief, protests have followed the state-sponsored extrajudicial killings of Black folks whose commonalities transcend national boundaries: João Pedro Matos Pinto, George Floyd, Lucas Eduardo Martins dos Santos, Breonna Taylor, Allyson do Nascimento, Tony McDade, and others. What we are witnessing is the end of one order and the possibility of a new one. The following two essays, dedicated to the Afro-Brazilian spirit Iemanjá and those who offered me a path to seek Her out, are my attempts to account for the reservoir of cultural resources available for transitioning from one world to another. Part 1. Searching for Iemanjá: On the MoveIf you’re looking for Iemanjá in Salvador, Brazil, you’ll find traces of Her wherever you go. In the touristy Pelourinho neighborhood, Her smiling face beckons from the towels and tchotchkes that litter the gift shop windows in the city’s historic district. At the shopping mall in the middle-class Barra neighborhood, She advertises a deal in a restaurant named after her. Yemanjá’s sits a few doors down from Johnny Rockets and promises fried acarajés filled with black-eyed peas, delivered by servers wearing lace tops, long flowing skirts, and headdresses. Iemanjá is not only a ubiquitous commercial icon; She organizes public space. Large-scale images of her preside over apartment buildings, cultural centers, beaches, bars, businesses, and markets across the city. Her outstretched arms extend her benevolence to those who seek her protection. The dozens of orixás, or deities, that make up the pantheon of Afro-Brazilian gods and goddesses dot the cityscape. For example, a sculpture of Exu, the guardian of the crossroads, who oversees all forms of communication, is positioned in front of the city’s central post office. But in this seaside city, Iemanjá, the goddess of the moon and the sea, is perhaps most visible. A sculpture of her stands stolidly in the Dique do Tororó, a man-made lagoon, where a metal sculpture by Tatti Moreno depicts her holding a mirror facing outward in a gesture of collective self-reflection. (Nearby, the orixá of fresh water, Oxun, can be distinguished from Iemanjá by her inward-facing mirror.) In modernist Bahian artist Mario Cravo Jr.’s fragmented rendering of Iemanjá, She bears her breasts and bulging eyes that look up to the sky. Cravo’s statue was recently moved: not all stand-ins for Iemanjá are made to last. At the Ponta da Humaita—which juts out into the immense, island-filled Bay of All Saints that gives the city its name—people leave offerings for Her in the form of white corn and candles that lie wet and scattered beside broken yellow platters. And in Rio Vermelho, where on every February 2 hundreds of thousands of people gather for a 24-hour celebration in Her honor (including the military police who survey the festivities and Evangelicals who are sponsored by the national government to come and protest them), fungible plastic miniatures that represent Her with a snow-white face and jet-black hair are bought one by one. Divine Mother Iemanjá—otherwise known as Yemanjá, Yamaja, Yemonja, Yemaya, Yemoja, and Emanje, depending on where in the Atlantic world you are—is a water goddess. In Bahia, She is the orixá of salt water, the deity of the ocean. In Yoruba, the cultural and linguistic group who were enslaved and transported en masse from West Africa to Brazil’s northeast and Cuba well into the 19th century, Her name is derived from the expression YéYé Omó Ejá: “The Mother whose children are fish.” Within Black and popular Brazilian culture (and even in places in the south of the country, where Bantu people were forcibly transported), She is known as the Great Mother, or the Great African Mother. Both religious practitioners and occasional believers turn to Her in search of good health, fertility, and abundance. Iemanjá is not only the source of life; She also intervenes when life is threatened, buttressing the living from the specter of death. She offers fishermen their catch and prevents their boats from capsizing. Her story, which varies across different traditions and places, often links birth to an act of near-death. In one telling, particular to the Americas, She gave birth to 10 other orixás—including the gods of agriculture, war, and health—after having been raped by a family member. Both an abyss and a womb, She organizes the relationship between the world’s creation and its destruction into a relatable family drama. Taken together, Iemanjá’s stories dissolve the boundary between the worlds of spirit and human. In most religious practices, gods and mortals remain separate, but in Afro-Brazilian religious traditions, including Candomblé, Quimbanda, and Umbanda, the two spheres come into contact physically through trance. Orixás are incorporated into bodily form by possessing individual practitioners. To receive the orixá, the initiate prepares by shearing her head, cutting a small divot at her crown. This religious encounter is not an everyday occurrence, and certainly wasn’t for me as an uninitiated person. But fazer a cabeça—the expression of preparation—like other Black Brazilian idioms, circulates in daily life. Outside of religious practice, it can mean to convince someone of something, a friend explained to me. It also describes an act of self-reinvention. During the month and a half I spent traveling across Brazil, Iemanjá appeared in official forms of culture through the performances and museums I visited obsessively looking for Her. The Balé Folclórico was one such place, in which a high-energy amalgamation of Black Brazilian movement techniques, including orixá dances, capoeira, and samba, were performed. On stage, Iemanjá was surrounded by 10 of her children, who used their arms to cast imaginary lines as if fishing at sea. (A sword fight between three duos of men dressed in loincloths followed.) In Salvador’s modern art museum and two different museums devoted to Afro-Brazilian culture in the city, artists marshaled symbols that made reference to Her: blue and white beads, a wooden relief in the shape of a goat, seashells. While I appreciated these fierce representations, I did not find the unnameable thing I had come looking for: the figure that might at once summon me and shatter something inside me. The closest I seemed to get to this feeling in a museum or at a concert stage was a collection of objects by self-taught artists where palm-sized ceramic mermaids by unnamed makers sat on small shelves. Behind a vitrine, their black pupils stared upwards, surrounded by full, white irises which looked steadily out at the horizon. It was only later that I realized that, like the people who had cupped these objects in their hands or placed them on a table for safekeeping before me, I too held the idea of Iemanjá steady in my mind’s eye as I crossed the city looking for Her. Duas Cidades For nearly 500 years, Salvador has been tailor-built to limit its inhabitants’ movement under the premise of “civilization.” After Portuguese settlers declared the triangular peninsula Brazil’s first capital in 1549, dispossessing the Tupinambá of their land, military architects carefully organized the city into two zones separated by a steep slope. Engineers trained by the Portuguese crown built the forts, prisons, ports, and markets for sugarcane and slaves that organized the cidade baixa (an area that might be called “The Bottom” were it set in a Toni Morrison novel.) The zone is so categorically split from its upper half that it has retained its name into the present. In their song “Duas Cidades,” the rock and reggae group BaianaSystem sing an organizing refrain in their chorus: “Divi- divi- divi- dividir Salvador.” The cidade baixa also answers to nicknames, proudly abbreviated by those who live there as the CBX as artist and CBX resident Rebeca Carapiá explained to me. While the cidade baixa was organized for industrial trade, the city's colonial architects adorned the cidade alta with gilded churches, two-story homes, administrative buildings, and botanical gardens. Many of these spaces were clustered around the Pelourinho, a neighborhood that took its name from the wooden pillories, or pelourinhos, built to constrain and punish enslaved people who greatly outnumbered whites in the city. In 1985, UNESCO designated the Pelourinho a World Heritage Site. Soon after this designation, the neighborhood was subject to a multimillion dollar rehabilitation, during which the colonial houses were repainted blue, yellow, and pink, and many of the neighborhood’s predominantly Black and trans residents were forcibly removed. While almost a half-millennium has passed since the vertical order of this city’s geography was established, its effects remain in effect. Quilombos Urbanos: Urban Marronage Salvador was constructed to limit Black and Indigenous people’s mobility, but formerly enslaved people have also long built their own territories outside of the law, just beyond the city’s limits. There are many examples of these urban quilombos—spaces of refuge for fugitive slaves, people of Indigenous and African descent, and others who want to live free—which date back to the beginning of slavery. Terreiros, the grounds where Afro-Brazilian religion is practiced, are one such space of refuge. When I visited Terreiro de Candomblé Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô, otherwise known as Casa Branca, a terreiro founded in the mid-1830s, Equede Sinha explained to me that the assembly of structures that form Casa Branca was built on the outskirts of Salvador. Equede, a sylphlike woman who wears delicately embroidered layers of white and whose name describes her role in caring for those who are possessed, is one of Casa Branca’s mães-de-santo—a priestess and its second-in-command. Terreiros are hierarchically structured and power is often passed down matrilineally. When I visited her, Sinha was buttressed by two younger women and told me about her new book on how power in the terreiro is coded through dress. She carries her power with a lightness and a sense of humor, dotting her sentences with meu filho—“my child”—inquiring about my boyfriend, and receiving her house daughters’ protective attention with ease. Casa Branca, she told me, is the oldest physical religious ground in the city of Salvador, established two generations before the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Casa Branca’s physical space was created in the wake of the Malê revolt, a planned rebellion organized by enslaved Muslims during Ramadan in 1835. While 200 of the revolution’s leaders were subsequently deported to West Africa, a small group including Francisca da Silva later returned to Salvador, where they established the spaces that today house three dozen residents at Casa Branca. The terreiro was surveilled by the police in the 1940s due to its presumed association with “communist activity,” and was nearly destroyed by the city in the 1980s because its inhabitants did not hold a deed to the property. During former president Lula’s tenure, it received state support from the ministry of culture. Today, it remains a space of worship and mutual aid, a cultural workshop. Each of its various buildings is filled with tools for making clothes, food, music, or dance: rows of sewing machines, black-eyed peas and palm oil, a battery of drums. Upon entering the space through a yard that faces a busy city street, you can see a defunct water fountain dedicated to Oxum designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer. (The fountain is one of two works Niemeyer made in Bahia; the other is a tomb for the Bahian-born, Afro-Brazilian writer and guerrilla Carlos Marighella, who was murdered by the military dictatorship in 1969.) Iemanjá appears in a smaller mosaic made by Bronx-born terreiro initiate Manny Vega. This mermaid looks back at the people and other animals who sit under one of the yard’s trees. If you ask, the origin of each tree is known by those who find cover under them. Artists across the country use the expression quilombo urbano, or urban maroon communities, to describe their spaces of work. Erica Malunguinho—an artist and Black feminist state congressperson in São Paulo—uses the term for the cultural space she made in 2016 from her studio, Aparelha Luiza. Aparelha is many things: an art gallery; a rehearsal room for dancers and drummers in the weeks leading up to Carnival; a dance party filled with ’90s throwbacks from Congo, Brazil, and the Black US; and a center for political education. The stakes of the space are made clear by a large-scale artwork by Raylander Mártis Dos Anjos that greets you upon arrival: VOCÊ TEM QUE PARAR DE ACHAR QUE ESTÁ NO LUGAR ERRADO (“YOU HAVE TO STOP THINKING YOU’RE IN THE WRONG PLACE”). You’re once again reminded of why you are here when you leave or go out to chat with a friend. A mural on the facing building features a photographic reproduction of Marielle Franco, the Black queer activist and politician who in 2018 was gunned down in Rio de Janeiro by President Jair Bolsonaro’s extrajudicial militar. Next to her smiling face, which has become a rallying cry for anti-fascist activists across the country, are the silkscreened words be inspired; get mobilized; don’t forget. On the first night I went to Aparelha, Malunguinho got on the mic to describe the historical necessity of creating space explicitly for Black and Indigenous people. (Malunguinho's Chief-of-Staff, Sandra Silva, generously translated for me.) Her message, a compelling stump speech that yielded to poetry, starts as far back as Palmares, a quilombo that developed in the early 17th century and may have included up to 20,000 inhabitants at its height. The urgency for this kind of space continues today under Bolsonaro’s tenure. (Malunguinho and Bolsonaro were elected on the same day.) Malunguinho was raised in the country’s northeast and often makes references to the place she grew up. At one recent public talk titled “How to Overcome This Crossroads,” she began her remarks by invoking a specific terreiro in her neighborhood of Água Fria dedicated to Iemanjá. Malunguinho—whose name means “one who travels with you” in Bantu, a name adopted by newly formed kin who were forcibly transported during the slave trade—is one of several artists working across Brazil whose studios are extensions of terreiros. Terreiros are imaged in artworks. For example, in Dalton Paula’s 2009 painting Comunhão, São Cosme and São Damião sit with a child facing out in three-quarter profile. Paula places these figures within the sparse interior of a terreiro’s safe haven.&nbsp;The painting invites the viewer into an open space, a lateral horizon line that refuses a perspectival center. Three sitters calmly protect their space from the onlookers’ gaze. Hariel Revignet, an artist trained as an architect and living in the same city as Paula, calls the spatial logic of the terreiro “axétetura.” The term is a conjunction of architecture and axé, the concept used to describe the energetic force that sustains terreiros, as well an affirmation used in everyday speech. In a downloadable broadsheet that includes bulleted descriptions and digital collages juxtaposing people and buildings at fantastical scales, Revignet defines axétetura through “its opposition to a notion of architecture, which constructs ‘universal,’ ‘international,’ or ‘good’ architecture, which are racialized territories…of class dominance and white hegemony.” One collages a photograph of architect Oscar Niemeyer, later in life, with a cigar in hand reclining on top of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, a French national monument. Cultural institutions, axétetura suggests, are one of these intensely racialized territories. Can a Museum Be an Urban Quilombo? Museums devoted to Afro-Brazilian art are the epicenter of this contestation over cultural space. Perhaps most iconically, the Museu Afro Brasil, in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, occupies a Niemeyer building, which artist Emanoel Araujo turned into a display for his massive collection of cultural objects related to Black Brazil. In addition to being a key artistic figure who began showing in the late 1950s, Araujo was a longtime director of the state Pinacoteca museum, hosting a series of exhibitions that were key to crafting the category of Afro-Brazilian art. (His ongoing series of exhibitions, A mão afro-brasileira [The Afro-Brazilian Hand], first included key mid-century artists who straddled abstraction and Black spirituality, like Mestre Didi and Rubem Valentim, and later featured important living artists like Sônia Gomes and Rosana Paulino.) One series of vitrines in Araujo’s display at the Museu Afro Brasil, devoted to Iemanjá, gives a sense of the range of this total artwork-as-museum. In a single sightline, you can see a colonial-style Portuguese tile of a mermaid, a wood relief African sculpture of a figure carrying a basket on her head, a plastic banner adorned with silver tinsel and butterflies, and a high-gloss color photograph of cropped eyes covered with beads. Each representation of Iemanjá comes from a different aesthetic history and is installed, one on top of the other, in non-chronological order without accompanying wall texts. This is not a from-slavery-to-freedom story, but rather a history of Black creativity and religious experience under the expansive title of Afro Brazil. Today, other attempts to write a history of art from inside the circle of Black life proliferate. These efforts have significantly shifted the stakes for art made by Black people. In the past five years, the country’s most resourced museums have organized landmark exhibitions, including the 2015 Territories: Artists of African Descent in the Collection of the Pinacotecaand MASP’s 2018 exhibition Histórias afro-atlânticas (Afro-Atlantic Histories). Meanwhile, São Paulo galleries like Mendes Woods and Sé Galeria have demonstrably increased the representation of Black artists in commercial venues. This is not unlike the shift in museum and commercial discourse occurring in the country’s North American neighbor, and as I spoke to Black curators working inside and across institutions, I began to understand the nuanced contexts they are creating. If Blackness is a layered category whose meanings change across time and place, Black curatorial work is equally shaped through specificity and collaboration. A handful of the curators doing this work whom I had a chance to meet include: Hélio Menezes, Curator at the Centro Cultural of São Paulo, who co-organized Histórias afro-atlânticas and whose thesis on the emergence of the category of “Afro-Brazilian art” is a key reference; Amanda Carneiro, assistant curator at MASP, who, in addition to running their public programs, is working on a research project about the history of Black Brazilian artists working in abstraction in the 1960s and ’70s; Uriel Bezerra, who co-organized the Ecos do Atlântico Sul about the Afro-Luso-Brazilian triangle; Diane Lima, who, with artist Rosana Paulino, organized the 2016–17 Diálogos Ausentes (Absent Dialogues) exhibition at Itaú Cultural, in 2018 created AfroTranscendence, a radical education program for artists, curates the Valongo Festival Internacional da Imagem, and is co-organizing the Third Frestas Triennial with Beatriz Lemos and Thiago de Paula Souza; and de Paula Souza, whose exhibition Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals recently opened at BAK in Utrecht and who, with Gabi Ngcobo, was co-organizer of the 10th Berlin Biennial, titled We Don’t Need Another Hero, and the trans-disciplinary platform I’ve seen your face before, models of collaborative curatorial practice. Black artists are also creating their own models for supporting one another’s work through organizations such as Trovoa, a collective started by four women artists in March 2019 that has since greatly expanded. In cities across the country, its various chapters respond to the needs of their contexts while organizing across sites through a WhatsApp group and shared Google Docs. Technology as a means of bringing people together in real space is also important for 0101 Art Platform, a residency program and social media network that includes Moises Patricio, Ana Beatriz Almeida, and Keyna Eleison, among others. It is hard to overstate the range and depth of Black-feminist approaches to curatorial work in Brazil today. Tiago Sant’Ana’s 2013 six-part photo series Composições simples para ouvir ancestrais (Simple Compositions to Listen to the Ancestors), which opens this essay, provides an inadvertent portrait of this richness: In this dedication to Iemanjá, the artist, scholar, and curator, currently pursuing his PhD at the Federal University of Bahia, depicts himself being steadily drowned by seashells, a symbol of Her prosperity. These curators and organizers are not only showing and collecting Black artists’ work; they are creating Black spaces, meaningful augmentations and redefinitions to the museum as a cultural institution. This other kind of Black space, like the itinerant Batekoo party I went to with Thiago, requires material support to sustain itself, as well as brick-and-mortar space in which to gather. Nevertheless, it remains on the move. Read part two of “Searching for Iemanjá” https://thomasjlax.com/How-Do-Black-Lives-Matter-in-MoMA-s-Collection Mon, 21 Jan 2019 05:34:44 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/How-Do-Black-Lives-Matter-in-MoMA-s-Collection How Do Black Lives Matter in MoMA’s Collection?MoMA Inside/Out Blog July 9, 2016Less than a month after 49 people were killed and 53 wounded by a single gunman at a gay Latino party in Orlando, Florida, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile’s gruesome murders by police officers were captured on video and widely circulated. The two recordings of Sterling’s death were made by Abdullah Muflahi, a local store owner, and Arthur Reed, an activist, while Castile’s was made in a lucid, terrifying account by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, under police duress as he died next to her. At least 5.4 million people have seen Reynolds’s video as of Saturday morning. Documentation of violence against black people is nothing new: it has been disseminated through photography and video since the beginnings of both media. But the fact that the recent events were streamed instantaneously and made available for mass distribution on our handheld devices has galvanized a mass response, prompting protests throughout the country as Louisiana and Minnesota’s governors have sought a civil rights investigation from the Justice Department, and President Obama reminded the nation that “we’ve got some tough history and we haven’t gotten through all of that history yet.” And then on Thursday evening a sniper, who served in Afghanistan in the U.S. Army Reserve, killed five members of law enforcement during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. While The Guardian has documented 136 black victims of U.S. police killings since the beginning of 2016 alone, the recent fraught images have become a rallying cry for politicians, activists, and artists. Some have responded via social media and Instagram, posting images of the 1930s flag the NAACP would fly outside of its New York City office to publicly announce a lynching. These posts not only make a connection between this moment and the history of state violence against black people in the U.S. but are also meant to remind us of the organization’s anti-lynching pamphlet campaign that often redeployed lynching photographs to reclaim the power of image making as a tool to intervene against state violence. Others have posted the black monochrome square that has appeared repeatedly after police killings, as if to say there are in fact no images that can capture the scale of this crisis and that the image of the black body in pain is part and parcel of how black people are policed. In other words: Can images do anything but aggravate the problem? At their best, pictures—on Instagram or at a museum—can offer a space of both meditation and change where anger, fear, and ambivalence can coexist. Sometimes artists respond to documents of death by giving you another option than either looking away or staring at the gore of your news feed. At other times, the significance of an artwork itself can change, especially when it enters a collection or institution. As it moves from the original place it was made, it takes on added meanings, rubbing up against other artworks and adding to our public image bank as new events occur and time passes. Here are three works—all recent additions to MoMA’s collection—by contemporary artists who have responded to anti-black racism over the past 50-plus years. In Steffani Jemison’s 2010–11 video, Escaped Lunatic, a steady stream of black people run across the screen, sprinting, jumping and rolling through the streets of Houston. The video borrows its narrative structure from early 20th-century cinema—the chase genre in particular—which often depicted African Americans in scenes of flight from various forms of authority. Shooting the work with a Houston-based parkour team when she was living in that city, Jemison links a structure borrowed from early cinema to a contemporary scene, boldly linking the unjust conditions of urban life for black folks across time. Put simply: Jemison’s work reminds this viewer that black folks are perceived as fugitives whether they are running or just have their hands up. As I recently rewatched the figures move across the pixelated image, it newly reminded me of the death of Israel Leija, the subject of another high-speed chase the year Jemison began her video. When Leija, the subject of a warrant for a misdemeanor probation violation, evaded arrest by car, authorities set up a spike strip to disable his highway escape. Despite the certainty of thwarting Leija, Texas state trooper Chagrin L. Mullenix nevertheless fired six shots, killing him, and afterwards proudly boasted “How’s that for proactive?” (Last month, in an unsigned opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn a circuit opinion, giving Mullenix immunity; Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in a statement that chastised the court.) While Jemison’s video depicts another black chase scene that seems inevitable, in her work one can imagine her figures’ flights as small escapes to a place out of view but no less real. At 6 x 12 feet, Faith Ringgold’s 1967 American People Series #20: Die is a monumental painting—a document of its time as well as the long stay of the issues it depicts. The final work in a series inspired by a range of modern icons, including Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Josef Albers’s abstract geometric murals, and Ad Reinhardt’s black monochrome paintings, Die represents a culmination in the artist’s search for what she called “a black aesthetic.” A crimson bloodbath on a black-and-white checkered ground, the canvas depicts a riotous scene in which a slew of archetypical white and black men, women, and children are entangled in relationships built at once out of conflict and care. Curiously, only two subjects (one black, one white) hold weapons, yet everyone appears to be injured, implying that people on all sides of the color line are the potential victims of racial violence, which itself can take many forms. Outfitting her subjects in the business attire of the time, Ringgold’s picture suggests that racial tensions are not only the stuff of street warfare, but what we would today call microagressions—those daily, seemingly fleeting forms of verbal and behavioral discriminations that add up to create violent environments for people of color across all classes and segments of society. While the artist worried that Die would be a prophesy of her times, the work has proven to anticipate a far longer arc. Let’s be clear about how Ringgold’s work resonates today: Just as the painting indicts all of the suit-and-dress-wearing, white-collar workers in her picture, we must implicate the professional institutions in which we find ourselves as part of a broader anti-black culture. Kerry James Marshall, known for his large-scale paintings of coal-colored black subjects at the club, in love, and enjoying some of the creature comforts of African American life, completed his Untitled (policeman) last year. In it, a black cop with a Chicago insignia on his hat sits on his squad car’s hood, underneath the nighttime lights of a parking lot. He stares into his own space and away from the viewer, with one hand on his hip and the other in his lap. At once authoritative and contemplative, resolute and undecided, he is not simply a type—for example, the black policeman as a contradictory symbol of power and powerlessness. Rather, Marshall portrays this policeman as an individual whose reflective countenance reveals a subject the artist describes as in the middle of thinking of the circumstances that he is in. In watching the images of Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown holding his head in his hand during a prayer vigil on Friday, it was hard for me not to think of him as an avatar of Marshall’s rendering of a black man trying to fix an institution seen by many in this country to be structured by racism. Indeed, Brown—an African American and fourth-generation Dallas native who championed greater transparency by Dallas law enforcement before Michael Brown’s 2014 death—has his own complex personal history of police violence: He lost his former partner in the line of duty, his brother in a violent crime, and his son after he killed a police officer and another man. But what do we do that goes beyond Brown’s public grief? What happens after Marshall’s policeman’s self-reflection? What is greater than the effects of this Museum’s acquisitions? I have a certain faith that Jemison’s image of flight and fugitivity, Ringgold’s sense of the banal pervasiveness of racial violence, and Marshall’s portrait of a vexed authority figure are not just scenes of contemplation. Maybe they will intervene into our visual languages, spawning our sense of social imagination. For example: Will Marshall’s officer get up from his car to unholster and give up the gun to which his right hand points—another black rectilinear monochrome at the horizon line of the car’s hood? Can we arrive at the nearby place to which Jemison’s subjects are fleeing one after the next? If these works offer anything in this moment of crisis, it is space in which we might be undone and welcome the unknown. Analyzing and acting beside one another, perhaps we’ll continue the good fight and pursue the hard love we need right now. Thanks to Elizabeth Alexander, Morgan Bassichis, Naomi Beckwith, Jocelyn Brown, Stuart Comer, Leah Dickerman, Adrienne Edwards, Darby English, Thelma Golden, Che Gossett, Kathy Halbreich, Saidiya Hartman, Rujeko Hockley, Laura Hoptman, Ana Janevski, Steffani Jemison, Kellie Jones, Carolyn Kelly, Glenn Lowry, Kerry James Marshall, Helen Molesworth, Faith Ringgold, Lanka Tattersall, Ann Temkin, Akili Tommasino, and Andrew Wallace for their prompts, ongoing conversations, or writing about related topics. https://thomasjlax.com/Deana-Lawson-Things-Not-Seen Mon, 21 Jan 2019 15:04:20 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Deana-Lawson-Things-Not-Seen Deana Lawson: Things Not SeenVision &amp; Justice (ed. Sarah Lewis) Aperture, 2016When President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy in the wake of Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s assassination in June 2015, I couldn’t help but feel that his voice was echoing, as if coming to me from some other time. In his remarks for the assassinated Democratic state senator and senior pastor at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Obama was careful to narrate the church’s history, from slavery to freedom and the long journey between, as a hush harbor, praise house, rest stop, and community center. In Obama’s sermon, he didn’t hesitate to put the church shooting in unequivocally biblical terms: “The Bible calls us to hope,” he began, “to persevere, and have faith in things not seen.” Photographer Deana Lawson, in a recent portfolio for Time magazine, captures the paradoxical power of things not seen in her pictures of the family members of those who lost their lives during the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel, as this historic church is known, on June 17, 2015: the Emanuel 9. In addition to Pinckney, those killed include Sharonda Coleman Singleton, Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, and Myra Thompson. Taken five months after the tragedy, Lawson’s portraits convey the sitters’ sense of grace through their upright posture and forthright gazes, giving a fuller life to the narratives of forgiveness that the victims’ families displayed in various news outlets in the shooting’s immediate aftermath. Known for other series of photographs that couple her subjects’ physicality with an uncanny familiarity, Lawson carefully frames her compositions in ways that take cues from vernacular photography, or depicts her subjects undressed, looking directly at the camera. Many are strangers she meets traveling throughout the American South, the Caribbean, and other depots along the black diaspora. For this body of work, Lawson brings her sense of intimacy forged from strangeness to an immediate history of violence, focusing her camera not on the ravages of the massacre, but rather on signs of physical affection among those who observe their loved ones every day. They hold hands, clutch bodies, and remind us that despite loss, the power of touch remains.People are not the only witnesses in these images. Within the domestic scenes that enfold the tragic events, we see inanimate objects give meaning to personal lives: people in framed family portraits look right back at us; landscapes with tires and crosses emphatically mark nature as a space for staking claim to a sense of home. Lawson reckons with the force of place, capturing the annex that led to the room where the shooting occurred. These portraits, still lifes, and landscapes emphasize the history of daily refuge that connects this site of an antebellum shelter to an ongoing need for prayer after emancipation. Lawson’s portrait of a community in mourning is preceded by a history of photojournalists who have depicted the South as a site for the negotiation of national exclusion using images that depict rites of familial belonging. Take, for example, Gordon Parks’s 1956 portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton of Mobile, Alabama, for his Segregation Story featured in Life. The Thorntons sit facing forward, toward the viewer, in front of them a table of flowers and photographs, above them a family portrait that similarly portrays a man beside his wife. Parks made portraits of black families in which the sitters claim their bonds. Similarly, in Lawson’s image of Gracie Broome, Reverend Pinckney’s maternal grandmother, Broome sits in a rocking chair in her home in Mullins, South Carolina. In one hand, she holds a framed school portrait of her grandson who has been taken from her, brightly smiling in his marching-band uniform, while with the other she holds her head up and looks straight ahead. A grandson can be with you even if he is not physically present; protection of one’s self and loved ones can be forged from faith in sights that remain unseen in the flesh. Photography, like forgiveness, can work in mysterious ways. https://thomasjlax.com/Kevin-Beasley-Openings Mon, 21 Jan 2019 16:29:22 +0000 Thomas J Lax https://thomasjlax.com/Kevin-Beasley-Openings Kevin Beasley: OpeningsArtforum (ed. Michelle Kuo) January 2015 Kevin Beasley kneels before two turntables in the lower-level theater of New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem. He’s in the middle of a set that is by turns haunting and propulsive, mixing samples that range from extra-percussive house beats to attenuated ambulance sirens, as his spoken-word excerpts betray their midwestern origins and unmistakably American character. Lines from Malcolm X’s 1962 speech “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?” are audible one minute; the next, the Cleveland neighbor who helped free Amanda Berry after she was held hostage for a decade recounts the story of her discovery. The set culminates with the sweet and sweaty promise of Detroit techno/house artist Theo Parrish’s 2011 track “Black Music,” but through it all, the audio clips that kicked off the set never stop reverberating: They killed him for no reason. They killed this nigger for no reason. He dead as a motherfucker. They killed this nigger for no reason. That guy is laying in the street dead. That man dead, man. Say he had his hands up and everything. Still shot him. The man laying in the street dead as a motherfucker. In her influential essay “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?,” published in the catalogue for the 1994 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art,”poet and critic Elizabeth Alexander considers the stakes of representing antiblack violence, attending in particular to the video that famously documented the 1991 beating of Rodney King by police officers in Los Angeles. To be black, argues Alexander, is to have no choice but to confront documentary evidence of the spectacularized violence waged against black people in the United States. “In order to survive,” she writes, “black people have paradoxically had to witness their own murder and defilement and then pass along the epic tale of violation.” Alexander’s title is not only an ethical interrogative but an ontological quandary about the difference between blackness and looking—the kind of looking that, in the Western tradition, has long been the birthright of the sovereign subject, who is free to take pleasure without reservation or threat to bodily integrity. To be black is not a biological or even a cultural fact, she suggests; to be black is to be a vexed onlooker. Yet looking is not the same as listening. Art historian Huey Copeland has recently argued that many artists of color working around the time of King’s beating refused codes of visual and racial representation through recourse to “other bodily faculties . . . : the haptic, the written word, the thinly surrogate, and most signally, the voice.” The voice, in particular, goes places vision cannot. Indeed, the terrible beauty of Beasley’s set ventures onto perilous ground precisely through use of the voice. He pairs audio clips—which, via the words of a secondhand witness, repeatedly describe the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—with a club track, which he performed at the Studio Museum just over a month after Brown was shot. The juxtaposition risks aestheticizing Brown’s killing, but in fact it subtly underscores the dreadful ordinariness of such acts, as the club and the bloody street are spaces of both eventfulness and habit. To hear a recurring testament of horror from someone who himself did not see Brown’s body produces a knowledge of the trauma, not through authenticated firsthand testimony or through the retribution that remains unattainable by due process, but rather in the way such accounts are so often transmitted in communities in which trauma occurs—through a chain of hearsay that feels more reliable than a sworn statement. The chain starts with unwilling looking, which Beasley reproduces by refusing to image it, instead using sound that produces a mental projection of an image in its visual absence. The focused vector of vision is exchanged for something more expansive, even shared. Immersed in and surrounded by the invasiveness of a sound that, once heard, cannot summarily be averted or forgotten, you feel the other listeners rocking next to you. Beasley—born in 1985 in Lynchburg, Virginia, educated in Detroit and New Haven, and currently based in Queens—works in an expanded sculptural language in which sound not only occupies space but is a material that changes spaces themselves through exertions of mass, weight, content. It’s noteworthy that Beasley does not exploit CDJs to the extent his contemporaries in, say, GHE20 G0TH1K or DIS do, instead preferring the physicality of turntables. For him, the materiality of sound seems to have a transitive property, flowing from the haptic immediacy of analog turntablism to the palpable presence of a bass line or a voice. For his 2012 work I Want My Spot Back, for example, Beasley was invited by choreographer Ralph Lemon, on the occasion of a dance series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to occupy the institution’s atrium gallery. During his two one-hour sets, Beasley mixed and slowed down just under forty a cappella tracks by deceased black male rappers from the early to mid-1990s, using more than ten subwoofers and loudspeakers to transform the music into a physical sensation that literally made the museum’s walls shake, creating a vibrational force as architectonic as it was somatic. Beasley’s acousmatic music—composed for live presentation using speakers—often functions in negativa, as the listener hears sounds without recognizing their originating sources. But while they may be disembodied, abstracted, even nameless, the rappers in I Want My Spot Back are here, for as long as their voices issue from Beasley’s speakers. Vocality in Beasley’s work is always mnemonic, recalling and addressing the departed, and redressing the proximity of black life to social death as the artist points to the potential for everyday culture to attend to loss. Beasley’s sculpture likewise explores the physical pressure of things that remain out of sight. He produces assemblages in which detritus, found or saved, is agglomerated with resin and polyurethane foam, a material that, despite its commercial ubiquity in everything from insulation to surfboards, often remains unseen. Beasley combines a polymer catalyst and reactant to produce the foam, which remains malleable for about half an hour. Within that window, he wrestles his combines into shape—molding, wrapping, stuffing, and embedding. In the resulting works, foam spills formlessly from a sneaker; bulges, bound and taut, beneath fabric or plastic wrappings; or serves as a primordial matrix for bits of junk. The sculptures bear the traces of postindustrial urban cycles of use and disuse, alongside the imprints of his body. Yet despite their folds, holes, and seepages, his objects (like his performances) refuse to represent a body, instead indexing the absent body’s actions and movements—a fugitive remainder, reminding the viewer of what was once there. Beasley’s absenting presence—presence as voice, as indexical mark, presence that may be active and collective or haunted, spectral, and deferred—strategically negotiates the reality of being an embodied subject who cannot elide the dangers of subjection or its historical and political specificities; it is a mode of presence that quickens and guards against embodiment’s enmeshment with the violent dynamics of spectacularization. His practices of dislocation and recontextualization, his stagings of fragmentation and unstable materiality, and his fleeting consolidations of the mnemonic trace seem to ask: What does it mean to assemble things when those things are beats, limbs, corpses, or people brought provisionally together to mourn or to protest? He encourages us to begin our response by swaying in our seats.