Melisma/against Hope

Melisma/Against Hope steven leyden cochrane

ARTIST STATEMENT 2009 – Present Found one-inch button.

Contents Essay: Introduction: Throwing the bones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 Melisma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Overdetermination and Critical Drag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Other slippages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Catalogues raisonnés . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Work: Always Be My Baby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Catastrophe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Forgeries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Florida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Fluo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

Sickness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Young Luv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Destroy Everything You Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

No Heroic Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Melisma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Untitled (Against Hope) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 The Hand, the Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Index of works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

ARTIST STATEMENT 1969 – 2008 – ∞ Foil banner letters. Text from Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969).

Introduction: Throwing the bones My position regarding narrative ranges from one of vague mistrust to one of out-

right hostility. As one inevitably applied retroactively, narrative structure can, at best,

only ever misrepresent that which it is meant to describe. At worst, by electing to exclude from “the story,” as stories require, those supposedly impertinent details that

comprise the bulk of lived experience, it seems one does real violence to that experience. These conclusions are not new, and they are by no means uniquely my own, but

still the logic of storytelling persists, even as its endemic metaphors fall ever further out of step with conditions as we apprehend them, now.

Beyond the inherent trouble of exclusion and the appeal of revisionism, there

is the problem of motive: the process of fabricating narrative (and narrative is always a fabrication) necessitates the attribution of causal relationships, of intent, even

where—especially where—such relationships are unknown or simply do not exist. 05

To understand a narrative, any narrative, one must first ascertain the motives of any active subject that the narrative describes. Having done so, one must then address the

possible motives of the speaker. For my own part, I doubt my ability to accomplish the former task, doubt even more strongly my ability and willingness to even approach

the second. Matters are compounded further, of course, when speaker and subject are the same; they are compounded further still when that speaking subject is, in fact, oneself.

In order to discuss or to explain one’s own intentions, one must arrive at a nar-

rativized understanding of one’s actions, and such an understanding is necessarily

a fiction. To provide an account that is articulable, much less believable, one must

brush away most of the muck that flies about the decision-making process. Again we encounter an invitation to exclude and to revise, but here there is more at stake. To “get one’s facts straight” is not to discover the true order of those purported facts, if

such an order ever existed or such facts ever held, but rather to arrange them in such

a way that the speaker concludes his or her account looking credible and, if done correctly, looking good.

I could tell you my reasons for having done and made the things I’ve done and

made, but I’d almost certainly get my story wrong. My work is, in large part, about the pitfalls of narrative thinking, of storytelling, about the impossibility of constructing a narrative with any quality of objective truth, about the unlikeliness of constructing one that effectively or even adequately communicates subjective experience.

All this has been to say that the prospect of writing an introduction to my work

is not one that I relish. This kind of document purports to locate a practice (a manner of working, a body of work) among clearly defined and broadly accepted narrative

trajectories—art history, one’s “development as an artist,” and so on. Through my work, I have taken great pains to call into question the viability of just such mediating

strategies. I am tasked, then, with writing the story of a practice whose aim has been to problematize and disarticulate the impulse to tell stories or to find them. This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.

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Put simply, I make a lot of things, seventy-two of which comprise, in several itera-

tions, the work I’ll be discussing here. The number seventy-two is not in and of itself

significant, except that it’s the number of pieces that I managed to complete, and it’s a number that’s cleanly divisible in several potentially useful ways. These seventy-two

works, some of them single objects, others collections of objects, fall into ten broadly

thematic groups of between five and twelve pieces each. These groups are outlined in the “Works” section of this document.

The thesis exhibition itself is divided between two venues. The first half is in-

stalled at the Art Gallery of Windsor and consists of a bank of ten cork bulletin boards, called Untitled (Against Hope). Each of the corkboards corresponds to one of the ten thematic groups and features photo-documentation of the constituent pieces, textual

descriptions of each, and related documents and ephemera—source photographs,

galleys, drafts, proofs and so on. The bulletin boards occupy a space in the front atri-

um of the Gallery, leading up to and trailing behind the main stair. They are arranged in two rows, the upper of which extends to a height of roughly eleven feet.

The second venue, the University of Windsor’s LeBel Gallery, houses an exhibi-

tion called Melisma, which consists of all seventy-two of the original works. Their arrangement in the gallery does not adhere strictly to their thematic groupings; rather,

the pieces are organized, informally, by type and with deference to concerns of display

(all of the pieces displayed on shelves are grouped together, for instance; floor pieces are placed where they are less likely to be stepped on). In a hallway outside the gal-

lery is installed a second group of corkboards (there are six of them), called The Hand,

the Deal. These again feature documentation of the seventy-two pieces, but, in this case, the works have been divided arbitrarily, with the aid of a random-integer generator, into groups of twelve.

In brief, Untitled (Against Hope) is characterized by deliberate organization—

though no original objects are present—while Melisma features all of the original ob-

jects but is distinguished by a near-absence of explicit, explanatory arrangement. It

should be evident, I hope, that in my work the ways in which art objects are organized,

exhibited, documented, and disseminated are as important as the objects themselves. It should likely also be evident that my approach is marked by a certain obstinacy, and I hope to provide a more nuanced account of that approach as we proceed.

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Thus far, I’ve referred to the objects that I make in terms only of their presence

and non-presence, organization and non-organization in their respective exhibition

contexts. While it would be impractical to describe all seventy-two in any great detail, I’ll do my best to indicate some of their overarching commonalities.

I earned my undergraduate degree with a major in figurative painting. The ma-

jority of the works I’ve made over the course of the last two years have not, however, been paintings, less frequently still been ones easily identifiable as “figurative.” Nevertheless, painting, the material qualities of paintings, concepts of representation and figuration, and the function of paintings in collective imaginaries of the art object do, in some capacity, inform much of my present work. I have made some paintings

and cycles of paintings, but the work I’m defending includes numerous photographic works, some sculptures, a handful of video works, two book-works, and an array of commercially-produced objects ranging from business cards, letterhead, and offset-

printed posters to custom-designed quilting fabric, T-shirts, and silicone bracelets. Also, there are the corkboards. Also, there is this document.

In terms of my aesthetic points of reference, I look most frequently to emulate

forms associated with Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, and practices emerging from

these (here I wish to be unequivocal in stating that this is an acknowledged process of appropriation). Paintings are usually monochromes; photographs tend to be straightforward documentation or else based on found images; text-based pieces are com-

mon; videos progress at a glacial pace. It should be mentioned, however, that I am

concerned as much with the aesthetics of home décor as with Minimalism, with both commonly at evidence within a single piece. Most of my work is small. This owes in part to a temperamental disinclination to the making of large-scale objects, but

it equally reflects practical concerns arising from a desire to make large numbers of discrete works and an to arrange and rearrange them as needed.

In terms of subject matter—I am of the conviction that one could not make “non-

representational” work, at this point, even if one wanted to or tried—my sphere of reference is fairly broad. Traditional (that is, Renaissance and pre-Renaissance)

painting techniques make occasional appearance, as do further references to Western art history (again, old paintings on the one hand and strains of critical practice after 08

1965 or so on the other) and to conservation science, medicine and pathology, color

theory, top-40 R&B, vernacular design (tourist trinkets, office supplies, party decorations), pedagogical and didactic materials (corkboards, textbooks), and arts and crafts (in the “Martha Stewart” rather than the “William Morris” sense).

The relative visual austerity that I tend to favor (I say “relative” because a mono-

chrome painting, when executed in fluorescent pink, on marble, might reasonably

strain one’s working definition of “austere”) has been for me one means of reining in these divergent influences. My commitment to multi-disciplinarity at points verges Fugitive Forever. Oil on marble.

on the pathological, and while I frequently avoid overt indications of “the hand,” I do strive toward something like a unified aesthetic. At this point, I have no particular desire to mount solo exhibitions that look like group shows.

I do not shy from and in fact at points actively pursue inscrutability. The ref-

erences I make tend to fall outside of anything approaching common knowledge; whether these are historical, technical, or autobiographical in nature (and they are most frequently of this final sort), I make no particular effort to clarify them. I nevertheless feel (and feel quite strongly) that inscrutability can only be an unnecessary contrivance unless it is matched by perceptible intent: if the works are opaque, they

are emphatically so. Over the course of this document, I will attempt to frame my particular interest in both autobiographical content and inscrutability, how I see these

functioning both in artistic practice and in light of certain contemporary conditions. It’s worth bearing in mind, however, as I lay out my arguments for other aspects of my practice and while viewing the work itself, that underlying each of my concerns—

strategies of exhibition, received understandings of how works of art function, the permeability of boundaries between ordinarily-discrete fields and disciplines—is a

keen interest in exploring how individual experience and understanding is and is not, can and cannot be conveyed through practices of visual art.

To return to my misgivings about narrative, though, and in the event that men-

tion of “autobiography” should be cause for any undue concern, my ultimate stance is that one does not ever, cannot ever have “a story.” This either will or will not be of any

reassurance, but, continuing, why that seems to me the case and what one might be 09

said to have if not “a story” is, perhaps, the dominant concern at evidence in my practice. I do make explicit (if unheralded and unexplained) references to events in my own life—my upbringing in central Florida, my mother’s illness and eventual death,

ex-boyfriends, family vacations, inside jokes, pets, birthdays, whatever—even if those

references are unlikely to fully understood. The point of the work, if I am in a position to declare what is or is not “the point,” is not, has never been, and should not be to

lead a viewer to reconstruct the ostensibly-unique events of my life, the work acting

as some kind of cipher. Lots of people are from central Florida; most people’s mothers die at some point, and it’s understood, generally, to be a horrible thing; nobody, by and

large, cares all that much about anyone else’s ex-boyfriends, family vacations, inside

jokes, pets, or birthdays. Frankly, if I were to engage in acts of overt emotional blackmail (and believe me when I say that I do not rule out the possibility), I hope sincerely that I would do so towards more interesting ends.

The work only functions as I want it to when “the story” doesn’t add up, when

there is shown to be no story at all—none, at least, that would satisfactorily account

for the work as it’s presented. Lives are not stories; they’re nearer to scatter plots,

and to trace any single arc through one is necessarily to disregard the particularities of its constituent data. Visual art’s appeal for me lies in that its forms do not, in and of

themselves, demand that such arcs be drawn. We make those demands of visual art, to be sure, and the means by which we encounter art—exhibitions, retrospectives, art history texts, monographs, catalogues raisonnés—invite such readings, but works of

art themselves (the ones that I endeavor to make, at least, and the ones I tend to like) are mute, immobile things. Where art takes on “function,” that function is determined

externally to the work of art itself. In some respects, the thrust of critical art practice over at least the last century has been to render that fact palpable, and my practice constitutes my own contribution toward that effort.

To cast works of art as bones with no inherent meaning, nothing more, is to work

against our deeply-ingrained and largely inherited desire to find magical purposes

to the arrangements in which they fall. Indeed, that desire may, to greater or lesser extents, constitute the generative conceit of all artistic practice—the conceit that, 10

top: Les Moments (Gesamtboyfriend). “Custom oil portrait,” dye-sublimation print, “Strata” frame, and packaging materials. bottom: Untitled (Carrollwood Meadows). Framed Chromira print.

by means of exclusive knowledge or of tricky bookkeeping, we can make or imagine things to be, to mean more than whatever it is that they certifiably are. Whether I,

personally, do or do not believe in the possibility of such purpose is either wholly irrelevant or absolutely crucial to the way in which I work. I could come down for or

against magical thinking, tell you of my intentions toward it one way or the other, but, again, I would almost certainly get my story wrong.

By way of final introduction, I want to make one further, practical point, which

itself should already be clear: my goal for the preceding two years has not been to create “a body of work” nor even ten bodies of work. I have attempted to establish

a practice, to solidify a set of concerns and to arrive at and explore a number of potential methods for addressing those concerns. The distinction is largely semantic

in nature, but it’s important. The desire to hone and polish a group of pieces that fully and exquisitely demonstrates the product of one’s methodology is by no means foreign to me, but this has not been my aim. Rather, I have worked to hone and polish

a set of questions, and the works that I’m defending now constitute several of many possible approaches to those questions. In this sense, “the work” is not and cannot be completed. In my view, the success or failure of the effort hinges not on my ability

to answer these questions (nor, for that matter, on my ability to help others answer them) but on my ability sustain them. Were I able to answer them to my satisfaction, I’d have to find something else to do.

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Melisma Dye sublimation prints, sheet music, and push pins on cork bulletin board.

Melisma With seventy-two pieces, each presented in four distinct formats (original work,

organized documentation, randomly-arranged documentation, and textual description), “excess” and “overdetermination” would seem to be logical points of departure

for discussing my work. I understand these factors to be working in tandem to shape individual subjectivity, generally, and artistic identity in particular; for now, however, I would like to focus on each in how they function as generative and organizational

structures for the work that I’ve made. While closely related, each condition requires a different set of parameters by which to address them, and I’ll begin with excess.

Seventy-two pieces is far too many, and that number will only increase as time

goes on—I don’t tend to work in such a way that one or another work or group of

works is completed and set aside in favor of new ones. Despite what one may know

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of the actual viewing habits of “typical audiences,” that the “average viewer” spends with a given work something like seven seconds, conservatively, to a few minutes, on

the high end, artists by and large continue to produce under the polite misapprehension that their task is to make objects for individual, committed contemplation. While

any number of practices have emerged that challenge this understanding—either through the creation of deliberately ephemeral works or deliberately overwhelming

situations, among other strategies—such practices nevertheless define their respective terms of engagement with the fiction in mind. My work is no different.

Even where individual works are made to appear inconsequential (I’m thinking

here of the business card pieces, say, or various stack- and scatter-pieces), my aesthet-

ic references or visual cues tend towards Minimal and Conceptual practice, and they suggest certain modes of address along those lines. All matters of individual content aside, the pieces look in such a way that one makes certain assumptions about them: they look, I’ve been told (in terms suggesting either admiration or disdain, depending

on the speaker), “slow,” or they look “cerebral.” They might be “slow,” and they might

be “cerebral,” even where their tone skews flippant, and, if true, the way they operate in combination is certainly slower and more cerebral still. But then there are another six dozen pieces to contend with. The same contrast of regard and disregard comes to play in other ways for other pieces: wood panels with engaged frames, gessoed in fullon quattrocento fashion, bear only text in gold Letraset (text taken from the chorus of

a mediocre pop song, at that) and lean, overlapping against the base of the wall as if forgotten. A duotone photo-lithograph of the sky has one effect; twenty-two of them,

differing only in color, have another. Taken collectively, though, the effect is always the same: the pieces themselves demand a measure of individual scrutiny, and the format

of display, whether conventional installation, bulletin board, or book, all but rules out

the possibility. It matters little to me whether a viewer opts to spend time with sev-

eral pieces, passing over others, to quickly survey the whole range, or to simply turn on his or her heel and leave the room. My concern is that the decision, whichever it

may be, is a conscious one. I am, in a very real sense, challenging the viewer to ignore me, and this is, in my conception, a function of excess. 14

Still, I’m after something more nuanced than frustrating the interested viewer

left top: Untitled (Everyone remembers where they were that day). Set of 1000 thermographic (raised-ink) business cards. left middle: Young Love (Where hope is knowing and wanting not to know). Chalk ground and mirror-finish gold Letraset on panel. left bottom: Untitled (Proof). Series of 22 digital offset prints.

and aggravating the uninterested one. If my mode of address is outwardly a petulant

one, it’s one that I’ve adopted with certain desired effects in mind. To illustrate those desired effects, I’ll ask you now to consider Donald Judd and Mariah Carey.

Melisma (more commonly encountered in the adjectival form, “melismatic”) is a

term that refers to the attenuation of a single syllable, in lyrical music, over a run of

notes. The most frequently-cited example of this seems to be sacred music, Gregorian chant in particular, with its oscillating, distended alleluias. A perhaps more famil-

iar (and certainly more current) example would be the Middle-of-the-Road ballad,

typified by the 1990s output of pop chanteuses the likes of Mariah Carey, Céline Dion,

and Whitney Houston, or, more recently still, by contestants in the Idol franchise of televised singing competitions. Melismatic phrasing is, then, the stylistic hallmark

of monks and divas alike. That what is, fundamentally, quite a basic formal device could bring to mind such seemingly divergent connotations—expressions of religious

ecstasy and what I suspect most likely readers of this document would tend to dis-

miss as calculated sentimentality, vocal histrionics, or schlock—is a source of nearlimitless satisfaction for me. The melismatic gesture can also be a useful framework for thinking about Donald Judd.

Understand first that I can probably count on one hand the number of Donald

Judd sculptures that I’ve seen in person. The not-always-acknowledged fact of the

matter is that people who grow up well away from any of the major cultural centers (and I can assure you Tampa, Florida, where I myself grew up, is not one of these major cultural centers) tend only to encounter works of art by way of documentation and description. I was in university before I saw a Judd box in person, by which point

I would have had already a reasonable grasp both of the phenomenological play at work in Minimal sculpture and its role in a historical trajectory of critical practice.

This is to say that the discourse of Minimal Art preceded, and so largely came to supersede, for me, the physical encounter of its objects. I mention all of this for several

reasons. Firstly, it goes quite a ways toward explaining my particular fondness for displaying work in the form of documentation and reproduction. More importantly, at

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least for the time being, I mention it because the reader who might reasonably expect to encounter art objects in person could be forgiven for having forgotten the imagi-

native and imaginary functions of those objects for those with no such expectation.

That is, I suspect that someone for whom mention of Donald Judd primarily brings to mind actual encounters with actual objects might be less likely than I to think of those objects in terms of Mariah Carey.

Moving on: I was looking at a monograph or I was looking at the thumbnailed

results of an online image search (I’m not sure which, and I’m not sure that it mat-

ters), and I found myself wondering what the effect, in terms of both visual and affective impact, would be of seeing every Judd box brought together in a single room.

I’m thinking here of something more expansive than the installations in Marfa (not

that I’ve been there) or than even an exhaustive museum retrospective (not that I’ve been to one); rather, I imagined a purely fictive environment in which every sculpture,

every box (and there must be hundreds of them) was brought into a single space. I picture this looking like something between an ancient Egyptian tomb cache and the pickup area of an IKEA store. In any case, it would be ridiculous.

That music can be thought of in mathematical terms is well enough understood,

and the Western musical scale is, formally, not unlike Minimal Art’s grid. Along these

lines, a Judd box is not formally far removed from an exploration of a single musical

note (something Cage-y, perhaps). One is perhaps unlikely to read much in the way of emotive or expressive content into such an exploration, and the same holds for any

given Judd sculpture. Five-hundred Judd boxes would, however, take on a markedly different character. In that a Mariah Carey song (I had in mind Vision of Love, Carey’s 1990 debut single and a master-work—some might say, “train-wreck”—of melismatic phrasing) can, as any conventional piece of music, be broken down into individual

notes on a standard scale, that song, for all its perhaps intemperate theatricality, can be thought of as not altogether different from Judd’s oeuvre, regarded in toto.

It’s a leap, to be sure, but this was my starting point. What remains unclear even

to me through this exercise, however, is what its impact would be if actually realized.1

If Judd’s life work can amount to a single sweeping, melismatic gesture, is that gesture qualitatively more like the Gregorian chant or Vision of Love? Such a distinction can 16

I went so far as to make a bulletin board pairing several-dozen photographs of Judd sculptures with the sheet music for Vision of Love [Melisma], but this served more to illustrate the premise than to realize its potential results.

1

left top: Mariah Carey. Vision of Love 7” single (1990). left bottom: Melisma. Dye sublimation prints, sheet music, and push pins on cork bulletin board.

only made by the individual listener/viewer, of course, and herein lies the point.

Melisma is necessarily an excess, an excess of feeling and so an excess of meaning,

and it would seem that such an excess necessarily inspires a degree of ambivalence.

It is entirely possible to be swept up in the excessive feelings of the Carey single— certainly this must have had something to do with its commercial success—if one can believe in them or else suspend one’s disbelief in them. If one cannot, however, or if one chooses not to, the gesture becomes crass or manipulative, offensive on a

range of principles spanning good taste and moral certitude. One may be more read-

ily prepared to trust in the sincerity of the warbling monks or of Donald Judd, but the devices that each employ are, formally at least, identical.

Donald Judd is dead, of course; his career spans decades, and its products are so

resolutely unembellished as to provide an ideal set of experimental conditions. I have a harder row to hoe, given the relative diversity of the objects I make and the fact that

the pseudo-retrospective situation I’ve set up spans only two years, but the perilous space between transcendence and schmaltz is nevertheless one that I consistently seek to occupy.

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Overdetermination and Critical Drag If the melismatic gesture constitutes a surplus of meaning whose product is irre-

ducibly ambivalent, overdetermination, a surplus of meaning of an entirely different

character, yields similar conclusions by wholly different means. Historically, the condition of subjective overdetermination has been felt most acutely, if to varying degrees

and in various ways, by persons made to occupy marginal or marginalized subject

positions. With the exponential growth of information economies, however, a similar excess of specious causality now threatens to mark all persons in one form or another. As we come to know, or as we come to believe that we know, increasingly more about

ourselves (and others, in turn, come to know or think they know increasingly more about us), we each begin to feel the tightening strictures of that knowledge.

Legal and medical (and extra-legal and pseudo-medical) discourses have circum-

scribed the subjecthood of marginalized people—women, members of ethnic minori18

ties and colonized subjects, gay people, the list goes on—to such a degree in history that their effects have come to be intuited by those people as much as they are read-

ily acknowledged. For evidence of legalistic incursions onto personhood, one need only consider the fact that, in a North American context at least, “Women’s Rights” or

“Civil Rights” or “Gay Rights” each describe something qualitatively distinct from “Hu-

man Rights.” The impact of medical discourse is no less conspicuous: in the case of women, one can cite the turn-of-the-century fashion for hysterics, say, or the frenzy of judgment that continues to attend all aspects of motherhood. Where non-European people are concerned, there have been the pseudo-scientific investigations of head

size and shape, bone density, libido or purported libido, the mandatory sickle-cell

screening (a de-facto blood-quantum test and once-common prerequisite for marriage); one can think of The Bell Curve. For gay people, too, there is the looming influ-

ence of psychiatry, and there is HIV, which marks all non-straight people, irrespective of sero-status, should they attempt to donate blood, bone marrow, or organs.

Legal constraints, in short, confer outlaw status on the blandest of activities, and

medicine pathologizes what remains. That these tendencies exert a deleterious influence on societies at large is widely (if not universally) accepted, but, in any case, certain present conditions would indicate that similar subjective limitations may likely

come, increasingly and more directly, to mark just about everyone. The seeming proliferation of non-life-threatening ailments, familiar to anyone living where televised

prescription drug advertisements are allowed, is perhaps one indication, as is the

rush to self-diagnose such ailments with the aid of the Internet. Mounting incursions

upon civil liberties in response to the “Global War on Terror” constitute another. The modes of action are different, but we’ll see if the effects aren’t very much the same.

I don’t mean to belabor any of these points, only to suggest that past artistic re-

sponses to the condition of marginalization become only more pertinent in a scenario where all people are increasingly likely to find themselves similarly co-marginalized.

In particular, I would like to devote some attention to the ways in which aesthetic

tactics arrived at in the 1960s and 70s—Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Institution-

al Critique, each of which in turn foregrounded, in some fashion, the visual codes of bureaucracy and of the “institution”—have been taken up by “minority artists.” I do 19

so in part to address particular precedents to the work that I make and to clarify the

position I see my work occupying in the informal trajectory that those precedents describe. I also hope to demonstrate that, as interested as I am in an academic explora-

tion of how art objects and artistic strategies come to hold their understood functions, this exploration is fundamentally linked to something like a political stance, even if my first instinct is not necessarily to discuss the work in those terms.

One can of course cite any number of minority artists (if, for simplicity’s sake, we

can forgive the shortcomings of that phrasing) who worked in and around dominant

modes of critical practice before the Minimalism. Insofar as Abstract Expressionism or Color Field painting constituted “critical practice,” one could look to Helen Fran-

kenthaler, say, or Sam Gilliam as examples. That we tend to speak of Frankenthaler

as a “woman painter” or Gilliam as a “black abstractionist” has in most cases, it bears

restating, little to do with the work itself. In other cases, we encounter artists whose work assimilates less cleanly: in Rauschenberg or Johns, say, we can descry a varying-

ly subtle detourning of masculinist constructions of expression, culminating in a mordant rejection of “the hand” then taken up Warhol (and nearly everybody coming after

Warhol). I would like, however, to suggest a distinction—albeit a permeable one— between these artists’ practices and those pursued by certain minority artists after Minimalism. In that Minimal Art constituted a form of Modernist end-game, practices

arising from and around it (Conceptualism, Institutional Critique, etc.) share, I would argue, a sensibility distinct from those arising earlier.2

To ascribe, as I am about to do, to artists like Eva Hesse or Lynda Benglis (working

in her Process-Art mode) a characteristic set of concerns distinct from those of someone like Robert Morris, or to describe Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s early performances

using terms removed from those one would apply to someone like Michael Asher is, unfortunately, to participate in a long-running and well-established program of ghet-

toization, of essentializing discourse. I do so now with trepidation, and I do so only because such discourses have shaped the way those artists’ work has been received and so have shaped the influence that their practices would have on artists coming

later, myself included. Hesse and Benglis, by discrediting the presumed universality of Minimal Art’s viewer, and Ukeles, by revealing the institutions of art to be not only 20

2 It’s worth noting here that the cliché of Duchamp being “ahead of his time” is not one arrived at unreasonably, with Fountain or Boîte-en-valise or any number of other works predating by decades similar explorations into the role institution by other artists and critics.

compromised by capital but also inherently gendered, each contributed to a process by which Minimalism and Institutional Critique came to be more than academic explorations in a Modernist vein. They introduced, in varying degrees of explicitness, the notion that works of art and the manner in which we apprehend them have very much to do with the circumstances of individual lives.

That minority artists would first come to prominence in a concerted way during

this period is of course due largely to concurrent political developments beyond the sphere of visual art. Beyond that, though, critical practice of the period marks the first

time in which artists, “minority” and otherwise, began to make work that specifically

addressed the ways in which institutions and other delimiting structures (structures of varying transparency) direct and circumscribe the experience of that work. For

Minimalism there was architecture; for Conceptual art, language; museums, galleries, universities, governments, and corporations for Institutional Critique. For reasons

outlined already, the investigation of such structures was and largely continues to be of particular, visceral concern to minority artists.

Beyond even this emotional/political alignment (political and emotional life

never straying far from one another), developments in critical practice during this

period brought about a shift in favored aesthetic forms, away from anything gestural or “expressive” and towards the institutional, the clinical, and the bureaucratic. Paint and the implements for applying, flinging, pushing, and scraping it were largely out;

dispassionate photography, didactic panels, documents, and furniture came increasingly to be the norm. Because minority artists had and have for so long been denied

access to so-called “expressive” forms and because the institutions to which such “bureaucratic” visual devices refer had and have for so long defined their subjective potentials, it comes as little surprise that these would find persistent favor among

such artists even now. It is in no small part for this reason that they continue to hold appeal for me.

Having established that certain critical practices by women artists in the Sixties

and Seventies should be considered integral to the wider explorations of which they

were significant parts, even if we commonly fail to do so, it’s worth noting that the character of other practices arising later operate somewhat differently. By the end 21

of the Seventies and certainly throughout the Eighties and Nineties, the aesthetics of critique, established over the preceding decades, came to be employed by artists

not only to further broadly-political or –theoretical explorations but by which to attempt, as well as to problematize, ideas of individual “expression.” More importantly, because of the presumed transparency of bureaucratic visual forms, the expressive content of such work demonstrates a certain furtiveness and so can be thought to

carry a quality of subversive intent. This manner of crypto-expression contributes to

what I’ve elected to call a “Critical Drag,” by which critique is accomplished through insinuation or performance, either of institutional conventions or of the conventions

of critique itself. I would argue that artists working in this manner tend to undergo a (frankly) rather bizarre process of identification with the institutional object of critique, and I’ve most consistently aligned my own practice in terms of artists working in this vein. I’d like to mention some them here, briefly, now.

Where methods of exhibition are concerned, a number artists have explicitly

used the museum as a vehicle for exploding those narratives that we mostly take for

granted, and certainly a project like Marcel Broodthaers’s Département des Aigles, in its sardonic take on art history and museological convention, warrants mention

for having perhaps first and most fully realized a “museum fiction” to which no discernable narrative manages to attach itself. A project like Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum

Document, however, though similar in the vocabularies of display that it employs, is an altogether more disturbing proposition, chiefly for the way in which Kelly sub-

mits the emotionally (and culturally and politically) charged collective narrative of motherhood to the proscriptive rigors not only of exhibition but of psychoanalysis

and of archaeology (or pseudo-archaeology). That institutional discourse had always been applied to motherhood is of course the point; the sense of trauma that the

work provokes comes from Kelly’s having adopted those discourses herself, realizing them within particular conventions of display such as to rend not only the conceptual

wholeness of her own experience but the ways in which we, as viewers, choose to understand and interpret experiences like hers. Ultimately, my interest in Document arises less from the content of its constituent pieces or even the particularities of the 22

top: Marcel Broodthaers. Département des aigles, section des figurines (1972). bottom: Mary Kelly. Post-partum Document V (classified speciments, proportional diagrams) (1977).

psychoanalytic constructions that propel the work, more in the ways in which those pieces and those constructions are framed, literally and figuratively. As Kelly herself indicates in the introduction to the published version of the work:

Lorna Simpson. Untitled 2 (Necklines) (1989).

[It] subscribes to certain modes of presentation; the framing, for example, parodies a familiar type of museum display in so far as it allows my archaeology of everyday life to slip unannounced into the great hall and ask impertinent questions of its keepers. This reading relies very heavily on the viewer’s affective relation to the vital configuration of objects and texts.3

This “unannounced” arrival to “ask impertinent questions” is Critical Drag’s ba-

sic method of action, and one encounters it, albeit in forms more subtle (and so more insidious) than those of Kelly’s autobiographical specimens, in Lorna Simpson’s work from the 1980s. Simpson’s practice in that period deftly yet decisively makes use of

a variety of institutionally-coded signifiers: the anonymous (or “anonymized”) pho-

tographic elements, reminiscent equally of ethnographic and medical surveys and of

mug-shots, the etched plastic placards that call to mind the name tags of office spaces, or of doctor’s waiting rooms, of laboratories, museums, or prisons. The work occu-

pies a place firmly within the milieu of second-generation Conceptual practice—it is,

in its formal devices, indistinguishable from it—while at the same time eliciting from its vocabularies an underlying menace, revealing in and through them the racialized systems of language itself, theretofore unaddressed in the work of her peers.

This fact speaks to one of the aspects of such practices that most appeals to me,

their fundamental inability to “sit with” either other practices with which they share common aesthetic or conceptual strategies or with work that treats similar political

content more explicitly. Thus Post-partum Document, though it on the surface might

resemble, for instance, Haacke’s Shapolsky et al., and though it is no less concerned than that work with problematizing institutions of artistic display, stands disquietingly apart from that work. At the same time, Kelly’s methods set the project radically 3 Kelly, M. (1983). Post-partum Document. London ; Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul.

apart from other, more essentializing efforts characteristic of Feminist practice of the

same period. That is to say, Document has precious little in common with, say, Judy Chicago’s attempts to arrive at a gynocentric mode of artistic production, though both

23

artists work toward concerns broadly (if often disparagingly) identifiable as “wom-

en’s issues.” By the same token, Simpson’s approach is categorically unlike the less ambiguous, more directly confrontational practices characteristic of other Identity Politics work emerging at the same time. There are pragmatic reasons for adopting

these approaches, and we can see just one outlined, unambiguously, by Félix González Torres in this 1995 interview with Ross Bleckner:

[We] cannot give the powers that be what they want, what they are expecting from us. Some homophobic senator is going to have a very hard time trying to explain to his constituency that my work is homoerotic or pornographic, but if I were to do a performance with HIV blood—that’s what he wants, that’s what the rags expect because they can sensationalize that, and that’s what’s disappointing. […] Some of the work I make is more effective because it’s more dangerous. We both make work that looks like something else but it’s not that. We’re infiltrating that look.4

This quality of “infiltrating the look” is one shared by both Kelly and Simpson, as

well as González and several others whom I’ll address shortly. In a very real sense, these artists adopt as a strategy the logic of “passing,” in terms of both its tactics and

its effects. “Passing,” as a critical or artistic gesture, like other forms of passing (passing, individually, for white, for straight, etc.), delineates an affective space of concerted

ambivalence, operating on a premise of disingenuousness that makes all parties uncomfortable, even where the subterfuge is understood by its audience. In political

terms, we can understand such gestures (artistic and otherwise) as causing reasonable consternation both for “some homophobic senator” and for the artist inclined

to “do a performance with HIV blood.” For one it carries the threat of enemy incursion, for the other the hallmarks of a betrayal. Still, as Kelly’s Document worked in

some senses at cross purposes to Institutional Critique and early Feminist practice, as Simpson’s work did to Conceptual Art and Identity Politics, the jarring ambivalence

engendered and exemplified by models such as these can be thought to instantiate

small points of rupture in the conceptual wholeness of ideology and practice, so creating unexpected and critically (and affectively) useful points of entry. 24

In sociological terms, at least where the United States is concerned, one tends to

4 Bleckner, R. (1995). Felix Gonzales-Torres. BOMB Magazine. 51. Retrieved from http://bombsite.com/ issues/51/articles/1847

think of “passing” most frequently in terms of race, the term most frequently applied to non-white people (and here most frequently people of African descent) “passing for white.” This is where the most familiar literary examples direct us, though many

cultures also trot out the occasional example of women pretending to be men (usually so as to be able to participate in some battle or another).5 Adrian Piper would have been among the first visual artists to tackle the phenomenon directly, and her work

has certainly shaped my perception of the issue. Nevertheless, I would like to devote some attention, now, to how the practices of several gay artists can be thought to

Untitled (Tampa Bay, November 1947). Framed Chromira prints and plastic sheeting.

reflect its concerns. Passing is, in fact, the default experiential mode for gay people: in marked contrast with other forms of passing, a person tends to be presumed het-

erosexual (this is usually framed as giving one “the benefit of the doubt,” a supposed

courtesy) until he or she identifies him- or herself otherwise. For precisely this reason, I would argue that the influence of “performing normativity” or “insinuation” or

“infiltrating the look” is at times expressed with a far greater degree of native ambiguHere it’s worth qualifying that “passing” nearly always refers to marginalized subjects imitating or “passing themselves off for” normative subjects—black people for white, women for men, gay people for straight, etc. The ambivalence that I’ve referred to this engendering has much to do with a perception that passing is something done for individual gain, hence the understandable acrimony on the part of marginalized people who cannot or do not “pass.” “Drag,” by contrast, refers in most cases to an inverse phenomenon, most commonly of men impersonating women. My usage of the term (in describing “Critical Drag”) is a considered one: drag is always an acknowledged performance, a kind of qualified illusion, and we tend to read it as a form of commentary, even where it extends no further than mockery. As with the melismatic gesture, the formal properties of drag versus passing are identical, our differing judgments of either coming down to a perception of intent. 5

Baker, G. (2007). The Other Side of the Wall. October (120) : 106-137. 6

ity and reflexivity in the work of gay artists.

The three people whose work has most indelibly (and visibly) marked my own

have been Roni Horn, Félix González Torres, and Tom Burr. One needs only a passing familiarity with their work and mine to determine as much. Each of these artists

has introduced certain conceptual and formal strategies that have resonated deeply

with me and, in some shape or form, marked the work that I produce. Horn’s posi-

tioning of like objects (turned copper cylinders, colored glass wedges, near-identical photographs) in ways that suggest and then disarticulate perceptual and narrative continuity have directly informed a number of pieces I’ve made—photographic works

like DREAMS COME TRUE 1993 – 2002 – 2008 and Untitled (Bound to Fail) and a video

work, Dreams Can Come True, where a I’ve digitally modified the colors of single images to make up entire spectra, or Untitled (Tampa Bay, November 1947), where I pair near-identical found photographs. Indeed, it was through her early work that I came

to fully appreciate the affective and even poetic potential of phenomenological explorations arrived at through vocabularies of Minimalism. Burr’s “camp” appropriation

of Tony Smith,6 coöpting failed or dead-ended trajectories of Minimal Art as a means of exploring personal and collective of loss, was equally foundational, and, though

25

mine look very little like his and are less similar still in their contents, the idea of

bulletin boards is one that I certainly arrived at after being aware of his own. More

basically, both of these artists engage in substantive and aesthetic deployments of Minimal and Conceptual tactics in ways that blur distinctions between performance (or insinuation) and appropriation.

In my own work, the impact of subjective overdetermination, “offness” (of the

kind one finds in Roni Horn’s cobblestones cast in lead, say) and ambivalence (Burr’s

Brutalist Bulletin Board, perhaps, and certainly in Deep Purple, his modular plywood recreation of Serra’s Tilted Arc) are not invoked as means of addressing one or another “issue,” not typically, anyway. Rather, I understand all of these things systemically,

intuitively, and they inform my work in ways that are not always as easily identifiable as they might be in some of the practices mentioned. These are, however, central both to the way that I understand experience and to the decisions that I make as an artist. And then there is Félix González Torres. Here it gets messier.

My fondness for González’s work goes well beyond conceptual or aesthetic or

even political affinity, and if there is any influence that has colored every aspect of everything I’ve done, it’s been his. The role his work has played in shaping my own way of thinking about art very nearly approximates, I suspect, what people mean

when they speak of “having saints on our side.” I could construct an argument for

or around it, but any such argument would be gravely beside the point. I try to remain candid about the forms and tactics that I’ve appropriated from various sources,

either in whole or in part, but my quotations of his work are certainly and by far the most numerous, and they are among the most explicit. A decision as trivial as using blue cardstock for the text panel of a bulletin board is ultimately informed by Untitled (Loverboy); there is Fear, a set silicone arm bands (“awareness bracelets” of the Lance

Armstrong “Livestrong” sort) laser-etched to read “Untitled (Fear),” another González

piece; when I make photographs or offset prints or scatter pieces, I am invariably

thinking, in some form or another, of his photographs and offset prints and scatter

pieces. My “Untitled (Parenthetical)” titling is less a tactic than a tic, and González is at the heart of it. I don’t see these references as being categorically any different 26

top: Felix González Torres. Untitled (Fear) (1991). bottom: Fear. Laser-etched silicone arm bands.

than the processes of quotation that characterize countless similar gestures in the

tradition of painting, say, though I prefer to think of them more along the lines of a singer who interjects a phrase or two of a favorite song into one of her own, or the way someone might, consciously or unconsciously, adopt the mannerisms of a loved one. Either that, or González’s work simply constitutes my standard for clarity of artistic

vision, and, if I can’t expect to ever make work as clear or as powerful myself, I’m willing to settle for imitation.

Or it’s both. (It’s probably both.)

Plea for Intercession (Is it my goal? Is it your goal?). Oil and gold leaf on linen.

Early in producing this work, in the winter of 2007, I made Plea for Intercession

(Is it my goal? Is it your goal?), a pair of oil portraits depicting Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Aaliyah, two R&B/hip-hop performers that died in 2002 and 2001, respectively. The

style of the paintings was cribbed from the airbrushed tribute T-shirts that became popular after their deaths (you can still find them at shopping mall kiosks across the

States). I did this with two things in mind: (1) that I was a fan of both performers, was affected by their deaths, and had always wanted a pair of the airbrushed T-shirts me-

morializing them, and (2) that, if I was to actually buy and wear the shirts, the gesture

would almost certainly be understood as an ironic one. The same, I knew, would likely go for making oil portraits on linen. There would be a rift, likely one I wouldn’t be able to span, between reception and intent, and my interest was, in fact, not in spanning

that rift at all; my aim was simply to occupy it. Is the song a heartfelt “vision of love”

or a ploy to sell records? Are the paintings an ironic expropriation of hip-hop culture

or a genuine, individual expression of collective loss? Are the González references instances of intellectual laziness, of plagiarism, or something altogether more sincere and even inevitable? The work would be a great deal more boring, I think, if I could convince my audience one way or the other, so, by and large, I do not attempt to.

27

Florida Work Charts 1 & 2 Archival inkjet print and “Color Harmony Work Chart” on Crescent board.

Other slippages I hope that by this point the conceptual and art-historical bases for my interest

in blurred distinctions are somewhat clear, why Conceptual practice and institutional

methods of display seem to me pertinent to an exploration of subjective experience. The precedents I’ve discussed largely demonstrate precisely such dichotomies, and,

while they certainly reflect on many of the individual gestures that make up the work, they don’t account for all of the choices that I’ve made. Crucially, they don’t account

for my decision to locate much of the work within the aesthetics and material culture of domestic life. They don’t clarify my fondness for dollar-store picture frames [Un-

titled (for Peggy Noonan), Untitled (Mom), Untitled (I could still go there), and quite a

few other pieces], for party decorations [Happy Birthday! (Self-portrait at 23), Con-

gratulations!, Untitled (Whistle register), Untitled (A Long December), and others], bolts of fabric [Untitled (1971a) and Untitled (Wedding Rocks)], or tourist memora29

bilia [Untitled (Ride into the mist) and Untitled (Maid of the Mist)]. They only partly justify the text-based business cards or the corkboards.

In short, my near-constant conflation of domestic, artistic, and institutional ref-

erents speaks to a sensibility that is maybe uniquely my own (though shades of it are

at evidence in Tom Burr’s forced integration of Minimal sculpture and the interior architecture of leather bars), and, to explain that sensibility, it seems appropriate to offer several of the extra-artistic circumstances that have conspired to inform it.

I’ve already suggested that central Florida is not place marked by its popular em-

brace of contemporary art (with the exception, perhaps, of the be-eyepatched glass

artist Dale Chihuly, who, like Hulk Hogan and a handful of lesser-known professional athletes and Mafia figures, seems to have found in the Tampa Bay Area a welcoming harbor). I’m also—though this is hardly a fact unique to me—the only person in my family who has elected to pursue fine art in an academic context. I come, instead,

from a family of research scientists (this is perhaps more exceptional). My mother was a palynologist and paleoecologist, my father is a geneticist. My father’s family has

been involved in the field of microbiology for some hundred years (a yearly conference held by the Biological Stain Commission was, for a time, named after my greatgrandfather, a founding member). My paternal grandmother and great-grandfather

(he of the Stain Commission) were both also painters, though, and my grandmother also worked in sculpture (primarily hammered lead), stained glass, mosaic, print-

making and probably other media. Examples of their respective outputs were to be found everywhere around the house as I grew up.

I mention these things because they contributed to an aesthetic home-life that, in

many ways, I seem bent on recreating in my work.

I don’t recall ever having had babysitters, in the conventional sense. Rather, I’d

be dropped off at one or the other of my parents’ labs at the University and left tem-

porarily in the care of one or the other of their doctoral candidates. There tend to be, it’s worth noting, quite a few corkboards in and around university science labs

(or there were, at least, in the late-Eighties and early-Nineties, when I spent time in

and around those labs), and on those corkboards one is (or was) as likely to encoun30

top: Untitled (For Peggy Noonan). Series of seven framed Fuji Frontier prints.

bottom: Untitled (Ride into the Mist). Framed souvenir photograph. With Nadja Pelkey.

ter vacation photos and clipped-out Far Side comics as electron microscope photographs, PCR gels, or diagrams charting the course of insecticide resistance in fruit

flies (Drosophila melanogaster, one childhood constant I’ve as of yet not felt the need to revisit artistically). Some of my earliest drawings are of rotifers and of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-inspired character called “Radiation Bunny,” modeled after the biohazard warning signs that marked the refrigerators and autoclaves in my parents’

labs. At home, stacks of Science or Nature butted up against woodblock prints, oil paintings, and the accumulated rolls of gift-wrap that my brother and I sold for school fundraisers (and which our parents inevitably bought), all of which bore the degradations of a rotating crew of housecats.

These anecdotes are cute enough, I guess, if mildly embarrassing, but I introduce

them mainly to suggest that the pervasive dorkiness that characterizes so much of what I do is, at the very least, something that I come by honestly. Insofar as I’m now

suggesting that the thrust of my practice has been, in many respects, the recreation of these familiar aesthetic scenarios, I run the risk of deflating some of my arguments about the critical potential of ambiguity, say, or the political necessity of collapsing distinctions between artistic and institutional discursive spheres. I don’t have any real problem with that.

top: Happy Birthday! (Self-portrait at 23). Mulberry paper, glue, and yarn.

bottom: Congratulations!. “Shrinky Dinks” platic and embroidery floss.

Because I suspect that, at times, my work doesn’t really look (or, more ambigu-

ously, “feel”) like it was made with an exhibition space in mind. I suspect that it—or

I—come across as ill-at-ease in or ill-suited to that environment. This is, in fact, very much the case. My work is marked by a kind of “offness” in many ways of a different sort than that of the artists whose work I’ve mentioned, and the particular offness of

my work leads, perhaps, to different conclusions. As in their work, however, that bit of discomfort is, I think, a very real—if not the primary—point of entry.

One visitor to my studio remarked that he thought my work looked “like decora-

tions for a very weird, very sad five-year-old’s birthday party.” I was, as you’ll perhaps expect, delighted.

31

Untitled (Pink Flamingos) Laser-printed cardstock and push pins on cork bulletin board.

Catalogues raisonnés I’ll end now with some brief thoughts on autobiography as it relates or does not

relate to my practice, and, more generally, on what “autobiography” can or might

mean for someone born at the tail-end of 1984. Because, for all that certain writers

or cultural critics might hyperbolize about purportedly drastic changes to the social,

economic, and technological landscapes in which lives play out, certain facts of the present matter are different, and the character of these differences seems to bear consideration. Of these new facts, perhaps the most startling concerns notions of

“the past.” There is really no longer any such thing. This has largely been a function

of shifting metaphors, and the agent of these changes has been, all hyperbole aside, 33

technological in nature.

What I mean by this is not that people born at the tail-end of 1984, who have

grown up with and on the Internet, are somehow more inclined to “live in the present,” and I most certainly don’t mean to say anything like “the future is now,” which people do seem in the habit of saying and which of course means precisely nothing.

Rather, I mean to say that metaphors for conceptualizing the past, in which “the past”

is something that ends—that shapes one, certainly, and which can proverbially “come

back to haunt” one, but which nevertheless does, in some meaningful way, end and

then in some meaningful sense goes away, available for reconsideration but, at least for the moment, gone—are no longer fit to describe present conditions. How those conditions are set to change over the next five years, one year, six months, two weeks, I don’t care to predict, but here are several facts that stand as of this writing: 1.

I cannot think of anyone my age whom I have ever known—for any amount of time or in any context or capacity—that I cannot or could not find online, one way or another.

3.

This archival process continues unabated, and it will do so, in some capacity, with or without my direct contribution or consent.

2. 4.

There are records of my activities archived online as far back as 1994. I was nine years old in 1994, and I could not purge those records if I wanted to nor if I tried. None of these facts seem at all strange to me.

The received metaphors that we employ to describe the progression of time, the

“stories of lives,” or what have you, are rapidly losing currency. The idea of a life as a

“story” with “chapters” that begin and end seems likely to first to go. The full data set of a given life is increasingly compiled automatically, preserved indefinitely, with in-

dividual points in that plot available for recall immediately and without modification. Where before narrative was essential in order account for oneself, for one’s individual

actions and failings and contributions up-until-this-point, this is increasingly not the 34

case. What can it mean to “open” or “close” a “chapter in one’s life” when everyone one has ever known, for any amount of time and in any capacity, is right there to coun-

ter with his or her own take on just how things all went down? We cannot make into

the characters of a story people who will not, in any meaningful sense, go away. We cannot make into the protagonists of stories our prior selves if they, too, are naggingly and indelibly present.

This is neither the language nor the logic of storytelling. It is, instead, the logic

of aggregation—perpetual past, perpetual present, automatic and impassive. This, again, does not seem strange to me.

Under such circumstances, where histories aren’t “written” so much as simply

allowed to accumulate, the catalogue raisonné comes to seem an apt enough means of

giving form to one’s experiences. Under circumstances where everybody one has ever known for any amount of time in any context or capacity is ineradicably at hand, un-

der circumstances in which they, like all of experience’s impertinent details and, too,

like works of art, all seem more familiar and indeed make more sense as thumbnailed results of an online image search, the catalogue entry—a small picture, a caption, a note on provenance, and a date—may be the most appropriate, the most honest form top left and right: Illustrations for Untitled (Pink Flamingos).

left bottom: In Case of Emergency (2002). Stained glass windows, hardware cloth, and ceramic tile letters. Included in Pink Flamingos, my high school graduation exhibition.

that an art practice might take.

It is enough. Anything else is too much.

Plenitude, excess, and the melismatic gesture have their own logic, and it’s ulti-

mately a logic of flatness and of ambivalence; it is the logic of a bed of nails. There can

be depths, and gestures can be “piercing,” but, taken in aggregate, the effect is one of perfect surface, perfect smoothness. This is why it doesn’t necessarily matter if the work is present in the gallery or not present, if the documentation on the corkboard is organized or not organized, if “the story” is written or not written. There’s something

to be gained by trying, however, or at least there ought to be (there are, you see, some stories that even I still need to tell myself). So that’s what I’ve done.

It appears to me, troublingly, at times, that the questions which I’ve been hon-

ing and polishing, and these for far longer than the preceding two years, amount to

something very like, So what? Why bother? You’ll see then, why it may be in my best 35

interest to avoid answering them, why the success or failure of what I do and make does not rest in answering them but in sustaining them, continually probing them if only to keep them alive a bit longer.

I could come down for or against this effort, constituting as it does its own kind of

magical thinking; I could tell you of my intentions toward it, one way or the other. I would, of course, almost certainly get my story wrong.

I’ll say, however, and I’ll conclude by saying: I am nothing if not a hopeless opti-

mist. I am hopelessly optimistic.

I Could Still Go There Single-channel digital video loop (still).

Untitled (1971a) Chromira print, poster frame, and digitally-printed cotton fabric.

Work Always Be My Baby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Catastrophe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Destroy Everything You Touch . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Florida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Fluo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Melisma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Untitled (Against Hope) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 The Hand, the Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Forgeries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 No Heroic Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Sickness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Young Luv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

39

Always Be My Baby

Calling

Dissertation

Untitled (1971a)

Laser-cut and -etched acrylic

Framed dye-sublimation prints

Chromira print, poster frame, and digitally-printed cotton fabric

Untitled (1971b)

Untitled (Always Be My Baby)

Chromira print, poster frame, and digital inkjet print

Graphite and white Letraset on photographic paper, marble tile, mirror, and wall

Untitled (In Astrology we see the state of the Cosmic Mind)

40

Framed natal charts

Untitled (Litanies)

Untitled (MC)

Untitled (Missing You)

Laser-cut acrylic, steel key ring, and steel hook

Single-channel digital video loop

Embossed paper, dust, and wooden trays

Untitled (We Belong Together)

Untitled (Wedding Rocks)

Untitled (Whistle register)

Set of 1000 thermographic (raised-ink) business cards

Framed rubbing on canvas, digitally-printed cotton fabric

Foil banner letters

41

Catastrophe

26 Years and 3 Months

I’ll Love You for 1000 Yrs

The Ground – Split – Forever

Crocheted stuffed animal, chalk ground, encaustic, and ash from the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption

Set of 1000 four-color business cards

Titanium white oil ground on copper

Untitled (Catastrophe)

Untitled (Often, but only a little at a time)

Untitled (WHAM CITY)

Two sets of 1000 thermographic (raised-ink) business cards

Set of 1000 thermographic (raised-ink) business cards

Twelve “God’s eyes” (yarn and wooden dowels) and lead white oil ground

42

Destroy Everything You Touch

Congratulations!

Fear

Gone, Gone

“Shrinky Dinks” plastic and embroidery floss

Laser-etched silicone arm bands, Félix González Torres monograph

Unique collograph print

Liberty Forever

Untitled (A Long December)

Untitled (Before you die, you see the ring)

Framed Fuji Frontier print

Flag case and polyester confetti

Framed Chromira prints

44

Untitled (Destroy everything you touch) Set of 1000 thermographic (raised-ink) business cards

Untitled (Ride into the mist) Framed souvenir photograph

Collaboration with Nadja Pelkey

Florida

1 Year, 111 Days

Damn Shame

I Could Still Go There

Single-channel digital video loop

Single-channel digital video loop

Single-channel video loop

Untitled (Carrollwood Meadows)

Untitled (Everyone remembers where they were that day)

Untitled (for Peggy Noonan)

Framed Chromira print

46

Set of 1000 thermographic (raised-ink) business cards

Series of seven framed Fuji Frontier prints

Untitled (I could still go there) Framed dye-sublimation prints

Untitled (Tampa Bay, November 1947) Framed Chromira prints and plastic sheeting

Fluo

Fugitive Forever

Love Songs

Untitled – Journey – Don’t Stop Believing

Fluorescent oil paint on marble

Fluorescent pigments (various media) on letterhead

Graphite and fluorescent oil paint on paper

Untitled (Mom)

Untitled (Mt. St. Helens)

Framed photo-etchings, printed with fluorescent ink

Fluorescent oil paint on copper

48

Forgeries

Color Harmony Manual

Descriptive Color Names

Florida Forever

Framed pages from the Container Corporation of America’s 1948 Color Harmony Manual

Hardcover book

Oil on marble

Florida Work Charts 1 & 2

Untitled (Florida)

Untitled (Proof)

Archival inkjet print and “Color Harmony Work Chart” on Crescent board

Framed Chromira and Fuji Frontier prints

Set of 22 digital offset prints

51

Light

Dreams Can Come True

DREAMS COME TRUE 1993 – 2002 – 2008

Having Chosen the Best of All Possible Worlds

Single-channel digital video loop

Framed dye-sublimation prints and black photo corners on Crescent board

Dye-sublimation prints

Untitled (Bound to Fail)

Untitled (Condolences)

Untitled (Glories)

Twelve framed dye-sublimation prints and plastic display easels

Framed Chromira prints

Framed Chromira prints

52

Untitled (Knoll Ridge)

Untitled (Maid of the Mist)

Chalk ground, lead oil ground, and oil on panel

Framed Chromira prints and blue disposable poncho material

Untitled (Nauseous from a broken heart) Black photo corners on Crescent board

No Heroic Measures

6/49

Blanket

Blanket, to Blanket

Paperback book

Graphite on paper

Crocheted cotton afghan and chalk ground

Happy Birthday! (Self-portrait at 23)

Ooo-ooo, Ooo-ooo

Mulberry paper, yarn and glue

Fuji Frontier print, mirror, glass, and mirror clips

Plea for Intercession (Is it my goal? Is it your goal?) Oil and gold leaf on linen

55

Sickness

FDP (for Joan and Félix)

Untitled (Bilirubin)

Untitled (Jaundice)

Oil on copper

Glazing medium, Indian yellow pigment powder, and “Suspense” frames

Oil on marble

Untitled (Sclerae)

Untitled (The Beheading of St. Barbara)

Chalk ground tinted with Indian yellow pigment powder on upholstered linen

Chromira prints and acrylic box frames

57

Young Luv

Forever

Melisma

Les Moments (Gesamtboyfriend)

Oil and mirror-finish gold Letraset on marble

Sheet music, dye sublimation prints, and push pins on cork bulletin board

“Custom oil portrait,” dye-sublimation print, “Strata” frame, and packaging materials.

Nostalgia Kills

Untitled (Bleeding Love)

Untitled (Pink Flamingos)

Flock-printed t-shirt

Single-channel digital video loop

Laser-printed cardstock and push pins on cork bulletin board

58

Young Love (Where hope is not knowing and wanting not to know) Chalk ground and mirror-finish gold Letraset on panel

Melisma LeBel Gallery, University of Windsor Monday, April 27 – Friday, May 8, 2009

60

Untitled (Against Hope)

abraham cowley

Against Hope

(1656)

HOPE, whose weak Being ruin’d is, Alike if it succeed, and if it miss; Whom Good or Ill does equally confound, And both the Horns of Fates Dilemma wound. Vain shadow! which dost vanish quite, Both at full Noon, and perfect Night! The Stars have not a possibility Of blessing Thee; If things then from their End we happy call, ‘Tis Hope is the most Hopeless thing of all.

Hope, thou bold Taster of Delight, Who whilst thou shouldst but tast, devour’st it quite! Thou bringst us an Estate, yet leav’st us Poor, By clogging it with Legacies before! The Joys which we entire should wed, Come deflowr’d Virgins to our bed; Good fortunes without gain imported be, Such mighty Custom’s paid to Thee. For Joy, like Wine, kept close does better tast; If it take air before, its spirits wast. 76

Hope, Fortunes cheating Lottery! Where for one prize an hundred blanks there be; Fond Archer, Hope, who tak’st thy aim so far, That still or short, or wide thine arrows are! Thin, empty Cloud, which th’eye deceives With shapes that our own Fancy gives! A Cloud, which gilt and painted now appears, But must drop presently in tears! When thy false beams o’re Reasons light prevail, By Ignes fatui for North-Stars we sail. Brother of Fear, more gaily clad! The merr’ier Fool o’th’ two, yet quite as Mad: Sire of Repentance, Child of fond Desire! That blow’st the Chymicks, and the Lovers fire! Leading them still insensibly’on By the strange witchcraft of Anon! By Thee the one does changing Nature through Her endless Labyrinths pursue, And th’ other chases Woman, whilst She goes More ways and turns than hunted Nature knows.

Untitled (Against Hope) Photographs and assorted documents on cork bulletin boards. 78

79

The Hand, the Deal 01. For Peggy Noonan Untitled (The Beheading of St. Barbara) Untitled (Wedding Rocks) Untitled (for Peggy Noonan) Descriptive Color Names Untitled (1971b) 1 Year, 111 Days Untitled (Mom) Untitled (I could still go there) Untitled (Maid of the Mist) Fear Untitled (MC) Having Chosen the Best of All Possible Worlds 39, 69, 48, 10, 35, 01, 59, 51, 56, 15, 57, 23 (03)

02. Jaundice Untitled (Always Be My Baby) Untitled (Tampa Bay, November 1947) Untitled (Florida) Untitled (Nauseous from a broken heart) Les Moments (Gesamtboyfriend) Untitled (We Belong Together) Untitled (A Long December) Untitled (Litanies) Calling Untitled (Jaundice) Untitled (Pink Flamingos) Dreams Can Come True 37, 67, 49, 61, 26, 68, 36, 55, 06, 52, 63, 12 (10) 80

03. Florida Work Charts Untitled (Everyone remembers where they were that day) Gone, Gone Dissertation Florida Work Charts 1 & 2 Forever Untitled (Destroy everything you touch) Untitled (1971a) 6/49 Untitled (Bound to Fail) Untitled (Catastrophe) Untitled (Ride into the mist) Melisma 47, 20, 11, 17, 18, 46, 34, 02, 42, 43, 65, 29 (04)

04. I Could Still Go There Untitled (WHAM CITY) Ooo-ooo, Ooo-ooo Congratulations! Untitled (Knoll Ridge) FDP (for Joan and Félix) Young Love (Where hope is not knowing and wanting … ) The Ground – Split – Forever Untitled (Before you die, you see the ring) I Could Still Go There Florida Forever 26 Years and 3 Months Untitled – Journey – Don’t Stop Believing 70, 31, 08, 54, 14, 72, 21, 38, 24, 16, 03, 33 (09) 81

05. Love Songs Untitled (In Astrology we see the state of the Cosmic Mind) Untitled (Glories) Damn Shame Untitled (Missing You) Liberty Forever Blanket Untitled (Condolences) Love Songs Color Harmony Manual DREAMS COME TRUE 1993 – 2002 – 2008 Blanket, to Blanket Untitled (Sclerae) 53, 50, 09, 58, 27, 04, 45, 28, 07, 13, 05, 66 (08)

06. Mt. St. Helens Happy Birthday! (Self-portrait at 23) Untitled (Bleeding Love) Fugitive Forever Untitled (Proof) Untitled (Whistle register) Nostalgia Kills Untitled (Often, but only a little at a time) Untitled (Bilirubin) Plea for Intercession (Is it my goal? Is it your goal?) I’ll Love You for 1000 Yrs Untitled (Mt. St. Helens) Untitled (Carrollwood Meadows) 22, 41, 19, 64, 71, 30, 62, 40, 32, 25, 60, 44 (11) 82

Index of works

1 Year, 111 Days, 46 6/49, 55 26 Years and 3 Months, 42 Always Be My Baby, 40–41 Blanket, 55 Blanket, to Blanket, 55 Calling, 40 Catastrophe, 42–43 Color Harmony Manual, 51 Congratulations!, 44 Damn Shame, 46 Descriptive Color Names, 51 Destroy Everything You Touch, 44–45 Dissertation, 40 Dreams Can Come True, 52 DREAMS COME TRUE 1993 – 2002 – 2008, 52 FDP (for Joan and Félix), 57 Fear, 44, [26] Florida, 46–47 Florida Forever, 51 Florida Work Charts 1 & 2, 44, [28] Fluo, 48–49 Forever, 58 Forgeries, 50-51 Fugitive Forever, 48, [9] Gone, Gone, 44 The Ground – Split – Forever, 42 The Hand, the Deal, 80–83 Happy Birthday! (Self-portrait at 23), 45, [31] Having Chosen the Best of All Possible Worlds, 52 84

I Could Still Go There, 46, [37]

I’ll Love You for 1000 Yrs, 42 Les Moments (Gesamtboyfriend), 44, [10] Liberty Forever, 44 Light, 52–53 Love Songs, 48 Melisma, 58, [12, 16] Melisma, 60–75 No Heroic Measures, 54–55 Nostalgia Kills, 48 Ooo-ooo, Ooo-ooo, 55 Plea for Intercession (Is it my goal? Is it your goal?), 55, [27] Sickness, 56–57 Untitled – Journey – Don’t Stop Believing, 48 Untitled (1971a), 40, [38] Untitled (1971b), 40 Untitled (A Long December), 44 Untitled (Against Hope), 76-79 Untitled (Always Be My Baby), 40 Untitled (Before you die, you see the ring), 44 Untitled (The Beheading of St. Barbara), 57 Untitled (Bilirubin), 57 Untitled (Bleeding Love), 58 Untitled (Bound to Fail), 40, [38] Untitled (Catastrophe), 42 Untitled (Carrollwood Meadows), 46, [10] Untitled (Condolences), 52 Untitled (Destroy everything you touch), 44 Untitled (Everyone remembers where they were that day), 46, [14] Untitled (for Peggy Noonan), 46, [30]

Untitled (Florida), 46 Untitled (Glories), 52 Untitled (I could still go there), 47 Untitled (Jaundice), 57 Untitled (In Astrology we see the state of the Cosmic Mind), 40 Untitled (Knoll Ridge), 52 Untitled (Litanies), 40 Untitled (Maid of the Mist), 53 Untitled (MC), 40 Untitled (Missing You), 40 Untitled (Mom), 48 Untitled (Mt. St. Helens), 48 Untitled (Nauseous from a broken heart), 52 Untitled (Often, but only a little at a time), 42 Untitled (Pink Flamingos), 58, [32-35] Untitled (Proof), 44, [14] Untitled (Ride into the mist), 45, [30] Untitled (Sclerae), 57 Untitled (Tampa Bay, November 1947), 47, [25] Untitled (We Belong Together), 41 Untitled (Wedding Rocks), 41 Untitled (WHAM CITY), 42 Untitled (Whistle register), 41 Young Love (Where hope is not knowing and wanting not to know), 59, [14] Young Luv, 58–59