How to Remain Human Catalog

Home , Celeste Lyn Paul, Derf Backderf, Floating canvas, Furt, Nike (Kougioumtzis), Nyotaimori

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX CURATED BY ROSE BOUTHILLER, ASSOCIATE CURATOR & MEGAN LYKINS REICH, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF PROGRAM, PLANNING, AND ENGAGEMENT

WITH ELENA HARVEY COLLINS, CURATORIAL ASSISTANT

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

ON DISPLAY IN THE MUELLER FAMILY GALLERY, ROSALIE + MORTON CO- HEN FAMILY GALLERY, GUND COMMONS, KOHL ATRIUM, AND OTHER SPACES THROUGHOUT THE MUSEUM. Mary Ann Aitken Derf Backderf Cara Benedetto Christi Birchfield dadpranks Kevin Jerome Everson Ben Hall Jae Jarrell Harris Johnson Jimmy Kuehnle d.a. levy Michelangelo Lovelace Sr. Dylan Spaysky Carmen Winant

On View JUNE 12 – SEPTEMBER 5 59 TO FEEL, TO FEEL MORE,TO FEEL MORE THAN BY FRED MOTEN 1 63 HOW TO REMAIN HUMAN I WILL ALWAYS CREATE ROSE BOUTHILLIER & MEGAN LYKINS REICH JAE JARRELL & ROSE BOUTHILLIER 7 69 OF SINGULARITY JAE JARRELL AND THE FASHIONING OF BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER BLACK CULTURE BY DAVID LUSENHOP 9 75 A LANGUAGE OF SELF QUEASY AND UNSURE, HAPPY AND AFRAID BY ED FRAGA HARRIS JOHNSON & ROSE BOUTHILLIER 13 81 PRELUDE HARRIS JOHNSON: PAINTING AND ANXIETY BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER BY OWEN DUFFY 19 85 LAST NIGHT #PINKTHINGMOCA BY AMY FUNG JIMMY KUEHNLE & MEGAN LYKINS REICH 21 89 FLAT LINES, ROUND BODIES INTO THE PINK BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH BY TERRY SCHWARZ 25 91 RECONFIGURATION / PAINTING FALLING APART SOMEBODY SHOULD JUST GIVE HIM A HAIRCUT BY INDRA K. LĀCIS BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS 29 95 FEEL YOURSELF STRANGE D.A.LEVY: AWARENESS & ECLIPSE BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS BY INGRID SWANBERG 31 101 A CROWD-SOURCED ESSAY ON THE NATURE OF MEET ME AT THE CROSSROADS DADPRANKS (CHRISTINA VASSALLO REMIX) BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS 35 105 MAGGOTS, METAPHORS, AND MAGEE LOOKING BACK FROM THE FUTURE AT BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH MICHELANGELO LOVELACE BY EBONY L. HAYNES 41 DEAR MISGUIDED IVORY TOWER DWELLING 109 DILETTANTE BY KEN EPPSTEIN SOFT THINGS BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER 43 PRACTICE MAKES PERFORMANCE 113 BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH US: AFTER DYLAN SPAYSKY BY LYNN CRAWFORD 47 GRACE AND GRIND: NOTES ON THE WORK 117 OF KEVIN JEROME EVERSON TOUCHING AND TRAINING BY MICHAEL B. GILLESPIE CARMEN WINANT & ELENA HARVEY COLLINS 53 121 THE SPACESHIP IS CRASHING CARMEN WINANT: THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS KRIS PAULSEN INTRODUCTION ROSE BOUTHILLIER & MEGAN LYKINS REICH

... have arrived from elsewhere. Their goal is to reflect critically on & everyday i sit here contemporary art that comes out of, trying to become one of you or passes through, particular places, after another here or nearby. We say particular as trying on those high school dreams opposed to certain, because we are not for size working from a strict definition or it doesnt work geographical boundary. “The region” you dont fit me is equal parts geo-political, social, as a poet i try to learn and psychological. It regularly how to remain human shifts and transforms. Realization despite technology is Better than Anticipation (2013) & there is no one to learn from was MOCA Cleveland’s first exhibition i am still too young to built from this vantage point, and be quiet & contemplative it generated a topology for ongoing inquiry. ... How to Remain Human continues the —d.a. levy, excerpt from “SUBURBAN conversation with 14 artists working MONASTERY DEATH POEM,” 1968 across a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, film and video, performance, fashion design, sound, and architectural installation. They How to Remain Human is both a question share a need to make, in order to and a proposition. The question question, clarify, or understand points to all that de-humanizes, the life. They explore various ways of challenges and breakages that divide acting in and experiencing the world, people and make the way forward examining how we can go on, relate, unclear. The proposition suggests and be. that there are ways to re-imagine, practice, and hold on to our humanity. d.a. levy is a key figure in the exhibition. He was someone who was This exhibition is MOCA Cleveland’s truly all-in, an artist who lived and second iteration of a bi-annual breathed his work. The show’s title series featuring artists connected to is drawn from his “SUBURBAN MONASTERY Cleveland and the surrounding region, DEATH POEM,” an epic work that brings including neighboring cities in Ohio, to life a range of his desires and Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These frustrations with the world at that shows bring together emerging and time. He battled, protested, resisted, established artists, some with deep and ultimately insisted on other ways histories in the region, others who to live and make. levy was a pillar

1 of Cleveland’s underground literature Elsewhere in How to Remain Human, and art scene in the 1960s, centered artists are using disparate mediums around the University Circle/East to look closely at people and Cleveland area. He worked tirelessly, communities. Derf Backderf’s renowned publishing original manuscripts and comix and graphic novels give honest, several alternative newspapers, along unapologetic voice to Midwest living. with making prints, paintings, and Featuring stories from his upcoming collages. Ardent and aching, his book, Trashed, the sampling of hand- work expresses a passionate love/ drawn pages in How to Remain Human hate relationship with Cleveland. show a range of Derf’s wild garbage- In the reactionary climate of 1960‘s collecting experiences. The exploits Cleveland, levy’s anti-establishment serve as subtle metaphors for broader sentiments, disheveled appearance, sociopolitical and existential unconventional lifestyle, and talk conditions: bar brawls (class); trash of drugs made him an easy target for collecting blues (culture); government the authorities. Repeated arrests bureaucracy (democracy’s failings); and ongoing harassment left levy foreclosed properties (capitalism’s exhausted and paranoid. On November failings), unsuccessful come-ons 24, 1968, he committed suicide at (sexual rejection), used condom hunts the age of 26. Perhaps because his in a civic baseball field (sexual work did not fully mature, his words fulfillment), trips to the cemetery, retains a youthful rawness, a way of lots of dead animals, and Marv’s (the using words searchingly. curmudgeonly city dog catcher) passing (mortality). The ultimate symbol is, Cara Benedetto also use words in an of course, all the garbage. Page after intimate, feeling out (and up) way. page, Derf portrays the relentless Her texts and performance-based events gluttony of consumer culture. use language to confound communication and subvert power structures. Often, Speaking to the significance of place, she will take up vernacular and Michelangelo Lovelace’s figurative structures from romance novels, paintings depict Cleveland’s urban fundraisers, and advertisements. She fabric, combining environmental, then shifts, mutates, and destabilizes social, and political experiences these forms. For her participation in into vibrant expressions. According this exhibition, Benedetto produced to Lovelace, art saved him from an Prelude Her patron, a private event uncertain future, and it continues at the Museum modeled on a traditional to offer him a platform for self- preview party with a soft S/m theme. preservation and expression. Works The artist directed all aspects of like These Urban City Streets (2013) the project, from designing the represent inner city neighborhoods invitations and writing the press that bustle with life, depicting release, to providing special napkins community parties and people going and lip balm for guests. Rather about their errands. Lovelace also than doing a disservice to the BDSM reflects on themes of social justice— community with “a hack portrayal or violence, inequality, criminal tourism into their world,” Benedetto lifestyles, and racial conflict—often seeks to “draw a parallel to exploits hinting at personal struggles and in current academia, specific to the redemption. institution of MFA, where all art students are treated as masochists Deeply informed by his upbringing and contracts are unclear.” Prelude in Northeast Ohio, Kevin Jerome brings an element of vulnerability Everson focuses on the performance of and the unknown into the Museum, identity and the rituals of labor. asking staff, guests, artists, and His African American subjects perform the institution to question, explore, simple, obligatory, or repetitive and feel the boundaries of their actions for the camera: high school relations. athletes running football drills, magicians doing sleights of hand, young men watching a fireworks

2 display, an old man blowing out under the influence of the “male birthday candles. Studying and re- gaze.” It may be a world without men, imagining the quotidian activities of yet they are very much present. real life, Everson creates deliberate vignettes that combine fiction and Jae Jarrell’s radical fashions use realism. These poetic montages that the body as a vessel for protest, speak to practice, effort, futility, resistance, and identity. In 1968, mortality, and reward. Jae, her husband Wadsworth Jarrell, and fellow artists Jeff Donaldson, Similar themes resonate with Ben Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Hall’s complex sculpture and Williams founded the collective audio installations. Concerned AFRICOBRA (which stands for African with politics, identity, social Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). interaction, and the histories held by The group formed in response to a objects, his works are mash ups with a lack of positive representation of multitude of references. Hall created African and African American people three new works for How to Remain in media and the arts. Their goal was Human. His large structure, The Drill to produce works that conveyed the (2015) brings together elements as pride, power, history, and energy diverse as the transparent backpacks of their communities. As a fashion used in the Detroit Public School designer, Jae expressed those ideals system (which here act as cactus through clothing. Incorporating terrariums); stickers with the face diverse elements such as brick walls, of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American graffiti, colorful bandoliers, jazz, man who was beaten to death in 1982 Scrabble, and African shields, Jae’s by auto workers in Highland Park, a work is a celebration of life and suburb of Detroit; pins featuring individuality, with a strident “Look Larry Doby and Ozzie Virgil, two good, feel powerful” message. Black Major league baseball players that integrated the Cleveland Indians How to Remain Human also features work and Detroit Tigers, respectively; and with a strong sense of vulnerability didactic references to Goldman Sachs, and introspection. Christi the Adidas slogan, and Monopoly. As Birchfield’s large textile sculptures he states, the sculpture represents possess intense bodily references. a microcosm of the artist’s Starting with black canvas, Birchfield “understanding of humanness in applies gestural lines of bleach America right now,”an experience that paste, folds the fabric in half, and still breaks apart along race and runs it through a printing press. class lines, where individuals must Next, she uses a utility knife to cut find their own ways to salvage and out areas of un-bleached fabric. These reconstruct in a culture of violence flat, lacelike shapes are conjoined, and control. layered, stretched, and affixed to the ceiling, wall, and floor, a web How to Remain Human also emphasizes of linear forms that resemble hanging our physical engagement with the skin and skeletal systems, evoking world through works that examine the fragile body and its transience. or evoke the body. Carmen Winant’s massive wall collage, A World Without Mary Ann Aitken’s oil paintings on Men (2015) is constructed from images newspaper have a light, spontaneous of women found in magazines dating quality. The fragile paper—meant from the late 1960s to the early to last only for a day—becomes a 1980s. Much of the material for the surface for preserving a moment in collage is gathered from Playboy or time. Aitken’s subjects, goldfish and WE magazine and books on puberty, flowers, are both life forms found in charting shifting representations domestic settings, and in capturing of women over time for different their essence, she calls attention audiences. While the title calls back to the beauty of the everyday. An to Feminist Separatist movements of extremely private person, Aitken the 1970s, the images are clearly rarely showed her work during her

3 lifetime. A self-portrait included in the Museum. A sculpture-cum-human. the show depicts the artist in her red painting robe, which she wore in the A selection of videos by the studio to protect her clothes. Though Pittsburgh collective, dadpranks, her face is indistinct, her presence plays on the Museum’s free ground and energy are strongly felt. On floor. They portray cheap consumer the right, loose brush strokes seem goods isolated in colorful sets, to be casually placed, as if Aitken employed in strange ways to were using the background itself as a carry out bizarre actions. The palette for mixing colors. This work collective’s name is a playful take captures how painting and a dedicated on the internet phenomenon of parents studio practice were integral to pranking their children for YouTube Aitken’s spirit and sense of self. “likes.” These videos are the result of a collaborative process, where Dylan Spaysky’s sculptures, which take the artists come together for short modest, familiar objects as their periods of time with bags full of subjects, are richly tactile. goodies and a video camera, and riff Spaysky uses cheap materials and off of each other’s ideas. found objects that relate back to domestic settings. He is inspired by Harris Johnson’s paintings often use the pop-culture aesthetic of Disney, “dumb” humor to tackle anxieties. He knickknacks found in suburban homes, addresses the individual’s place in children’s crafts, and thrift store the world, as well as the significance dollar-bags. The artist’s hand is (or triviality) of art amidst chaotic, visible in the crude way that these troubling times. American Ramble sculptures are assembled. In addition (2015), painted directly on the wall, to exploring notions of beauty, value, is a frenetic stream of consciousness and preciousness, Spaysky’s work is that mixes banal chatter and with very much about the desire to make. darker, angrier thoughts on society They have a sense of impulsiveness: and hopelessness. A swirling vortex to salvage, tinker, repurpose, and lies at the center of Black Hole decorate. (2015), sucking in color, energy, faded words, and frowning stick Humor and nonsense are used by many figures. This collapse speaks to artists in the exhibition to playfully the constant worry and existential puncture life’s routines, habits, wondering of humanity: how will and anxieties. The largest piece in everything end? How did everything the show, Jimmy Kuehnle’s giant soft begin? What, possibly, could it all pink sculpture, Please, no smash. mean? engages MOCA Cleveland’s audience, architecture, and neighborhood in an Such moments of doubt and personal interactive way. It begs visitors to reflection run through How to push, press, nuzzle, and otherwise Remain Human. But the exhibition is engage with its curious presence and ultimately a romantic one, operating shifting form. Made from hundreds under a conviction that art is of yards of neon pink PVC fabric, essential to understanding ourselves the work hovers above viewers as it and contemporary life. In that regard, slowly inflates and deflates. Its artists are vital, and the artists in lights flicker and glow according the How to Remain Human are particularly time of day, and the form radiates a generous with their questions and hot pink glow that is visible from perceptions. Their work is openhanded. outside the Museum at night. When It offers and invites, sometimes it’s fully expanded, the work’s plump quietly, other times urgently. One body extends into most areas of the imperative for remaining human: we Kohl Atrium. As it deflates, the work must ask a lot of one another. recoils and draws up against the wall like a folding flower. It appears to move like a living, breathing Would everything be too much? organism, or a beating heart inside

4 1.

1. Ben Hall, work in progress

2. Jae Jarrell in her studio

3. Christi Birchfeild’s studio

5 4.

4. Jimmy Kuehnle installs at MOCA Cleveland

5. Easel and unfinished painting in Michelangelo Lovelace Sr.’s studio

6. Outfit purchased for Cara Benedetto’s Prelude Her patron

6 OF SINGULARITY BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER

A particular houseplant—some sort tracing the cool metal curves of the of bromeliad; spiky, weeping, spoon. Her Untitled (Coffee Maker) lush—appears often in Mary Ann (1984) evokes habitual movements, Aitken’s paintings. Her focus on the performed in the haze of drowsiness, plant suggests its life-affirming the gathering of drips and stains, potential, but not in any general soft gradual browns. sense. Rather in a truly personal sense, as in how one object becomes Domestic life forms breathe in more familiar than the rest, more Aitken’s work. Her paintings on known, and in turn, somehow knowing. newspaper are particularly animated: exposed, dated fragments of text and Along with her dedication to the advertisement toggle with colorful studio, Mary Ann Aitken worked for dobs of petals or goldfish. The over 20 years as an art therapist fragile paper, meant to last only for patients with mental illness and for a day, preserves a fleeting addictions. This experience of art moment in time. These works are making as a healing, self-affirming reminiscent of Paul Thek’s paintings act imbues her work with gravity. on newsprint, sharing a similar There is a deep, heartfelt joy in sense of lightness despite (or in) that seriousness, just as there is transience. Yet, Aitken’s paintings darkness and aloneness. Solitude are more down to earth, grounded. gives Aitken’s paintings their disarming directness; looking at I really can’t get Aitken’s Self- them, one feels (aches with, floats Portrait (1983) out of my mind. in) their own singularity. The artist floats in a rough black field, a turbulent void. She wears Her works on panel have a her red painting robe, donned in distinctive thickness to them, the the studio to protect her clothes slowness of heavy oils, layers, and from paint. In the painting, it grit. This texture implies intimacy protects her from the void. Compact as well; closeness to the thing and raw, her features are indistinct and to the self in painting it. (two merged, bluish dots, a glob But there is levity too: wrought, of dirty blonde) but her presence roughhewn working offset by quick and energy are strongly felt. On gestures—a foot print, scribbles of the right, loose robe-hued brush mixing color, the nimble swipe of strokes are casually placed, as if a brush or palette knife. Grounded she were using the background itself and vigorous, Aitken’s paintings as a palette (does painting have are steadfastly electric. Looking a fourth wall to break?). Every at her Untitled (1989) still life, mark reflects and reveals the self. I feel as if I’ve held each item in Aitken, an extremely private person, my hands, sticky now from the slice was hesitant to share her paintings of dark pink watermelon, softly while she was alive. Perhaps this flopping the banana peels down on was for the very reason that they the table, weighing the heaviness disclosed so much of her in their of canned goods, closing the gummy intense, material sincerity. screw top on the ranch dressing,

7 1.

1. Mary Ann Aitken Untitled, 2010-11 Oil, sand, and paper on canvas 11 1/4 x 14 inches

2. Mary Ann Aitken Untitled (Coffee Maker), 1984 Oil on panel 9 1/4 x 7 inches

Courtesy of the Estate of Mary Ann Aitken

8 A LANGUAGE OF SELF BY ED FRAGA

A single, blond haired figure stands art school. I found this building on in a sea of fiery red. Another the corner of Gratiot and Broadway figure in a pinkish robe and gray called The Cary. Along with my fuzzy slippers emerges from a field friend Kathy Rashid, we convinced of darkness. Images of a fish bowl, the landlord to rent studio spaces coffee maker, banana, a dog named for us. A year later, Mary Ann Soldier, leaves of a plant—animate quietly moved in. She liked her and inanimate—are painted on various solitude and coveted her time in the everyday materials: sections of studio. During the day, she worked the daily newspaper, old paneling, at an art store near the Detroit Masonite, linoleum, and cardboard. Institute of Arts. We both got The material is never precious, but around without a car, which at the the emotion expressed is deep and time didn’t seem to be a problem. In genuine. Honesty is a word that fact it made it easier to see the comes to mind when thinking about city’s quirks and discover spaces my friend, Mary Ann Aitken and her unique to Detroit. paintings. She was a woman of high moral character who lived modestly Her studio practice remained private and unselfishly. How many artists all the years I knew her. In the today could resist showing their five years we lived in The Cary, latest paintings after finishing she never talked about her process. them? Not true of Mary Ann. She I think in part because she was spent her life creating beautiful working out ideas and trying to works but rarely exhibited them master her skill as a painter. until the end of her life. But her She was a harsh critic of her devotion to her art also extended own work. Like most artists, she to her work as an art therapist doubted herself. She didn’t like the at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, scrutiny art received when exposed New York. For 22 years, she worked to the public. For her, art was very with patients in their substance personal and intimate, an interior abuse recovery. Many of her exploration of self and the human colleagues share similar stories of psyche. I recall the smell of oil a compassionate clinician who worked paint as I would pass by her door tirelessly to better the lives of en route to the communal bathroom others. on the third floor. It wasn’t until 1988 that she finally invited me to I first met Mary Ann when we were see her paintings. Later that year in our twenties. It was 1983 and I we were evicted after being told our was looking for a space to work in residency in The Cary was illegal. Detroit, having just graduated from

9 The Cass Corridor aesthetic emerged health began to fail in 2008 she in Detroit in the early 1960’s, kept up the pace, especially the driven by artist including Gordon last two years of her life. She Newton, Michael Luchs, Bob Sestok, juggled time between New York and Ellen Phelan, Nancy Mitchnick, Jim Detroit, but it was the time spent Chatelain and Brenda Goodman. A at her family’s summer cottage second generation wave of artists in Canada that gave her the most took up the mantle in the early pleasure. She was surrounded by 1980’s; Gilda Snowden, Diane Carr, family and nature, her art books Cay Bahnmiller, Kurt Novak and and a cold beer. Nothing could be Gary Mayer were some of the primary better. Like the early paintings, voices. The works by these and the later works are layered with earlier artists are distinguished by thick, encaustic surfaces but are the sheer physicality of materials. different in the use of sand, Raw, gutsy, tough, and bold aptly shells, and shards of broken glass, describe their works and approach all found on the beach. Into these to art making. Some of Mary Ann’s paintings, she literally pours in paintings use a dark palette, the natural world around her. drawing comparison to the work of Bahnmiller, and yet her figurative Mary Ann’s sister Maureen wrote a works share a common link to moving tribute titled In Memory of Mitchnick. Robert Wilbert was Mary Mary Ann in 2012. In it she writes, Ann’s painting teacher, mentor, and “When Mary Ann found out she had friend, whom she always held with cancer, the news was devastating. high admiration and respect. When But Mary Ann did an amazing thing: looking at Mary Ann’s paintings spiritually, she became stronger. one can see his influence; like She felt you couldn’t always Mr. Wilbert’s paintings, her work influence what happened to you, is rooted in formalism. Mary Ann’s but you could make meaning of what paintings seem to offer an entry happened to you. She took great that is never forced. The open inspiration from the New York artist spaces in her paintings allow for Cordula Volkening, who had terminal contemplation. brain cancer, and gave Mary Ann this advice: the only way out of fear Mary Ann’s knowledge and scope is to live in the moment and paint. of art was immense, as evident That is what Mary Ann did. She lived in her vast book collection. every moment with even greater Subjects varied from The Art of the intensity. She said the people she Japanese Print to monographs on loved and painting were all that Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, mattered, and she focused her last Jasper Johns, and Georgia O’Keefe, years on these endeavors. She made as well as books on clinical meaning out of the experience. She psychology. She earned two degrees painted more.” from Wayne State University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1983) and a At its core, Mary Ann’s art speaks Masters in Art Therapy (1989). In a language of self all people can many ways her life epitomized these relate to and understand. It is a two ideas: she wanted to celebrate simple language in which isolation, all the beauty in the world through nature, the domestic, darkness, and her art, and use her skills as a lightness occupy one picture plane. therapist to improve the lives of people around her. In 1989 she moved to New York, where she lived for 22 years until her death from breast cancer in 2012.

Mary Ann maintained a voracious drive to paint over the entire course of her short life. As her

10 1.

1. Mary Ann Aitken Untitled (fish bowl), 1983 Oil on paper 12 x 14 inches Collection of Susan Goethel Campbell

2. Mary Ann Aitken Untitled (Coffee Maker), 1984 Oil on panel 9 1/4 x 7 inches Courtesy of the Estate of Mary Ann Aitken

11 3.

3. Mary Ann Aitken Self-Portrait, 1983 Oil on panel 19 x 15 inches Collection of Ed Fraga

12 PRELUDE BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER

Cara Benedetto explores desire, there is nonsense that lubricates our vulnerability, and the giving and speech acts. the performers are paid. we taking away of power. Working across have discussions about their practice. performance, images, and writing, they act undirected. they hold scripts. she adopts familiar languages and they read and feel by choice.” structures from such things as romance novels, fundraisers, or //////////////////////////////////// advertisements. She then shifts, mutates, and destabilizes these 6:45 PM forms to create room for a heady mix I don the skintight, mesh top, of confusion and intimacy, inviting black-and-white striped collared viewers/readers to let down their bodycon dress that I purchased for guard and feel through their own this occasion. I bought this dress mutable entities. with Cara in Pittsburgh sometime in April, from her favorite vintage For her participation in How to dealer, Linda. We spent hours in the Remain Human, Benedetto produced store digging through stuffed racks, Prelude Her patron, a private drinking gin out of Styrofoam cups, event at the Museum modeled on a and shooting the shit as people traditional cocktail reception dropped in and out. Suddenly, this including music, food, and little number popped out, and before performances by her students and I know it I have it on, and it fits, frequent collaborators. As Benedetto and I have to buy it. When we left, describes, “the event functioned as I felt light-headed. In the weeks to a How to Remain Human preview party come, every now and again I would for museum patrons with a soft S/m take it out, spray it with unscented theme. I say soft because I won’t Febreze, and run my fingers over its disservice the BDSM community with golden lamé label: Cachê. my hack portrayal or tourism into their world. But rather I refer to 6:48 PM the recent offence and fascination I make my way to the Museum in the in S/m culture produced by the film early evening light, feeling some- Fifty Shades of Grey. In so doing I what exposed. seek to draw a parallel to exploits in current academia, specific to the 6:55 PM institution of MFA, where all art I buzz in at the security entrance. students are treated as masochists and contracts are unclear.” Hi there. May I have your name?

What follows is an account of the Thank you. I see you. You are The events of June 11, 2015. They are List tonight. muddled and loose. All italicized words have been drawn from the You have been expected. Don’t wor- performers’ scripts, written by ry it is safe. As long as you are Benedetto unless otherwise noted. As she considerate, kind, sensitive and reflects, “the event is not an event. mine. Now, tell me what do you it invites. it swarms. it does little. see?

13 My safeword is “blue.” across exposed wrists; dark folds of cured meat are piled up on the abdo- My phone vibrates. “Thank you. I men. Little piles of green pods are want to fuck you too.” dispersed across the table, quick- pickled rat tail radishes that burst 7:00 PM with a hot salty tang. Guests select I’m greeted by two blonde guides their items carefully before picking with piercing blue eyes. them up. Eyes linger. Some people are wearing suits. I pick up a nap- Now we’ll go through these labias. kin to wipe my mouth, then read it: The doorway to her critical hole. “Am i Yours?” Right this way. 7:26 PM Some event horizons tried to keep I order the first of too many vodka us secure, but we won’t let them. martinis. There’s a bowl of chap- sticks at the bar and I open one, It’s not important to stick any- inhaling a woody spiced scent, the ways. Watch your step, her hair flavor of BPC (Bored Phallic Class). fell here. Her head is sensitive. 8:00 PM Winding our way through the loading The room swells in anticipation of dock and furniture storage, we ar- the evening’s first performance, a rive at the entrance to the Museum’s speech by Cara. Gund Commons: Here it is. I am not your teacher Here is her dark room. Where we today. There are clear boundaries can feel her organs seep. There is in this another way. Not like the much to feel. Please do so here. success that doesn’t grant. Not like a shade of A. Today I won’t So far about a dozen people have ar- share my I. I’ll use us. rived, and they mill about in the softly lit room. A projection on U.S. loop shows several scenes of a man gyrating, stretching, grinding, and There’s a hush in the room as the dancing on a bed, floor, and against music quiets and her soothing, am- a black backdrop. The music is at- plified voice fills the space. It’s mospheric, gently pounding. We are deep, watery, hypnotic. The words down the hall. We are in the club. speak of resignation (accepting, Dusky rays of sunshine peek around departing) and they’re sad, angry, the silver mesh curtains, revealing wanting, commanding. The day before, that we are on our own time. Have Benedetto gave notice that she is you met the artist? She’s the one leaving her position as Visiting As- wearing the pearl necktie. sistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh. 7:14 PM I work my way over to the food ta- it is not enough that we are not ble, catered by General Sisters. slaves; Their concept for the evening is inspired by Nyotaimori, a Japanese and if social conditions further tradition where sushi is served di- the existence of automatons, aca- rectly from a reclining nude body. demics, the result will not be I nibble on a variety of open-faced love sandwiches: egg salad with fried ca- per, cilantro, and ricotta; balsamic US strawberries with arugula, cashew cream, and mint; sage salt cream of life cheese with radishes and cucumber. Soft folds of smoked salmon and thin but a slices of lemon are tenderly laid U.S. love of death.

14 So how do I resign lightly? 8:20 PM How may I understand the correct There’s a man in a leather col- panel, function, fucking for a lar, cuffs, and codpiece sitting on drum that isn’t beaten? the floor. On order, he types and retypes lines of critical theory, She reads from her last Sub Journal: blackboard punishment with hard 50 WPMs. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I’m finally leaving and my head feels clear, the bound is clear, 8:30 PM constructed as part of the system, The band, L’ Amour Bleu, begins theirs... their first set. Thrashy sex-noise washes over everything as one member Can we disseminate the self. Ex- kisses and caresses another’s feet, pand the self. Explode the self splayed out through the holes of a without crouching being held get- wooden screen. There is some kind of ting small. The decision. Two ex- powder involved and I imagine that tremes. It is not Your fault. it tastes bad but that they don’t care. Some people look confused, She delivers and it gets personal. others ecstatic. Cara. An airport terminal in Frank- furt. A black duffle bag stuffed 9:02 PM with corsets and silk blouses. Pucci The crowd starts to form a circle sunglasses tucked into her collar, around two women speaking theatri- exhausted, considerate eyes wan- cally. dering, coffee in hand, red nails (slightly chipped) gripping a Bic E: My Toy, you are now my Toy, you and slowly writing in a crisp leath- will respond only to Toy and noth- er-bound journal. ing else. Who are you? R: Toy. So then what is the value of a E: You are my Toy. Say I am Your single body in the art world? Toy. R: I am your Toy Sir. One woman. Status of one. The intern. The assistant. The associate. A bed. Legs spread. A pearl. Lips. The adjunct. The underpaid, and over Slap. Blind and begging. Something regulated. Temporary opportunities shifts and for all manners of opportunism. Your services rendered for others in a R: Should we go dear, it’s getting not-for-profit experience economy. early today, the sun is rising on We all started as the bottom. you. E: yes I think so but first we What kind of position is static, need to wait for mommy you it attracts something like Repeat. The lines aren’t well known, the the delivery is somewhat stilted, This awkward, and anxious. There is some- feeling thing sticky about this self-con- of sciousness. An unscripted humilia- touch. tion. Weights shift uneasily.

So touch us. Scene.

9:13 PM Silence fills the room and it’s like Death comes and sits across from we’ve all been let go, from some em- me. I really can’t see anything of brace. The music fades back in and Death’s face and Death is so dark people resume mingling. dark dark it seems to make the room darker. Death directs its non- face at me and points while slowly

15 sliding one skeletal finger across What does it take to get on top? its neck, moaning. I implore you, prod you into I tug my dress down and the Cachê places, muddier and less sure. tag itches my back. To borrow from Helene Cixous: “Use your own body as a form of 9:15 PM transport.” Melissa Ragona begins furiously slapping a meter stick on the I stand here with an unidentified tabletops and floor. The deafening inferno inside of me—and it is whacks continue until the stick this disoriented heat that I leave snaps in half, muting them somewhat, you with. though the gesture continues. She has written her own speech, adapted Thank you. from a script by Benedetto.

Commence a Dress! Applause. Cheers. Woops. Whistles. We begin with our theme for the Ice cubes rattle around in plastic evening, to be unclean. Unclean glasses. with joy. 9:25 PM She’s wearing a leather bomber L’ Amour Bleu’s second set begins. jacket that Linda helped her pick Those who remain are getting really, out, too. Not sure where she got the really into it. Thrashing. Tonguing. gimp mask. Abandon. The Submissive typer is on the dance floor, bound and in the Academic, Macadamia!——thriving as hands of his Key Keeper, who circles it does within the dark, rotting around him, playfully sashaying with interior of the law, this tiny, chains in hand. heartless, scathing little, teeny, tiny empty center. This 9:45 PM law list, this listlessness, of The band wraps and dance music takes debt—monetary, soul-bound and over, we are all releasing, dizzy chained to the inner walls of and Cara grabs the mic to remind our folding flesh structures, us that “this is not a fucking our soft machines melting in the wedding.” Some clothes are removed, hallways of petty penny pushing some bouquets are given. Last drinks bureaucracies and bursars, and are downed and we stumble out onto burden-trundlers. the street, surprised at how early it is and how late it feels. Her stage presence is frenetic, explosive. The speech soap-boxy and sing-songy and taunting.

Indeed, descent is much more ***** difficult to achieve than what these institutions call “success” with implications of licking the poles that administrators ride as they circus their way to the top. Event production and zip ties....Kory Dakin Giddyap! Giddyap! cry all the Mr. Guides...... Lanne Margrett Guppys toeing their way into the Elaine Ziol climbing-wall, jerking themselves Death...... Paul Heyer off on the ivy curtains and the General Sisters.....Dana Bishop Root lush shag rugs. But, I order you Ginger Brooks Takahashi to jerk off too—commit small Submissive Typer...... Daniel Pillis crimes and treacheries in order to E...... Kevin Brophy avoid the self-denials that build R...... Brittany De Nigris these halls. Key Keeper...... Elena Harvey Collins

16 Cara Benedetto Save the Date Prelude Her patron, 2015

17 1.

1-3. Documentation of Prelude Her patron

18 LAST NIGHT BY AMY FUNG

Last night Hunting attention out of a primor- dial instinct, an intuition towards I dreamt I came to visit you. The connection floor of your studio was covered in text and semen. The piles and pools To be longed for and to be left were sculptural in presence, but ul- alone. timately unresolved. Before I wrote this text, I was a You had two studio assistants. The human being. one flirting with me went up to the roof to release a pair of roosters. Coming and going, re-caressing the Freeing the cocks. With absolutely language that came before us no irony in her voice. Just joy. On Trying and trying again to keep the her face. The other assistant lurked fire going. in the far corner. He was working with both hands on a menial task, It’s all any of us can do and his back wanted to be noticed. To stay warm, for just a moment. You walked up to me with a smile. It was a genuine and modest upturn of the corners of your mouth and you hesitantly put an arm around me, bringing yourself in for a hello. I looped an arm around your waist and leaned forward for a second and another second. It felt warm, and then we stood apart for a better look at each other.

I looked around at the work surrounding us and everything was black and white. All the floors, walls, ceilings, covering every surface from tables to a teevee mounted where a window would be. I couldn’t tell if we were below ground or not in a world fueled by desire. By dis- appointments.

Congratulations, I said, on remaining human. Because everything everyday is telling you not to be one.

19 Cara Benedetto Membership Portrait 1, 2015 iPhoto, archival inkjet print 16 x 16 inches

20 FLAT LINES, ROUND BODIES BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH

Our bodies are round, dimension- ink, graphite, paint, and other al. As newborns, we understand them mark-making devices like burning and through touch, scent, and taste, cutting. When run through the press, seeking our mother’s body for nour- these materials generate a web of ishment and warmth. As we grow, we graphic lines, geometric shapes, begin to understand the body visu- ethereal forms, and crumbling fo- ally, recognizing familiar faces, liage. Often, Birchfield folds the mimicking gestures. Eventually, we paper in half before pressing it, come to know bodies through images, which produces mirror images that identifying our own reflection in a recall Rorschach inkblots. The works mirror, and later in photographs, have both illusive depth (caused by videos, and other representations. nuanced gradations of color, line, During these early years of develop- and form) as well as real dimension ment, we learn about the human body (from the crushed flowers and other as an exterior form. The inside, materials). however, remains a flat out mystery. In contrast, Birchfield’s newest In a recent interview about her new- series involves a strictly reduc- est series, on view for the first tive process. She begins by drawing time in How to Remain Human, Christi improvisational lines using bleach Birchfield describes how she hopes paste on long pieces of black can- the works reminds viewers of their vas. Next, the fabric is folded and bodies, specifically their inter- run through a press. Compressed nal make-up and materiality. Com- tightly, the bleach dissolves the prised of long thin sheets of can- pigment, fading the canvas and pro- vas affixed to the ceiling, walls, duced meandering lines and broad and floor, Reconfiguration (2014), washes. Once printed, Birchfield ex- Slab (2015), and What Shadows We Are cises lines and forms from the can- (2015) all contain interlacing lines vas using a utility knife, creating and forms that resemble our nervous holes and gaps that emphasize the and skeletal systems. These ghostly lattice effect. In Reconfiguration, evocations ebb and flow like tangled Birchfield also added small amounts specters, suggesting life’s inter- of color to the canvas. connected and ephemeral nature. Allusions abound in these abstract A printmaker by training, Birch- images, from charred vines to insect field pushes the discipline’s poten- carapaces to ancient symbols. Yet, tial for compressing layers of ma- the most potent connotations are to terial into new visual information. the human body. In color and form, For several years, she has combined the images recall common X-ray imag- organic matter, mostly flora, with es of chest cavities and hip joints,

21 with glowing curves of calcium-rich metaphoric value of this oscilla- bones against the faint halo of soft tion between flat and round, two tissue and organs. The first X-ray and three-dimensional. Numerous image was taken by German physicist, long canvas sheets stretch and weave Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discov- through space and each other, ap- ered the technology in 1895. It was pearing both like a single organism a picture of his wife’s hand, show- and individual forms crossing one ing only her metacarpals, phalan- other. The images oscillate between ges, and wedding ring. Upon seeing large and small, alluding to astro- the image, she said, “I have seen my nomical nebula as well as microscop- death.”1 ic neurons. A series of composite parts, there is not a single vantage Like X-rays, Birchfield’s black point; no fully fleshed form. As the lacelike sheets emphasize the viewer moves, the work re-adjusts, strange, complex, and mysterious like a shadow responding to the systems within us. Flat but double- light. Taking all its parts togeth- sided, Birchfield maximizes their er, the installation evokes the body bilateral nature by conjoining, lay- as complex, symmetrical, smart, but ering, and stretching them between also fragile, unpredictable, unruly, the ceiling, wall, and floor, pro- and ultimately mortal. ducing a spidery maze that viewers can see and walk around. Here, translated into three-dimensions, the prints gain body, becoming cor- //////////////////////////////////// poral, lifelike. They intersect and overlap, each slightly stained or 1. Markel, Howard. “’I Have Seen My Death’: imperfect. Sagging and taut, with- How the World Discovered the X-Ray,” PBS drawing and extending, they express NewsHour. www.pbs.org. Retrieved June 7, various states of being, or moments 2015. Röntgen discovered the X-ray in early in lived time. November, 1895. He took the first radiograph on December 22, 1895. Birchfield’s titles support iden- tifications with the body and its transience. Reconfiguration suggests ongoing changes in form, while Slab implies stasis, referring, among other things to the table on which a cadaver lies in a morgue. This work is wall-bound, a confluence of parts layered on top of one another in a flowering or piled effect. Because the staining creates shadows that are not cast but rather embedded in the material, the work appears strangely flat when viewed frontally. This effect is similar to that of Lee Bontecou’s untitled relief sculptures from the early 1960s. Bontecou applied graphite shading that contradicted the actual spatial protrusions and cavities of the works. A perceptual shift occurs when one realizes the works are dimensional, not flat, one vaguely reminiscent of those childhood de- velopmental insights about the body and its form.

What Shadows We Are exemplifies the

22 Christi Birchfield Installation view, MOCA Cleveland Photo: Timothy Safranek Photographics

23 Christi Birchfield Slab, 2015 Bleach paste, black canvas 65 x 20 x 8 inches Photo: Timothy Safranek Photographics

24 RECONFIGURATION / PAINTING FALLING APART BY INDRA K. LĀCIS

A certain kind of gothic cadence installation again reformulates rises and falls in Christi the composition, this time a play Birchfield’s work. Her gestural between two and three-dimensions— sculptures elicit a guttural the flatness of the cut-out canvas response originating somewhere itself and the muscle of the work deep in the heart chakra, edging as a whole, with arms and legs carefully toward your lips, fingers, that either collapse or elongate, and knees. Sprawling, or maybe just depending on the view. hanging on for its last breath, Reconfiguration (2014) calls to mind Like a cocoon unraveling, the effect sooty stained glass windows, the of Birchfield’s canvas sculptures arc of something familiar, perhaps reveals her nimble sense of line, sleeping or lost. If this work has a her depth as a printer, and a scent, it might be incense burning dialogue with histories of both or a cotton shirt dried crisp in hot painting and sculpture. These wall- sun. based works fall into a genealogy that might begin with Henri Like a painting falling apart Matisse’s mid-twentieth century or turning out of its skin, cut-outs of flora and fauna, made Birchfield’s work gauges the when the artist was bedridden and movement and curvature of human nearly blind.2 If these late career bodies. In turns reductive and works by Matisse had a dark side, additive, her process demands a however delicate and oblique, tenuous, psychological kind of Birchfield seems to have discovered labor. It involves mirroring, the it. Her canvas sculptures play uneasy feeling of wanting to look purposefully on the instability of over your shoulder but resisting the silhouettes and shadows, channeling urge, or the futility of untying a not permanence, but the perpetual knot that will not come undone. changeability of lines and mark making.3 Birchfield’s most recent sculptures begin with yards of commercially Displaying a quiet concern with the dyed black canvas and bleach paste natural world, Birchfield’s work appliqué. As the solution sets, suggests a loose engagement with she folds the fabric to create bio-mimicry, processes that adopt a Rorschach effect, searing and nature’s innate organizational tattooing these thinly drawn lines tactics as a model for problem with the weight and warmth of solving at all levels. In her an iron. The first part of this earlier work, Birchfield frequently process happens on the floor, incorporated dried flowers. In Tear recalling the horizontality that (2010), for instance, she ran a freed easel painting from its bouquet of parched blooms, stems position as a window on the world.1 still in tact, through a printing Then Birchfield moves the work to press, a pressurized process that a table, where like a surgeon or unintentionally tore the paper, seamstress she cuts the sinuous revealing its fleshy, pulpy skin forms into new structures. The final with a sort of flirty recklessness.

25 This “happy accident,” as Birchfield only one point of view, the work’s refers to it, now inadvertently intricacy demands circumambulation, summons Eva Hesse’s Hang Up of as if it were a shrine protecting 1966, a work that both favored and something unspecified but revered. questioned the concept of framing Although a slightly sinister as central to painting and sculpture sensation occasionally creeps up alike. Like Hesse’s Hang Up (whose in Birchfield’s work, the feeling title also bears double meaning), is elusive, fleeting; it forces Tear begins ordering our view of looking closely at the work itself, the work’s form and subject via one at these tightly woven ellipses, slender strip of folded aluminum turning over and sliding past one foil, draped delicately along another seamlessly, like water the edges, and sagging, just so, molecules might. Birchfield makes at the bottom; as if the work’s order from structures that at first content had been stolen or spilled, feel congested and chaotic. This the gash on the left side remains work both accepts and relies on despite the shiny frame’s modest the stability of variability, its effort to bandage or contain it. echoes and the unpredictability of This defiantly wounded work, with how it might all sound together. its pure physicality and the abject In this sense, Birchfield’s canvas absurdity of its brittleness, sculptures are nuanced with a bold, confounds our processing of its repetitive tempo that reads like a shape and contour with a dose of perpetual cleaning of the slate. sly, sad humor, the kind of irony Hesse might have admired.4 ////////////////////////////////////

Like the wilting frame in Tear, 1. In his late teens, Walter Benjamin outlined the idea that the horizontal the tug and pull of gravity— orientation is an axis at odds with the our inability to avoid it—guides verticality of the body. In her analysis of the syntax of Birchfield’s wider Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Rosalind Krauss vernacular. The artist’s most takes up the implications of this issue, expansive canvas sculptures conjure writing: “The floor, Pollock’s work seemed to propose, in being below culture, was the simple motion of something out of the axis of the body, and thus also strung up, suspended, or caged: a below form.” See Krauss’s musings on the creature or a carcass whose exposed matter in her entry about “Horizontality,” rib cage appears at once disjointed in Formless: A User’s Guide, R. Krauss and and intact. Elsewhere in the work, Yves-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 93-103. innocuous and more purely decorative referents take hold: we see tangled 2. See the recent catalog Henri Matisse, The vines, scarab shells, rusted Cut-Outs, Karl Buchberg, Nicholas Cullinan, pulleys and belts, or Victorian-era Jodi Hauptman and Nicholas Serota, eds. (New wallpaper. A multi-tiered layering York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014). effect deploys again and again with 3. In Birchfield’s work, painterly constancy, here and there winking effects haunt and deceive, evoking also a coyly or taking as its distant distant camaraderie with the cardboard and touchstone classic post-minimal burlap cut-outs Claes Oldenburg used in obsessions with supple materiality— performances of The Street (1960), which the tumbling effect so pronounced celebrated the crude grit and complexity of Manhattan’s lower east side. Far more in Robert Morris’s 1970s felt wall eloquently crafted than Oldenburg’s tattered sculptures or the fragile density of Street pieces, Birchfield’s work nonetheless Faith Wilding’s immersive Crocheted shares a kinship with these brutally honest, Environment (1972/95). flat, theatrical forms.

In Birchfield’s largest pieces, the 4. For more on this see Cindy Nemser’s “Interview with Eva Hesse,” originally body becomes the frame in greater or published in Artforum in May 1970 and lesser ways, requiring that we “see” reprinted in Richard Armstrong and Richard and understand not with our eyes, Marshall, The New Sculpture 1965–75: Between but with our whole physical selves. Geometry and Gesture (New York: Whitney Nearly impossible to understand from Museum of American Art, 1990), 196-199.

26 1.

Christi Birchfield Reconfiguration, 2014 Bleach paste, black canvas 80 x 57 x 60 inches Courtesy of the artist

27 Christi Birchfield Reconfiguration, 2014 (detail) Bleach paste, black canvas 80 x 57 x 60 inches Courtesy of the artist

28 FEEL YOURSELF STRANGE BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS

Human beings often imbue inanimate functioning as crude appeals to objects with emotional qualities. the (presumed) female consumer. Loving things is out of style, Some of the videos parody marketing clutter weighs you down, in our campaigns for cleaning products age of faux-zen, weightless, always like Swiffer, slyly undermining the available lifestyles in which only idea that all “we” ever wanted was a selection of carefully curated a new dishwasher or a toilet seat objects should ever make it into we could eat off, squirty mops that our lives and homes. dadpranks are come in purple, or decorative tools. a six-women artist collective who In another work, floral-patterned get together for short periods of pliers delicately unpick a hair time, with bags full of dollar store extension braid against a background goodies and a video camera, and riff of lavender faux marble. off of each other’s ideas to make short, strange, gleeful videos. An odd transference occurs in these The collective’s name is a playful works. The objects seem to want to take on the internet phenomenon of think and feel; the hands become parents pranking their children object-like and dumb. for YouTube likes. In these short, untitled works, common household In most of dadpranks’s videos items—a broom with dangling dust to date, female hands are the bunnies, ice cube trays—are used only parts of the body presented in ways unintended, as anonymous onscreen. One video, however, hands (female, manicured) carry departs from this model. In it, a out bizarre tasks that suggest Mac computer is used to prepare a celebration of deliberate a spaghetti dinner. The cover is uselessness or an unlearning of removed from the computer tower and the domestic. In one video, fingers the little laser-cut holes making adorned with florescent fake nails up a lattice of air vents are used peel tin foil off a Cadburys Creme as a cheese grater and a strainer. Egg. The nails are impractically As the boiling spaghetti is dumped long; as the egg melts, the hand on the vent, steaming, water streams becomes coated in sticky chocolate, over the guts of the computer. There the precious item transformed into is something delicious about the a scatological clump. In another destruction of fetishized, expensive video, tiny tooth-like gravel is electronics. Almost as delicious as flossed, hesitantly at first, by the ham-fisted approximation of a one disembodied hand. This hand is dinner that follows—whole vegetables quickly joined by another and then are slapped on the plate after the more, each deliberately grooming spaghetti, a distastefully blue the tooth gravel, producing toe glass of liquid beside it. Slowly, a curling sensory overload. The use red faced person——a Real Dad——lowers of color——brightly hued objects and himself until he is seated at the radiant blue screens——references the computer-cum-dinner table, raising shrill, neon aesthetic of cheap real his head in a dead pan fashion, eyes and digital retail environments, twinkling, in on the joke.

29 1.

1-2. dadpranks 2014 Screenshots from HD videos Courtesy of the artists

30 A CROWD-SOURCED ESSAY ON THE NATURE OF DADPRANKS (CHRISTINA VASSALLO REMIX)

The following nonsensical yet decep- understand hashtags, but still manage to tively informative essay is comprised #boycotthershey using #strange #realhu- of visceral responses to a set of 6 mor. Like a Nike model training on a So- questions posed to 15 people about dastreamTM beach with a Febreze® sunset dadpranks: peeling off, their work conjures a nos- talgic yearning for Easter Sundays spent -How does this work make you feel? at grandma’s house, when gooey residue from CADBURY CREME EGG Candy would cling -How would you describe this work to to your hands. somebody else? Dystopia, aggressive femininity, and any -What do you think the creative process kind of disruption to mundane domes- behind this work is like? ticity are all fodder for these post- adolescent/pre-adult artists. The sexy -Describe who you think made this work. discomfort of their work results from the intersection of popular internet -What themes do you detect emerging from aesthetics + intuitive, real-life, hu- these videos? man-to-human processes, and is amplified by the familiar dance of getting online, -What kind of hashtag would you give it? offline, and back on again. Evoking the absurdity of Matthew Barney’s The CRE- The responses were delivered via email MASTER Cycle, each dadpranks video chal- and in-person interviews conducted in lenges the viewer’s comfort zone in public places. Then, they were picked different ways by usurping materialism apart, strung together, and augment- through penetration. ed with equally visceral thoughts on dadpranks’ work by this author. Please In what can be described as ASMR1 vid- note: this essay is only about 7% accu- eos gone off the rails, dadpranks con- rate, depending on your perspective, and ducts auditory/visual experiments with approximately 55% contradictory, regard- consumer packaging, the noises we make less of your POV. while eating, and the experience of just being human. For example, in one video, * * * * a blue nylon broom with dangling dust bunnies is plucked by highly manicured dadpranks, a collaborative effort com- nails, as though it were a harp. A pile prised of six educated middle class of fake teeth is “flossed” by a rapidly white women, want to effect change increasing number of vigorous hygienists through their art while eliciting a in another video. A cell phone sandwich response to visual stimuli. A nutty is deconstructed by the vibration of an cocktail of digital iGenerationism and incoming call in a video so short it post-consumer waste, #dadpranks do not feels more like a sketch than a finished

31 piece. These are depictions of glamor- (ASMR) is a perceptual phenomenon charac- ized non-glamorous moments, stemming terized by a pleasurable tingling sensation from a bad day at the dentist and verg- felt in the head, scalp, or extremities, ing on a group gross out seminar. in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli. See: dadpranks’ creative process is at once en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_me- like being in a sandbox, an exquisite ridian_response corpse therapy sesh, and a potluck. It starts with the viewing of lots of You- //////////////////////////////////// Tube and instructional videos and cul- minates in the eating of many different kinds of snacks—both sugary and neon, like their work. The production process Special thanks to co-authors: Amber J. itself is a digital video shoot, behind Anderson, Chloë Bass, Hilary Bertisch, which is a series of intelligent deci- Aliya Bonar, Maureen Dixon, Bruce Ed- sions: specific color choices, costumes wards, Kirsten Goddard, Vitus Pelsey, surrounding those choices, integration Iris Rozman, the 3 men standing outside of objects matching the palette, light- of Edison’s, the two women standing out- ing, and background sound emphasis. side of Civilization, and the daddies.

Similar to the exploded contents of a piñata filled with 99¢ store detri- tus, dadpranks calls attention to the unplanned beauty that can be found in household objects and activities, and the synergy between them. The viewer is left with a profound sense of how our quotidian actions make up the majority of our lives. How what we present to the world is largely the small minutiae we don’t consider, instead of the larger calculated gestures for which we would prefer to be remembered.

1. Autonomous sensory meridian response

32 1.

1-2. dadpranks 2014 Screenshots from HD videos Courtesy of the artists

33 dadpranks 2015 Screenshot from HD video Courtesy of the artists

34 MAGGOTS, METAPHORS, AND MAGEE BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH

In the first pages of Derf Back- Trashed is a twentieth-century com- derf’s new graphic novel, Trashed ing-of-age story that is, in many (2015), J.B.——the 21 year-old pro- ways, ageless. The book is organized tagonist based on Derf——has a memo- by seasons, tracking a year’s worth rable rookie experience as a garbage of J.B.’s experiences. Some, like man. While gingerly attempting to harvesting “yellow torpedoes” (pee- dispatch a maggot-infested trashcan filled water bottles that truckers (a “cooker”), J.B. is sprayed by the throw out their windows) give unique back splash of rank garbage “soup” flavor to the story. Many serve as that he pours too quickly into the subtle metaphors for broader so- truck. Derf skillfully portrays ciopolitical and existential con- J.B.’s classic reaction. Vibrating ditions: bar brawls (class); trash words like “SCHUP!,” “SLOSH!,” and collecting blues (culture); govern- “SPLAT!” evoke the thick, gelatinous ment bureaucracy (democracy’s fail- muck that drips out of the can, hits ings); foreclosed properties (capi- the truck, and catapults back into talism’s failings), unsuccessful J.B.’s face. Emphatic hash marks come-ons (sexual rejection), used around J.B. tell us he is shivering condom hunts in a civic baseball in utter disgust as he sweats, rips field (sexual fulfillment), trips to off his shirt, and frantically wipes the cemetery, lots of dead animals, maggots off his body. Nearby stands and Marv’s (the curmudgeonly city Curt, a tenured garbage man whose dog catcher) passing (mortality). solid, sturdy demeanor balances J.B.’s frenzy. The scene ends with a The ultimate symbol is, of course, close-up image of the filthy steel all the garbage. Page after page, garbage can lying on its side, flies Derf portrays the relentless glut- buzzing above; in the upper right, tony of consumer culture. He even the word “CHOKE!” notes that J.B.’s offers a CliffsNotes-esque brief revulsion continues. history on garbage, tracking the human production and management of Weeks later, J.B. encounters another trash from Ancient Greece to cur- “cooker” and handles it with ease. rent day. At the end, he cautions It is simple but potent statement our disposable predilections, repre- about time, perspective, and expe- senting a world literally buried in rience, but one that resonates with trash. the themes of How to Remain Human. The book ends with J.B. introducing Trying to dig one’s self out is a “Betty,” their truck, to two newbies framing device in many of Derf’s who soon whimper at the site of mag- graphic novels. His work examines got-covered garbage bags. The life poverty, ignorance, bigotry, apathy, cycle continues. entitlement, psychosis, anger, dis-

35 appointment, and other unsavory con- cludes a third portrait of Magee, ditions. Derf’s characters tend to this time after his clothes have embody, in look and spirit, the core been soaked by a drenching trash aspects or consequences of these haul. He stands in the service lock- ailments. He gives no leeway to his ers reading a porn magazine, still subjects, unapologetically depict- dripping wet, wearing only saggy ing, even amplifying, their essence, men’s briefs, cowboy boots, striped even if repugnant. In True Stories, athletic socks, and a bug-spraying there is no shortage of crazy home- hat. The mayor and other officials less guys speaking nonsense or nas- enter to get coffee, but stop short, ty, tasteless women casting judgment aghast at Magee’s appearance. His without regard for their own flaws. indifferent expression is the cherry Like the maggots, Derf portrays vile on his “screw the system” outlook. characters so vividly that your fingers feel dirty turning the pages. The last time Derf portrays Magee, he is wearing a “Half-Cleveland” t- Derf has a unique talent for trans- shirt. The shirt could be interpret- lating personality through line and ed many ways: Magee’s partial asso- gesture. In Trashed, this technique ciation with the city, a nod to its is most palpable in the eccentric strange East/West divide, a glass- character, Magee, J.B.’s roommate half-full (or empty) metaphor. Yet, and occasional co-worker. Magee is it also suggests how Magee plays introduced early in the book as the yang to J.B.’s yin throughout the crazy cemetery lawnmower, and is the book. If J.B. is the down-to-earth, only character that regularly gets astute, industrious side of Cleve- full-spread portraits. The first of land, Magee is its cultured, crazy, these gives life to Magee’s uncon- crooked counterpoint. And both are ventional personality: seated on garbage men. Like so many other spe- a thin pad in Sukhasana (a cross- cial nuances in Trashed, this small legged yoga position), Magee wears detail grounds the story in our com- sunglasses, pants, striped socks, plex, strange city. The book offers and a CREEM t-shirt (a monthly rock innumerable allusions to Cleveland’s magazine out of Detroit). Burning strengths, weaknesses, and endur- cigarette in hand, he is meditating ing realities. At its core, though, in the dark by simultaneously watch- is trash, which as J.B. notes in ing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and his final line, “never fucking stops listing to a Sun Ra 8-track tape. coming.” A plate of nearly finished Chi- nese food sits beside him. J.B. offers Magee a mid-century lamp that he found while trash collecting, to which Magee replies, “Bertrand Rus- sell said ‘It is the preoccupation with possession that prevents men from living nobly and freely.’” Mo- ments later, he recants this ideology when J.B. offers him free 8-track tapes.

Throughout the book, Magee provides flamboyant commentary that is at once forceful, educated, contradictory, and ruthless. His actions are as bizarre as his words: defecat- ing behind a private bus shelter, getting in unwinnable bar fights, and leaving town suddenly with four months of J.B.’s rent money. Just before this final event, Derf in-

36 Derf Backderf Excerpt from Trashed, 2015 Pen and ink, spot color 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of the artist

37 Derf Backderf Excerpt from Trashed, 2015 (detail) Pen and ink, spot color 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of the artist

38 Derf Backderf Excerpt from Trashed, 2015 Pen and ink, spot color 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of the artist

39 Derf Backderf Excerpt from Trashed, 2015 Pen and ink, spot color 11 x 14 inches Courtesy of the artist

40 DEAR MISGUIDED IVORY TOWER DWELLING DILETTANTE BY KEN EPPSTEIN

June 12, 2015

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland Management 11400 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, OH 44106

Dear Misguided Ivory Tower Dwelling Dilettante:

I am shocked and dismayed that despite my previous eight letters of protest and petition with OVER a dozen signatures of concerned citizens that you are still intent on displaying work by “Derf.” As if that’s a real name! I’ve heard that Facebook banned his account upon learning that this dubious individual was using an alias. I assume that the museum is publically funded; Don’t my taxes buy some due diligence? Do some research or at least background test!!!

Aside from his craven use of a bizarre and nonsensical pen name, I wonder if the curatorial team has even looked at this guy’s body of work, as it is offensive to the core.

For years, the liberal media foisted Derf’s hipster observational humor on us with his weekly cartoon strip “The City.” The strip was laden with supposedly true stories that are, in fact, just concocted potshots aimed at wounding the pride of white middle class America. If we are the 1%, as the media is so proud of pointing out, aren’t we worthy of protection from being brutalized as a minority!? I’m sure you could imagine the uproar if you featured artwork taking similar pokes at women or the African American community, and would take pause before offering it up for public consumption. Clearly this exhibition is a case of double-reverse discrimination and I hope you are prepared for the repercussions.

By the artist’s own admission, for a significant run of “The City,” he was in a “brutalist” phase wherein normal people were drawn with popping bloodshot eyes, bulging veins and splattering bodily fluids…like some damn Big Daddy Roth Rat Fink Monster. That brutalist phase prepared him well for what was to come…the tyranny of his career as a comic book creator. (Oh…excuse me, I forgot to translate that into your own high faluting jargon…Graphic Novelist)

While The City was the longest running of Derf’s offenses, I suspect that his graphic novels will make up the bulk of your exhibit. When I was growing up, comics were a wholesome form of entertainment featuring morality plays that reinforced good old fashioned American values. When Superman saw a wrong, he righted it. Superman had integrity and a

41 strong moral core. Derf’s comic books are about trash, both literally and metaphorically. Is that what the kids are reading today? The integrity and morality of GARBAGE!?

Just look at his recurring “Otto Pizcock” character. For the sake of propriety, I’ll skip a discussion on the juvenile genitalia joke inherent to the character’s name in favor of a more adult conversation about what this character represents symbolically, namely Derf’s heroically trashy alter ego. Otto is a seven foot tall band geek who spouts Tolkien references, befriends sleazy punk rock icons, works in grungy bars and dirty bookstores, beats up “rednecks” (Read: young men with conventional and clean taste) and still somehow manages to have premarital sex with numerous women of questionable character. Otto refers to himself as the Baron, a royal designation flying in the face of our democratic values. The endless paganistic Tolkien quotes spewed by Otto represent his disdain for Christian values. Your fantasy life is showing Mr. Backderf, if that is indeed your real name.

It’s not even a particularly original idea. Derf’s hero, Jack Kirby, created test pilot and football star Ben Grimm as his own alter ego in the pages of the Fantastic Four. There are significant differences between the two alter egos. Kirby’s Grimm rises from his destitute beginnings in the squalor of Yancy Street in New York City like a true blue American hero, while Derf’s Pizcock remains mired in filth. Where the noble Ben Grimm pays karmically for trusting an eggheaded scientist by being transformed into the monstrous Thing, Otto Pizcock revels in his sinful lifestyle and monstrous form. Instead of being a proper handwringing and apoplectic hero, Otto swims in the pool of garbage in Derf’s Twilight Zone world of topsy turby amorality and dirt.

I suppose you think I’m exaggerating about the filth. The man’s first graphic novel was titled TRASHED and it was about GARBAGE MEN.

I remember when comic book characters were secretly military officers, lawyers, and corporate CEOs. You know…college boys. Who wants to read about characters who labor all day in garbage? Apparently the artsy-fartsies at Abrams Arts, who have ordered up a brand new edition of these sanitorial chronicles. Everyone has had embarrassing summer jobs. It teaches us the value of a dollar. But most of us have sufficient etiquette not to talk about our hard labor. One year father made me work at the country club, I had to wait tables because all of the caddy positions were filled. You don’t see me glorifying that miserable experience!

In summation, I have skimmed through Derf’s work and see nothing of value. I hope that your institution will reconsider inclusion of this controversial figure and perhaps add a more acceptable cartoonist to the exhibit. Is the guy who does Marmaduke from Ohio? I love those cartoons...That dog is SO DARN BIG!!!!

Sincerely,

Ken Eppstein A “White Middle Class Suburban Man” 5783 Eagle Nest Dr. Bentleyville, OH, 44022

42 PRACTICE MAKES PERFORMANCE BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH

“Practice makes perfect” is a false realism. Some feature actors and objects euphemism. Practice makes something, the artist makes, like the manhole but it’s never perfection since humans covers in Fe26 (2014). Others chronicle are intrinsically imperfect. At most, precise, framed moments in Everson’s practice creates exceptional or personal life, like Vanilla Cake with extraordinary ability, the best of the Strawberry Filling (2014), which records best——think Olympians, Nobel prize- a memorial for the artist’s son. With winning scientists, or master chefs. reference to practice, all of Everson’s More often, practice makes competent, films can be seen as his ongoing cohesive, or effective. In certain practice of being an artist, honing his industries or disciplines, practice is a craft one work at a time. He states: behind-the-scenes activity that leads to “Procedure is the formal quality I am on-stage success, something that informs exploring with the work. The process but is not displayed or celebrated. In is the execution of the formal quality. other areas, like law, medicine, and Once I have a grasp of procedure, the art, practice is (philosophically) the process becomes a discipline.”1 focus; the process of repeating acts to deepen and sharpen skill is revealed Several films in How to Remain Human because it is the purpose, the point. portray practice, but Tygers (2014) is the most obvious example. A short film Practice is a central focus in the work depicting football drills for a group of of Kevin Jerome Everson. In general, high school athletes at Mansfield High his films and videos consider the School in Mansfield, Ohio, it literally performance of identity and the rituals portrays practice. Players execute moves of labor. Everson’s African American two, maybe three times each, making subjects execute simple, obligatory, subtle adjustments with every attempt. or repetitious actions for the camera: Some come at the camera, others run in How to Remain Human, this includes away, all in set patterns. Everson magicians doing sleights of hand, intersperses their movements with close- watching a fireworks display, blowing up portraits wherein helmeted players out birthday candles, and trying to fold practice looking “the part”: stoic, a map. Everson’s artwork is strongly fierce, confident. informed by his upbringing in Mansfield, Ohio. He began his artistic career in Throughout the film, the players drill Cleveland in the 1990s, first exhibiting directly in front of the camera, as if at MOCA Cleveland in 1991. it were a linesman or coach. In showing different students executing the same Although his imagery is familiar and drills/movements, Everson demonstrates direct, Everson is not a documentary the nuances of practice, the ways in filmmaker. He creates deliberate which individuals performing the same vignettes that combine fiction and tasks are intrinsically different

43 (better or worse, advanced or beginner, //////////////////////////////////// etc.). Although training to create a cohesive team, each player shows degrees of promise and growth. Like in a play, 1. Kevin Jerome Everson, “Kevin Jerome Ever- the empty stadium behind them is a son,” Drain: black, drainmag.com, Vol. 8, stage, used now for rehearsal, but soon No. 1, 2013. for the main “performance.” The camera flits and focuses at times, reinforcing the in-progress, working-on-it nature of this subject.

Tygers is silent. We never hear the quarterback’s count, the football’s smack against his gloved hand, the panting and heaving of speedy transitions, the taunting from opposing players, the coach’s direction and feedback. This silence, coupled with the film’s grainy black-and-white palette and tight, frontal vantage point, removes all distractions from the singular task at hand. Ultimate focus—a core element of practice.

Practice requires time; they are necessary bedfellows. How much time is endlessly variable depending on the task. At just two minutes, Tygers doesn’t depict a “full” football practice. Moreover, we never see the game, never know the payoff. We assume that the athletes repeat these actions often, for hours, several times a week, over the course of many months, even years. Long time is insinuated both in the repetitive nature of the action and in its lack of narrative.

Everson’s deliberate application of (brief) time, (no) color, and sound(lessness) in Tygers connects notions of practice and performance. Although we are watching a football practice, the film is not just about practicing football. In just two minutes, Everson swiftly and deftly captures the expressions, gestures, poses, movements, interactions, and environment that these players employ to perform a particular identity, one deeply significant in the Midwest. This identity is more than just playing football—it’s also about playing masculine, playing teammate, playing submissive, playing fearless, playing consistent, playing tough. And playing “perfectly,” of course, a performance best realized through lots and lots of practice.

44 Kevin Jerome Everson Tygers, 2014 stills from 16mm film, 00:02:00 Courtesy of the artist; Trilobite- Arts-DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Copyright Kevin Jerome Everson

45 46 GRACE AND GRIND: NOTES ON THE WORK OF KEVIN JEROME EVERSON BY MICHAEL B. GILLESPIE

Growing up people thought we were rich vitation for contemplation, not simply a because both of my parents worked. My passive spectatorial practice of watch- mom was a bank teller and my dad was an ing. His work never proffers anything auto mechanic. Also, people thought we resembling an essence or definitive were rich because we had two cars. The answer. Instead, it demonstrates a devo- illusion of art is that it is of the tion to quotidian occurrences and tasks. leisure class. But, that’s a projection As Ed Halter notes: in a weird way. When I was doing street photography and considering how to frame Everson rejects the role of cultural things, the subject matter I was concen- explainer in his work, opting instead trated on was people of african descent to place the burden of understanding performing or posing. In this way, the on the audience and its own labor. job site for me became a performance In this way, he has carved a place piece of a craft. I don’t pretend to be for himself outside both the typi- working class anymore but I respect it cal expectations of documentary and and appreciate it. the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the —Kevin Jerome Everson1 materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else. Kevin Jerome Everson’s work represents a distinct processing of materials, craft, This short essay focuses on Everson’s and blackness. work by way of conversations we had over the years and offers a glimpse of an Having worked in various mediums (e.g., artist continuing to push his craft and photography, printmaking, sculpture, grow. Furthermore, this piece speculates painting) for over twenty years, Everson on how his work might be considered to has shifted significantly since the late engage with the exhibition’s query of 1990s to primarily film and video. His How to Remain Human. growing catalog of film and video work includes over one hundred shorts and six * * * * * feature films. This work has shown at film festivals, museums, galleries, and MICHAEL B. GILLESPIE: When did you first other exhibition sites throughout Europe start making art or identify as an art- and America. Everson’s film and video ist? work deliberately defies easy categori- cal claims. It gives the impression of KEVIN JEROME EVERSON: I began when I was a scripted documentary that is mediated getting my BFA in Photography at the by experimental/avant-garde gestures University of Akron. I continued grow- and yet there is a refined insistence ing as an artist while getting my MFA on the everyday, black people, history, in Photography at Ohio University. I and repetition. Everson’s film and video was doing a lot of street photography, work always functions as a distinct in- people like Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank,

47 Garry Winogrand. But really I was always KJE: Because nothing is real in my work, dealing with multiple media. I was doing everything is made up. My work documents sculpture, printmaking, and painting. I artifice. I’m working on a project with did some films in school but mostly for a colleague who wants to do documen- me it was all about the influence of my tary. The first thing that I was think- undergraduate teachers. They all came ing about was when to start auditioning from Kent State, Ohio, and Iowa where actors. it was all about material, process, and/ or procedure. So for me, the work al- MBG: We’ve spoken before about how ways has to project its material, pro- you connect black intellectual prac- cess, and/or procedure. Even the film tice with “being satisfied.” I’m think- and video. ing about the footage of your family in Erie (2010) discussing how working in MBG: One of the ways I continue to iden- the factory used to be about a certain tify with your work involves the way it kind of pleasure derived from a craft, defies the expectations of black art, but that eventually as management became experimental art, and the meeting be- less labor identified it became just tween the two. Why do you primarily work work and finally, drudgery. How are your with film and video? What does film and ideas of labor and being satisfied in- video do for you more so than sculpture, flected in your work? painting, or photography? KJE: For me, being an artist is the KJE: Well, I haven’t stopped working practice of getting better. Art is not with multiple media. I finished my last necessarily a job. I don’t just want to large body of serious photography when I do my work well. I want to develop. I was in Rome at the American Academy back have a responsibility to my family, my in 2001. Beyond the fact that I’ve been hometown of Mansfield, close friends, teaching film more, my move to working and a history of former students to keep more with film and video has lot to do making that art. I’m not a doctor so I with the things I’m trying to say about don’t heal, and I’m not a lawyer so I gestures, tasks, and conditions. I’m don’t advocate. I’m an artist, so I have interested in duration and time-based to keep cranking out cultural artifacts. media works best for that. I tell my students I am an artist and a teacher, but mostly an artist. I want MBG: How has Ohio informed your work? them to believe that. So, I prove it every day, week, month, season, and year. KJE: I identify as someone from Northern Art has to be made. Ohio. Unemployment, employment, migration from the South, language, weather, MBG: I looked back through the catalogue benchmarks, and basements. These are for the Black Male exhibit at the Whit- the keywords for my craft as I continue ney Museum of American Art (1994). I was to try and get better as an artist. I’m thinking about your Mansfield, Ohio, End drawn to what gestures might represent. Table piece. I am very struck by the way in which Mansfield, Ohio inhabited that MBG: Do you still bristle at being work and continues to inspire your art called a black avant-garde or experimen- practice. In that same vein, I am also tal artist? interested in what motivated you or at- tracted you to carry out this signifi- KJE: I would still prefer to be called cant shift to the medium of film and an artist. I’m still down for the ev- video. Because in thinking about that eryday political and the every other day piece, it seems to me that it does have political. a collateral relationship to what you are doing now in film and video. What MBG: People have to write dissertations, are the photographs on the end table? Kevin. You can’t be just an artist. On that note, why do you refuse to identi- KJE: The photographs on top of the table fy as a documentarian or want your work were 1950s school photographs. And also thought of as documentaries? there were pictures of prison guards. I had family and friends who worked in the

48 prison. My hometown of Mansfield used to that you demonstrate. Could you speak to be more of an industrial town, but now where you locate your work in the ongo- the penal institution is the main indus- ing discussions of black representation? try. My son’s mom, my uncle, and several You have an investment in visual and ex- cousins are all prison guards. The end pressive culture but without an inflec- table was basically done in the style tion of universal humanism. of Dutch modernism with these two photographs placed on it. I really liked KJE: I was and remain interested in the making those objects; I made probably craft. What motivates my approach to twelve of them. But, what I really liked composition has much to do with the his- at that time was that someone would ac- tory of migration, the working class, tually go to work, come home on Friday, and black performativity. I am a forget paid on Friday because everybody got malist. I want the presence of materi- paid weekly, and then they would go to ality. I look for ways that histories Bing’s Furniture. It was one of the few and formal properties can be understood furniture stores in my hometown and ev- as complexly performed. I consider my erybody had the same kind of furniture. work to be art. When I was first showing Everybody had the same end tables. So Spicebush (2005) here in America I en- the fact that they would go and pick out countered this sense of how observation their end table with a different color does not trump perception. Once they see or stain than that of their neighbor and black people they get freaked out and bring it home and rearrange it inter- start needing something more familiar to ested me. What I liked more so than the them. That’s when I get questions about sculpture was the time-based element, the absence of drugs. It says ‘art’ on the performative aspect of a normal my door. It says ‘art’ on my license day. I was thinking of these performance plate. Yet, observation does not trump pieces of people just arranging their perception. furniture. My parents would arrange furniture seasonally and put up new pic- * * * * * tures. In Everson’s North (2007), an old black MBG: What this kind of furniture signi- man (James Williams) struggles to refold fied is interesting. Your attention to a large map on a windy day. Comprised details of craft raises the issues of of two static shots, the man stands on class, labor, and materials. It touches a cliff with Lake Erie at his back. Un- on the broader question your work makes able to find a proper crease and fold to about the conception of labor in regards close the map, the high winds foil his to the construction of the piece and task and turn his attempts comic and ab- the labor necessary to accumulate the surd. The film’s designation of ‘north’ capital to purchase it. The work demon- evokes senses of movement and futil- strates your driving concern for perfor- ity. Perhaps, an abstracted gesture to mativity and the laboring body. a history of black migration arrested and thwarted as this exacting attempt at KJE: I like that the body changes with folding reveals a gesture that neither labor. Coal miners have thick forearms. succeeds nor fails. Rather, it remains Truck drivers have potbellies. I am in- a poignant observation of a struggling terested in those moments when the body process of mapping and navigation. shifts and changes. In Twenty Minutes (2005), you have the classical idea and The man appears again in Ninety-Three form of the pulley then matched by the (2008), a short film comprised of a very same complexity of the performance single slow-motion shot as he attempts of the men crafting a pulley to raise to blow out ninety-three candles on a the engine out of the car. birthday cake. In this instance, the perfunctory ritual of blowing out the MBG: I appreciate your investment in the candles becomes meted by the elongation art of blackness as not patronizing, in of time. This stretching demonstrates an ethnographic sense. There are few not the granting of a wish, but the cin- artists who address or enact blackness ematic measuring of time. In this way, with the degree of rigor and ambiguity the film captures more than a birthday

49 celebration. It documents contemplation a black everyday, but in fact does not. and resignation, ceaselessness, aging, The manhole cover shenanigans are art- and a quiet joy and inevitability. In ful forgery as Everson himself cast one contradistinction to the blowing out of of the manhole covers and a crowbar used the birthday candles and the marking of in the film. Fe26 is avant-garde comedy maturation, Vanilla Cake with Strawberry about craft, genre, and the art of arti- Filling (2014) offers another cake and fice; an abstraction of form rather than a marking of a life that has ended. The an exposé on the trickle down truths of cake features the smiling pose of DeCar- black communities. rio Antwan Everson, Kevin Everson’s son who died in 2010. The edible image is Set in Windsor, Ontario, there is a sur- that of the joyful look of a young black veilling quality to Grand Finale (2015) man not for the occasion of a gradua- resulting from Everson’s use of a tele- tion or birthday, but a crossing over, photo lens and the lack of precise fo- a goodbye. The guests eat the cake not calization cues. The handheld camera out of a “this is my body” sanctimo- in the crowd at a distance displays two niousness, but as if to say he has left young black men from behind while they but he is honored by the vanilla cake watch a fireworks show. The watching with strawberry filling that remains. of the watchers accentuates their ges- The film ends with the ritual closure tures and movement as they talk, record of memorialization as the photo cake, the event on their phone, and sporadi- now an icon, is carefully sculptured so cally look away. The sight of the event that only the portion featuring DeCar- itself is distended by the lens; it is rio remains. The careful packaging of a distorted flashing of blurred colors. the memorial cake completes one part of In this way, the film is composed by a process that cannot easily be thought the clustering of distinct and contin- to be closed. gent quotidian gestures—the telephoto vantage, two young black men engaged in Tygers (2014) is a perfect example of the perfunctory ritual of watching fire- many of the core themes of Kevin Ever- works, and finally the distorted image son’s aesthetic practice: repetition, of the pyrotechnics on the screen ho- a devotion to form, and Northern Ohio rizon. Yet, as Everson has noted, the sports. The film focuses on football scene is about an everyday black perfor- practice for “The Tygers,” a high school mativity: how two black subjects observe football team in Mansfield Ohio. Ever- an event and inhabit a space. The two son positions himself and the camera on young black men are indeed the event on the field within cycling repetitions of display or more precisely, the affec- the drills that cover passing patterns, tive force that compels the film’s pro- coverage schemes, and handoffs. They are saic spatio-temporality. When the film constitutive elements of a sport that, has a slight cut to the grand finale of echoing the attempt to fold the map, the pyrotechnics show, the exuberance does not guarantee success or failure of light and sound becomes matched by but only the learning of form. the cool teens breaking character as the sight of their emoting joy and awe ri- Fe26 (2014) illustrates Everson’s poi- vals the spectacular grand finale in the gnant disregard for any suggestion of sky. But, to have Everson tell it, if documentary as an exercise in truth. you thought the fireworks were the show, The film is scripted verité set in East then you have missed the real show. Cleveland and observes characters who are scrap scavengers who specialize in //////////////////////////////////// stripping abandoned homes of their valu- able remains. But the script speculates on manhole covers as a prized posses- 1. Michael B. Gillespie, “‘To Do Better’: sion. The film, like much of Everson’s Notes on the Work of Kevin Jerome Everson.” work in general, pivots on the over de- Kevin Jerome Everson (Chicago: Video Data terminacy of a black image, the visual Bank, 2011). rendering of blackness. Coupled with the documentary conceit, East Cleve- 2. Ed Halter, “The Practice of Everyday land might be thought to correspond to Life” Artforum (May 2010): 33.

50 1.

1. Kevin Jerome Everson 2. Kevin Jerome Everson Grand Finale, 2015 Vanilla Cake with Strawberry Filling, 2014 Still from HD video, 00:04:41 Still from 16mm film, 00:01:50 Courtesy of the artist; Trilobite- Courtesy of the artist; Trilobite- Arts-DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Arts-DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Copyright Kevin Jerome Everson Copyright Kevin Jerome Everson

Kevin Jerome Everson Fe26, 2014 Still from 16mm film, 00:07:21 Courtesy of the artist; Trilobite- Arts-DAC; Picture Palace Pictures Copyright Kevin Jerome Everson

52 THE SPACESHIP IS CRASHING BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS

Objects are heavy things for Ben Wall Street and the group Anonymous, Hall, bundles of tightly coiled among others. relationships and histories. With a scavenger’s knowledge of Detroit, Equally responsive to architecture he sources materials for his pieces and spaces as to objects, Hall all over the city, keeping tabs worked with his frequent on where supplies can be found, collaborator Andrew Mehall seeking matter that “still has the to develop a 4-channel sound human in it”.1 Hall listens to installation, The assumption that his human materials, folding their a wild animal is coming into former lives, places, and contexts contact with a domesticated one. into his sculptures. His works (After Harry Bennett) (2015), are like conversations: unfixed, for MOCA Cleveland’s yellow fire rangy, and evolving. His approach escape stair. Completely enclosed to materials is metonymic, full within the main staircase, the of rabbit holes to go down. Take interior stair’s narrow, winding the use of bulletproof plexiglass, corridors resist the clean geometry repurposed from a vacant liquor and aspirational transparency store worker’s booth into a emphasized throughout the rest of bookshelf. Hall was unsettled by the building’s architecture. The how the material embodied the artists were fascinated by the protection of the worker, who positioning of this stair. Although watches the customer while also a transitional space designed being watched. Hall maxes out the primarily for emergency egress, conceptual possibilities of the it is not a “non-place,” design plexi through proxies that pursue explicitly for everybody and so for and extend its meanings; questions nobody. It’s decidedly non-neutral: of transparency, surveillance, and disorienting, intensely yellow, protection arise throughout the confusing—a “claustrophobia stair.” works in the exhibition. Local As Hall states: resources, questions of economic injustice, everyday radicalism and it’s a place where the worker resistance, and personal experience goes and returns a FB msg, also connect the three works Hall technological avoidance made for How to Remain Human. Hall’s that reifiies technology and sensitive material approach is consumerism [...] a weird move further informed by a theoretical by the architect to create a framework pulling from Marxism, the solidarity with the security Situationist International, critical guard, the docent, the student. pedagogy, and the ideas of recent protest movements such as Occupy

53 Hall and Mehall sought to heighten is mediated rather than directly the experience of “psychedelic experienced. This title, among other oppression” in the stairwell, important texts of the avant-garde, working another important 1968 can be purchased by visitors who text into the exhibition: Brazilian are invited to leave the suggested philosopher and educator Paulo donation, using the honor system. Freire’s influential book, The All of the titles on the bookstand Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire are still distributed by Fredy’s criticizes traditional models of wife, Lorraine Perlman, who ships education as reinforcing existing them out of her home in Ferndale, a power structures and perpetuating suburb of Detroit. oppression, advocating instead for a critical pedagogy in which students The Drill (2015), a large, complex gain the agency for self and social structure, occupies the main transformation through active gallery. A base of cement blocks methods of teaching and learning. supports a ramshackle scaffolding Passed through text-to-speech of broom and mop handles in a software, the tone and meaning of rough V formation. From this, this impassioned, human-centered other objects are draped, hung, and text is shifted as the robotic tones stretched. One wall of the piece stumble over the words, rendering is made of 150 backpacks which it cold. The sound is layered hang side-by-side like bricks in a and chorused, reminiscent of the wall. The same as those approved “human loudspeaker” technique used for use in the Detroit Public by Occupy Wall Street protesters. School system, the backpacks are It sounds as if the batteries transparent, a visualized buzzword are running out; or, as put by a that references the constantly friend of the artists, as if “the surveilled environment through spaceship is crashing.” The sense which the schoolchildren move. of emergency is heightened by an Transparency is a key concept ever-present high pitched frequency of MOCA’s architecture, though that reverberates insistently inside rather to oblige porousness and one’s head, a reference to the accessibility within the Museum ringing sense of strain felt by Hall than to enhance security and while taking care of his parents protection. In both cases however, when they were ill. Hall would use transparency makes the inhabitant the hospital stairway as a cooling of the building or the wearer of off zone when the stress became too the backpack ostentatious, aware much. of being watched. Within the Museum, the boundaries and codes of The scuffed up liquor store acceptable behavior are invisible plexiglass mentioned at the start yet clearly and swiftly delineated of this essay resurfaces in the once transgressed, requiring an exhibition as a book stand that internalization of surveillance—of doubles as a terrarium and a self-policing—in order to enter and donation box. Titled Lorraine & remain. Fredy (2015), the piece is a tribute to the quiet radicalism of a local The backpacks double as cacti Detroit area couple. Fredy Perlman terrariums, each one a “living (1934-1985) was a naturalized monument” to (and bearing a sticker American author and activist who portrait of) Vincent Chin, a Chinese came to the US from the Czech American man beaten to death by auto Republic. He made the first English workers near Detroit in 1982, cast translation of Society of the as the feared specter of the foreign Spectacle (1968, Guy Debord, founder worker. Barely discernable, Chin’s of the Situationist International) faint, fragmented portrait, printed in which Debord defines the large scale, forms the backing of spectacle as a hallmark of late the terrariums as a large tarp? At capitalist society, where life the closing of How to Remain Human,

54 the backpacks will be distributed US healthcare system. These broad out into the world, further themes are anchored to Hall’s lived disseminating Chin’s monuments. experience through the inclusion Inside the transparent traps, the of deeply personal references. cacti strain; organic matter stand- One screen features an image of ins for the liquor store worker, a piece of old cypress wood that the school child, and the docent. Hall cut from under the sink in his Personified, they don’t have room mother’s Detroit home. Scaled up and to breathe, time to pause, the monolithic, the wood looms large. latitude to make mistakes, unwatched It bears marks and scratches, scars spaces——all things that more and of domestic breakdown and parent- more people have less and less child roles reversed. The wood image of. The backpacks literalize the overlays a meme-like joke about burden (of responsibility, of the cowboys and American Indians, another performance of innocence, holding it reference to racial and economic all together) in an ever narrowing inequity. These as with other objects social and civic sphere. are available for endless processing, a mix-n-match syntax of hopelessness A large, handmade quilt made from and structural violence: Goldman old t-shirts covers the other outer Sachs Healthcare Murdered Occupy/ wall of The Drill. Three repeated Monopoly Backpacks and Watched graphics tumble across its surface: Schoolchildren Made in China. the text “Emma Goldman Sachs,” the Situationism Could Not Stop It, We unlikely merger of Emma Goldman Were Entertained/ Interchangeable in (1869-1940), an anarchist writer a system of victims. and activist, and Goldman Sachs, one of the global investment banks Stretched thin and curiously that profited from the subprime bodied, The Drill also suggests a mortgage crisis; the Adidas slogan different reading, a superstructure (shifted to read All Day I Dream that appears to clutch at its About Situationism), and the free garments, gathering itself up in parking square from Monopoly. The vain, its rickety supports showing interior of The Drill contains through. From this angle, the two used t-shirts stretched on work conveys a hopeful precarity; crowbars, adorned with red, blue, the ungainly monolith nearing its and white buttons in a patriotic tipping point, while the base is array. The red and blue buttons strong. Hall’s sculptures are never show two African American Major static; assembled in place and League Baseball players: Larry later deconstructed, their objects Doby, the second player to integrate flow in and out, given away as the league, joining the Cleveland gifts, absorbed into new works, all Indians in 1947, and Ozzie Virgil, merrily proceeding towards entropy, who played for the Detroit Tigers, circulating in parallel economies. the second to last team to integrate Perhaps it is Hall’s process, his in 1958. The white buttons show resourceful and sensitive approach Rich Uncle Pennybags, the monocled to making, which suggests a way to tycoon from the board game Monopoly, keep moving. When the syntax is who Occupy protesters adopted as destabilized, new sentences can be shorthand for the corruption of Wall written. The spaceship is crashing, Street. but those who were never permitted to board in the first place are In The Drill, Hall implements watching from the ground. Once it objects to form a visual grammar, hits, it’s time to build again. becoming glyphs that inscribe deep narratives about contemporary //////////////////////////////////// life: the intertwining of the global financial market, 1. This and all subsequent quotes of worker exploitation, sports and Hall are from emailsto the author, entertainment, and brushes with the April, 2015

55 MOCA Cleveland’s interior stair, installation site: Ben Hall and Andrew Mehall The assumption that a wild animal is coming into contact with a domesticated one. (After Harry Bennett), 2015 Four channel audio installation with Adobe pdf read- er, pirated version of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, latent frequencies, non-repetitive sound waves, chorus. Total running time 05:00:54. Courtesy of the artists and Young World, Detroit

56 1.

1. Ben Hall The Drill, 2015 Concrete, DPS approved backpacks, cacti, perlite, soil, mesh, rebar, cement, laundry bags, reprinted t-shirts, chiffon, spray enamel, broom and mop handles, scrapped conduit, buttons 168 x 180 x 84 inches Courtesy of the artist and Young World, Detroit

2. Ben Hall Lorraine & Fredy, 2015 Repurposed bulletproof glass, cacti, soaps, enamel, independently published books 62 x 38 x 38 inches Courtesy of Young World, Detroit

57 Ben Hall The Drill, 2015 (details) Courtesy of the artist and Young World, Detroit

58 FEEL, TO FEEL MORE, TO FEEL MORE THAN BY FRED MOTEN

1. jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat Ben Hall has a kind of evangelical listening to my phonograph. It was obsession. Some joker gave him a strange evening. Invisibility, something and now he wants to give let me explain, gives one a you some. See if you can see and slightly different sense of time, hear and feel certain passages you’re never quite on the beat. in and of a collective head Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes arrangement, as if Lygia Clark were behind. Instead of the swift and touring with a territory band. imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip 2. into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Now I have one radio-phonograph; Louis’ music. I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my I went toward the microphone where hole, and when I have music I want Brother Jack himself waited, to feel its vibration, not only entering the spot of light that with my ear but with my whole body. surrounded me like a seamless cage I’d like to hear five recordings of of stainless steel. I halted. The Louis Armstrong playing and singing light was so strong that I could no “What Did I Do to Be so Black and longer see the audience, the bowl Blue” -- all at the same time. of human faces. It was as though a Sometimes now I listen to Louis semi-transparent curtain had dropped while I have my favorite dessert of between us, but through which vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I they could see me——for they were pour the red liquid over the white applauding——without themselves being mound, watching it glisten and the seen. vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam “May I confess?” I shouted. “You of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like aremy friends. We share a common Louis Armstrong because he’s made disinheritance, and it’s said that poetry out of being invisible. confession is good for the soul. I think it must be because he’s Have I your permission?” unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids “Your batting .500, Brother,” the me to understand his music. Once voice called. when I asked for a cigarette, some

59 There was a stir behind me. I this old arena, the new is being waited until it was quiet and born and the vital old revived. In hurried on. each of you, in me, in us all.1

“Silence is consent,” I said, “so I’ll have it out, I’ll confess 3. it!” My shoulders were squared, my chin thrust forward and my eyes If one is human, as a matter of focused straight into the light. sheer biological determination, then “Something strange and miraculous to feel more human, which is given and transforming is taking place in only in the experience of having me right now . . . as I stand here been made to feel less human, is, before you!” in fact to feel more than human, which is given, in turn, only in the I could feel the words forming experience of having been made to themselves, slowly falling into feel less than human. What if the place. The light seemed to boil human is nothing other than this opalescently, like liquid soap constancy of being both more and shaken gently in a bottle. less than itself? What if all that remains of the human, now, is this “Let me describe it. It is something realization? What if the only thing odd. It’s something that I’m sure that matches the absolute necessity I’d never experience anywhere else of remaining human is the absolute in the world. I feel your eyes brutality of remaining human? Is upon me. I hear the pulse of your there any escape from the interplay breathing. And now, at this moment, of brutality and necessity? Serially with your black and white eyes upon excessive of itself in falling short me, I feel...I feel ...” of itself, brutally imposing the necessity of its retention as the I stumbled in a stillness so only justification and modality of complete that I could hear the gears its retention, the human is only ever of the huge clock mounted somewhere visible as the more than complete on the balcony gnawing upon time. incompleteness from which it cannot quite be seen. Invisible Man marks “What is it, son, what do you feel?” and is the blindness and insight a shrill voice cried. of this impossible point of view. Invisible Man can’t quite see when he My voice fell to a husky whisper, tells us how he feels; and when he “I feel, I feel suddenly that I tells us how he feels he does so by have become more human. Do you way of a paradox that is contained understand? More human. Not that I by the very feeling it cannot quite have become a man, for I was born approach. All we know about what a man. But that I am more human. it is to feel, to feel suddenly I feel strong, I feel able to get that one has become more human, is things done! I feel that I can see that it is to feel immeasurably sharp and clear and far down the more than that. The immeasurable, dim corridor of history and in it I here, denotes every earthliness can hear the footsteps of militant that remains unregulated by human fraternity! No, wait, let me confess distinction and distinctiveness. At ...I feel the urge to affirm my stake is the sheer, slurred, smeared, feelings...I feel that here, after swarmed seriality of mechanical buzz, a long and desperate and uncommonly horticultural blur, geometrical blind journey, I have come home... blend, an induced feeling’s Home! With your eyes upon me I feel indeterminate seeing Ben Hall that I’ve found my true family! My musically instantiates in his art. true people! My true country! I am Let the gallery’s held logisticality a new citizen of the country of your explode into the Brotherhood’s vision, a native of your fraternal improper displacement. Give a sign. land. I feel that here tonight, in Shake a hand. Dance.

60 4. digitized into uncountability by an unaccountable sonority Freire now Charismata——the gift of spirit of would recognize, is the undercommon which Cedric Robinson and Erica instrument whose instrument we’d Edwards teach——is conferred upon like to be. In the glow and blur of the one who cannot see by the ones the collective head’s collective who see him, in their hearing of embrace, more precisely and properly him, in their bearing of him, in the valued in its fuzzy disruption touch of their eyes, in the el of of valuation, in its radical their ears, in the sight and sound unbankability, in its inappropriable of their open, lifted hands. It’s impropriety, light and sound are as if he fades into their senses, the materiality of our living, the them, the ones who in being so much basis of our revolutionary pedagogy, more and less than one can only be the ground of our insurgent, auto- figured by science as the mob. To excessive feel. be held in the mob’s embrace, in the wound and blessing of their shared, accursed sensorium, is //////////////////////////////////// to be made unaware of one’s own invisibility——to feel, to feel more, to feel more than, to feel more 1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, than I feel, I feel. Can you hold 2nd Edition (New York: Vintage one another tonight in the blur, so International, 1995) 7-8, 341, 344- that one and another are no more? A 45. table is prepared for your common unawareness, for the disinheritance you might not know you long to know you share, the share you’re blessed to share right now that only unawareness of yourself will let be known. Invisible Man had withdrawn, if only for a moment, into the external world, which responsible subjectivity rightly understands to be no world at all in the brutality of its wrongful attempts to eradicate it. Adrian Piper, pied, in motley, blind, silent in her consent not to be single while, at the same time, loud, and felt, in the intensity of her confession, has been led to lead us out of the art world and into this exteriority with that same pentaphonic song Armstrong was always playing no matter what song he was playing. No matter what song he is playing, they are the ones who are not one who are playing it. That’s what this entanglement of Ben Hall are playing. You have to excuse their grammar. DJ Crawlspace’s repercussive counterweight is stairwell, in golden light well, in sound booth, in reverberate hold. That Armstrong plex, given elsewhere in Hall’s Some Jokers (For 5 Turntables, basement, ice cream and sloe gin), regifted as Paolo Freire, vocoded,

61 Ben Hall The Drill, 2015 (detail) Blue, red and white pins showing the faces of Larry Doby, Ozzie Virgil, and Rich Uncle Pennybags Courtesy of the artist and Young World, Detroit

62 I WILL ALWAYS CREATE INTERVIEW BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER

Jae Jarrell was born in Cleveland in Vest (2015) recalls the ornate cloth- 1935. She grew up in the historic Glen- ing and jewelry of the Maasai people, ville neighborhood, the same area of who live in parts of Kenya and northern the city that she returned to in 2009 Tanzania. Shields and Candelabra Vest with her husband Wadsworth, after having (2015) uses the organic form of cac- lived in Chicago, Washington D.C., and tus plants, flipped on their sides, as New York. They settled into two sprawl- frames for colorful African shields. ing apartments facing Rockefeller Park: Jazz Scramble Jacket (2015) brings to- studio spaces above and residence below. gether two of Jae’s loves: jazz and Every wall and surface bursts with art, blues music (a constant backdrop at home life, family, and soul. and studio) and the crossword board game Scrabble. The intersecting names of Jae has always been a maker and an en- influential musicians speak to the im- trepreneur. Her passion has carried portance of community in developing a through many pursuits, from art to fash- scene, style, and history. ion design, vintage dealing, and furniture restoration. In 1968, she was one I sat down with Jae in May 2015 to talk of the founding members of AFRICOBRA about her extraordinary life and cre- (African Commune of Bad Relevant Art- ative vision. ists), along with Wadsworth, Jeff Don- aldson, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams. The collective formed in response to a lack of positive representation of African American people in me- RB dia and the arts, and their goal was to Were there any influential figures for develop a uniquely Black aesthetic that you growing up in Cleveland that set you conveyed the pride and power of their on your path as an artist? communities.

How to Remain Human features three of Jae’s garments from the early days of JJ AFRICOBRA: Urban Wall Suit (1969) drew I am the granddaughter of a tailor, and inspiration from the graffiti and con- though I never met him—he had passed by cert posters that filled the streets of the time I was born—my mother always Chicago, where brick walls became mes- shared with me the wonderful workman- sage boards for the community; Ebony ship that he taught all of his children. Family (1968) embodies Jae’s deeply So I’ve always been mindful of fabrics, belief that strong Black families are a recognizing different fibers, weaves, source of power; and Revolutionary Suit classic dress. Mother would take me to (1968) takes the shape of a Jae’s sig- vintage shops, and when mother wanted nature late 60’s 2-piece suit: collar- your attention, she whispered. She would less jacket, three-quarter length bell bring a collar of a garment forward and sleeves, and an A-framed skirt—with the say, “Just, look at that! Just, look at addition of a colorful bandolier. Jae that workmanship! When you see these also made three new pieces for the ex- saddle stitches, you know that that is hibition, revisiting designs and ideas a special tactic, so watch for these that still inspire her. Maasai Collar things!” And so I always thought of mak-

63 ing clothes in order to have something unique, and later I learned to sew very JJ well and made it my business to always I was always full of dreams. In my up- make my garments. And I also have a love bringing, it was always “yes you can!” for vintage, knowing that it has secrets The sky is the limit. I remember be- of the past that I can unfold. ing very taken with my family’s business. My Uncle Jimmy was a haberdasher and had this wonderful men’s shop that RB I worked in. I often thought, “I’d like When and how did “Jae” become the name to have my own business.” That was a you go by? mission that I thought I could pursue. High school was wonderful, it was interracial, about 30% black students. And JJ we just did everything together; we had When I left the Art Institute of Chi- parties and there were interracial rela- cago, I started a business in my apart- tionships. So I didn’t see any reason to ment, designing for a number of mod- have pause. els that worked for shows and needed to provide their own garments. So I built Then, somehow or another, you would the idea that I wanted to have a shop. hear trends in the news that might give At one point I got a job at Motorola— you an indication that things could be I was hired to help integrate the com- other than wonderful. I just thought, pany. They wanted me to be the face of you know, treat this with caution…but I Motorola. I was hired as a reception- didn’t think it would affect me because ist, and I bounced between three recep- there was so much “plus” in my life. I tion rooms in three buildings on the left Cleveland to go to college at Bowl- same property in Chicago. There was one ing Green State University, where they woman whose place I took when she went were forming a black student union. And to lunch and on breaks. She was an older I thought, “Well, that’s nice.” There woman and was a bit concerned about los- were only a handful of Blacks, maybe ing her job. I wanted to befriend her ten or fourteen on campus. At the same and so I started chatting with her about time my sister was dating a young at- clothes. I liked the way she dressed torney from Albany, Georgia who was go- and she liked the way I did, and there ing to school at Case Western Reserve was something about our spirits that University. He was completing his law was good. And she was somebody that I degree and intended to go back to help imparted my secret to, that I really his people. And I thought: “help them wasn’t going to be at Motorola for long. to what?” But at that time, a very ac- I wanted to be a designer and I wanted tive kind of revolutionary movement was my own place. We decided to try to name forming in Albany to free their people, this place. She loved having my secret give them guidance, give them opportuni- so we played around each time I came and ties. By the same token, I was struck by she toyed with it. I wasn’t going to be the fact that colonized African nations Elaine, my first name, and I wasn’t go- were beginning to be decolonized. And of ing to be Annette, my middle name, and course, fashion sort of takes a note of I certainly wasn’t going to be Johnson, activities occurring in the news, things my maiden name. At one point she came that would affect expression. So these up with throwing the initials backwards, concerns that I didn’t have before were J-A-E, and that’s when I chose “Jae.” I entering my life. always loved Hyde Park, and I envisioned having a store there. I found a one-room One of the things that struck me was how shop with one display window right at successful Uncle Jimmy was in his hab- the corner of a very lovely building at erdashery. Turns out Uncle Jimmy looks 52nd and Blackstone. And I named it “Jae like a white man. For all practical pur- of Hyde Park.” poses, as far as his clients knew, he was a white man. So I’m seeing that my dear Uncle Jimmy, who had such a knack RB in business, also had certain opportuni- You’ve always done things in your own ties based on an assumption that he was way, on your own terms. As a black fash- white. Later he formed a business rela- ion designer, did you feel that you had tionship with several other merchants, to forge your own path because it would realtors, a whole spectrum of black be more difficult to get your clothing business owners in the Cleveland com- into other people’s stores? munity. They started a Negro Business

64 League. And I thought, “Really?” Then it pay attention to the walls in our Chi- occurred to me that these were precau- cago area, all of the markings on them. tions, to protect and support one an- AFRICOBRA had made us missionaries to other. It was only then that I thought, the community; we were doing art for the “How do you protect yourself?” Because community. And I saw the walls as com- I’m always going to be going off to the munity message boards. I was struck by big lights somewhere. I realized that folks who tagged questions or propo- you’d better have your head on straight, sitions on the wall that someone else because you may need to cut your own might answer. I thought, “Wow, this is way. And one way that I thought was very hip.” As I was putting together this manageable was to have a business. You fabric I thought, “Let me see if I can call your shots in business. You set the make bricks in it.” I used velvet ribbon tone. And I’ll tell you, frankly, I’ve for my mortar, and began to paint and done a number of businesses, and for the write graffiti as well as incorporating most part, I’ve had particularly white the posters with announcements that you clientele. It was just interesting, would find. That’s how I got to Urban those who were drawn to what I offered. Wall Suit. It was a voice of the commu- I never really thought of activism until nity and a voice to the community. I was in AFRICOBRA. RB RB Can you tell me a little bit about the Can you talk about the process of making life of that piece? Did you often wear a garment? How does it start—as an idea, it, or was it made primarily for display a mood? Is it inspired by a texture or or exhibitions? color? JJ JJ We were taught to design with an inspi- Originally it was for exhibition, but ration from the fabric, but I tend to on occasions of import, I wore it. I do think of the end product before I really remember once wearing it in D.C., coming address the fabric. If you want individ- back from a grocery store with one of my uality, you have to use your own voice children in a sling and one in a stroll- from beginning to end. So, I birth fab- er and one walking, helping to push the ric sometimes. Fresh avenues of making stroller. But D.C. was like that to us. garments that might not have been used It was our people, and everything was on before. In AFRICOBRA I chose to use felt time. And so, it wouldn’t be unusual to and leather pelts. I ended up painting have popped it on. on leathers to express what I was doing. I included figures, because AFRI- COBRA was interested in speaking to the RB people, and you feel you’re spoken to What are some of your thoughts on the if you see your image. But I’m diverse renewed interest in AFRICOBRA? How do in how I work, sometimes I design right you envision its enduring legacy and on the tabletop as I’m working, and this relevance to the contemporary moment? gives me a degree of variety. JJ RB My mother was always telling me that Can you tell me the story of Urban Wall I was “bred.” If you brought somebody Suit? What was the inspiration? home, she would ask, “Who are their people?” And she would remind me that the training that we received was with JJ real intent, and was something to serve I made Urban Wall Suit in 1969. One of you always. When I was totally on my own the tenets of AFRICOBRA was to reinvent living in New York City, I pulled out yourself, reinvent how you were, rein- every guidance measure that she taught vent your whole manner so that you had to manage myself as a young adult, so- a fresh voice. I was inventing my fab- cializing, experimenting, and whatever ric. I had made a line of silk shirts at else. I kept these rules in mind, and my Jae of Hyde Park shop, so I decided it’s a reference that we used to carve to use the scraps. I put them together out AFRICOBRA. It was done in a very in large and small patches of rectan- family-like way. The love we had for one gular shapes and squares. I started to another, the respect we built for one

65 another, the trust we had. When would you put together as many as ten artists RB that bring their art partially done and What are you excited about now in your ask each other for input? Outside of a practice? What’s next, what’s your vi- classroom, you don’t expect that to hap- sion pointing to? pen. This was true trust and true interest and love of developing a voice, signature voices. You know them when you JJ see them. There’s a value in that you I will always create; it’s how I go never divorce family, and it’s always a about things. It’s part of my tool part of you if you really buy into it. kit. And I say “tool kit” without jok- So it’s very comfortable to exercise ing, ‘cause I might bring a saw out in some of those principles in anything you a minute! I love creating things. Pre- do, in living as well as creating. sentation means a lot to me. I’m hoping to expand my interests in wood making. Some of my art is more structural. RB What’s in the works is structure that I Your pursuits have most often related build alongside symbols that I borrow. to functional things, beautiful answers I’m making some panels, now, that will to what people need or how they want express my interest in sculpture as well to present themselves or imagine their as painting, using the leather again, place in the world. Could you talk a still interrelating materials. I think little bit about humanness and how it’s the sky is the limit on what I want to guided your practice? do or can do. It will always be a part of me and you will always know that it’s my voice, but it’s just moved in another JJ place. I just love being around people. And it’s probably why I chose to be a mer- chant , because it’s hands-on. I don’t XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX know what I’ll do with the internet, because I like eye contact and handshakes and shared stories. I always think of functional things, but add pizzazz to them. That’s where art comes in. But I am forever driven to make something that others might enjoy and that they might know me better by. I then grow from the joy they have. RB How do you want people to feel when they’re wearing one of your garments? JJ I think there’s a term that I use when I’m interacting with clients. And it’s an advice thing, but I always used the word “attitude.” Clothes allow you to have attitude. You can really define your place in a crowd with the proper sense of self and projecting your personality. You’re seen across the room. It’s a feel-good kind of tactic. That’s what I think I enjoy most about dressing people—I’ve seen glow as a result of knowing you have the right colors on, something that complements your phy- sique. Something you like, and that you can see in other people’s eyes that they like it too.

66 1.

1. Jae Jarrell Going to NYC, 1994 Mixed media on canvas 53 x 74 inches Courtesy of the artist

2. Jae Jarrell Jazz Scramble Jacket,2015 Silkscreened cowhide splits 25 x 21 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist

67 Jae Jarrell Maasai Collar Vest, 2015 Leather and suede with cowhide splits 19 x 22 inches Courtesy of the artist

68 JAE JARRELL AND THE FASHIONING OF BLACK CULTURE BY DAVID LUSENHOP

Artist and fashion designer Jae Jarrell ing as symbolic, public gesture. “Adorn made headlines in January 1971 when her to reflect” became Jae’s mantra from Revolutionary Suit (1968), a salt-n- this period forward. Today, a renewed pepper tweed jacket and skirt ensemble interest in the political and performa- with incorporated faux bandolier, in- tive nature of art, and in the cultur- spired Jet magazine editors to run a ally metamorphic period of the 1960s and cover article entitled “Black Revolt 70s, has brought new attention to Jae’s Sparks White Fashion Craze.”1 The influ- pioneering contributions. “[S]he antici- ential journal castigated the mainstream pated the confluence of fashion and fine fashion world for “borrowing” the bando- art this is so prevalent today,” writes lier from the Black revolution, and for Kellie Jones.4 turning a symbol of righteous political resistance into a neutralized fashion At the SAIC, Jae was one of few African- accessory.2 As evidence of this blatant American students. She recognized that cultural appropriation, the magazine her potential could be hindered by the juxtaposed Jae’s Revolutionary Suit with mainstream fashion industry’s racist and an illustration of New York socialite exclusionary practices of the time. As and art collector Ethel Scull, who posed she recalls: “one of the reasons I went in front of a Jasper Johns “flag” paint- into business with my own shop was being wearing a black turtleneck, lace-up cause I was going to circumvent getting boots, and a bullet-belt slung around turned down by some design house.”5 Jae her hips. Jae went on record in the ar- left the SAIC and honed her skills inde- ticle decrying this white consumerism. pendently, though she later completed a Her fashions had intensely political BFA at Howard University, took graduate ends: “We were saying something when we courses in textile design there, along used the belts. We’re involved in a real with an advanced, professional course at revolution.”3 Parsons School of Design in New York. She settled in the Hyde Park neighbor- As exemplified by this garment, Jae con- hood on the South Side of Chicago, an sistently seeks to merge the principles area she says “had an element of art and of fashion design with the liberatory class and tolerance.”6 She opened a bou- politics and culturally-specific expres- tique called Jae of Hyde Park in 1964, sions of the 1960s and 70s Black Arts where she offered one-of-a-kind coats Movement, generally considered an exten- and suits, and custom tailoring. sion of the Black Power movement. In 1965, several tragic events had a In 1958, ten years before Jae’s ground- profound impact on the art and activ- breaking work began appearing in art ism of Jae and her circle in Chicago. journals and museum exhibitions, she Malcolm X was murdered, Dr. Martin Lu- transferred from Bowling Green State ther King and peaceful protestors were University in Ohio to the School of the met with violence in Alabama, and the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where Watts Rebellion erupted near downtown she enrolled in the fashion design pro- Los Angeles. Spurred by these trou- gram. The SAIC was not her first expo- bling events, and others before them, sure to clothing design; her grandfather African-American activists founded vari- was a tailor and her family in Cleve- ous social and political “Movements” in land all sewed. It was during her for- the months and years that followed. For mative years in Chicago, however, that many, the slow pace of social and po- she began to understand fashion design litical change during the preceding ten as a potent cultural force, and cloth- years of the Civil Rights movement sig-

69 naled a need for more aggressive mea- (1968) and Urban Wall Suit (1969) were sures to address racism, economic in- among the seminal designs by Jae fea- equality, and white cultural hegemony. tured in the New York exhibition. In the guise of apparel, these artworks in- In response to this political and so- vite a subjective reading of the forms, cial turmoil, in 1968 Jae co-founded colors, and lines as part of the over- the now renowned visual arts group AF- all aesthetic experience, yet they are RICOBRA, along with her husband Wad- forcefully political and demonstrative. sworth Jarrell, Jeff Donaldson, Barbara As Jones-Hogu reflects, “it was not fan- Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams.7 An tasy or art for art’s sake, it was spe- acronym for African Commune of Bad Rel- cific and functional.”10 evant Artists, the group’s name boldly proclaims their intention to pivot away What could be more “specific and func- from critiques of white oppression, and tional” than garments designed specifi- instead use their work to address the cally for a revolution? As Jae recently Black community head-on. Barbara Jones- explained, “The rectangular format of my Hogu explained: “[O]ur visual statements Ebony Family dress is a dashiki imitat- were to be Black, positive, and di- ing a poster.”11 By taking the form of rect.”8 AFRICOBRA also rejected the idea a traditional West African men’s gar- of using mainstream art modes of the day ment that became de rigueur in African- like Minimalism and conceptual art, and American communities during the 1960s disavowed much of the modern Western art and 1970s, Jae connects her design prac- history they had learned in art school. tice to African, rather than European, Instead, they began conceptualizing what fashion traditions. Employing letter- a “Black aesthetic” might look and feel ing (in the form of scattered Es and like. Fs) subscribes to AFRICOBRA’s practice of reinforcing images through language, During formal AFRICOBRA meetings, often but referencing in an oblique way that held at the Jarrell’s home and studio on is comprehensible without being literal East 61st Street in Chicago, the members like many of the political and protest began exploring ways to concretize a posters of the period. “Black aesthetic,” a self-defined set of image making practices and philosophical The reductive nature of Jae’s figural protocols that drew from lived experi- design in Ebony Family underscores AF- ences, African prototypes, and African- RICOBRA’s interest in forging links American vernacular culture, especially between African prototypes and Afri- the sights and sounds of their own South can-American art traditions. This is Side community. The principles of AFRI- especially reflected in the faces of COBRA’s “Black aesthetic” were outlined her rendered Black family. Their forms by Jeff Donaldson, as spokesman for the recall the stylized geometry of Lwalwa group, in a lengthy, manifesto-like es- and Dan masks made by artists in regions say entitled “10 in Search of a Nation,” of Angola and Congo in West Africa. The first published in Black World magazine geometric velveteen shapes and thick, in October 1970. Each AFRICOBRA artist rectangular lines of complimentary col- was intended to incorporate the concept ors imbue this work with a rhythmic of “Expressive Awesomeness,” to include visual buoyancy. These are AFRICOBRA’s “Free Symmetry,” to make “organic” art, famous “Cool-ade” colors: “bright, viv- to convey “Shine,” to include lettering, id, singing cool-ade colors of orange, and to adopt a palette of “Cool-ade” strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime and colors, among other prescribed image- grape. Pure vivid colors of the sun and making modes the group defined in de- nature. Colors that shine on Black peo- tail.9 By adhering to this set of aes- ple, colors which stand out against the thetic principles, each member’s artwork greenery of rural areas.”12 was conceived of as part of a larger collaborative project. While Ebony Family is infused with an inherited spirit of Africa, the work Guided by the tenets of AFRICOBRA, Jae also speaks directly to that cultural produced several fashion garments in the moment in America when Jae and others period leading up to the group’s nation- in the Black Arts Movement celebrated al debut at the Studio Museum in Har- the unique artistic contributions of the lem in the summer of 1970. Ebony Family African-American artistic avant-garde.

70 By embodying the AFRICOBRA principle visit was over, I could hear in their of Free Symmetry, defined as “the use voices, and see in their eyes, respect— of syncopated rhythmic repetition which Real respect...and pride.”16 constantly changes in color, texture, shapes, form, pattern, movement, fea- //////////////////////////////////// ture, etc.,” Ebony Family conjures the dazzling 1960s paper collages of Romare 1. “Jae” is the name under which Jarrell has Bearden, himself an artist-turned-activ- produced art since the early 1960s. It is an 13 ist in the Civil Rights era. Jae’s col- acronym for Johnson Annette Elaine, the reverse orful, staccato composition also echoes order of her birth name. the free-form, improvisational music of 2. I have capitalized the B in Black out of African-American Jazz masters like Eric respect for the long tradition of doing so when Dolphy, Roscoe Mitchell, and John Col- referring to people of the African Diaspora. This trane, whose music filled the studios of form of the word was commonly used by African- the AFRICOBRA artists. American media outlets, beginning in the 1960s. 3. Jae Jarrell quoted in “Black Revolt Sparks Few artworks of the 1960s and 70s joy- White Fashion Craze,” Jet, vol. 39, no. 18, fully “represent” as well as Urban Wall January 28, 1971: 42-45. Suit (1969), a natty two-piece woman’s suit. The garment declares its ori- 4. Kellie Jones, “Civil/Rights/Act,” Witness: gins loudly and proudly. Constructed of Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Teresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones, eds. (New York: printed and dyed silk with applied vel- Brooklyn Museum and Monacelli Press, 2014), 46. vet lines suggesting a brick wall, and covered in painted graffiti and imi- 5. Unpublished TV Land/Hudson Street tations of tattered broadsides, Urban Productions interview transcript, 2010, Additional recorded and transcribed materials Wall Suit crystalizes the vibrant cul- are held as “Interviews with AfriCOBRA Founders” ture of the South Side Chicago community by the Archives of American Art. For more that Jae lived in and loved. The faux information see www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ tattered posters, rendered in acrylic interviews-africobra-founders-15925 paint, reference contemporary politics (Vote Democrat), and advertise local 6. Ibid. gigs by Blues and Jazz greats (Muddy Wa- 7. The group was originally named COBRA, an ters, Duke Ellington). Graffiti on the acronym for Coalition of Black Revolutionary bodice honors Chicago colloquialisms of Artists, but changed to AFRICOBRA in late 1969. the day like “E Thang,” “Miss Attitude,” Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell prefer that the name of the group be spelled with all capital letters, and “Black Prince.” Jae reflected on as it was on the poster produced for the first Urban Wall Suit recently: “It was impor- AFRICOBRA exhibition at the Studio Museum in tant, because the language was who I was Harlem in 1970. Other group members and scholars speaking to, and I was saying, I under- have used AfriCOBRA, AFRI-COBRA, and Afri-COBRA stand your newsletter on the wall. And I in printed material that references the group. join you. Why not [graffiti] on a per- 8. Barbara Jones-Hogu, “The History, Philosophy fectly good silk suit made to look like and Aesthetics of AfriCOBRA,” AfriCOBRA III a wall.”14 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1973), unpaginated.

By creating her art in the form of a 9. Jeff Donaldson, “10 in Search of a Nation,” wearable garment, Jae extended the work Black World, vol. 19, no. 12, October 1970: 80- outside of the museum environment, where 89. it is perceived as a precious art object. Curator Kellie Jones explains: 10. Jones-Hogu, unpaginated. “The traditional canvas is understood 11. Jae Jarrell, artist’s page, Witness: Art and here through its constituent parts, pig- Civil Rights in the Sixties, 117. ment and cloth, and its confluence with other uses, as quilt, as clothing.”15 No 12. Jones-Hogu, unpaginated. mere aesthetic object, Urban Wall Suit asserts its specific function through 13. Ibid. visual references to the street. This 14. TV Land/Hudson Street Productions interview wearable urban billboard becomes at once transcript, 9. personal shelter, public political act, and cultural observance. Jae recalled 15. Jones, 46. wearing the Urban Wall Suit during a 16. Jarrell, 117. visit with friends in Boston: “When our

71 1.

1. Jae and Wadsworth Jarrell, outside of Jae Jarrell Vintage Menswear & Collectibles, 466 Greenwich St., New York City, 2005

2. Jae Jarell in Urban Wall Suit, posed with Wadsworth Jr.(3 yrs), and Jennifer (3 mos) Revere Beach, Massachusetts, 1971

72 Jae Jarrell Ebony Family, c. 1968 Velvet dress with velvet collage 38 1/2 x 38 x 10 inches Collection of the Brooklyn Museum Gift of R.M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emma L. Hyde, by exchange. Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.16

73 Jae Jarrell Urban Wall Suit, c. 1969 Sewn and painted cotton and silk, two-piece suit 37 1/2 x 27 1/2 x 10 inches Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, Gift of R.M. Atwater, Anna Wolfrom Dove, Alice Fiebiger, Joseph Fiebiger, Belle Campbell Harriss, and Emma L. Hyde, by exchange. Designated Purchase Fund, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, and Carll H. de Silver Fund, 2012.80.16.

74 QUEASY AND UNSURE, HAPPY AND AFRAID INTERVIEW BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER

I first met Harris Johnson in 2013 at a solo exhibition of his work RB in Cleveland. The paintings were I was trying to think of a way to de- colorful, punchy, and slapstick; scribe your sense of humor. I kept landscapes, still lifes, and tools circling around words like sarcastic or of the trade. Many came across as wry or smart-alecky. Daffy comes close. jokes. Together, they could be read But the word that kept rising to the like a stand up comedian’s mono- top was “dumb.” It’s the dumbness of logue, a heady blend of confidence your work that makes it so funny and and desperation. At a studio visit pathetic and powerful all at once. soon after, I saw how intense and quizzical Johnson’s practice is, how his interrogation of painting, HJ and struggle with and against style, Yes! It is definitely dumb. Part of were enmeshed with apprehensions of that is about futility. A painting self, presentness, history, and in- can’t change anything but it of- adequacy. Over the next couple of fers an experience. Like with the years, as Johnson pursued his MFA, faux rock painting—I just wanted to his practice expanded, becoming less paint a rock. Sure, it brings up no- canvas-centric,more open-ended, and tions of stage setting, artificiali- stylistically diverse. They retained ty, realness, existential questions. the personality of the earlier work, But it’s also just a stupid little articulating it with greater nuance. trompe l’oeil thing. I sat down with Johnson on June 9, 2015, a few days before the opening of How to Remain Human, to discuss RB his work over drinks. The paintings that you were making before going to grad school were quite different than the ones you’re XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX making now. They were more graphic and comically-styled. What was the first painting that made you know that you were doing something really different? What was the break for you? HJ There were a few breaks. One was a painting of a desert, a sort of imaginary landscape I did after I got back from LA. I feel like that

75 was the first time I really strug- a work and they might think, “Oh, gled through a painting. Before there’s no planning.” But there’s that I feel like I was doing… may- also no hesitation, there’s no be illustration or something? Like doubt. There’s mistakes, there’s bad a frame-by-frame story of my life moves, but there’s good moves, too. here. The other painting was of a Maybe. dead soldier. From Iraq or Viet- nam, with his brains blown out. I RB felt like, “Woah… What the fuck?” I When I was reading American Ramble I got out of genre painting, got out was struck by all of the dated ref- of the idea of still life painting erences: JonBenét Ramsey, OJ Simp- as a habit. The previous work was son. Is that because those things about me, it had aspects of my life, are related to the development of true stuff and fake shit, everything your psyche as a child of the 80s? was a “Harris Johnson painting” but it seemed disingenuous at a certain point, like I was copying myself. HJ And I wanted to make paintings that That’s one way of looking at it. meant something more. But also, you can think about Rod- ney King—which I don’t really remember, I wasn’t tuned in at that RB moment—and then think about today So your paintings now, to what de- and all of the police brutality. The gree are they autobiographical? When ramble piece is a really frustrat- you make a painted text piece like ed piece, because I don’t know what American Ramble, is that your expe- the fuck to say. I don’t know what rience, or is it meant to speak to to say, and I don’t know how to say more of a generalized consciousness, it, but I know I’m mad about some- a broader, shared experience? thing, and that I can’t articulate it. Something is so fucked up, something is so wrong, and nothing has HJ really changed. It’s not really that I hope it’s effective in a gener- different. The way that the news is al sense, in a broader picture. I structured, commercials or whatev- don’t want to be specific in a poli- er, there’s a cut sequence between tic; I don’t want to be specific in a 12-year-old girl being raped and a statement. I don’t want to tell murdered to a special interest story people what I think, or what they to a commercial to a bunch of dudes should think. I want people to feel, chilling out... Dodge, Dodge, rock ideally, kind of queasy and unsure, hard cock, American man. That shit happy and afraid. Going through os- is really disturbing to me. And it’s cillations of feeling, really com- hard to express how disturbing it fortable and then terrified. This is. is really bleak… like the dumbness thing. People might ask, “Is this The dated references are dated guy an idiot? Or, is he really on to but they’re part of the cultural … something? Does he really care about blech. JonBenét Ramsey is as much the world and what’s going on?” And a part of it as John Wayne Gacey, I do. I do. That gesture, scribbling Al Capone, Babe Ruth. I could talk on a wall, is a very teen angsty, about Desert Storm and it would be spazzy thing. But it’s also expres- the same as Iraq or Iran. ISIS is sive, and I believe in that commu- the same as Contra. That’s why the nicative directness. That’s probably tone of the piece is just really, what I retain from my earlier paint- really pissed off, it really makes ings, the idea of intuition being me angry. There’s a lot about the really, really important, along with world that I’m unspecifically pissed improvisation. “MacGyver-ing” it and off about. winging it on the fly is really, really important. People see that in

76 are, this little stick figure fall- RB ing into a vortex. It could be about Let’s talk about your painting Black you being at the center. Or it could Hole (2015). I like looking at peo- be “Stairway to Heaven.” There’s a ple look at this work. It has a re- little ladder in the picture. The ally beautiful and sharp connection way I work is very … I don’t be- to the individual viewer. lieve in planning things. It doesn’t feel right. It feels gross. Like a design. It works well for some peo- HJ ple, but I’m not one of them. I’m I was really attentive to that definitely clumsy. I’m like a fid- painting, in a really specific way. dler. John Wesley, Peter Saul, they Not as in paying attention to what plan the shit out of what they do. was happening inch by inch on the It’s amazing, but it’s not neces- canvas, but just when I was mak- sarily painting that jives with me. ing it, it was like “What the fuck I’d rather stare at a Frank Auerbach is this going to be?” The canvas is painting for like, a year. There’s soaked through completely, I’m doing something about the tactile surface things to it, and then I’m going to of a painting, about the fact that come back and I don’t know what it’s you’re fumbling through it, and you going to look like. When the paint- don’t really know what you’re doing, ing was wet, the stars were perfect, that I think is really, really im- and I was like “That’s it!” I would portant. come back the next day and it’s dead. And I would have to fix it, make it alive again. It’s a painting that is meant for you to spend time XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX with. It’s not like a quick glance and “ha ha.” It’s subtle. RB What is on the canvas? What is being devoured? What is out there? HJ It depends how you see the painting. I guess I see it as a push/ pull. It sucks you in, pushes you away, sucks you in again. I mean, it’s a picture of depression. It’s a picture of being sad. And me feeling absolutely inside this painting. It’s kind of Pollock-y, a little corny, a little spacey, it’s a lot of things. The process of the painting—dribbling, dabbing, and all of that stuff—was really nice. The paint is in the canvas. On it, in it, and behind it. It’s kind of a weird tactile thing. But it really does depend on how you look at it. It could be a bible picture. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Congratulations, you’re all going to heaven. It could be an apocalyptic picture. You’re getting sucked into a black hole; there you

77 Harris Johnson Black Hole, 2015 Oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas 84 x 72 inches Courtesy of the artist

78 1.

1. Harris Johnson Tiny World, 2013 Acrylic on canvas 16 x 20 inches Courtesy of the artist

2. Harris Johnson Rock, 2014 papier mache, modeling,paste acrylic 13 x 21 x 13 inches Courtesy of the artist

79 Harris Johnson American Ramble, 2015 Acrylic paint on wall Dimensions variable Installation view, MOCA Cleveland

80 HARRIS JOHNSON: PAINTING AND ANXIETY BY OWEN DUFFY

As I write this essay, I have watched to Washington D.C., and sell them on the two places I love torn apart: Baltimore National Mall. With social media feeds and Nepal. In the aftermath of riots flooded with the government shutdown and earthquakes, I am left with and a bungled War on Terror, Johnson feelings of ambivalence about what “I felt disillusioned about his role as a can do” as an art historian to effect painter. In search of a politic, Johnson meaningful social change. Compounding recalls: “I actually felt like I was this disaffection and doubt, my own going to watch our country collapse, and president has publicly stated that I was drinking coffee and pushing paint my profession is of little use to around in my studio. I thought about America as it climbs out of economic how I could help. I was going to D.C. to collapse.1 Moreover, one of the objects pay off [America’s] debt.”2 Along with I engage with as a scholar, abstract his clumsy, abstracted flag paintings, painting, has been recently dismissed Johnson set up shop with a hand- as something to be instantly suspicious painted sign that contradictorily asked of, a “zombie formalist” commodity readers to “support the arts” by buying of no real significance outside of a painting, with the proceeds being market potential. What is an artworker, donated to the U.S. Treasury. Cheeky, let alone a human being, to do under cynical, and absurd, Johnson’s efforts such circumstances? Harris Johnson’s on the Mall raise questions about how paintings interpolate traces of painting can meaningfully contribute anxiety and uncertainty, and seem to to society during such watershed presciently anticipate such indecision moments. In the aftermath of the 2008 about what an individual “can do” in a economic collapse, when auction prices— moment of global turmoil. His works ask particularly for choice paintings—were urgent questions about art’s political breaking records, Johnson, in an ironic functions in the contemporary world, and humorous form of self-criticism, and use humor, irony, and, ultimately, riffs on the notion that art’s most sensitivity to cope with ambivalent worthwhile attribute is its ability to attitudes toward art in the twenty-first perform as a commodity. century. Abstract Protest Sign (2013) likewise After spending several years working in uses humor to conjure the absurd. And, Cleveland, Johnson moved to Richmond in like Johnson’s actions on the Mall, 2013. Finding himself in close proximity it does so in order to establish an to the epicenter of the American ambivalent attitude toward painting- government during heated partisan as-political, held in tension between debates over the federal deficit, doubt and levity. Far too heavy and one of Johnson’s first actions in cumbersome to hold comfortably for Richmond was to create over one hundred an extended period of time, let alone paintings of the American flag, drive for a multi-day picket, this object

81 asks if the language of abstraction Previously, Johnson has worked retains the radical politics from extensively through discrete visual modernism’s halcyon days. What would languages. As of late, his paintings it mean to introduce the crimson, demonstrate remarkable range. Recent loopy forms of Abstract Protest Sign paintings such as Big To (2015) and to a demonstration in Ferguson or Black Hole (2015) are united through Baltimore? When one begins to imagine their unapologetic aesthetic difference. such a ridiculous act, the idea of an They are also all palimpsests; surfaces abstract painting affecting social where Johnson cycles through ideas, change becomes implausible, potentially feelings, and entire paintings to even ludicrous. Abstract Protest Sign arrive at a singular image replete with suggests its own failure; not as a multiple histories and interpretations. work of art, but the failure of the Big To took over eight months to work of art to communicate universal complete; a landscape, a gestural meaning. At a more existential level, abstraction, and other works are Abstract Protest Sign asks, “What can buried underneath the slick, liquid painting do?” In a more immanent sense, surface. Big To presents viewers with Johnson proposes that the work, if it contradictory visual information. The protests anything at all, objects to the painting’s text could be read as “To,” “dominance of abstract painting,” while with the pinkish lump morphing into the also suggesting a deep-seated anxiety letter “o.” It could also be read as about painting as a viable medium in the “T.”, or the acid green form could be twenty-first century.3 During a moment viewed as devoid of linguistic meaning, mired with Silicon Valley “innovation,” and be seen iconographically as a cross, government relegation of the arts, and and so on. Whereas earlier works, such STEM educations, how can we begin to as Abstract Protest Sign, internalized characterize this anxiety? How does and expressed ambivalence about art’s Johnson’s work navigate such an ethos; relationship to the political, this what paths out of this condition do type of apprehension is ameliorated in these painting trace? more recent works through the painting process itself. In Big To, anxiety and For Johnson’s work, perhaps we can uncertainty are manifested in terms of consider anxiety as it is understood by how the work encourages ever-shifting, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. unstable meanings. Summoning the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, Žižek contends anxiety is Let us momentarily consider some a response to the knowledge of freedom, Freudian implications of Johnson’s to the “abyss of possibilities” that palimpsestic approach to production; confronts an individual.4 Anxiety doing so elucidates how Big To’s produces an uncertainty, a contrapuntal aesthetic strategies reveal traces movement between repulsion and of human experience. In Civilization attraction directed at existence itself, and Its Discontents, the Austrian and one must work to make meaning out neurologist Sigmund Freud characterizes of the vertiginous infinite. Žižek’s Rome, the Eternal City, in relationship interpretation of anxiety provides to the mind: a useful model for understanding a painter’s plight, as well as Johnson’s Suppose that Rome is not a human creative practice. At a moment of habitation but a psychical entity reinvigorated doubt about painting—when with a similarly long and copious art can be anything, instantaneously past—an entity…in which nothing that circulated, and abstraction’s has once come into existence will transcendent, universal narratives are have passed away and all the earlier replaced with financialized discourse— phases of development continue to how can one imbue artistic production exist alongside the latest one.5 with meaning? Rather than succumbing to the fundamentally human experience of Following Freud’s imagination, all anxiety, Johnson’s practice, and its that has ever happened to the Eternal aesthetic diversity, revels in the sense City—the battles, the Bacchanals, of freedom that causes it. and cultural memories—never actually

82 ceases to matter, just as all the aspects of the Kantian sublime and events, emotions, and relationships one Johnson’s work demonstrates sensitivity has ever experienced determines how toward this initial frustration, which that individual faces Žižek’s “abyss is followed by assurances of the mind’s of possibilities.” Rome, as with the competency. psyche, becomes a site of accumulation for history to continually rewrite In the context of the contemporary itself on. Even though the resonances moment, a precarious one marked by of past events may not be readily ideological and ecological fissures, observable and understood, like the Johnson’s paintings present potential countless underpaintings of Johnson’s resolutions. The works come to palimpsest-like works, they leave their terms with uncertainty, doubt, and mark, they are felt on the surface, and anxiety through sincere and sustained undoubtedly shape the reality that will investigations into how art can function eventually emerge. Johnson’s paintings, in relationship to such times and how, such as Big To and Black Hole, have thus in turn, it can meaningfully contribute become what they presently are because to the world. Given the extensive of their past—their layers of literal polarization created by such fissures, and conceptual accumulation. this ability to critically think about one’s own position is more crucial and Black Hole, specifically, brazenly imperative than ever. confronts the “abyss of possibilities” and its attendant disconcertion. The matter at hand—the centrifugal black hole at the center of the spiraling //////////////////////////////////// universe—lends itself to idea of the ultimate unknown. The uncertainty of what lies beyond the event horizon 1. On January 30, 2014, President Obama casts the work as an exploration commented at a General Electric plant: “I of epistemological limits, thereby promise you, folks can make a lot more, inserting it into the trajectory of potentially, with skilled manufacturing anxiety, ambivalence, and uncertainty or the trades than they might with an art I have tracked in Johnson’s oeuvre. history degree.” However, it is how Johnson approaches this work, with painterly conviction, 2. Harris Johnson, interview with the that articulates resolve and author, April 25, 2015. acquiescence to mystery. The surface of Black Hole, like Big To, a consequence 3. Johnson, interview with the author, April of coat after painted coat, gesture 25, 2015. after gesture, creates a reverberating, oscillating aura that draws the viewer’s 4. Slavoj Žižek, “Anxiety: Kierkegaard with eye inward to the painting’s point of no Lacan,” in Lacanian Ink, Vol. 26, (Fall return, only to return one’s vision to 2005), p. 114. the galaxy’s sweeping arms. Expressive marks, fragments of texts, and even a 5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its lone, distressed stick figure (humor Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton & always permeates Johnson’s work) are Company, Inc., 1962, p. 17 swept up into the frenzied vortex. Astutely rendered, Black Hole suggests an acceptance of painting’s limits, or, perhaps, an acceptance of the uncertainty about what those limits are. In a manner akin to the Kantian sublime, where the imagination collapses in on itself in its futile attempts to fathom what lies beyond, vertiginous feelings are replaced with sense of serenity. This ability to accept the unknown and the limits of cognition are powerful

83 Harris Johnson Abstract Protest Sign, 2013 Acrylic on panel, wood 40 x 32 inches Courtesy of the artist

84 #PINKTHINGMOCA INTERVIEW BY MEGAN LYKINS REICH

Jimmy Kuehnle takes up space. His sculpture balloons over the handrail past works include massively-scaled and swells up to the ceiling. As it inflatable costumes and outlandish deflates, the work recoils and draws bicycles that put the artist in up against the wall. It functions close, unusual contact with the like a living, breathing organism, world around him. Most recently, or an erratically beating heart Kuehnle has started making site- inside the Museum. specific sculptures, representing a shift from personal performance to Please, no smash. bears structural the activation of space. These works and aesthetic similarities to “get in the way,” disrupting usual Kuehnle’s previous inflatable functions and raising questions costumes and sculptures. It is about public versus private, and the the most complex sculpture the “place” of art. artist has built to date, with its unique combination of scale, For How to Remain Human MOCA movement, mechanics, and mounting commissioned Kuehnle to create an system presenting many unknowns. installation for MOCA Cleveland’s Kuehnle thrives on the unfamiliar. three-story Kohl atrium. Alluring, He regularly generates ideas that odd, and delightful, his new work push him beyond his current limits Please, no smash. engages the and force him to learn, grow, and Museum’s audience, architecture, and expand. Of course, failure is neighborhood in an interactive way. inevitable. So Kuehnle conceives It begs visitors to push, press, his projects to minimize the nuzzle, and otherwise respond to its severity of failure—barring ultimate curious presence and shifting form. catastrophe, what are the ways this Made from hundreds of yards of neon may shift/ fail that are acceptable pink PVC fabric, the work hovers aesthetically, mechanically, above viewers as it slowly inflates institutionally. In these ways, and deflates. Its lights flicker and Please, no smash. represents how glow according the time of day, and contemporary art practice relates the form radiates a hot pink glow to and invokes other industries. that is visible from outside the Artists are problem solvers. Their Museum at night. When it’s fully works are solutions, though not expanded, the work’s plump body necessarily answers. extends into most areas of the Kohl Atrium. On the ground level, leg- Here are some answers from the like protrusions zig-zag down from artist about aspects of this work. above like bulbous stalactites, creating tunnels and pathways. //////////////////////////////////// At various stair landings, the

85 MLR MLR How did you approach designing Why pink? the sculpture’s form? Are there any references that inspired its shapes and protrusions? How did the JK architecture influence your design I like pink. The Museum’s interior choices? color palette is blue, black, and white—very cold on the interior aside from the yellow interior JK stairs. Of course, this is by I wanted to fill the space with form design. In a museum, the artworks and mass. I think that inflatables are meant to be highlighted. I are very interesting when you are wanted to have something that inside one. When you’re inside an really juxtaposed that blue steel, inflatable, the lack of 90-degree something warm and illuminating and angles and natural architectural glowing. That limited the piece to forms really makes for a surreal colors such as red, orange, yellow, experience, and I enjoy it very or pink; no blues, no greens, no much. Some of my original ideas were purples. Also, nylon fabric only based on an inflatable that would comes in a limited color palette. completely fill the space and only You can have any color custom made, leave spots for people to stand with but why reinvent the wheel when they the work enveloping them. Lights sell hot pink fabric? would shine down from above indicating the spots that would be safe in the sculpture, as it would come down and MLR surround that entire area. Some of Describe if and how your impression the first designs included these all- of MOCA Cleveland’s architecture encompassing sections. Some were only changed while making and installing, (in theory) three feet high, so they Please, no smash. would require squatting and not have enough room for a standing adult. There were also passageways that JK required visitors to meander through My experience of the architecture the inflatable.The logistics of this changed as I made the digital model idea were not feasible, however, so for the initial ideation and sketches. in this case, the zigzag protrusions As I was making the 3D model, I kept are my attempt at making a surreal, second-guessing myself, thinking, “That absurd, abstract atmosphere in the can’t be where that is,” or “It can’t environment. really be that angle.” Everything seemed so strange as I recreated it in The architecture influenced my design digital form and filled it with ideas by its very shape. MOCA Cleveland’s and sculptures. Then I double-checked building has a very hard feeling, so I those ideas in reality by measuring the wanted something soft and overwhelming physical space. My model was within an to shove up against these rigid inch or so of the building, which makes architectural elements. I started with sense because there are adjustments a 3D model of the Kohl Atrium that I that occur during construction. I built from CAD plans of the original learned to appreciate and experience building. I designed shapes that the architecture of MOCA Cleveland much would fill that space in different more. I also learned how difficult it ways. Some design decisions such as is to work on a lift, especially since the height of the steel armature that there was always something just out of supports the piece, as well as the reach. Often I thought, “It’s just over sharp angle of the railings, had to there, but I can’t get there, because be sculpted around. I also wanted to there is a reverse cantilever sloping press against the sloping glass on the piece of glass.” Museum’s exterior.

86 in order to make the work. Yet, I don’t MLR want to plunge into the darkness or Upon first read, the title Please, “jump off a cliff,” so these unknowns no smash. seems to be a request from are usually extensions or variations on either you or the sculpture itself themes that I already understand. (to the viewer, assumedly). However, installed in the Museum, I suddenly For this work, I focused on several read it as an appeal by the building themes and processes that I partially to the sculpture, a plea for the understood, and extended them all into work to keep its distance (which it unknown territory. I combined them into obviously ignores). Talk about the a single artwork so that all those title—how did you come to it, and unknowns, combined into a new work, has its meaning changed for you over would add up to something very new for time? me. JK Although this work is heavily planned I like titles that make people like you from start to finish and executed curious, but also offer the potential according to plan, it still had many for the viewer’s own interpretation by different surprises. For example, having some sort of call-to-action for my interest in the space originally the audience. Yes, Please, no smash. is came from seeing Michelle Grabner’s definitely a request to not be smashed sculpture, Grabner/Killam Family by the art. It also is a request from Summer 2013 (2013) hanging from the the sculpture not to be smashed. It ceiling. I thought to myself, “Great, could be interpreted as an impression you can hang stuff there,” only to or request from the building. But you find out after initial planning that can’t really smash it: if you press the ceiling was not an option in this on it, it will pop back. Because the case. So I decided to cantilever off sculpture will sometimes go down the wall and use brackets on the towards the audience, it may very well metal railings. The form had to be be the audience pleading, “Please don’t redesigned to accommodate that style smash.” as well as the building as it of armature rather than anchors coming comes towards the glass. from the ceiling. I had to learn a bit about electronics, mechanical winches, sailing blocks (pulleys) and stage rigging rope as I worked on the MLR piece— things that I did not expect to During installation, you mentioned be researching. I had to learn the that Please, no smash. converges open-source Arduino micro-controller many previous works—both in form programming platform as well as some and function—into one ginormous other electronics to get the sculpture installation. What surprises did to work. There are many surprises and you encounter during the process setbacks along the way, but that’s of planning, constructing, and part of the fun of working on a site- installing this work? Can you specific piece. estimate its influence on your future inflatables, or work in Most times, when I finally finish an general? inflatable, I swear I won’t make one for a while. But they’re so much fun! Somehow this center of gravity keeps JK pulling me back. I think that I will When I work on projects, I always incorporate more kinetic effects in like to learn things and have new future projects. This is not the first experiences. I don’t want to just time that I’ve used illumination, and repeat things I know. So I set up I will continue to do that because challenges, situations that require me it provides different views of the to learn new techniques, skills, and sculpture at night and day. And I’ll processes, to use new materials, to probably continue making things with an know something that I don’t know now, ON and OFF button.

87 Jimmy Kuehnle Please, no smash, 2015 Fabric, thread, fans, electronics dimensions variable Installation view, MOCA Cleveland Photo: Timothy Safrankek Photographics

88 INTO THE PINK BY TERRY SCHWARZ

Jimmy Kuehnle’s installation, Please, no 30’ tall spider figure, the deceptive smash. (2015) is a vivid pink presence puffiness of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2002), or the buoyant sweetness of Cleveland—monumental in scale, but more Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck (2009). malleable and tender than most monuments ever aspire to be. Unlike these other works, Jimmy’s installation at MOCA Cleveland is not I’ve encountered Jimmy and his a recognizable creature. But it is remarkable inflatables in other undeniably creaturely. Suspended more contexts, including projects we’ve than twenty feet in the air, its body worked on together for specific sites in contorts and strains against the walls Cleveland. In partnership with Cleveland of the Museum. Its columns (or legs) Urban Design Collaborative, Jimmy stretch to the ground. It moves as we has deployed his talents to protect move (sort of) and we identify with its pedestrians from downtown traffic (Pop existential struggles. Up Rockwell, Cleveland, 2012), enliven an underutilized parking garage (Hipp It also functions as architecture. It Deck, Cleveland, 2011), and shelter creates and defines space, providing people on a long walk across a dark opportunities for chance encounters under bridge (The Detroit-Superior Bridge and around its massive pinkness. Prior Project, Cleveland, 2013). to installing the piece, Jimmy prepared architectural renderings to show how These objects pull people near with a it would fit within MOCA Cleveland’s playful and irresistible force. Once we atrium. The avatars who inhabit Jimmy’s have their attention, it becomes possible rendered world are clustered near the to have all kinds of conversations about inflated object, not really looking at future development plans and public it, nor at each other. In its posture realm improvements. An inflatable object and presence, the object is notably more is an excellent icebreaker. natural and alive than the people drawn around it. Jimmy’s current installation has a somewhat different intent. He’s created In architectural jargon, the human a friendly form at MOCA Cleveland occupants of a rendering are sometimes that interacts with museum visitors referred to as people textures—cut and and engages pedestrians outside. Even paste characters intended to provide when no one is around, it continues to human scale and establish a social inflate and deflate, inhale and exhale. context. But in this case, it’s the Perhaps it even sighs occasionally when object we’re more likely to identify it feels lonely, or crumples after a with and befriend. It’s a companionable long day on the job. thing, an inflatable counterpart to our own humanity. Of course, it’s a thing, not a person. But Jimmy gives us permission to Maybe someday this charismatic character anthropomorphize his installations. will produce offspring, as tiny pink He makes relatable objects, akin to plushies or refrigerator magnets in the other, more figurative artworks such MOCA Store. If one follows you home, you as the encompassing embrace of Louise can keep it. And take great pleasure in Bourgeois’s Maman (1999), a towering, its (and your own) existence.

89 1.

2. Jimmy Kuehnle Please, no smash, 2015 3. Installation view, MOCA Cleveland Photo: Timothy Safrankek Photographics

1. Jimmy Kuehnle 3. View of Please, no smash lighting rendering for Please, no smash up the MOCA Cleveland Atrium from Courtesy of the artist outside the building at night.

90 SOMEBODY SHOULD JUST GIVE HIM A HAIRCUT BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS

I moved from the UK to Cleveland centers, hillbillies, magical names at 23 years old. I had a baby, my (WINDERMERE, MAGNOLIA, SEVERANCE), husband worked long hours, and I had brawls, rain-washed pavements, casinos, no family support. I’ve always been dance halls, Lincoln Continentals, and a place person, my identity tied to ecstasy, crossing between present and surroundings and daily habits, and here past just to insult Moses Cleaveland I felt myself slipping. I had visited (Mose-ass...) and visit the Seneca, Cleveland twice before I moved, once Huron, Delaware, and Chippewa tribes in the dead of winter and once in the who once lived in the region.3 hyper-lush summer, and remembered certain traffic intersections and For all of the thick, epic works like routes that we drove to the grocery “Cleveland Undercovers” and “SUBURBAN store or the park or the cinema; small MONASTERY DEATH POEM” (1968, from disjointed maps hanging in space. which the title of this exhibition is After moving, I couldn’t find those drawn), levy produced many shorter precise routes again, although I have poems, which are often simple and sometimes felt their edges. I spent romantic. “blues for life” (1960) is a a year and a half crisscrossing the bittersweet whisper of a poem, as if city without a car, on a mission, levy is standing outside of himself, overlaying South London affect atop of foretelling his future: Cleveland reality. My son was always my companion, down for whatever, cheerios. i miss the cups of coffee I got lost and pushed his stroller for that we miles. were never without i miss the wild topics d.a. levy was a walker too,1 and his we used poetry is full of maps.2 When I first to talk about stumbled across his work, it was as [...] if someone had captured the from- i miss the night life the-ground-up weirdness and visual and digging the sounds stabs that Cleveland gives on a daily i miss the lakefront drives basis; he saw the city critically, as and making the midnight rounds an outsider would. I was—am still— coming to terms with basic things; the “REFRIGERATOR MANTRA / the sunlight inhumanity of the large-radius curb shining thru my wife’s paisley skirt” or the un-cleared sidewalk in winter, (1967) pairs two efficient poems. The and his incredulity meant a lot to first, a concrete poem in the form of me. “Cleveland Undercovers” (1964-65) a refrigerator, imagines its familiar, narrates a long, wandering walk through domestic whirr and hum as a meditation. a necropolis in which much is hidden or The second evokes a moment of calm, muffled by ashes. Over its pages levy everyday beauty; I am transported, excavates the city’s unowned histories can feel the raking sunlight slanting and psychic pathways, stating, “i through the kitchen window and catching have a city to build.” levy’s city is the translucent fabric of Dagmar’s built with words that become “sweaty dress in the kitchen of the apartment brick-flesh images,” a mash-up of they shared. Though they were never neon boozeries, steamships, shopping married, they had an intense three-year

91 relationship, after moving in together the city government, police, and any partly out of convenience. levy had publication that refused to print outstayed his welcome with friends in his poetry found equal and opposite Shaker Heights. Dagmar, feeling her expression in his passionate advocacy seventeen years, just wanted to be out, for other poets and artists, tirelessly but the world felt big and she wanted making a space for their voices. He “a body in the house.”4 The University railed against the complacency of city Circle/East Cleveland border, the leaders and politicians but repped East area where MOCA Cleveland now sits, Cleveland the same way rappers in the had an energy about it in the 1960‘s. 1990’s gave big-ups to Brooklyn and the levy and his friends—Tom Kryss, rjs, Bronx; like it was a name that people Russell Salamon, Kent Taylor, D.R. should know. Knowing these things, I Wagner—and many more, haunted the think his response to recent turns establishments running the length of in Cleveland—the Orwellian-sounding Euclid Avenue: the Trinity Cathedral “Opportunity Corridor” development; basement; the Continental Theater; the the police shooting death of Tamir Crystal Restaurant ($1.90 dinners); Rice, a 12 year old child, on the near the Asphodel bookstore, owned by his West side; the breakaway inequality friend and supporter Jim Lowell.5 Allen and foreclosure crisis—would have been Ginsberg came through. But for Dagmar, scathing. Or perhaps that’s off the living with an increasingly paranoid mark; maybe he’d have mellowed with and exhausted levy became “a mindfuck” age. Speculation on the future feelings as time went on.6 Firmly planted of a dead man is impossible. But levy in the real world, Dagmar elicited understood that when you really love levy’s scorn, despite the fact that something you are allowed to be angry she worked full time to pay the rent, at it for not being better. Right now, supporting his efforts and allowing him I think we could use some of his rage. to maintain his oppositional stance as an uncompromised artist. She remembers //////////////////////////////////// this time as a short, intense period of her life; after his death she moved on and left the scene behind. But levy is 1. levy owned very few possessions, and no car. It was frozen. both an ideological position and a function of his self-imposed poverty. Karl Young discusses his walking practice in his essay “At the Corner of Euclid Ave. I extrapolate levy and thaw him out, and Blvd. St. Germaine: d.a.levy’s Parables of Local imagine him hanging around East Necessity and Universal Decentralism,” d.a.levy & the Cleveland, broke and complaining, or mimeo revolution, edited by Larry Smith & Ingrid Swan- drunk off of 1/3 of a beer, holding berg, Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press, 2007, page 155. threats of suicide over everybody’s 2. Ingrid Swanberg connects the geographic dots beau- head and distributing the Buddhist tifully in her essay “clouds sun moon mountains water 3rd Class Oracle on the corner, wind: the planetary vision of d.a.levy,” Renegade making his frenetic psychic mark on Flowers: The LevyFest 2014 Anthology, edited by D.R. a slow city during fast times.7 I Wager & John Dorsey, published by Hydeout Press in coordination with the Kulchur Cooperative Print Work- imagine his response to Cleveland shop. today. An unapologetic, often juvenile provocateur, levy painstakingly typeset 3. All words in this list excerpted from “Cleveland the words cunt, cock, and pussy Undercovers,” 1964-1965. (Farewell the floating cunt, 1964), 4. Dagmar Walter, interview with the author, June 2015 and produced a calling card bearing only the words Fuck Smut , a smart- 5. The Continental Theater showed many experimental alec response to the obscenity charges films, including early works by Andy Warhol. brought by the city. In general, he acted the part of the cartoonish poster 6. Walter, interview with the author. child for middle-American outrage 7. levy’s friend, Cleveland artist George Fitzpatrick, (except with the grandmothers of recalls how sensitive to alcohol levy was, and thus Cleveland Heights, in whom he—thin, how ironic it was that he was held up as some kind of scruffy—reportedly elicited a motherly, drug kingpin. Says Fitzpatrick, “I knew kingpins, and hair tousling response). But the rage- levy wasn’t one of them!” Interview with the author, May 2015. powered invectives he directed towards

92 d.a. levy REFRIGERATOR MANTRA / the sunlightshining thru my wife’s paisely skirt, 1967 Manuscript, 11 x 8 1/2 inches Courtesy of Kent State University Department of Special Collections and Archives

93 d.a. levy TOP ROW: pages from Farewell the floating cunt, 1967 Letterpress prints, 6 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches BOTTOM ROW: Fuck Smut, n.d. Block print on card stock, 2 x 3 1/2 inches All courtesy of the d.a. levy Collection, Cleveland State University Library.

94 D.A.LEVY: AWARENESS & ECLIPSE BY INGRID SWANBERG

Cleveland poet, artist, editor, and In August 1968, three months before his publisher d.a.levy was a seminal figure suicide, levy wrote “SUBURBAN MONASTERY in the underground press movement of DEATH POEM,” decrying the appropriation the 1960s.1 He was in touch with writers and marginalization of the arts by around the US, publishing both the industrial-consumerist society and the famous and obscure as well as his own distractions of modern technological poetry and dozens of other Cleveland culture. poets. He was always open to new voices. as a poet i try to learn levy felt it was necessary for the poet how to remain human to speak out to bring about change despite technology in awareness and the transformation of the culture. He was “part of a SUBURBAN is levy’s farewell to his movement trying to make this planet more expressed frustrations of being civilized,” as he said in a newspaper Cleveland’s poet, “the nothingness interview soon after he was jailed on of being a poet in America” (from trumped-up obscenity charges brought by “Jaywalking Blues,” 1967). city authorities trying to stifle his often scathing criticisms (strung with Over time levy’s poetry had moved from expletives) of government hypocrisy and claiming the “necropolis” of Cleveland corruption.2 Complete freedom of speech as his own poetic ground: was his poetic ethos, a freedom he expressed to the point that the powers- i have a city to cover with lines that-be were moved to silence him with (Cleveland Undercovers, 1966) arrest and persecution. Poet Douglas Blazek, levy’s friend and contemporary, to angry confrontation with it: wrote: cleveland, i gave you levy criticized the media: “I think the poems that no one ever it would be better to have no paper wrote about you than a propaganda sheet aimed at and you gave me keeping people ignorant.” He spoke NOTHING out against the war in Vietnam, (“lettre to cleveland” against the lethargic city officials, Kibbutz in the Sky, 1967) against unfair police tactics, against the cherished institutions to renouncing his role as Cleveland’s and values of Middle-America. He poet and disavowing his project of helped friends avoid the draft. He bringing change: organized what were probably the first coffeehouse readings in the im not advocating anything history of Cleveland at The Gate (E. (“SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH 22nd & Euclid) in the basement of POEM,” 1968) Trinity Cathedral, from which emerged four issues of Poets at the Gate.3

95 In 1963 levy acquired a small letter- “George Washington visits the cleveland head hand press and type and proceeded zoo.” In 5 Cleveland Prints he applied to work with great energy and inten- block prints alongside inked condom sity, sometimes 16 hours a day, produc- impressions (an invention challenging ing chapbooks under the imprint Renegade the moral guardians with mocking humor); Press and his first periodical The Sil- in 6 Cleveland Prints he combined ver Cesspool. He lived in self-imposed block prints and streams of freeform poverty in order to devote himself to type, introducing elements of Concrete his poetry full-time. At times friends Poetry. “Lakefront at Night” presents shared in the work. “We set type, print- a completely dark surface superimposed ed & laid in each page by hand, pulled with a semi-transparent, textured, the handle, removed the page, collated, greenish horizontal swath interrupted and even carved woodcuts using lino- with intermittent, small wiggling leum.”4 Friends also shared in the dis- strokes, somehow at once suggestive of a tribution of the work, posting through- living waterfront and the inability to out Cleveland the stickers levy had see anything. produced in a satirically funny, prose- lytizing vein, with the moral imperative Blazek writes of levy’s engagement with reading, “FUCK SMUT.” In 1965 levy was Concrete Poetry: given a small mimeograph and his output increased exponentially. In 1966 Ren- Though he was seldom given credit for egade Press became 7 Flowers Press. In it, levy was . . . one of the first 1967 he began printing on newsprint (his to introduce Concrete Poetry to the mimeograph had been confiscated by the American literary public. Since its police), producing the Buddhist Third conception in the early 1950s it had Class Junkmail Oracle, which presented pretty much remained in Europe. Only a range of materials, including poetry, a few people such as Aram Saroyan’s Concrete Poetry, editorials, articles on Lines magazine or Dick Higgens’ Buddhism, and levy’s collages. Something Else Press were in on this development. Many of levy’s books and The collages are wonderfully rich, magazines were devoted to his own usually filling the entire frame with personal brand of concrete.5 (often erotic) images from antiquity, history, current events juxtaposed with levy’s Concrete Poetry primarily clippings of letters, words and phrases involved mimeo printing and collage. taken from magazines, newspapers, Some of the Concrete poems present advertisements, comic books, and repeating rows of typed characters sometimes hand-lettering or overstrikes. shaped to resonate thematically (and The overall mood of the collages is sardonically) with the poem’s title, generally ironic, evocative, and and with the characters and symbols sometimes satiric. composing them. Examples from the exhibition include variations of Many of levy’s paintings involve “visualized prayer to the american god,” areas in which the paper or canvas in which repeated dollars and cents is saturated with large swaths of symbols form the shape of the American deep colors softly melding together, flag, a swastika, or just fields of sometimes with the imposition of an dollar signs. A different example is image in another medium or vigorous “REFRIGERATOR MANTRA,” in which the poem over-strokes of paint or ink, drawing offers the sounds of a refrigerator as a our attention to the richness of the meditation. medium itself, and the energy of its application. levy’s paintings and prints levy also approached Concrete by are largely non-representative, yet they over-inking mimeo stencils and over- often bring forward a strong feeling for printing pages to create dense fields organic form. These are often playfully of obscuration in which words move titled with Cleveland landmarks and in and out of decipherability. Scarab place names, as in the two sets of Poems, from the exhibition, is an Cleveland Prints (1964), i.e. “the angel excellent example. The sustained of death rides the van aiken local” and ellipses, sometimes denoted with

96 blacked-out lines interposed with words and fragments of phrases, sometimes completely eclipsed, evoke the coming and going of thought in meditation and the coming and going of text before the eyes of the printer. The heavily saturated lines of obliterated text appearing below the intact poem titles are also suggestive of censorship, of silencing the poem. These poems strongly evoke levy’s ambivalence about language as a means of communication. “Words scramble everything. The whole civilized communication system is all screwed up!”6 The representational, descriptive, interpretive aspects of language are in complete abeyance. We are invited to experience only what is there: ink on paper, “words . . . on a material level,” silence and to notice ourselves being there.7

////////////////////////////////////

1. Note that levy’s poetic signature appears as “d.a.levy” with no spaces, and I have chosen this formatting here.

2. Interview with Dick Feagler (Cleveland Press, March 31, 1967).

3. Douglas Blazek, untitled essay, Zen Concrete & Etc. (Madison, WI: Ghost Pony Press, 1991), 209.

4. Kent Taylor, “The Cleveland Underground Poetry Scene: A Personal Reminiscence,” Zen Concrete & Etc., 225.

5. Blazek, 210.

6. “Raging Against the Dying of the Light: Interview with d.a.levy,” Andrew Curry, Dust 12, “d.a.levy Issue,” Spring 1969, 17.

7. d.a.levy, “Introduction,” 18th Dynasty Egyptian Automobile Turnon, by D. R. Wagner, 2nd ed., (Glendale, CA: Poetry Est, 1967), unpaginated.

97 d.a. levy blues for life, 1960 Manuscript, 11 x 8 1/2 inches Courtesy of Kent State University Department of Special Collections and Archives

98 d.a. levy Agent from Vega H.S., 1967 Collage 8 1/2 x 6 inches Courtesy of the d.a. levy Collection Cleveland State University Library

99 d.a. levy Untitled, 1967 (detail) Collage, 8 1/2 x 11 inches Courtesy of Kent State University Department of Special Collections and Archives

100 MEET ME AT THE CROSSROADS BY ELENA HARVEY COLLINS

Michelangelo Lovelace Sr. chronicles redemption. Life affirming Bible verses the Cleveland streets around him, cre- are placed on billboards, sending mes- ating expressive records of city life. sages of love, community, acceptance, Largely self-taught, he has been paint- and responsibility. There is a strong ing every day for the past 30 years and moral force in these works, backed up was mentored by the late Reverend Albert with love, a lesson to be given, the Wagner (1924-2006).1 Wagner encouraged painting a vehicle for allegory. In Lovelace to endure his personal strug- Standing at the Fork in the Road at gles through art, to continue to paint Temptation and Salvation (1997) Lovelace no matter what, and to develop a voice represents different life choices as and style that was true to his experi- real destinations, inhabited by symbolic ences. individuals. The painting grows brighter and lighter as the viewer travels along There is an animated joy in Lovelace’s the pathway towards goodness and spiri- canvases. Works like Backyard Celebra- tual peace; in the opposite direction, tion (2007) portray inner city neighbor- darkness awaits. Lovelace returns to hoods that bustle with life, back yard images of street intersections and cor- parties and people going about their ners often, evoking the cultural sig- daily errands among tree-lined streets, nificance of the crossroads as a meeting hair shops, and grocery stores. P-Funk place where a reckoning must be made. Party (1999) depicts a Parliament Funk- James Baldwin wrote about the tension a adelic concert that the artist painted person feels when being drawn towards a from memory. Revelers throw their bod- negative force despite best intentions, ies around in wild abandon, you can feel imagining those competing energies the heat coming off the room. The ex- (Guilt and Desire) as characters that travagant style of the musicians and the fight for the attention of Love2: show (spaceship on the stage) opened Lovelace’s eyes to the multitude of ex- At the dark streetcorner pressions through which creativity can where Guilt and Desire flow, that it doesn’t need to be man- are attempting to stare nered, or follow anybody else’s rules. each other down This sense of freedom, self-love, and [...] acceptance is articulated in Lovelace’s Love came slouching along erotic paintings like Lights Out (2006), an exploded silence which unapologetically celebrate sexual standing a little apart pleasure, experience, and body. but visible anyway in the yellow, silent, steaming In Lovelace’s paintings, the realities light, of police violence, poverty, addiction, while Guilt and Desire wrangled3 and criminal lifestyles are approached fearlessly and with the kind of clear- In his depictions of the world around eyed relentlessness arrived at through him, Lovelace operates as a witness, an daily practice and pursuit. These themes insider who is also an outsider. Katrina of social justice form the main narra- Aftermath (2006) portrays the chaos of tive framework for his paintings. Often the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans, in autobiographical, Lovelace references which looting (in order to find food, his personal trials as a way to con- clean water, and supplies) by white sur- nect to universal themes of struggle and vivors was often excused or defended,

101 while black survivors doing the same ley Housing projects, the King Ken- thing were treated like criminals, even nedy projects, all of the projects were shot. Lovelace mediates these events, brick, we called it Brick City. I fell stepping back to reflect on them, an ap- in love with the brick.”4 The bricks proach evident in the shifts in perspec- form a visual shorthand for the ar- tive and depth in his paintings. chitecture of the inner city. But the bricks that Lovelace paints are nev- Encountering a group of his works, the er just brown or red; they are rain- viewer travels above, under, through, bow bricks, holding green, red, black, and finally into Lovelace’s Cleveland. brown, yellow, white, purple. The paint At the intersection of Cedar-n-E. 79th is thickly applied so that it stands Street (1997) presents a three-quar- out from the surface, often looking as ter birds eye view of a street cross- if it was mixed on the canvas. The col- ing, complete with car-dealership bun- ors change, depending on the mood of ting that marches off into the distance. the scene and the inhabitants who move These Urban City Streets(2013) shows through his paintings. In Another Street a neighborhood where stores, trees, Corner Memorial (2006), the bricks are streets and signage are compressed and painfully vivid and fleshy, interrupted stacked on top of one another like a by the blood red curtains in the win- Chinese scroll painting, traditional dows that overlook the road side marked narrative paintings which often show by death. Blue Wall of Silence (2000), landscapes arranged vertically, fold- confronts the reality of police bru- ing vast distances within them and con- tality. The intense blue runs off the veying a sense of rhythm and order. A policemen’s uniforms and drenches the further distancing is evident in Work wall behind them; the unnaturally blue in Progress (2010), a painting inside a bricks, sidewalk and street fill the en- painting in which Lovelace depicts his tire visual field, only interrupted by own hand, tracing the curving outline of the pink skin and blonde hair of the of- figure at the outset of a new work, both ficers, and the red of the blood spilled distancing and touching. on the sidewalk. The officers faces are portrayed by a seres of quick hard This idea of record keeping (or of cor- slashes. The colors vibrate; this paint- recting the historical record) evokes ing hurts to look at. In both of these the work of Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), works, there is a sense that the bricks who painted the rich life of Depression- are bodies, and that the walls of the era Harlem, drawing visual information city are sentient. Like Lovelace, they from his surroundings—brightly colored can’t, won’t, turn away. clothing of neighborhood residents, the patterned fabrics used inside their //////////////////////////////////// homes for decoration, the bustle of the streets—into his works. Lawrence’s Mi- 1. Wagner was a visionary and prolific painter and sculptor, who began his work as an artist at gration Series (1940—41) helped ingrain the age of 50, developing an eccentric signature into art history the impact of the Great style, working with diverse materials such as Migration, while other series focus on driftwood and found objects. the life of Harriet Tubman and the sto- 2. Here I refer to a couple of stories among ry of Toussaint L’Overture, who led the many; the myth of blues legend Robert Johnson, 18th century Haitian Revolution result- who allegedly sold his soul to the devil at a deserted crossroads at midnight in order to re- ing in the liberation of that country ceive greater musical prowess,going on to record from France. Also a chronicler of the the Crossroad Blues, 1936, but also more recent times, Lovelace has responded to such cultural references such as the hit single Cross- roads by Cleveland rap group Bone Thugs N Harmony events as the police beating of Rodney released in 1995. King in Los Angeles in 1991, the election of the United States’ first black 3. James Baldwin, Jimmy’s Blues, Selected Poems. (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1983) p57 president, and recent “Black Lives Mat- ter” rallies. 4. From an interview with Lovelace, April 2015. The Garden Valley Public Housing Project was in the Kinsman area of the city, now demolished and Brickwork and graffiti form strong replaced by townhomes. The King Kennedy Housing through lines in Lovelace’s paintings. Project, also in the Kinsman-E 55th Street area, As he remembers, “Living in Garden Val- is still standing.

102 1.

1. Michelangelo Lovelace Standing at the Fork in the Road at Temptation and Salvation, 1997 Acrylic on canvas 52 3/4 x 92 inches Courtesy of the artist

2. Michelangelo Lovelace Work in Progress, 2010 Acrylic on canvas 26 3/4 x 21 inches Courtesy of the artist

103 3.

3. Michelangelo Lovelace Blue Wall of Silence, 2000 Acrylic on canvas 24 1/2 x 42 1/2 inches Collection of Alissa McKendrick

4. Michelangelo Lovelace These Urban City Streets,2013 Acrylic on canvas 37 x 28 3/4 inches Courtesy of the artist

104 LOOKING BACK FROM THE FUTURE AT MICHELANGELO LOVELACE SR. BY EBONY L. HAYNES

I never wanted to be a part of planet and politics are key in the Afrofuturists’ Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so aesthetic, and to their goal of empowering anything I do for this planet is because Otherness. Afrofuturists paint portraits the Master-Creator of the Universe of how they want to be seen, or perhaps is making me do it. I am of another how they see themselves. But this is not dimension. I am on this planet because always how others seem them. people need me. What, then, is the Black future? -Sun Ra, quoted in an A&M Records press release (1998) * * * *

Michelangelo Lovelace Sr. has been painting for most of his life. His Afrofuturism is an ideology linked to treasure trove of canvases includes music and art and a Black experience. hundreds of paintings, which are snapshots Sun Ra often acts as its musical trope. from moments in his life. Some are Born in 1914 in Birmingham, AL, Sun Ra celebratory, depicting community pride, claimed to not be of this earth. His block parties, and dancing. Some are more outer space sounds challenged the Black personal and include portraits of people aural aesthetic in many ways, including in his life or of the artist himself, being one of the first musicians to painting. Others are social commentary: use electronic instruments. Like Sun the historical election of the first Ra’s music, the overarching phrase Black president of the United States of “Afrofuturism” responds to a search for America; the swift block-to-block changes the world of tomorrow, today. Afronaut that occur within the landscape of the artists like William Villalongo and urban American cityscape; dark temptations Cristina de Middel, and writers like of our inescapable vices; the light of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany redemption; police crime scene tape keep an undeniably thick racial history marking the site of another dead young as a subject but present new ideas about Black man. race and representation, breaking with normalized racism to create a space for Lovelace’s scenes are not paintings of change. Coined in 1994 by writer Mark the future. Instead, the tableaux capture Dery, the phrase Afrofuturism questioned moments of the present. He paints what he the largely streamlined depictions of sees—often visions of all races sharing both utopian and apocalyptic futures, similar experiences. In one of these which were predominantly Anglo/European paintings, Katrina Aftermath (2006), he based. Afrofuturism is not about science paints the chaos of the flooded streets fiction, though that may be the genre of New Orleans, post-hurricane. Here, chosen to relay ideas of the future; more colorful acrylics paint the faces of the accurately, it is about imagining a Black displaced—people of all colors, all in reality not limited to racial identity. desperate need of help. The masses are In this world, the human race exists in faceless, as are most of the faces in colors other than Black and White to Lovelace’s large and vast crowds. Black include the Purple, Green, and Orange. Pop and White, young and old, the ailing

105 and the able bodied, all vulnerable. As residents destroying police property. Much people on the ground try to stay dry atop less attention was paid to the rioters who of cars, or stand in the rising water, a were not Black, and even less still to the few dead bodies float by. Some fill the peaceful protests. The reality painted for rooftops and hold up signs, hoping to those not on the ground differed from what catch anyone’s attention. the angry and exhausted communities were experiencing: a seemingly endless fight Lovelace takes this opportunity to use for justice. commentary and media coverage of Hurricane Katrina and inserts them onto the signs. * * * * A White man holds a sign that reads “Help Us!,” and another holds one that reads “We Lovelace’s Katrina Aftermath, as most All Are American.” A small group stands of his paintings, comes from observing in front of a sign that reads “Need Help and absorbing the moments around him. In Don’t Call FEMA.” A Black man waves the the style of Afrofurism, race remains an American flag while another holds a sign overarching theme, but he plays with it paraphrasing the musician Kanye West’s by means of dissecting ideas of community off-script remarks: “Bush don’t care about and empathy. He is not, by conventional Black people.” West’s outbursts during a definition, an Afrofuturist. The work is live NBC telethon for hurricane relief, neither intergalactic nor fantastical. less than a month after the storm, was in And his paintings have been criticized response to aid, or lack thereof, being for depicting racial stereotypes. I agree delivered to the affected residents of that they depict stereotypes, stereotypes New Orleans. Criticism came from both that have sadly stood the test of time, inside and outside the city walls. The reappearing both pre- and post- his predominant accusation being that help Katrina Aftermath. But the stereotypes are would’ve been swiftly and effectively not of people in his paintings; instead, delivered had the affected not been they often reflect those looking in from predominantly Black. the outside. An Afrofuturist attempts to create an alternate reality, where In the same painting, where locals rummage identity is not bound by race or racial through stores in desperation and panic, stereotypes, but may present itself in store signs reflect the racist double many forms. From an electro-infused jazz standard of the media’s interpretation and song to a photograph of a Black astronaut reporting on riots and looters: “White in the Zambian desert. But what if the Folks Just Looking For Food,” and “Black viewer, not the artist was an Afronaut? Folks Just Looters.” This, in particular, feels very close to recent press coverage Looking at the works now, through an of the aftermath of various accounts of Afrofuturist lens of an alternate racial murder at the hands of the police. This reality, the work has both utopian and past April in Baltimore, the story of apocalyptic elements. Like an artist, an a young man named Freddie Gray, and his Afrofuturist viewer can retain race as a suspicious death, seemingly at the hands subject but move beyond it and customize of local police officers, sparked a wide it. Seeing Lovelace’s paintings from range of emotional reactions from the this point of view, the work challenges local, predominantly Black, neighborhood. stereotypical depictions of race by The sensationalized news coverage of both illustrating the artist’s reality, the video recording of Mr. Gray’s scuffle one that is often not acknowledged or with officers and mysterious uncaptured appreciated for the ongoing strides made moments which left him in excruciating toward equality. Afrofuturism uses fantasy pain and paralyzed, mixed with the to discuss bigger issues. Michaelangelo rioting, looting, and property damage Lovelace does just that, but this demands caused by incensed locals, had media more work from the viewer. In this Black outlets calling the people of Baltimore future, a brick wall is not part of a “Thugs.” Cable news consistently presented ghetto, the death of a young Black man is nearsighted views of the riots. Drawing tragic, all humans deserve to be treated attention to young Black men dressed as equals, and life can be a party. all in black, reporters become visibly irritated at the sight of Baltimore

106 Michelangelo Lovelace Sr. Katrina Aftermath, 2006 Acrylic on canvas 50 1/2X 53 inches Courtesy of the artist

107 Michelangelo Lovelace Sr. P-Funk Party, 1999 Acrylic on canvas 58 1/2 x 67 1/4 inches Courtesy of the artist

108 SOFT THINGS BY ROSE BOUTHILLIER

When I look for too long at Dylan a very concise construction, a Spaysky’s sculptures I start to just so, on which their formal ache a bit. It isn’t desire (as informality hangs. Often, in, I want to own) or sympathy Spaysky’s works are displayed in (as in, I want to protect), but groups, on shelves or tabletops. rather a very intense feeling of These clusters further personalize fond (as in, I want to be friends, the objects: they are considered, forever). The feeling isn’t arranged. Less Museum and more straight. And it isn’t one: it’s mantelpiece, or memorabilia case. form and formlessness, Mickey & mini, lucky and hapless, clean and Hunched Dolphin (2013) takes the dirty. Touching is part of it. shape of an upright marine mammal, They are always soft: drooping, carved from a stack of multi- crumbling, squished, foamy, colored kitchen sponges (now faded draped. a bit), shoulders forward, stiff flippers downcast. The sponges Spaysky uses modest materials: are a favored object in Spaysky’s thrift store grab bags, dollar studio; cheap, light, and easy store deals, cast offs, twigs, hot to sculpt. Their pastel palette glue, foam, beads, tar. These recalls sorbet (strange, this are carefully cobbled together, mouthwatering color on a most with a distinctive gingerliness unappetizing object), while the (though some of them have been tapering shapes and gentle curves treated roughly, i.e. placed under call out for touching, squeezing. plywood and run over by a car). Many have domestic functions: Foot (2014) carved from a purple clocks, fountains, lamps. They yoga block is more grotesque: at breathe familiarity: suburban its life-sized scale, the rough living rooms, middle class kitsch, texture and purple “skin” are kindergarten crafts, garage sales, zombie-like (but also vaguely like Grandpa’s work shop, Disney Land, a cake, with slathered icing); souvenirs. Impulsiveness comes shiny silver toenails jut out and through: to salvage, tinker, could flake off. Mickey Berry repurpose, and decorate. (2014) also looks edible, an oversized glass raspberry coated Fragility gives them a vague in tar and candies shaped like the edginess——they teeter, cling. infamous mouse. Encrusted, jewel- While they might appear to be like, it’s a conglomeration of slapdash, awkward, or clumsy, textures: sticky, shatter, chewy, their postures are the result of crunch.

109 Spaysky’s lamps are also a personifying a missing individual, mishmash of parts and clutter: injured but merrily determined. It decorative bottles, pickled is precious and ridiculous, funny cheerios and grapes, duct tape, a and dark, feeble and defiant, the visor, a lava lamp globe. These kind of thing you want to spend come together in loosely elegant time with, and really get to know. ways. Ornament is nonsense; taste is indiscriminate but also discerning. Spaysky’s clocks tick tick tick away, their hands’ measured movements splayed out over crushed sacks of plastic cast offs. Toiletries Clock (2014) is made up of mostly off- brand and hotel-room products, in the usual, pearly shades of care and cleanliness. Apple Clock (2015) bursts in bubbles of bright hollow fruits. Although clocks are typically “timeless” decorative items, these repurposed cast-offs speak to cycles of consumption and discarding. They also convey the touches, moments, and memories that objects collect and become charged with. Might it be too obvious to say that these timekeepers are tchotch momento mori? Saying what, exactly? That existence is brief and things are crap? That was then and could have been and this is now and is...sNothing much? That place that these things came from is far away but the things still gently reek of it. They dissipate their chrono-perfume, whiling away their (slowly) degrading half-lives, cheerily. There is something touching about their new usefulness, their new place in the order of things. A reclaiming of potential, openness, becoming something else through the eyes and hands and heart of a new human.

Matthew (2015) is one of Spaysky’s most endearing works. It looks to be a small child’s wheel chair, constructed from fragile repurposed wicker, with gloopy, irregular wheels (compressed bags of fake squash, raffeta and twine), sprinkled with cinnamon and held together with threaded rod. It sits quietly, slightly askew, leaning. Like Tiny Tim’s crutch it is sad but buoying,

110 Dylan Spaysky Matthew, 2015 Wicker, threaded rod, fake squash, cinnamon, staples, caster wheels, wire, silicone, glue 25 x 38 x 24 inches Courtesy of the artist Installation view, MOCA Cleveland

111 Dylan Spaysky Hunched Dolphin, 2013 Sponge, 11 x 3 x 5 Courtesy of the artist Installation view, MOCA Cleveland

112 US: AFTER DYLAN SPAYSKY BY LYNN CRAWFORD

It has been, continues to be, a is, so WRONG. But to understand rocky road for Camp and me to reach where I, and we, are, and want to the place we are in now: good. soon be, I must meet that past.

Initial time together depends on My offense? Failing to recognize schedules: my parents’ (car, work, Camp’s potential. I misjudge its finances, health) and mine (lessons, structure, mistakenly split expen- jobs, licenses). Those logistics— diture vessels. I will name them bumps, not rocks—get sorted out with Thinker and Maker. time. Those labels are elementary, ob- I will never forget our first en- vious, laden. Ouch. But sometimes counter: early evening, mom and dad you, or I anyway, need to go through drop me off at the gate. I follow things lame before moving onto instructional banners: find my hut, things meaningful. Maybe it will change into uniform—pink slip, grass ease things if I use their initials. & twig sandals—reach Camp. We sit, cross-legged, for twenty calm min- I believed, wrongly, T and M existed utes. Then dig a pit for Evening as parallel, not entwined, strands. Roast and practice Moon Salutations. If I had only been able to view them Camp is multi-faceted: sweet, angry, the way I view salt and pepper (nev- scared, calm, hot. The mood varianc- er salt or pepper), we would have es are inspirational. saved so much time and waste.

Our problems stem from me, not it. To try and figure things out, I But if this means anything to you, sketch a series of T and M por- and it does to me, it is my ig- traits. norance, not malice, which stirs things up. I harm Camp, but uninten- Here is one of each: tionally. It is like the difference between manslaughter and planned T murder. Indoors, lounges on a couch, stares at a wall, sucks a toothpick, twirls I changed, still try to, keep chang- a strand of hair. Outfit: headband, ing. plaid tunic, slippers (open toe straw, slides with tassels) It is not agreeable admitting to wrongdoing. To think back on how a Body language: leave me alone. sentiment that felt so RIGHT was,

113 M on tables, take the afghan we made Multiple scenes of M, running, out on down to the river for a wash. grilling, drinking, dancing, surf- ing, delivering a speech. Outfit I weed gardens (not mine), varies from frame to frame but there is always denim. hose down outdoor showers,

Body Language: I have so much to do and collect the fish carcasses that say. sometimes wash up on our beach,

A few more T&M distinctions: rinse them in lemon juice,

T: dresses in one of Grandma’s old nail them on the bland post office ball gowns and ponders, considers, wall, absorbs. remove and melt down spurs from all M: repurposes that same frock, or is riding boots (they harm our poor inspired to design something because horses), of it. drain gas from jet-skis for safer, T: recalls Grandpa’s sweet, smoky, longer, swims, smell and the stories he read. And, just for me, M: seals Grandpa’s breath in a test tube. loosen up and join in on Beach-Night Stimulation. Differences between the two are real and interesting. But impossible to Things feel right. guess: Why? A change. I thought of T & M T appears stationary, blank, perhaps as discreet (picture: silos). But stoned but mostly is not. learn to think of them as a union (picture: colonies). With that, Camp M appears enthused, vigorous but moves from a distinct space to some- battles melancholia. thing close, animate, handy. Its— our—value swells with the new acces- How you look is not how you are. How sibility. you look is not how you feel. How you look is not who you are. It has been, continues to be, a rocky road for Camp and me to reach I, mistakenly, lug around a be- the place we are in now: good. lief that it is impossible for T&M to meet, merge, construct; that a close encounter would be a bust, or, a hard true love, and one or both would dump me.

Then:

One night, emerging from a heavy make out session in Craft Shop I trip and fall flat onto grass, do not get up but take in the sky. Stars move around or maybe there is a comet. Anyway, I experience, for the first time, T&M fusion and go on a purifying jag of Guerilla good deeds. Return to Craft Shop, bundle up all the popsicle sticks scattered

114 Dylan Spaysky apple clock, 2015 Fake fruit, plastic, silicone, clock components 4 x 12 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist

115 1.

1. Dylan Spaysky visor lamp, 2014 2. Dylan Spaysky Glass, wax, cereal, onions, vinegar, foot, 2014 visor, lamp components, light bulb Yoga block, craft paper, glue 7 x 6 x 21 inches. 9 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist.

116 TOUCHING AND TRAINING ELENA HARVEY COLLINS & CARMEN WINANT

Carmen Winant’s artistic practice is on, how long I stretched for. It’s so informed by her past training as a funny, because for so long I tried long-distance runner, in which self- to hide that part of myself. I would discipline, endurance, repetition, and go from practice to class and bring a management of the body were key ele- change of clothes so I can change in ments. Her work considers the ways in the bathroom so people wouldn’t know which images of women are consumed, that I had this other jock status. It for what audience they are produced, wasn’t until much later that I saw how and the ways in which identity and those two worlds can meet or what one self can become torn from such images could offer the other. As an athlete, over time and through repeated expo- my life was about body, and management sure. How to Remain Human features a of body. Long distance running is all selection of Winant’s works, including about pain management, measuring how A World Without Men (2015), a massive much you can take, and how efficient wall collage constructed from an ar- your body can be. It’s also about time chive of Playboy, We magazine, and pu- spent—there are runs that are two, berty-book clippings. The title calls three hours long. back to Feminist Separatist movements of the 1970s, when some women advo- cated for female-only societies. I EHC sat down to talk Winant during a site Tell me about your approach to col- visit to MOCA Cleveland in April 2015. lage. How do the elements of practice, endurance, repetition, and time find their way in? //////////////////////////////////// CW So much of how I live and work in EHC the studio is about repetition, ex- Can you tell me about your background haustion, and performance anxiety. as a runner? Training as an athlete is a series of failures——the mini failures during practice, where we tease out the CW inadequacies, and the big failures I was a long distance runner at like not crossing the finish line UCLA, the longer the better. I ran first I was incredibly tough in the longest track and field events practice, and I lived for practice, you could run—5,000 and 10,000 me- really, but I was a terrible racer. ters, as well as cross country, where I had a lot of performance anxi- I ran 6 kilometers. Competitions were ety, but I was also more interested year round; my life was in train- in pushing my body and figuring out ing, running once a day, twice a day, what the edge of my body was, where three times a day, and keeping running the limit was, and I couldn’t do logs, which I still have. I recorded that while racing in the same way as everything I ate, every run I went practice.

117 The repeated gestures of touch- 61 Minutes in Heaven (2012). Can you ing an image, and placing it, con- tell me about the process of making nect to the idea of practice. When that piece, and why it is important I make these sprawling wall collag- for you to handle the image? es all the images start out on the floor, there is no hierarchy. Once arranged, the process of transfer- CW ring the collage to the wall becomes I work with a lot of found maga- intuitive and automatic. I respond zines from the 60‘s to the early-to- with my body, squatting and work- mid-80’s. In magazines after that ing on the floor, then reaching and time, the pages are thinner, they’re stretching, stepping forward and slicker, glossier. I prefer something stepping back. I spend a long time thicker, more matte, where the ink sourcing and collecting printed mat- can literally rub off on your fingers ter, sometimes years, and keep them as you trace them across the page. until I have the right use for them. I’ll find that one crazy person, who I’ve worked with images of Linda has thirty boxes of magazines. So Lovelace, the star of the porn film there is a patience and timing to Deep Throat (1972), for years, and that too. I was interested in her because she represented such a multi-valiant EHC sexual identity, but also because she How did A World Without Men come has such different kinds of agency. about? At one point she was a sex star, at another point she renounced that and CW became a feminist, then she was a At some point I realized that I was victim; she wrote five different au- only collecting images of women. tobiographies that all contest each I was almost building this narra- other. And I thought that it was so tive when I was asleep. I woke up wild, that one woman could occupy all and I had five thousand images of of these really specific positions. women. The images of men were mostly For 61 Minutes in Heaven, I continu- in relation to women, or had a hand ously touched an image of her found around a woman’s neck, or a women in a Play Boy magazine from the year was reaching out to kiss them, they the movie came out, for the dura- sort of existed as women’s proxies. tion of the film. I had two images of At the same time coincidentally I her, so I watched the film two times was talking to somebody who had been in a row. One of them is worn almost a member of a lesbian separatist entirely away. That idea of erasing commune in the 1970’s. I’m particu- someone with a tender touch comes up larly interested in the ones in the often for me. It’s the idea that you 1970’s because that was at a moment can undo somebody, that they could be when people actually felt they could so fragile that you could undo them refashion the world. It was a short with an embrace. There’s also a real term solution, as opposed to a long desperation, on both ends. Someone term solution. And thinking about, such as Lovelace who’s posing in Play as they described it, the violence Boy, desperate for attention, money, that had been done to their bodies, or something else. I am also desper- or their sort of emotional status, ate to touch her, through a copy of a to the point where they didn’t even magazine that however many hundreds want boy children. of thousands of people looked at or cared about or masturbated to. I want that desperation to read in the work, EHC that it in fact ruins people on both The way you work with images of wom- ends. An image can come to mirror or en—collecting, repeated touching, echo that desperation and the ulti- selecting and trimming down, reori- mate undoing that can spring from enting—changes the image, sometimes it. beyond recognition, especially in

118 Carmen Winant 61 Minutes in Heaven, 2012 Found centerfolds of Linda Lovelace, each 13 x 11 inches Courtesy of the artist

119 120 CARMEN WINANT: THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN KRIS PAULSEN

Soviet filmmaker and teacher Lev either image, but in their meeting. Kuleshov described the physical and Composition is dialectic act: conceptual processes of filmmaking thesis—antithesis—synthesis. by means of an allusion to masonry. Just as “a poet places one word Let’s watch a film, a film of an after another in definite rhythm,” uncommon kind. It has a title: so too, he wrote, do filmmakers “A World without Men.” It has the by laying out their basic units, requisite “cinematic” scale, filling “shot-signs, like bricks… one brick an entire wall and our complete after another.”1 One builds a film field of vision. Brick-by-brick, as one builds a wall: with regular Carmen Winant has built a wall. tiles, cemented together, one after It is composed, like the Soviets the other in rows. For the Soviet described, of adjacent bits, taped filmmakers the essence of filmmaking and pasted. What kind of wall is was in the edit not the shot. It was this? What kind of film? This is a how one brought images together that film without movement; it is montage created art and narrative, not what in space not in time. It comes to was in the frame itself. One made us all at once as a great expanse film in the cutting room and on the of mosaic paper tile. But it does editing table, not on the set or in not lead us so easily from one the camera. brick to another as in Kuleshov’s neat rows, cemented tight. Like the Sergei Eisenstein, however, did not jigsaw puzzle walls at Sacsahuaman, see things quite as his colleague where the ancient Incas perfectly Kuleshov did. One image did not wedged together their many-sided flow into the next, leading the stones, Winant forces the viewer’s viewer easily into narrative and eye to follow many zigzag lines, emotion. No, the edit—montage—was and frame-by-frame we edit. We disjunctive; it was a collision, trace a path, new each time. Our an impact. “Montage is conflict,” skittering glances across the Eisenstein proclaimed: “What surface produce the narratives. then characterizes montage and, The story happens in the edits. consequently, its embryo, the shot? All paths are present; all are Collision. Conflict between two options. The images rest against neighboring fragments. Conflict. one another in tectonic tension. Collision.”2 Conflict of scales, We see Eisenstein’s collisions directions, levels, lights, radiate in all directions. There are volumes, spaces, masses. From the collisions, conflict, and rings of juxtaposition of stock images, a collateral contact. The irregular concept is born. Meaning is not in polygons create multiple points of

121 exchange between the images so that and flicker. Let foreground and they do not form straight lines, background switch places. This is but constellations and clusters of an art of fragments, a theory of images— images of all one thing: fragments. And this is an essay of women. We see their parts, their fragments. I will not try to close wholes; legs and leotards; torsos the gaps: not between the images, and teeth; limber bodies; limbs not between Kuleshov and Eisenstein, bent and broken; cracks and parts; not between women and men. It is skin and eyes and hair—lots of hair. the space in-between the images— Patterns appear. Images repeat, both in Winant’s still cinema and or seem to: it is easy to forget in the conventional kind—that lets one’s place in the jumble. It is us see the whole picture. Critical impossible to retrace one’s exact flicker fusion: that property of path across the steppingstones. We the psychophysics of vision that lose linearity. We lose narrative. marks the frequency at which light Everything is uniform in its and dark, emptiness and fullness, difference. The girls become almost movement and stasis merge into identical. Pictures of pleasure are an illusion of continuity and indistinguishable from pictures of coherence, which is achieved only pain. Affect and association jump through radical, rapid fluctuation across the gaps. It is all thesis: of difference. Synthesis. this is a world without men.

The Peruvian masons fit their //////////////////////////////////// polyhedron stones so tightly that no mortar was needed, and not even a sheet of paper could slip between 1. Lev Kuleshov, “The Art of Cinema” in the joints. Winant borrows their Kuleshov on Film: Writings (Berkeley: UC geometric tension but gives us Press, 1974), 91. the gaps. It is in the seams that everything seems to happen here. The 2. Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot regular distance between the images, [The Cinematographic Principle and the which traces irregular, winding Ideogram],” Film Theory and Criticism, eds. channels, becomes the invisible Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: mortar that suspends the women Oxford University Press, 2009), 19. and their autonomous parts in this static cinema. The spacing, not the pacing, gives this film its poetic rattling rhythm. Winant pushes the ground forward to subsume the figure of figures in a logic of fissures. She shows us the spaces in-between that hold the image together by holding it apart. Another collision: montage and collage, of ascending in time versus anchoring in space. The story is not in any of the images or in their adjacent meetings, but in the space in-between. This is a world with men: antithesis. They are the negative space—the ground that makes the figure visible.

Step back. Stop editing. Stop following the narrative chains of connection and repetition. Take it in. See the figures and see the ground; see forking network of negative space. Let them oscillate

122 Carmen Winant LEFT: A World Without Men, 2015 Collage on wall 14 x 18 feet RIGHT: detail Courtesy of the artist

123 124 CONTRIBUTORS BIOS

ROSE BOUTHILLIER is Associate Curator and KEN EPPSTEIN is a writer, editor and pub- Publications Manager at MOCA Cleveland, lisher from Columbus, Ohio. In addition to where she organized the recent exhibitions his own rock music and record store themed Kirk Mangus: Things Love (2014);Dark Stars imprint Nix Comics, Ken edits the Columbus (2013); and Realization is Better than An- Alive’s weekly “Sketch in the City” series ticipation (2013, with Megan Lykins Reich), featuring local cartoonists in the city’s and the off-site performance Kevin Beasley: only weekly entertainment magazine. Ken has And in My Dream I Was Rolling on the Floor been a contributor to Red Stylo Media Com- (2014) Her writing has been published by ics, Rocker Magazine, Roctober Magazine, frieze, C Magazine, esse, and Arthopper.org. WFMU’s Rock ‘n’ Soul Ichiban, and the satir- ical comic website, The Outhouse. MEGAN LYKINS REICH is Deputy Director of Program, Planning, and Engagement at MOCA AMY FUNG is a roaming cultural commentator, Cleveland. Her recent projects include arts writer, and events/exhibition organizer DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death, and currently based in Toronto, CA. She holds Realization is Better than Anticipation a MA in English Literature and Film Studies (2013, with Rose Bouthillier). from the University of Alberta with a focus on Deleuzian film theory and 20th-century ELENA HARVEY COLLINS is Curatorial Assis- poetics and creative nonfiction. As of Fall tant at MOCA Cleveland, where she worked on 2014, Fung has been appointed Artistic Di- the recent exhibitions Jessica Eaton: Wild rector of The Images Festival. Her research Permutations (2015); Kirk Mangus: Things interests usually involve ongoing consider- Love; and the off-site performance Kevin ations of identity politics, social engage- Beasley: And in My Dream I Was Rolling on ment, and a sense of place. Her commissioned the Floor (both 2014). Her writing has been writings for monographs approach arts writ- published in Temporary Art Review, Arthop- ing as a creative and critical platform. per, and the Kent State University journal Urban Infill. ED FRAGA is a Detroit artist who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wayne State Uni- *** versity in 1980. His paintings, drawings, and artist books are in the permanent col- LYNN CRAWFORD is a Detroit-based writer lections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose books include Fortification Resort; Cranbrook Art Museum and the Flint Institute Simply Separate People; Simply Separate of Arts. He has received fellowships and People, Two; and the forthcoming Shankus & awards from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Kitto (Black Square/Hyperallergic). Her work Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Na- has been published in Art in America, Brook- tional Endowment of the Arts, and the Awards lyn Rail, Zing, Tema Celeste, Metro Times, in the Visual Arts 8. Museum shows include Parkett, and Hyperallergic. MOCAD, the High Museum of Art, and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. OWEN DUFFY is Curatorial Assistant at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and a Ph.D. MICHAEL B. GILLESPIE is an Associate Pro- candidate studying contemporary art history fessor of Film at the City College of New at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is York in the Department of Media and Communi- also an Editor for ARTPULSE and the found- cation Arts and the Black Studies Program. er of ARTSKIP.com, a digital platform that His book Film Blackness: American Cinema and helps users discover contemporary art based the Idea of Black Film is forthcoming from on location and medium. He has published in Duke University Press. He is also co-editing ARTPULSE, Art in Print, Fjords Review, and Black Cinema Aesthetics Revisited and New Ceramics Monthly, and has presented his re- Chester Himes Criticism. His current proj- search at such institutions as the National ects include work on post-9/11 music, black- Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Ste- ness and speculative film, and a manuscript delijk Museum, Amsterdam; and LASANAA Live entitled Music of My Mind: Blackness and Art Hub, Kathmandu. Sonic Visuality.

125 EBONY L. HAYNES is a gallerist, writer, TERRY SCHWARZ is the director of Kent and curator based in New York City. State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative. Her work includes neighbor- INDRA LĀCIS earned her PhD in contempo- hood and campus planning, commercial and rary art history from Case Western Reserve residential design guidelines, and eco- University in 2014. She is editor of Ar- logical strategies for vacant land re- thopper.org, an online regional art maga- use. Terry launched the CUDC’s Shrinking zine covering the Great Lakes region, and Cities Institute in 2005 in an effort to also currently serves as Curatorial Re- understand and address the implications search Assistant in the department of Mod- of population decline and urban vacancy ern European Art at the Cleveland Museum in Northeast Ohio. In 2009, she received of Art. Lācis has curated solo, group, and the Cleveland Arts Prize for Design. She participatory exhibitions at SPACES, The teaches at the KSU College of Architecture Sculpture Center, MOCA Cleveland, Zygote and Environmental Design. Press, and The Cleveland Foundation, all in Cleveland. INGRID SWANBERG’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications since 1967, when DAVID LUSENHOP is a Cleveland-based d.a.levy published “to Sibyl.” She edits art and rare book dealer and independent the poetry journal Abraxas and directs scholar. He co-curated AfriCOBRA and the Ghost Pony Press, which published Zen Chicago Black Arts Movement for the Ditt- Concrete & Etc., by levy and some of his mar Memorial Gallery at Northwestern Uni- contemporaries (1991). Her other works on versity (2010). He was the art history levy include co-editing d.a.levy and the consultant for the TV Land documentary Mimeo Revolution (Bottom Dog Press, 2007) film AfriCOBRA: Art for the People (2010). and the d.a.levy homepage. levy is a cen- Most recently, he was a consultant to the tral figure in her dissertation (Compara- National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis tive Literature, UW-Madison). Her newest where he created content for the Black poetry collections are Ariadne & Other Power exhibition of art and artifacts from Poems (Bottom Dog Press, 2013) and Awake the permanent collection (2013). (Green Panda Press, 2014).

FRED MOTEN is author of In the Break: The CHRISTINA VASSALLO is the Executive Di- Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition rector of SPACES in Cleveland, where she (2003), Hughson’s Tavern (2008), B. Jen- is overseeing a relocation effort, expand- kins (2010), The Undercommons: Fugitive ing outreach efforts, and launching in- Planning and Black Study (2013, with Ste- novative participatory programming. Prior fano Harney), The Feel Trio (2014) and The to joining SPACES she served as the Execu- Little Edges (2014). He lives in Los Ange- tive Director of Flux Factory, a nonprofit les and teaches at the University of Cali- organization and art collective in Queens, fornia, Riverside. NY that supports collaborative projects. Additionally, she has independently cu- KRIS PAULSEN is Assistant Professor of rated exhibitions for a variety of venues, History of Art and Film Studies at The including Jersey City Museum, chashama, Ohio State University, and co-director of NURTUREart, Artspace, Lafayette College, The Center for Ongoing Research & Proj- and New Haven University. Christina holds ects, a non-profit art space in Colum- a BA in art history and MA in visual arts bus, Ohio. She received her BA from Brown management, both from New York University. University and her MA and PhD from the University of California-Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Representations, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, X-TRA Contem- porary Art Quarterly, Mousse, Design and Culture, Art Practical, Amodern, and Art- forum.com, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs.

126 ARTIST BIOS

MARY ANN AITKEN (1960, Detroit, MI—2012, DADPRANKS (Collective, founded Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, NY) earned her BFA at Wayne State PA, 2013) is Lauren Goshinski, (1981, Pomp- University, Michigan, in 1983, and an MA in ton Plains, NJ), lives and works in Pitts- Art Therapy from Wayne State in 1989. Ait- burgh, PA; Kate Hansen, (1982, Pittsburgh, ken’s works are held in the collection of PA); Isla Hansen, (1987, Philadelphia, PA); Wayne State University, Detroit and private Elina Malkin (1982, Philadelphia, PA); Nina collections both internationally and in the Sarnelle (1985, Belchertown, MA), lives United States. In 2014, a large scale solo and works in Los Angeles, CA; and Laura A. exhibition of her work was held at What Warman (1989, Porland, OR), lives and works Pipeline and Trinosophes, Detroit. in Amherst, MA. dadpranks has participated in group exhibitions at SPACE, Pittsburgh DERF BACKDERF (1959, Richfield, Ohio) re- and SPACES gallery, Cleveland (both 2015). ceived his BA from the Ohio State University Their work has been screened at H30, The in 1978. In 1999, the Akron Art Museum pre- Drift; VIA Festival; and the Three Rivers sented a retrospective of his work, Apoca- Arts Festival (all Pittsburgh, 2014), and a lyptic Giggles: The Industrial Cartoon Humor solo presentation of their work was held at of Derf. His work has been published in many Mote 078 Gallery, Columbus OH (2014). newspapers and magazines, including Playboy, The Wall Street Journal and The Progressive. BEN HALL (1977, Detroit) received his BA His long-running comic strip “The City” was from Bennington College, Vermont, in 2004 featured in newspapers including The Cleve- and his MFA from Columbia University, NY in land Plain Dealer, from 1990–2014. He has 2012. Selected group exhibitions include published several graphic novels, including Rob Base, Steal Treble, Malraux’s Place My Friend Dahmer (2012) and Punk Rock and Brooklyn, NY (2014); Outside Mediation, Trailer Parks (2008). His upcoming graphic Green Gallery, Yale University, NJ (2011), novel Trashed will be released in 2015. and Spatial City: An Architecture of Ide- alism, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit CARA BENEDETTO (1979, Wausau, WI), lives (2010). Hall has performed at INSTAL in and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She received Glasgow, Scotland; the Museum of Modern Art her BFA at University of Wisconsin River in New York City; and kunstenentrum BELGIE Falls in 2001 and her MFA from Columbia in Belgium. Hall was the 2014 Dance and Mu- University in 2009. She has participated in sic Fellow at Kresge Arts in Detroit. numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, at venues including JAE JARRELL (1935, Cleveland, OH), is a Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Ger- founding member of the group AFRICOBRA (Af- many (2014); Laurel Gitlen, NY (2014); Metro rican Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), es- Pictures, NY (2013); and Night Gallery, LA tablished in Chicago in 1968, with her hus- (2013). She is a recipient of the Rema Hort band Wadsworth Jarrell. Jae Jarrell attended Mann Foundation grant and has published both Bowling Green State University in Ohio be- creative and critical works with various fore moving to Chicago. She attended the presses. School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her work is CHRISTI BIRCHFIELD (1983, Cleveland, OH), held in numerous private collections, and in earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Mu- of Art in 2006 and an MFA from Columbia Uni- seum of Art. In 2014, it was included in the versity in 2010. Selected solo exhibitions Brooklyn Museum of Art’s exhibition Witness: include Above the Fold, Below the Surface, Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (2014). Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University, Adrian, MI; From the Inside Out, William KEVIN JEROME EVERSON (Mansfield, Ohio, Busta Gallery, Cleveland (both 2014); and 1965) lives and works in Charlottesville, It’s all Yours: Posture Pointers to Make you VA. Currently Professor at the University Prettier, SPACES Gallery, Cleveland (2012). of Virginia, Everson holds a MFA from Ohio Birchfield is a full-time Visiting Artist/ University and a BFA from the University of Lecturer at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Akron. Everson was awarded the 2012 Alp-

127 ert Award for Film/Video; his films have as well as numerous private collections. been the subject of mid-career retrospec- Several anthologies of his poetry have been tives at Visions du Reel, Nyon Switzerland published, including D.A. Levy and the Mim- (2012), The Whitney Museum of American Art eograph Revolution (2007, Bottom Dog Press, (2011); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009). OH); The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Ora- His work was featured at the 2008 and 2012 cle: The Art and Poetry of d.a. levy (1999, Whitney Biennials and the 2012 Sharjah Bien- Seven Stories Press, NY); and Zen Concrete & nial. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Etc. (1991, Ghost Pony Press, WI). SECCA (Southeastern Center for the Arts) Winston-Salem, NC and the Taubman Museum of MICHELANGELO LOVELACE SR. (1960, Cleve- Art, Roanoke, VA. Everson has received fel- land, OH), is a painter based in Cleveland, lowships from the Guggenheim, NEA, NEH, Ohio Ohio. He has participated in numerous solo Arts Council and the Virginia Museum, an and group exhibitions, including Black Heri- American Academy Rome Prize, and residencies tage Through Visual Rhythms, the National at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Yaddo Afro-American Museum and Culture Center, and MacDowell Colony, and numerous univer- Wilberforce, OH (2015); American Visionary sity fellowships. He is Professor of Art at Art Museum, Baltimore, MD; Space Galleries the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. & ClaySpace, Toledo, OH; The Cleveland Art- ist Foundation; Zygote Press, and Headfooter HARRIS JOHNSON (1986, Columbus, OH), lives Outsider Art Gallery, all Cleveland, OH. In and works in Richmond, VA. He received his 2013, Lovelace was awarded a Creative Work- BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, force Fellowship. Cleveland, OH in 2009, and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. DYLAN SPAYSKY (1981, Pontiac, MI), lives and Solo exhibitions of his work have been pre- works in Detroit. He earned his BFA from the sented at Rotten Meat Gallery, Cleveland, College for Creative Studies, Detroit in OH (2013), and Clara Fritsch Gallery, Notre 2007. Solo exhibitions include taz, Cue Arts Dame College OH (2012), among others. He has Foundation, New York, (2015); and Foot Foot, participated in numerous group exhibitions, Cleopatras, Brooklyn, NY (2014). He has including Greenpoint Gallery, Brooklyn, NY participated in group exhibitions at Inter- (2014); Reinberger Gallery, Cleveland, OH state Projects, Brooklyn NY (2014); the 9th (2012), and the Affordable Art Fair, NY Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China (2012); (2012). and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI (2011). In 2012, he curated Six Paintings, JIMMY KUEHNLE (1979, Atlanta, GA), lives Six Stalls, at the Buffalo Street Car Wash, and works in Cleveland, OH. He received his Hamtramck. He is also the director of Cave BFA from Truman State University, Kirks- project and exhibition space, Detroit. ville, Missouri in 2001, and an MFA from University of Texas at San Antonio in 2006. CARMEN WINANT (1983, San Fransisco, CA), He has participated in numerous group exhi- lives and works in Columbus, OH. She holds bitions, including State of the Art: Discov- a BFA from the University of California Los ering American Art Now, Crystal Bridges Mu- Angeles (2006), and an MA and an MFA from seum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas California College of the Arts (2011). Wi- (2014); ARS, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, nant has organized and performed in projects Milan, Italy (2010); and Betsu no Sekai, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Ange- Nagakute Cultural Center, Nagoya, Japan les (2014); Regina Rex, NY; and 365Mission, (2008). Selected solo exhibitions include LA (both 2015). Winant is a regular contrib- Inflatable Wonderland Labyrinth of Joy, The utor to Artforum, Frieze, The Believer, and Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio (2013); Art Papers, and is a contributing editor to and Things Bigger Than People, Pittsburg WAX Magazine. Her artist book, My Life as a State University, Kansas (2010). He is a Man, was published by Horses Think Press in 2008 Fulbright grant recipient. 2015. Winant is Assistant Professor of Vi- sual Theory and Contemporary Art History at D.A. LEVY (1942—1968, Cleveland, OH), was a the Columbus College of Art and Design, and poet, artist, and a pillar of the counter- a Dean at Skowhegan School of Painting and cultural scene in Cleveland during the mid- Sculpture. 1960s. The archives of d. a. levy’s work are held in the library collections of Cleveland State University and Kent State University,

128 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ROSE BOUTHILLIER & MEGAN LYKINS REICH

This catalog is intended to expand the scope of conversation and interpretation, with 14 writers from outside of the institution contributing their knowledge of, and ideas about, these artists and their work. We are grateful for all of these authors, as well as our many colleagues, near and far, who have shared their own insights and suggestions for studio visits. Ry Wharton’s sensitive design for this volume gives the exhibition a lasting visual record. And we couldn’t have done it without Elena Harvey Collins, our talented Curatorial Assistant, and MOCA Cleveland’s stellar Exhibitions team: Ray Juaire, Senior Exhibitions Manager; Kate Montlack, Registrar; and Paul Sydorenko, Preparator. Many thanks to the lenders to the exhibition, including the artists; Ed Fraga; Susan Goethel Campbell; Wayne State University Art Collection, Detroit; the Estate of Mary Ann Aitken; the Brooklyn Museum; Kent State University Department of Special Collections and Archives; and the d.a. levy Collection at Cleveland State University Library. Finally, we extend a deep gratitude to the artists, who have been extremely generous in their participation and our conversations.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

HOW TO REMAIN HUMAN WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE SUPPORT OF: JOHN P. MURPHY FOUNDATION, MEDICAL MUTUAL OF OHIO, THOMPSON HINE LLP

ALL 2015 EXHIBITIONS ARE FUNDED BY THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, AND LEADERSHIP CIRCLE GIFTS FROM THE BRITTON FUND, DOREEN AND DICK CAHOON, JOANNE COHEN AND MORRIS WHEELER, MARGARET COHEN AND KEVIN RAHILLY, VICTORIA COLLIGAN AND JOHN STALCUP, BECKY DUNN, LAUREN RICH FINE AND GARY GILLER, BARBARA AND PETER GALVIN, HARRIET AND VICTOR GOLDBERG, AGNES GUND, DONNA AND STEWART KOHL, TOBY DEVAN LEWIS, SCOTT MUELLER, AND BOAKE AND MARIAN SELLS. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

129 COLOPHON

How to Remain Human

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland June 12–September 5, 2015

JILL SNYDER Executive Director

MEGAN LYKINS REICH Deputy Director of Program, Planning, and Engagement

ROSE BOUTHILLIER Associate Curator + Publications Manager

ELENA HARVEY COLLINS Curatorial Assistant

KATE MONTLACK Registrar + Manager of Museum Records

RAY JUAIRE Senior Exhibitions Manager

PAUL SYDORENKO Preparator

JAMES WAITE AND RACHEL KRISLOV Curatorial Intern

Identity & Design concept by Ryland Wharton, The Work We Do.

FONTS: Pitch, Albertus, Lydian BT

130