80 Pepón Osorio. Face to Face, 2002. Installation View. Institute Of

Pepón Osorio. Face to Face, 2002. Installation view. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Photo: Aaron Igler.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 When Video Does Foster Care: Pepón Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence

KAREN BECKMAN

I. In recent years, as artists and critics have struggled with the question of how contemporary art can avoid becoming just another form of entertainment in this society of spectacle, the use of video has been treated with increasing skepticism. After com- paring Bill Viola’s He Weeps for You (1976) with the video work of Laurie Anderson and Vito Aconcci, for example, Ann M. Wagner writes: Now we know why Gary Hill calls video, with thanks to Robert Smithson, “the non-site of t.v.” Television, in other words, is the site—vast, unmapped, unedited—that video and its attendant mediated performances picture and articulate by negative reversal, as a broken piece of an absent whole. Does this mean that when these new media begin to offer pleasure and entertainment their critical dimension is lost? This is a question we might reasonably put to Bill Viola, as to any other practitioner of video and performance in the present day. For what is missing from Viola’s spectacular meditations on life and death and transience is any built-in mistrust of his medium.1 David Joselit usefully furthers this consideration of the contemporary video artist’s relation to “entertainment” in his comparison of Pierre Huyghe’s Streamside Day Follies (2003) with a range of earlier video installations by Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, and Joan Jonas. He notes that while in the 1970s, which he describes as the medium’s “ﬁrst ofﬁcial decade,” viewers usually encountered video through the closed-circuit apparatus and were free to wander among the feedback loops of live cameras and monitors, their own images often appearing on screens within the gallery or museum space, in the last few years the practice of projection on the wall of the gallery or museum has become increasingly common. For Joselit this move toward wall projection constitutes a move away from video’s radical

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 potential as a medium.2 He writes: Projection undermines one of the most progressive effects of the closed-circuit apparatus: its conceptualization of spectatorship as interactive, even if the interaction afforded is the arguably passive one of inserting one’s body within a media circuit in order to view it relayed back to oneself. . . . Projection rein- troduces a more conventionally theatrical mode of spectatorship in which the audience remains outside the media feedback loop rather than participating as actors within it. . . . In video projection the viewer is made more passive both in her consumption of spectacular imagery and in her ability to intervene within the space of the screen.”3 Haunting these statements, of course, is the specter of the art museum as cinema, a symptom of the growing fear that in the age of advanced capitalism, art galleries will offer only entertainment, helping to foreclose the possibility of a nonconsump- tive mode of looking. While Joselit allows that some forms of projection depart from and disrupt the norms of Hollywood cinema, either through the practice of fracturing the projected image across several screens or by varying the pace of editing in order to disrupt the smooth flow of coherent narrative, in his discussion of Streamside Day Follies he expresses a basic (and understandable) suspicion of “video projected cinematically onto just one surface.”4 Although I agree with Joselit that recent pro- jections, which “hug the architectural envelope,” evoke the “growing practice of treating building façades as flickering surfaces of advertising,”5 we need to be wary both of collapsing the entire tradition of cinema into Hollywood narrative film and of dismissing narrative film per se, including Hollywood film, as having no critical potential, as if commercial narrative necessarily and inescapably positioned spectators as passive consumers of the image. Numerous scholars throughout the 1980s and 1990s drew attention to precisely this tendency in film theory, and the current discussions within contemporary art about the use and exhibition of video and film might benefit from attending to film theory’s evolving conceptualization of the rela- tive activity or passivity of the cinematic spectator. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks’s important 1992 essay, constitutes a key intervention in film theorists’ thinking about the reception of narrative film, not only because it draws attention to the fact that, like much of contemporary art theory, “film theory as a critical ‘turf’ in the United States has been and continues to be influenced by and reflective of white racial domination” but also because it moves us beyond Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the female spectator as trapped and passive, drawing attention

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 instead to the way the mass media can be, and has been, strategically appropriated by those subjects who go unrecognized and unrepresented by it.6 hooks writes: Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for the construc- tion of radical black female subjectivity, and the way cultural production informs this possibility, fully acknowledge the importance of mass media, film in particular, as a powerful site for critical intervention. Certainly Julie Dash’s film, Illusions identifies the terrain of Hollywood cinema as a space of knowl- edge production that has enormous power. Yet, she also creates a filmic narrative wherein the black female protagonist subversively claims that space. Inverting the “real-life” power structure, she offers the black female spectator representations that challenge stereotypical notions that place us outside the realm of filmic discursive practices.7 Though Joselit’s discussion of Huyghe tends toward a homogenous view of narrative cinema, elsewhere, in a discussion of Michael Shamberg, Joselit emphasizes the need to avoid reductive dismissals of commercial culture, stating, It would be easy enough to describe Shamberg’s shift from political documentary to palliative entertainment as a simple instance of selling out, but I think this would be unfair. . . . In other words, instead of scoffing at Archie Bunker as an effective social critic, perhaps we should hold open the possibility that commercial culture can carry oppositional content.8 As we evaluate the status of video in the contemporary art world, we need to find ways of critiquing those works that seem to sustain or encourage passive and uncrit- ical spectatorship without reductively invoking narrative cinema and its usual exhibition modes as a negative foil against which all “progressive” noncommercial film and video practices can be measured. Such binary oppositions of the reception of cinema and video art not only resist complex thought, productive interdisciplinary exchange, and almost thirty years of feminist, black, queer, and postcolonial film theory, but also prevent us from inventing and recognizing the alternate possibilities of commercial culture. In the pages that follow, I will explore Pepón Osorio’s use of video in his recent work, an installation in three parts: Trials and Turbulence at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The installation was the result of Osorio’s three-year artist-in-residency at the Department of Human Services (DHS), also in Philadelphia. I will examine how this multimedia installation, which includes an example of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 “wall-hugging” video projection, uses video to activate a critically engaged, self- reflective, and participatory spectator; and how Osorio productively responds to what Hal Foster has recently called contemporary art’s “condition of aftermath,” which involves living in the wake “not only of modernist painting and sculpture but of postmodernist deconstructions of these forms as well, in the wake not only of the prewar avant-gardes but of the postwar neo-avant-gardes as well.”9 In trying to formulate alternatives to melancholia in a world where it has become increasingly difficult to see how art can “live on” or make a difference, Foster identifies four key features of relevant contemporary art, all of which I think we can see at work in Trials and Turbulence and the effects of which I will try to trace in the course of this essay: (1) an engagement with traumatic experience; (2) a consideration of spectrality or “place haunted by absence” (a component that is closely linked to the medium of film); (3) the staging of “nonsynchronous forms”; that is, the process of “making a new medium out of the remnants of old forms, and [holding] together the different temporal markers in a single visual structure”; and (4) the juxtaposition of different spaces, the “strategy of the incongruent.”10

II. In 1975, Pepón Osorio moved from Puerto Rico to New York City, where he trained and worked as a sociologist and as a preschool teacher before becoming a social worker at the Human Resources Administration (Bureau of Child Welfare) in the Prevention Division of the Child Abuse and Abuse Victims Unit. Throughout this period he was actively involved in a community of artists and performers, an involvement that eventually drew him into a variety of artistic projects, including a number of col- laborations with Merián Soto, with whom he still collaborates today. Not until 1988, in the multimedia performance work No Regrets, did he use video in his work.11 With the exception of the video footage of a young woman, Adrienne, which appears in the third part of the installation (also entitled Trials and Turbulence) and was edited by Irene Sosa, all the video in this installation was shot and edited by Wendy Weinberg under the direction of Osorio. This collaboration with Sosa and Weinberg, both accomplished documentary ﬁlm and video makers who have used cinematic and/or televisual forums for progressive ends, points to the possibility of using the mass media differently, and, rather than positioning “art” in opposition to the mass media, invites us to contemplate the possible spaces of exchange between the art museum, television, and cinema.12 The three intertwined installations involve large-scale reconstructions of a variety

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 of spaces within the gallery. Visitors wander in and out of DHS workers’ cubicles, a family courtroom, a storage unit containing the possessions of a displaced family, and an abandoned lot. Critical discussions of Osorio have repeatedly addressed the status of “the real” in his work, a fact we might in part attribute to his committed attention to pressing social and political issues, including AIDS, the prison system, young motherhood, and representations of the Latino community in the media, but also to the documentary impulse of his work. Critics have primarily discussed Osorio’s work as social commentary, often at the expense of a thoughtful consideration of the art itself. At a time when the art world’s interest in the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality continues to dwindle, as if these questions were “done” in the 1980s and are now over, the urgency of ﬁnding better ways of understanding identity across the globe continues to escalate. Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence challenges us to refine the way we think about the relationship among art objects, popular culture, spectatorship, and the politics of access and offers art as a space capacious enough to hold some of the seemingly irreconcilable difficulties of our historical moment without needing to resolve them in oversimplistic ways. In Trials and Turbulence Osorio focuses on the structural problems of the foster care system, but I would argue that the installation also grapples with some of our most pressing political and aesthetic conundrums. In response to Osorio’s Badge of Honor/Insignia de Honor, Joseph Jacobs, a curator at the Newark Museum, writes “Like a sociologist, he studies communities and orga- nizations and institutions such as museums; and like a social worker, he wants to bring about change. . . . But can the installation play a role in bringing about a shift toward the family, social responsibility, art and museums, and ethnic communities?”13 Jacobs’s question—what difference can art actually make?—is an important one, and although the “effects” of art might at times be ineffable, they are not always, and there are good reasons to note the immediate social and political effects of Osorio’s work. In the case of Trials and Turbulence, he has made artistic practice and the museum space accessible to young people from the foster care system with whom he collaborated during the video recording and installation process; he facil- itated conversations between scholars like me, working in the still predominantly white, upper-middle-class academy, and some of the young people represented in the installation, reminding us that understanding the world differently might involve finding new teachers; and, in collaboration with the curators at the Institute of Contemporary Art, he has made the art museum a resource center where people can not only see art but can also learn more about Philadelphia’s “Achieving Independence”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 mentorship program and can access the PEW Commission’s reports on the foster care system.14 Discussing a different social crisis, AIDS, and the art museum’s will- ingness to recognize its existence on just one day of the year (A Day without Art), Douglas Crimp writes, If art institutions were to recognize what I called a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis, it seems obvious that they would consider 364 more days a year during which they might act as if they knew a crisis existed. If, for example, an art museum is willing to display AIDS information on A Day without Art, why not display that information every day of the year?15 In Trials and Turbulence Osorio and the ICA move toward realizing Crimp’s vision of a “vastly expanded view of culture,” providing an alternative to recent critical suggestions that art’s resistance to advanced capitalism necessarily lies in a strategic return to aesthetic autonomy and disciplinarity.16 Nevertheless, while it is important to recognize how Osorio expands and challenges the limits of art and the museum, we need to avoid discussing his work as though it were purely social commentary and thereby marginalizing its aesthetic dimension. We need to avoid framing discussions of his work through a polariza- tion of art and politics, an approach most frequently reserved for female artists and artists of color. As the Guerrilla Girls write in a short piece entitled, “Is It Art or Is It Politics? Only Our MoMA Knows”: People always ask if what we do is art or not. From the beginning, as a group, we could never agree. But this is a very important issue to art pundits, because if what we do is art, then they have to take us seriously. If what we do is politics, then they can dismiss us as topical, not universal.17 Though many critics have spoken of Osorio’s work in terms of “realism” as a way of paying tribute to its social relevance, I want to suggest that this paradigm has not only contributed to the neglect of the aesthetic interest of Osorio’s work, but can also potentially blind us to the complex status of “the real” in these installations. Olu Oguibe, for example, resists assigning Osorio’s work to what he calls “the vague yet prevalently fatuous category of contemporary conceptual art” and claims instead that it belongs in “a noble tradition of social realism where art, rather than lecture the world or piss on it, ﬁnds a role in bringing society and the individual to look at themselves and rediscover avenues for the act of recovery.”18 While I agree with Oguibe that Osorio’s work promotes self-reﬂexivity and social healing, I am uncomfortable with

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 the way social interventionism and critical viewing are here separated from conceptual art and unquestionably aligned with “social realism” as though representa- tional realism were a completely unproblematic category and conceptual art always without social and political force. Though Sol LeWitt claimed in 1967 that “conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions,” Trials and Turbulence complicates any absolute separation of intellectual from ocu- lar and emotional engagement and instead invites us to contemplate the pressing issue of how we move between feeling and looking, politics and thought.19 In a related assessment of Osorio’s “Face to Face” (2002), the first part of Trials and Turbulence, which was exhibited independently in 2002, Roberta Smith writes in the New York Times, “It favors the documentary over the decorative, which is new for him and less visually satisfying, and it raises questions about substituting the power of reality for that of art.”20 Here, Oguibe’s “social realism” slips into Smith’s “power of reality.” While Smith places “the real” in opposition to “art,” what interests me about Osorio’s work is the way he challenges us to understand the two categories as fully intertwined with each other, to be open to the possibility that the problems of the foster care system arise as much from our collective failure to imagine differently the world and our relationship to it as they arise from more material explana- tions such as limited funding, unemployment, and drug addiction. Though Osorio’s work at times invokes something that feels “real” to us, these “realities” are typically invoked less to concretize than to transform the subject in question, often through something that we might think of as a “conceptual” intervention after all. As critic Berta M. Sichel has suggested, if this is realism, then we have to understand it within “the literary legacy of Latin American magic realism, or el real maravilloso.”21 Having noted this tendency of critics, however, it’s also important to acknowledge that in conversation, as in the installations themselves, Osorio likes to empha- size the authenticity of his objects, the fact that they are “real,” to point out that all the objects on and around the ofﬁce workers’ desks—photographs, posters, mugs, even the desks themselves—are actually on loan from DHS workers, or that the chairs in the reconstructed courtroom are borrowed from the family court system. Rather than taking this reality effect at face value, however, we might more usefully understand “the real” in Osorio’s work as functioning in the manner of a productive ruse. First, by framing the three installations as authentic reconstructions of spaces probably unfamiliar to many gallery visitors, Osorio encourages us to approach them curiously, naively, and with a certain confidence about our right to enter, as we might approach a living history museum: “Oh, is that how they live?”22 But the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 anthropological gaze initially encouraged by the “sculptural component’s” illusion of authenticity-on-display is immediately complicated by the far less accessible video components with which the three-dimensional objects are juxtaposed.23

III. Osorio intersperses video, exhibited in a variety of formats, throughout the three installations, yet he insists that, in contrast with the work of older video artists, video always plays a secondary role to the sculptural component in his installations.24 Critics, however, have not always agreed. David Blatherwick, for example, writes of Badge of Honor (1995), a multimedia installation that addresses the effect of imprisonment on a father-son relationship, “Despite the visual intensity of the sculptural element of this installation, the video component remains at the heart of this work.”25 Rather than try to establish the correct hierarchy between mediums, however, I want to shift the emphasis of this discussion and ask instead how the video and the sculptural elements interact, as well as what happens in the space between the two-dimensional image and the three-dimensional objects on display. How do Osorio’s exhibition practices impact the viewer’s engagement with the social and political questions represented in the installation? Each piece of footage in its specific exhibition context asks us to consider repeatedly how we must look, how we want to look, and how we are implicated by our own desires about visual access to the worlds of others. Separating the three mediums becomes increasingly difficult as they reveal themselves to be fully intertwined with and implicated in one another. First, the sculptural component of Trials and Turbulence has a highly filmic quality: the sculptural component makes strong claims to possess an indexical relation to the spaces, times, and people represented, much like the trace an object leaves on exposed film, holding out film’s promise of making certain spaces and times present to us and of making us present in those spaces and times.26 Like the evanescent film image, the ability of the sculptural component to offer “presence” is at best unstable, hovering between fulfillment and denial of our fantasies of access to the other and reminding us of the ethical issues that arise with these fantasies. Trials and Turbulence further evokes the mediums of film and video in its transfor- mation of visitors into something like editors, making us decide how we move from one space and time to another and encouraging us to articulate a narrative thread between the three interrelated installations. Osorio also describes himself creating a “superimposition” of incongruent spaces, such as the gallery and the DHS office,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 a description that explicitly invokes the ability of film to layer images over each other within a single frame, and thus the entire installation, not just the video component, might be said to address how we view moving images.27 In so doing, Osorio’s work offers us, through art, an experience of filmic spectatorship as active and participatory. If the contemporary artist is called upon, as Foster claims, to make a new medium out of the remnants of old forms in order to be able to juxtapose incongruent spaces, Osorio responds by creating an installation that runs like a Möbius strip between sculpture and film and video, neither collapsing the mediums into one another nor allowing the exact boundaries between them to become completely distinct or entrenched. Here the aesthetic and sociopolitical aspects of the installation inter- sect—the borders between spaces and mediums emerge as questions to be pondered rather than as certainties to be defended. The installation calls us to experience the identity of one medium through the properties we associate with others and then to extend the implications of this experience to our understanding of the foster care system and of identity itself. Trials and Turbulence allows us to experience film and video’s ability to collapse spaces into each other through superimposition and editing—with one crucial difference. While the editing process in the cinematic context remains largely hidden from a viewer who has no influence on that process, here it is not technology and the editor but the artist in collaboration with museum visitors, often members of different and quite distinct communities, who create the possibility of experienc- ing this filmic movement through incongruent spaces. While cinematic spectators cannot determine the nature of their journey, when viewing Trials and Turbulence, we are called upon to decide how we move through incongruent spaces and are thereby implicated in the narrative structures and decisions that emerge. The agency afforded the visitor of Osorio’s installation differs considerably from the notions of cinematic interactivity articulated by theorists of digital cinema’s possibilities, who imagine the future spectator’s agency in terms of “a computer mouse or a virtual reality glove at every seat in the theater” but who fail to comment on the way such sup- posedly revolutionary gestures threaten to atomize public viewing spaces.28 Osorio, by contrast, posits proto-filmic narrative interaction as a form of sociopolitical responsibility and collective involvement. Though individuals make narrative decisions rather than have their path determined for them, their choices emerge in relation to the behavior of other gallery visitors, a far cry from the contemporary fantasy of “new individualism” that, Paul Virilio argues, leads not to freedom and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 democracy but to the “irruption of a host of machine-toys for adults who could, with their aid, do what they had been forbidden to do as children.”29 Furthermore, unlike many ethnographic documentaries, commercial films, and interactive digital visual fantasies, all of which tend to present the globe and its people to first-world audiences as though they were fully accessible, ours for the taking, Trials and Turbulence con- stantly reminds us that visual access is not a given; it forces us to question our motives, our responsibilities, and the violations we commit when we move from one space into another. In an age of neoimperialism and globalization, where displacement has, for many, become routine, how we expand, defend, disregard, destroy, or cross the boundaries between spaces and what we assume about our rights when we do has become the ethical question of our time. Through the figure of the displaced family, Osorio offers us a model for thinking about complexities and contradictions of public and private identity and belonging in all its violence and vulnerability on a local and global scale.30 Positioned in the ICA on the floor below David Lamelas’s Limite de una Proyección I (Limit of a Projection I) aka Light Projection in a Dark Room (first seen in Buenos Aires in 1967) and a retrospective of Ant Farm’s radical art projects, including video screenings of their 1975 performance, Media Burn, which involved crashing a customized 1959 Cadillac Biarritz into a tower of burning televisions, Trials and Turbulence offers us a view of the ongoing participation of contemporary art in a tradition of politically engaged artists who have adopted film and video for the purpose of interrogating and imagining the possibilities of the media differently. At a time of ennui in the worlds of art, criticism, theory, and politics, Osorio refuses to be weary and compels us to do the same.

IV. I step through the door into the ﬁrst installation, Face to Face, and am immediately disoriented by two different recorded female voices. The words of women blur in the air, and I feel like a stranger because I can hear but cannot understand their words. Before me stands a huge metal cage, a storage container full of the possessions of a displaced family. The bars of the cage segment the entire home into small rectangles and suggest a family in prison, evoking Osorio’s prison installation, Badge of Honor, and emphasizing the way economic hardship operates on poor families like pun- ishment for criminals. My mind will return to this cage later in the family courtroom of Trials and Turbulence, where Adrienne, a young woman who has been through the foster care system, recalls seeing commercials about “save the animals” and wonders why people want to save animals when nobody cares about foster children:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 “I felt I was lower than an animal,” she will tell the Judge, who is absent. Inside the cage are the contents of a home, but the home itself is missing. We know from the old saying that “a house is not a home,” but the cage shows how hard it is to sustain a home when the house is gone. Two old televisions sit on the floor in the bottom right-hand corner of the cage, facing the gallery door. Their screens are dead. On top of one sits a chest of drawers; on the other a chair, as though this ubiquitous medium, entrapped like the family’s possessions within a cage, has lost its power to communicate, has become nothing but a piece of furniture. Speaking of these two old televisions, Osorio states that he does not want to “intimidate the public with the technological aspect,” for, he says, technology is “not as accessible as you would think” to the communities with which he primarily works. “I aim,” he says, “for a demystification of the media.”31 In a world where we are overwhelmed by what Osorio calls “a cacophony of media images,” he aims to create spaces for reflection by focusing, in his video work, on one single moving image at a time. A third old television screen on the other side of the cage plays the home video of a child’s first birthday party, sometimes giving way to static on the screen. Two small speakers on top of this television prove to be the source of one of the sets of voices, and a woman talks about her difficult relationship with her son. The juxtaposition of familial sounds and home-movie images invite us to synchronize the two, but the task proves frustrating. Do we hear one of the women we see in the home video? Who are all these other people? How, and why, do we draw the lines between immediate family and the wider community? Has memory been displaced by its technological double, the video camera, and does this mean that memory can now be lost (but perhaps also regained) as easily as other material objects? Back at the door, on my right, stands a reconstruction of a DHS conference room, the first space a child entering the foster care system would visit. The door is shut, but its clear glass window again suspends the foster child in the space between public and private that will become its home. A slow-motion looped video image projected on the wall depicts the head and shoulders of a young man in his midteens with closely cropped hair and tattoos up his arm. With eyes closed and hands over his ears, he shakes his head endlessly in a gesture of refusal or despair or both. Suspending viewers between conflicting emotional and spectatorial positions, empathy draws us to him while his gestures simultaneously block out the view and sound of others and remind us of our voyeurism. The video refuses viewers the catharsis offered by mainstream news images of suffering people at home or abroad, the kind that leave us happy to go on doing nothing because we have at least “really

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 felt” for someone, perhaps even shed a few tears, the phenomenon Lauren Berlant condemns as “the violence of sentimentality.” Berlant declares: “National sentimentality is too often a defensive response by people who identify with privilege yet fear they will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that benefits them.”32 The structural framing of this video projection provokes an awareness of our “eyedropping,” as Osorio calls it, and prevents viewers from treating this young man as a fully consumable, accessible, and knowable object. Instead the image compels us to witness, and, if we notice our own reflection in the glass door that becomes the superimposed image through which we watch the endlessly looping projection of his frustration, to consider how we are implicated in the suffering of another. To the left of the gallery we see the first of five DHS workers’ cubicles, each separated by venetian blinds that extend the cage’s opening motif of visual segmentation and semiprivate space. One of those blinds serves as the screen for another video loop, this time showing a caseworker, her head resting on a table, her right arm stretched out by her side. Slowly she draws herself up to a vertical position; then, equally slowly, she slides her arm back along the table. The rhythm of this dancelike cycle, which hovers above the endless towers of yet-to-be-looked-at client file-boxes, con- veys the traumatic repetitions encountered in social work, as well as the exhaustion of the system itself. The projection of the image on a “blind,” an instrument of half- light and partial vision, simultaneously fractures and doubles the image and again staves off the fantasy that we have full access to the caseworker’s image or feelings. Half of the image vanishes, only to reappear on the wall behind the blind. However, because of the distance between the wall and the blind, the background image appears substantially larger than the one in the foreground, leaving us to wrestle with the problem of how to fit different parts of “the picture” together. If we step too close to the blind, the image disappears completely, leaving open the question, “What is appropriate distance?” In the first cubicle a computer monitor plays another looping image depicting the head and shoulders of a long-haired girl, perhaps seven years old. As the girl shakes her head from side to side in slow motion, she mirrors the gestures of the young man

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 Opposite and right: Pepón Osorio. Face to Face, 2002. Installation view. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Video: Wendy Weinberg. Photos: Aaron Igler.

in the conference room. Like him, her hands cover her ears, and her eyes are closed. Direct access to or identification with the girl is blocked not only by her physical actions but also by the presence of a plastic magnifying sheet that hangs in front of the screen, enlarging and subsequently dis- torting and fracturing her image on the monitor. These sheets, ad- vertised as being ideal for enlarging the pages of an atlas, pose the question of what happens when we put people, like territories, under the magnifying glass in this way. Do the girl’s gestures speak of collective as well as personal frustrations and refusals? Emphasizing this implied relationship between local and global displacement, idyllic-looking postcards from Puerto Rico displayed in horizontal and vertical rows, along with stickers of the Puerto Rican ﬂag, arranged in the same gridlike manner as the postcards, decorate the cupboards above the monitor. Although the ﬂags and photographs of Puerto Rico evoke a sense of belonging, the manner of their display, and their proximity to the looping girl who cannot look or listen, simultaneously recalls the horizontal and vertical lines of the cage behind me. This Puerto Rican grid signals the barrier separating the office worker from those who send the cards, the worker’s own displacement, as well as the displaced person’s traumatically repetitious assertion of a former identity to coun- teract the sense of homelessness. In two adjacent cubicles, each one divided from its neighbor by blinds, monitors display the same video loop of the girl in distress. On the other side of the room, two further monitors, also equipped with magnifying screens, show identical footage of the long-haired girl shaking her head, over and over, the images distinguished from each other only by the personalized décor of the social worker’s desk on which the monitors rest.33 What are we to make of this girl’s ubiquity? Is one child segmented into pieces and then divided up among so many caseworkers? Does the repetition tell us something about the way people are homogenized by entering “the System”? Or perhaps this repetition of the girl’s image resists our impulse to care about just

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 one girl rather than about the wider structural problems of which she represents only a part. Her appearance on every screen seems to insist that this problem be thought about in both its singularity and its multiplicity. Each animated computer screen is surrounded by photographs of caseworkers’ children. Like talismans, these photographs work to ward off the suffering of the adjacent girl caught in traumatic video loops, yet the proximity of these children’s faces to each other makes it difficult to maintain the distinction between those who are owned and those who are disowned. As boundaries blur, the installation challenges us to question our understanding of identity, community, and care in terms of property. In a recent prescription for both artists and critics, Joselit calls for the need “to reinvent modes of the collective in a world where publics have become a new type of commodity,” and I share his sense of the urgency of this task. He writes: Rethinking “communities” is inseparable from rethinking identity politics. Just as postmodernism of the 1980s addressed what Sherrie Levine has identified as the nature of images as property, the best art of the last decade has explored the conditions of identity as property in the fullest material and psychological sense. This does not mean simply asserting the identity one possesses, but rather questioning why we should experience the self as possession in the first place.34 The second installation, Run Mikey Run, continues the work of disturbing pro- prietary notions of the self. It begins in the far-left corner of the gallery. On first glance we see only a gigantic floor-to-ceiling barrier made of the wooden pallets, which people in North Philadelphia use to make fences, to create some kind of line between private and public space. However, Osorio’s wall of pallets is no white picket fence; it’s not a gesture of spatial distinction but an absolutely impenetrable barrier. Fairy tale–like in its dimensions, it has no door, and you can’t climb over it. But on closer inspection, small gaps in the wood reveal themselves. If Osorio aims to show us something about the children who fall through the cracks, he does so here by inverting our paradigms of vision, making the cracks the only places where we can see. The first crack I find is too high for me, and as I stand on tiptoe peering through, I’m aware of my own intrusion on a place that smells unfamiliar to me.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 Opposite: Pepón Osorio. Face to Face, 2002. Installation view. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Photo: Aaron Igler. Right, top and bottom: Pepón Osorio. Run Mikey Run, 2004. Installation view. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Video: Wendy Weinberg. Photos: Aaron Igler.

Osorio has deliberately created a viewing situation where visitors who want to see what’s behind the fence have to press their faces against the pungent wood and breathe in the aroma of what he calls the “foundations of that community.” Through the cracks I see fragments of a gigantic wall projection of a young boy, Mikey, running endlessly. I move up and down but can’t quite grasp the whole image. Shifting from hole to hole, piecing together bits of the boy, wondering which hole gives the best view, highly conscious of the wood’s smell, I find myself incapable of the disembodied looking I’m accustomed to. I recall Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1966) and Simon Leung’s invocation of “glory holes” in A Call to Glory . . . or Afternoon Tea with Marcel Duchamp (1996) and wonder about the extent to which I am prepared to be touched by the world on the other side of this hole. Mikey’s run resonates with two other cinematic moments: the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), which shows another boy lost in a different system, running until he reaches the edge of the ocean; and the final scenes of Melvin Van Peeble’s 1971 black nationalist film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which concludes with Sweetback, an African-American hustler-turned-radical, endlessly running away from the white police to a soundtrack on which voices urge, “Run, Sweetback, Run,” prefiguring the title of this installation.35 Yet unlike Sweetback’s run, Mikey’s run is shot from behind and exhibited in a manner that positions the spectator as predator. Though Joselit expresses his concern that projection on the gallery wall threatens to position viewers as passive consumers of entertainment, Run Mikey Run evokes cinemas of aesthetic and social change, and reminds us that cinematic viewing is not a fixed or

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 Pepón Osorio. Trials and Turbulence, 2004. Installation view. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Video: Wendy Weinberg and Irene Sosa. Photo: Aaron Igler.

clearly defined experience. Mikey may seem to be running from the viewer, running hopelessly on the spot, trapped in place by the museum’s wall, but this is not the only way to read this image. Perhaps his spectral presence on the wall magically transforms the thick and impenetrable perimeter of the ICA not into an advertising space but into an ethereal and permeable portal of light that opens alternative path- ways between the art museum and its surrounding community, with Mikey not running from us but asking us to follow? The third installation, Trials and Turbulence, a reconstruction of a family court, complete with judge’s bench and advocate’s table, is disrupted by the presence of a glass and wooden oval bathroom made of a revolving door in the middle of the courtroom. The glass bathroom contains a bathtub and a shower curtain, which serves as the screen for the most narrative of the videos, and the only video with syn- chronized sound. On the shower curtain we see Adrienne, or Angel, as she is known to her closest friends and family, now a young woman, in a low-angled shot that shows her backed into a corner with her legs first outstretched, then drawn into herself. Adrienne challenges the (absent) judge with questions about the decision to take her out of her mother’s care and put her into the foster system, interspersing her story with the word “Judge,” which hovers somewhere between a term of address and a dare. Naked white Barbie dolls litter the bathroom floor, contrasting sharply with both the Puerto Rican souvenir doll on the shelf, and the large head and shoulders of an African-American “beauty-salon” doll, asking us to reflect on how Adrienne, a woman of color, formed her own identity amid these icons of racially marked femininity. The video is confusing, providing no clear critique or suggestion of a solution to the problems she experienced while in foster care. Further, because Adrienne never looks directly at the camera, she seems unwilling to engage the spectator’s look, and her resistance, like the children’s earlier resistance in Face to Face, again holds sentimental identificatory practices at bay. Whereas foster children have hitherto been unwillingly suspended between the public and the private, Adrienne seizes the opportunity to move her private feelings from the bathroom to the courtroom by agreeing to participate in this installation that will transform the walls of her bathroom into glass. Once the only private room Adrienne could retreat to in her various foster homes, the exposed glass bathroom becomes a new Oval Office from which Adrienne addresses the public; the judicial system is condemned by its absence at the hearing. Several outward-facing bathroom mirrors make it impossible to watch this video without catching sight of one’s own reflection: no projection without reflection.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 To see the final video installation, the visitor has to occupy the (absent) judge’s seat, the blind spot of the room, from which the footage of Adrienne’s address to the judge is, ironically, completely invisible. The video plays on a screen built into the surface of the bench. As the camera zooms in and out on the pages of a dictionary, a finger, presumably that of the judge, runs up and down each page, scanning for the meaning of Adrienne’s words, as though communication has completely broken down. We never see the full definition of a word, for when the camera zooms out to show the full page, the words are too small to read. In the end, we are left with strange and resonant fragments of definitions gleaned by reading vertical columns made up of the first word of each line of the definition. “Foster” is followed by “care” and annotated with the definition fragments: “safety, freedom, resentment.” Then

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 comes “advocates,” “rejection,” “compassion,” for which the vertical definition reads “passion, more, money.” “Anger” is preceded by “angel-wing,” perhaps a reminder that this is not the first time Osorio has worked with Angels (the previous time was in his 1993 installation, “Angel, the Shoeshiner”). The only word I see of the definition for anger is “angenesis,” which means “renewal.” “Promise” gives way to “forgiveness” and “forgive,” although the example the dictionary gives, “Father, ———— them,” reminds us that the jury is still out on what the father will be told to do. Below “home,” lies “homeland,” a final reminder of the relationship between local displacement of poor families and the public histories of colonial and neo- imperialist exploitation. Before returning to “foster,” the cycle ends with “change,” but all we are shown of its definition is “crooked.”

V. Trials and Turbulence focuses attention on the word foster, which the American Heritage Dictionary deﬁnes in the following ways: (1) To promote the growth and development of: detect and foster artistic talent; (2) To nurse, cherish; to foster a secret hope; and (3) To provide parental care and nurture to children not related through legal or blood ties. With the term foster, Osorio asks us to consider whether, how, and why we care for people who are not ours and to whom we are not bound, as well as how paradigms of ownership and belonging structure our identities and our relationship with the world. The challenge of this word and of Osorio’s meditation

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on it extends beyond the realm of the personal, beyond merely recon- structing and recognizing the “reality” of the DHS ofﬁces and the family courts—although making these spaces (partially) visible to gallery visitors is certainly one of the things this installation does. But it is in asking us to imagine our capacity to care in situations where we are not obliged to care by blood or law, to care outside of the paradigm of us and them that currently deﬁnes the relation of the United States to the rest of the world, that the visionary potential of Trials and Turbulence lies. Art is not an added extra to this political project, for art itself pro- vides us with one of the best examples of our capacity to care for something that isn’t really useful, that isn’t necessarily ours, and to which we have no obvious obligation.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 Notes This paper was presented, in slightly altered form, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, on the occasion of the opening of Trials and Turbulence: An Artist in Residence at the DHS (September 15, 2004). I thank Claudia Gould, Johanna Plummer, and Ingrid Schaffner for inviting me to speak, and Elyse Gonzalez for her help with the images. I am also grateful to Pepón Osorio, filmmakers Wendy Weinberg and Irene Sosa, and Adrienne, who appears in the Trials and Turbulence installation, for generously sharing with me their time and thoughts. This essay is for Elizabeth Cohen.

1. Ann M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 90. 2. David Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” Artforum 42, no. 7 (March 2004): 154. 3. Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” 154, 156. It is interesting to note the way the viewer is gendered female at the very moment the hitherto gender-neutral spectator becomes more passive and less inter- ventionist in the consumption of spectacle. For further discussion of the projected image in the contemporary art museum, see “Roundtable: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 71–96. 4. Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” 154, 157. 5. Joselit, “Inside the Light Cube,” 154. 6. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 125. 7. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 128–129. 8. David Joselit, “An Allegory of Criticism,” October 103 (Winter 2003): 10. 9. See Hal Foster, Design and Crime (New York: Verso, 2002), 125. 10. Foster, Design and Crime, 130–141. 11. Marimar Benítez, ed., De Puerta en Puerta: Pepon Osorio: Door to Door (San Juan, P.R.: EAP Press, 2001–2002), 154. 12. For further information on Wendy Weinberg’s work see: http://www.wmm.com/catalog/_makers/ fm372.htm. For information about Irene Sosa’s work, see http://www.bctvr.org/facstaff/sosa.htm. 13. Joseph Jacobs, “Pepón Osorio—Badge of Honor,” in Project 5: Pepón Osorio, Badge of Honor/ Insignia de Honor: Proyecto 5, exh. cat. (Newark, N.J.: The Newark Museum, 1996), 6. 14. The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, Fostering the Future: Safety, Permanence, and Well-Being for Children in Foster Care (Washington: The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, 2004); available online at: http:// pewfostercare.org. 15. Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 167. 16. See, for example, Hal Foster’s “The ABCs of Contemporary Design,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 191–199. 17. The Guerrilla Girls, The Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 21. 18. Olu Oguibe, “Badge of Honor: Pepson Osorio’s New Installation,” Journal of Contemporary African Art 5 (Fall/Winter 1996): 11.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.80 by guest on 25 September 2021 19. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, 822–826 (1967; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 826. 20. Roberta Smith, “Pepón Osorio,” New York Times, 11 October 2002, E38. “Face to Face” was included in the Pepón Osorio show at Robert Feldman Gallery, New York (September/October 2002) and showed again in March/April 2003 at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, FL. 21. Berta M. Sichel comments: “In Badge of Honor, the literary legacy of Latin American magic realism, or el real maravilloso, seems to be present.” Berta M. Sichel, “Pepón Osorio: The Theatricalization of Space,” in Project 5, exh. cat., 7. 22. For discussion of the relationship between the living history museum and film’s indexicality, the tension in historical representation between “preservation” and “restoration,” and the fantasy of immersing oneself in the experience of another, see Philip Rosen, “Entering History: Preservation and Restoration,” in Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001): 43–88. 23. Osorio describes the nonvideo aspects of the installation—the furniture, barriers, and reconstructions—as “the sculptural component.” 24. Pepón Osorio, interview by author, September 2004. 25. David Blatherwick, “Pepón Osorio,” Parachute 85 (January–March 1997): 65. 26. In making this claim, I’m indebted to Irene Sosa. 27. Osorio, interview. 28. John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 901–913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 906. 29. Paul Virilio, Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002), 1–2. 30. For an excellent discussion of the issue of national belonging, see Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (New York: Penguin, 2000). 31. Osorio, interview. 32. Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, 126–160 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 153. 33. In discussing the office workers’ use of ornamentation on their desks, Osorio referred me to the work of Daniel Harris, which usefully illuminates some of the contradictions inherent in the effort to “infuse our ‘work stations’ . . . with individuality.” See Daniel Harris, “What Do Office Workers Place on Their Desks and in Their Offices?” Salmagundi 92 (Fall 1991): 202–210. 34. Joselit, “An Allegory of Criticism,” 12; emphasis in original. 35. The title may also evoke Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), although I see this film as less directly resonant with Osorio’s work than the films of Truffaut and Van Peebles.

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