Category: art

Betye Saar at ICA Miami

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The Trickster, 1994 Mixed media tableau

All courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

The Trickster features an anthropomorphic metal sculpture adorned with daggers and chains at its center. Set against a backdrop of camouflage netting and a neon lightning bolt, hands appear to be reaching out of the ground, surrounding the sculpture. The installation is flanked by a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “hoodoo is a blade dat cuts both ways.” In Haitian Vodou as well as the Yoruba and Dahomeyan diaspora, the trickster represents an intermediary, standing at the (spiritual) crossroads between humans and gods. Usually male, Saar’s trickster appears to have female attributes. The figure guards the crossroads for the many hands reaching up from the ground.

2022-03-03_09-56-09

Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight, ICA Miami.

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AG2022_2100568a

Interview -Beatriz Cortez and Candice Lin

CORTEZ: In your work there’s a certain irreverence towards the Western humanist concept of the human as sacred. It is one of the things about your work that blows my mind. It makes me think not in terms of hyper objects but micro-objects: about all the worlds that already live inside our bodies and about how our bodies will disperse, not only to become cosmic dust but also to become lots of microbes and nutrients for other bodies, and not only when we become compost but also as we move around, each of us a porous body secreting its liquids throughout the world.

LIN: That is really fascinating that you are thinking about “what is not meant for us” as a way to shift scale, to think of justice beyond the political human sphere. I usually associate such scalar arguments, such as the idea that the Earth will survive us but we will not survive what we’ve done to the Earth, as arguments for nonaction—apolitical inertia. But you seem to be activating this reframing as a way to care more, to be more invested, while aware that we are neither master nor subject of the narratives unfolding. This reminds me of something that seems like a contradiction but perhaps is not, that I have been thinking about in both of our work. I think we share a desire or openness to learn from the materials—how they resist us, what their will asserts, and how we might embrace things that rust, mold, or change as part of the work.