Synthetic Ritual | Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College | Gabi Scardi | Ciara Ennis Synthetic Ritual | Pitzer Art Galleries, College Gabi Scardi Mounira Al Solh, Meris Angioletti, Beatrice Catanzaro, Marcus Coates, Joel Kyack, Lawrence Lemaoana, Yoshua Okon, Adrian Paci, Marco Rios, Kara Tanaka, Carlin Wing and Amir Yatziv Curated by Gabi Scardi and Ciara Ennis Synthetic Ritual September 28- ISBN: 978-0-9829956-2-4 December 9, 2011 Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College Tel: 909.607.3143 Pitzer Art Galleries, www.pitzer.edu/galleries Pitzer College Mounira Al Solh, Meris Angioletti, Beatrice Catanzaro, Marcus Coates, Joel Kyack, Lawrence Lemaoana, Yoshua Okón, Adrian Paci, Marco Rios, Kara Tanaka, Carlin Wing and Amir Yatziv Curated by Gabi Scardi and Ciara Ennis September 28-December 9, 2011 Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College Maravilla Handball Court. Archival inkjet print, 8 x 8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Anthony Greaney, Boston. inkjet print, 8 x inches. Courtesy of the artist and Anthony Greaney, Maravilla Handball Court. Archival Carlin Wing, Ball Portrait #26 Table of Contents (2011). Ball made by workshop participants as part of Jennifer Doyle Ritual and Routine 5 Gabi Scardi Rituals 13 Ciara Ennis The Sawdust Trail 33 Artists’ Biographies 62 Exhibition Checklist 70 Curators’ and Contributing Writer’s Biographies 72 Hitting Walls: Making a Ball Hitting Walls: Acknowledgements 74 at the Synthetic Ritual 1 artist and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan. Repetto, Kaufmann and artist (2001). Photographic installation (detail). Lightjet C-prints, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the the of Courtesy inches. 30 x 40 C-prints, Lightjet (detail). installation Photographic (2001). Okón, Yoshua Parking Lotus Parking Synthetic Ritual 2 Yoshua Okón, Parking Lotus (2001). Photographic installation (detail). Lightjet C-prints, 40 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kaufmann Repetto, Milan. 1 Synthetic Ritual Lawrence Lemaoana, Lawrence Fortune Teller #5 Fortune Teller Ritual and Routine Jennifer Doyle (2008). Cloth and thread, 62 x 43 inches. Courtesy of the artist and James Harris Gallery, Seattle. 62 x 43 inches. Courtesy of the artist and James Harris Gallery, (2008). Cloth and thread, How do you know when a routine is a ritual? When is habit compulsion? When does something you like to do every morning, like go to the beach, become something that makes a morning feel like a morning—just as going to church makes Sunday into Sunday? What makes the sea become “a part of my eyes,” more necessary than the woman who is “the veins in my body,” as declared by one of the sun-baked subjects of Mounira Al Solh’s Paris Without a Sea. Paris Without a Sea and The Sea is a Stereo are portraits of men who go to a Beirut beach every day. Undeterred by weather and war, they are pulled to the water’s edge as if they themselves were moved by the tides. One must wonder how Al Solh integrated herself into this homosocial community; how much time did she spend with them to have gained entry into their circle. These works are shaped by a dynamic specific to the outsider who finds herself in an impossible circle of intimacy. She is Whitman’s twenty-ninth bather, peering at “28 young men” who “bathe by the shore”: Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. Synthetic Ritual 5 artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery. artist and Sfeir-Semler Mounira Al Solh, The Sea is a Stereo, Let’s Not Swim Then! The Sea is a Stereo, Let’s (2007-08). Two-channel video, 50 minutes. Courtesy of the (2007-08). Two-channel Mounira Al Solh, The Sea is a Stereo, Let’s Not Swim Then! (2007-08). Two-channel video, 50 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery. 6 Synthetic Ritual Synthetic Ritual 7 The poet sees her [“for I see A security guard makes people feel safe, but how? By standing there like an you”] and she is transported into installation and being (or looking) vigilant. Mere presence. In most cases, they are the water—an invisible guest, living scarecrows: with no training and little to no authority, they appear to watch over all of a sudden, swimming a space that belongs to someone else. Their labor is hidden within the radical passivity alongside the men, as if she, of their mandate. Parking Lotus asks what kind of service might support men who are too, belonged there. paid not to move. What kind of training would a mode of work requiring a presence of body and an absence of spirit. The camera gives the artist access to a space of relaxed Work like this demystifies social ritual—the synthetic ritual of Parking Lotus is not male intimacy. The men are the meditative lotus pose, but the use of these men as talismans to make a space gentle in their interactions with feel safe. her; they seem soft. Or is that an impression left by her voice, Lawrence Lemaoana also redeploys and scrambles rite and habit, routine and ritual. with which the interviews are His works revise the kanga, popular colorful patterned rectangles of fabric originally dubbed? The sea and her worn by women in East Africa. A kanga has a message—a proverb, usually, like “A Mounira Al Solh, The Sea is a Stereo, Let’s Not Swim Then! (2007-08). camera bring these body- Two-channel video, 50 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir- person who wants you out of the house won’t say it in words” (but they will show it in proud mermen together for us Semler Gallery. their actions), or “A habit is a skin” (meaning, habits are hard to shake). Lemaoana’s and pull something sweet from them. All the while, the only thing we get from her kangas tease out the traces of proverb in the tabloid, surfacing a confluence of is her voice and the bemused affect of the men as they engage her. patriarchal patterns of thought, behavior and feeling. Lemaoana works with what Kobena Mercer describes as “pop vernacular”—surfacing the complexity of the way These works honor the importance of their relationships to the world and each other, that local communities live with, are made by and remake mass media. Lemaoana’s as forged in a space not defined by work or by family (the two avenues by which men tapestries describe an exasperated melodrama and reveal the broadcasting of political are made sense of, absorbed into “society”). They are liminal in that they happen on affect as itself both routine and ritual. the edge of the city; they are foundational in that they cannot imagine life without it. As a practice of the care of the self, this is deeper than leisure. It’s a ritual of escape. Al Solh’s works contrast starkly with Yoshua Okón’s Parking Lotus. Working as a security guard is affective labor. This is what many of the people around artists do for a living: they work in a service industry, educating, writing, selling and invigilating. The receptionist, the bartender at an opening and the person parking and guarding cars all provide services that have an affective dimension. This is what artists do as well—their work makes people feel good, smart or important (for example). 8 Synthetic Ritual Synthetic Ritual 9 Synthetic Ritual 11 Lawrence Lemaoana, Team Spirit (2006). Cloth and thread, 43.7 x 93.3 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Josef Vascovitz. 10 Synthetic Ritual Repetto, Milan. Adrian Paci, Vajtojca (Mourner) Rituals Gabi Scardi (2002). Single-channel video installation, 9 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Kaufmann We tend to neglect them, yet rituals are scattered across our lives, relegated to the margins, to the side, to the realm of implicit knowledge of little worth. But for artists they are dense and vital containers of need and desire, reservoirs of inherited beliefs, of personal convictions, of sensations and idiosyncrasies induced by social life. They are a way of relating to things and interpreting them. Above all, they are a field of expression of extraordinary metaphorical value. It suffices to consider the Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh, who, in an ironic and enthralling video, presents a series of men in Beirut who each day for years now, despite all odds, alone or in small groups, take a swim in the sea. It is not only a habit, but a choice, an effort, an act of resistance, a peaceful but determined defense of one’s own “ordinary” existence with respect to the overwhelming forces of the events in a country where normality seems impossible. In the video Vajtojca (Mourner) by Adrian Paci, the artist narrates the detachment, transition and sense of loss of those who leave their own country; he courageously tackles the theme of the absolute journey and the invincible experience of death. Without special effects and with great dramatic intensity, Paci, through images that evoke the high points of art history, stages his own funeral. A man knocks on a door and a woman invites him into a room; he changes from his everyday clothes into something more elegant while the woman prepares a bed, and he lies down while she covers her head. He lies still as she groans quietly. The woman is a weeper asked to mourn him, but at the end of the weeping, the man gets up, embraces the woman 12 Synthetic Ritual Synthetic Ritual 13 and then exits.