Author: dig

A loss/entry/return

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Recently auctioned, a work from the series Untitled (loss/entry/return) #00005, 2005, Xerox [solvent] transfer, ink and graphite on watercolor paper; and an exhibition at Frederic Snitzer Gallery.

Loss/ Entry/ Return offers works based on a journey of perception. Drawings, photos, sculpture and sound are the tangible manifestations of moments along the way. What we experience is the process of voyaging from indeterminacy to clarity, from vastness to specific identity. Ideas of guidance and presence are constant throughout the works.

From an email sent to the gallery for the press release.

With “loss/entry/return” Guerrier shifts ground. You see the artist looking through binoculars at the expanse of the metropolis. But it’s not a real city. This is more like a superimposition of events, black blotches and green tempera splashes (with directional tentacles) moving near the background of the metropolis’s silhouette. Amid these images you find linear sentence fragments, silent remarks as if coming from a lost century of ideologies.

Then one discovers this conspicuous cantilevered solid structure — a sort of corbel — that the artist draws in most of his pieces. I read a bit into it: In architecture, cantilevers separate themselves from the ground; they are singular, impulsive. What’s more important, they don’t subjugate the territory.

Guerrier is slowly moving away from the dense existential “feel” of reality expressed in his earlier photos. He has become a more gregarious, unconventional observer, exploring his own situation in relation to the rest of us. Now he should incorporate into his photography some of the new elements present in this series.

At the exhibit, an important local curator helped me see a bit of French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord in Guerrier’s work. Suddenly the seemingly disconnected one-liners inside the drawings made more sense.

In his 1967 Society of the Spectacle,Debord warned that our lives had become transactional relationships. Spectacle was a key concept for Debord, who borrowed from Marx’s idea of alienation. We become alienated from ourselves when everything we do, we do for the sake of abundance. The spectacle then becomes the sad and endless race to own more, which, paradoxically, turns into an abundance of dispossession. Some of this message is already present in Guerrier’s promising cityscapes.

Alfredo Triff, City Views and Latin News, Miami New Times, April 21, 2005.

AG2023_1120034a or think capaciously about the affective dimensions

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Berlant’s work is underpinned by a pressing desire for new forms of relationality and alternative ways to flourish. There is an urgency to their writing: feelings are political, affective life sustains the possibilities for other life-worlds.

[…]

What Berlant proposes then is ‘an affective register which recognises the relationship between the joy-giving parts and the parts that require a kind of patience with the way things do not fit. The out-of-synchness of being matters’ (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.

[…]

queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.)

[…]

Berlant helps us think about affective life through the lens of ambivalence, contradiction, and incoherence, rather than certainty and singularity. It is this that makes Berlant’s social theory so generative: an invitation to always ask questions, to unravel our own objects of attachment and fantasies of political transformation.

[…]

think capaciously about the affective dimensions it will take to rebuild the world from the fragments of the present.

Eleanor Wilkinson, 11 | AMBIVALENT LOVE, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.

Wiley, fleeting postures

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Kehinde Wiley, The Painter and his court in New Yorker.

Wiley, who once described himself as a manufacturer of “high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers,” never promised anyone empowerment. In a way, his has been the classic fate of the court painter: conscripted as a propagandist—by the royalists, the reformers, and the revolutionaries—when his real passion is for capturing the fleeting postures of his era.

[…]

Last winter at the National Gallery in London, I saw Wiley’s exhibition “The Prelude,” an exploration of nature and the sublime which envisions Black wanderers amid the mountains and seascapes of such nineteenth-century Romantics as J. M. W. Turner, Winslow Homer, and Caspar David Friedrich. For most of his career, Wiley conspicuously omitted landscape from his paintings, pointedly substituting decorative patterns for the land and chattels that loom behind many Old Master portraits. It was a liberation of style from property and privilege. Recently, though, he’s abandoned the constraint. The shift is a call for Black people to take up space in the world, which doubles as a wink at his own vertiginous climb.

Julian Lucas, Newyorker January 2 & 9, 2023.

AG2023-FBH_1011907a

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“… always felt that the ground below him was charged with a sense of belonging.” Lapvona: A Novel, Ottessa Moshfegh

the place where [it] remains a little distanced and discursive, but to which we are unfathomably attached. Joe Jukes, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.

Listening closely

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Tina Campt on episode 8 of ICA Miami’s podcast; begins at 22:54. Listening as an act of attunement. Listening for quiet (not an absence/subtle presence) affective registers within an image, a work, an installation, a practice.

“Attend to that which is not always directly confronting us”

T. Eliott Mansa project, Room for the living/ Room for the dead, at Locust Projects, would reward close listening.

Photography by Zachary Balber.

The installation merges the concept of Florida / Family rooms as a home’s casual, social hub for gathering, entertainment and play, with that of less-used living rooms that served as shrines for treasured family photos and heirlooms. Inspired/influenced by the artist’s friend and writer Noelle Barnes’ living room and the artist’s own memories of sunken living rooms of the 1970s, the artist considers the cultural phenomena of the living room as unlived, unoccupied, untouched spaces that children and guests were prohibited from using.

As an alternative, many people used ‘Florida/Family rooms’ to entertain company and watch television. Meanwhile, in the ‘unlived’ living rooms, many elders wrapped the furniture in protective plastic. For Mansa, these living rooms were treated as shrines–a space honoring one’s ancestors and those who have traveled beyond this plane. With this installation, the artist seeks to collapse the dichotomy between the ‘Living Room’ as shrine, and the ‘Florida/Family room’ in a way that creates ‘a room for the living’ as much as ‘a room for the dead’.

Chris Friday’s Good Times, curated by Laura Novoa, promises to engage quietly expressed modalities within the bold depicted.

[The works] prompt the viewer to consider more expansive notions of blackness and where communities – known and unknown – are given a space to dialogue, reflect, and celebrate.

Friday’s subjects – family, friends, colleagues – and the settings in which they exist, become mechanisms to unsettle traditional hierarchies and arrangements of power. In particular, she presents large-scale drawings of figures in acts of leisure – playing, dancing, resting – that refuse full exposure in a slight but noticeable turning away from the viewer. By placing them in the public realm (i.e. the gallery space), but limiting access to their interiority, Friday’s works inhabit a liminal space that is at once visible and hidden, silent and defiant.

AG2023_1011731a

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“It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them. She was writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers; she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, to bring back the old dead in the newly living, but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.”  

A sackful of seeds, Salman Rushdie, New Yorker, December 12, 2022 issue.