In 1967, Robert Smithson took a bus from New York City to Passaic, New Jersey, to investigate the definition of the word “monument.” Instead of any grand structures meant to mark history and stand the test of time, Smithson found significance in the mundane: a bridge, a parking lot, a sandbox. Nearly 50 years later, curator Joseph del Pesco from The Kadist Foundation in San Francisco asked photographer Jason Fulford to read Smithson’s essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” and visit Passaic to make photographs, using the essay as a point of departure. Fulford invited writer Hernán Díaz to join him and to create Monument (2015), an online, multi-media photo essay presented on The Kadist’s website.

Fulford’s photographs demonstrate a masterful ability to illuminate uncanny correlations and bizarre banalities of vernacular culture through sequences of otherwise unrelated images. In Monument, the combination of Fulford’s imagery with Díaz’s words exists in a translational loop, where information transitions back and forth between visual, textual, and abstract forms. Whatever manifestation the information takes, it remains anchored to the concepts of codes and ruins. The final sequence in Monument begins with an image of a pharmacy’s façade where an awning and a wall sign both read “Lucy’s Pharmacy.” While one sign is clearly worn and the other is newer, they create an almost perfect redundancy — a visual stutter. Beneath the image, Díaz’s words appear onscreen, typed letter by letter, as a female voice reads a Spanish translation of the text. A few slides later, a question in Spanish types onto a black screen as the same female voice recites the English translation. On the next slide Morse code beeps as it types below an image of a two-dimensional black dog on a stake casting its two-dimensional black shadow on the lawn it ornaments — another visual stutter. The Morse code answers the previous slide’s question:

Q: ¿QUÉ ES LO QUE QUEDA CUANDO NO HAY RUINAS? [trans: “WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THERE ARE NO RUINS?”]

A: … ___ __ . _ …. .. _. __. .._ _. _ ._. ._ _. … ._.. ._ _ ._ _… ._.. .

[“SOMETHINGUNTRANSLATABLE”]

The next and last slide is black and silent, then the whole sequence starts again in an infinite loop of its own.

Monument functions much like a book, albeit a digital one, though without the tacky skeuomorphic designs like animated “page” turning. Instead, Monument translates the qualities of a book into the digital, multi-media platform. In general, reading a book and using a computer are solitary, private pastimes. They can occur in public, but the reader/user focuses on the book or computer, and not her surroundings. Books and the Internet can connect us with billions of other people, and they can freeze time, existing in a temporal limbo when they are closed.

With the seemingly endless torrent of artist websites, blogs, and online magazines, it is easy to ignore — or at least be ambivalent about — the majority of art displayed on the Internet. In almost every case, viewers experience the work through some kind of standardized manner, such as an image carousel, slideshow, or grid. When we click, scroll, and swipe through countless images, how many truly affect us? On its most basic level, Monument is a digital slideshow of images, text, and sound. In this iteration, however, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco elevate the format’s stale viewing experience to a method that is both novel and nostalgic. As an alternative to the monotonous click- or scroll-through presentation pervading the web-based photo world, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco developed a dynamic and interactive method that necessitates greater participation and offers a greater reward.

Monument requires decoding, both literally and figuratively, and in this way the project takes full advantage of its digital existence. Fulford and Díaz insisted that the Morse code be copy-pastable so that viewers could translate the anachronistic cipher. Reading Smithson’s essay alongside Monument amplifies the project’s process of re-contextualizing the past within the present, making the essay’s online presence in PDF form a valuable asset (unless you have a copy of the 1967 Artforum lying around). In his essay, Smithson writes about a landscape by Samuel F.B. Morse, and remarks on its lack of finitude: “A little statue with right arm held high faced a pond (or was it the sea?). ‘Gothic’ buildings in the allegory had a faded look, while an unnecessary tree (or was it a cloud of smoke?) seemed to puff up on the left side of the landscape.” Fulford and Díaz continue Smithson’s line of questioning comparison of fabricated binaries: pond/sea, tree/smoke, dots/dashes, zeroes/ones, monument/parking lot. And they propose “Samuel Morse put an end to vastness. With the telegraph, immensity became a ruin.” The telegraph imploded our notions of size and speed in the 19^th century. Today, we can carry infinity in our pockets and the instantaneous speed of digital technology erases the present: the future is immediately translated into the past, a ruin. Monument asks, “What is left when there are no ruins?” A more appropriate question may be “what is left when there is nothing but ruins?”

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April 12 to June 7, 2015
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

Walking into “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views,” recently at Callicoon Fine Arts, was like walking into a kids’ art studio where the adults have lost control — but much stranger. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, the three artists responsible for the visual cacophony, filled the gallery from floor to ceiling with a schizophrenic amalgam of sculptures, videos, and two-dimensional pieces that fluctuate between fantasy and nightmare. Despite the frequently bright and graphic nature of the works, the artists successfully maintain enough editorial restraint to hold the installation on the precipice of dizzying inundation, without ever falling over.

The Haerizadeh brothers originally met Rahmanian in Tehran, and then moved to Dubai to escape artistic censorship in Iran. In light of the recent controversy involving the United Arab Emirates prohibiting members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and NYU professor Andrew Ross from entering the country, it might seem ineffective for artists to defect from one area of creative oppression to another. The act reveals the omnipresence of political manipulation that artists in the Middle East have faced for decades, which forces artists to find ways to challenge the highly congested political systems both locally and abroad.

The exhibition at first appears to be a playful free-for-all of image and text, and then reveals itself to be a darkly comical and deeply satirical critique of power, identity, sexuality, and culture. Long-stemmed amaryllis — flowers whose common name is Naked Ladies — grow out of a black-and-white, geometric path that snakes around the gallery floors and walls, and leads to a row of collages by Ramin Haerizadeh, hung low on the back wall. Each titled Rib Room (2015), the works feature fractions of images of women from fashion advertisements or art historical paintings with their bodies partially drawn back in with ink and pencil, and stamped labels that read phrases such as “PORK ROAST” and “SKIRT STEAK.” What could be interpreted as an objectification of female identity becomes part of a broader narrative critique of dehumanization by power structures. In two of Rokni Haerizadeh’s series, he paints on printed stills from YouTube videos and makes Rotoscope-like animations over top, adding animal heads and body parts to humans in protests and demonstrations.

Rokni pairs fable-like images, which melt in and out of clarity and painterly abstraction, with titles such as But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014–2015) and Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase (2013–2014) that further enhance the works’ ominous tone. Rahmanian’s paintings and collages continue the thematic removal of identity through images ranging from tragically funny puns to celebrity defacements. In his series Rearview Portraits (2012), we see the backs of the heads of elderly white men in suits and a white-haired woman wearing a crown and pearls (bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II, though none of their identities is openly revealed). The portraits hang close to the ground or shoved into corners, as though they were put on a time-out for bad behavior.

The show’s installation occurred over a period of several weeks, during which time the three artists brought their own artworks, works by Etel Adnan, Hannah Barrett, A.K. Burns, Martha Wilson, and Rose Wylie, and a variety of readymade objects into the gallery space. Through the process of extending their shared work and living spaces into the confines of a commercial gallery, the artists present a good-natured dismantling of the conventions surrounding artistic autonomy; everything is presented as one holistic idea, as opposed to a group show of many separate but related artists. The collaboration has resulted in an immersive experience that is further heightened by the show’s many three-dimensional objects: sculptures inhabit the space as both autonomous objects and interventions with the gallery’s bureaucratic operations. In the back office, where the exhibition continues, the gallerists sit on pieces from Untitled (2015): white plastic lawn chairs with blue painter’s tape partially covering the form or extending it in strange, decidedly nonfunctional protuberances. Break Free II (2015), a fuzzy cat tower decorated with bizarre hoardings both analog and digital stands like an absurd sentry near the entrance. An iPad and an iPhone playing videos of the artists, the devices’ chargers, wind-up teeth, bungee cords, a plastic ear, and various other bits of everyday life make up just one of the installation’s several readymade compositions.

Saturated with layered cultural and art historical references that have been turned on their head through the artists’ contemporary reexamination, “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views” creates new language through familiar signs. Imagine a car that has been crushed for disposal at an impound lot, and then expanded back to some semblance of its original form. All the initial information is there, but it has been translated into something entirely new. The collaborative, reconstructed visual lexicon enables the artists to use satire to criticize a humorless system.

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In 1973, Candy Darling invited the photographer Peter Hujar to her hospital room at Columbia University Medical Center. She was dying, and she wanted him to take her picture. The resulting photograph, the last taken before her death, appears very still. The velvety blacks and satin whites of the gelatin silver print render a glamorous woman lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers. It is, in a word, beautiful. After the initial captivation of Darling’s gaze and the sensory pleasure of the photograph loosens its grip, this aesthetic quality, however pure, quickly begins disintegrating into an image saturated with contradictions.

Born in 1944 as James Slattery, her youth was filled with the banal tyranny of the suburbs in Long Island, followed by several experiments with different transsexual identities in New York City, Candy Darling entered the world in the early 1960s. The duality of Darling’s identity gave her no shortage of discrimination and misunderstanding, yet there are countless stories of people overcoming their close-mindedness because of her undeniable beauty and femininity. When Darling’s mother, Theresa, first confronted James about the rumors she heard of him cross-dressing, he left the room and returned fully transformed into Candy Darling. Theresa later recalled, “I knew then… that I couldn’t stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”

Through Darling’s early realization that she was destined for something more important and more fantastic than the paths of her bucolic peers, she idolized classical Hollywood starlets. She was fascinated by Kim Novak and her piercing presence; in a home video of Darling reciting Novak’s lines from a scene in the 1955 film Picnic, Darling morphs into the character with total commitment, then says to the others in the room, “She was so strong, that’s what I liked about her. Something stable and so strong… but Kim was also vulnerable.” The combination of strength and vulnerability defined Darling throughout her short life. She filled pages of her diary with manifestos of tenacity: “I will not cease to be myself for foolish people. For foolish people make harsh judgments on me. You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.” As well as descriptions of her despondence and hardship: “I feel like I’m living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming. Can’t visit relatives. Can’t get a job. Can’t have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison.”

Despite consistent poverty and frequent homelessness, Darling’s determination carried her to the stardom she so desperately desired, albeit briefly. In the five years during which she starred in several of Andy Warhol’s films, and in Tennessee Williams’ play, Small Craft Warnings (1970), Darling got a taste of the life she always wanted. But it all fell apart when Andy Warhol lost interest in her, claiming he did not want to use “chicks with dicks,” instead, he wanted to use “real women.” When Warhol made his film Heat in 1972, he did not invite Darling to play any roll, which left her devastated. Two years later, Darling was diagnosed with lymphoma. Those close to her suspect it was caused by the hormones she took to grow breasts — at Warhol’s suggestion. In the ultimate tragedy, it may have been her effort to transform into what she believed was her true self that killed her.

As she faced the last days of her life, she received one final, perfect tribute in the photograph, Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1973) by her friend Peter Hujar. Fran Lebowitz — a friend of both Darling and Hujar — recalled the day they visited Darling in the hospital, and that she was too scared to see her friend so close to death, let alone photograph her. But Hujar was uniquely suited for the act because he had an innate understanding and appreciation for subjects in liminal states of contradiction. Lebowitz said: “No one else could have taken that photograph. Peter never thought of Candy as a freak… I think that’s why Candy responded to Peter. He thought of her in the way that my mother thinks of her best friend or anyone she would meet, the most usual kind of person. Candy loved that.” That was typical of Hujar in both his life and his artistic practice; subjects that existed outside the norms of orthodox culture fascinated him, but they were not abnormal to him. They were mysteries he wanted understand, and knew that the camera could help him reveal their enigmatic secrets. In both his portraits of humans and animals, Hujar captured an unconcerned openness and intimacy; there is an understanding and collaboration between the photographer and his subjects. Candy Darling On Her Deathbed, considered by many to be the apotheosis of Hujar’s career, contains everything that made Darling’s personality and Hujar’s photographs so alluring.

Technically, the photograph is masterful. Hujar expertly rendered the high contrast between the darkened room, Darling’s alabaster skin, her dark shirt, the white hospital bed sheets, and the fluffy white chrysanthemums floating on a darkened back wall, recalling the classic Hollywood glamour she loved so dearly. If the photograph were in color, the sconce above her would cast the room in a sickly florescent light, but in black and white it glows softly. The title of the photograph, despite being purely descriptive, carries a lyrical quality when spoken aloud; it is almost impossible not to sing it. Mirroring the content of the image, the sweetness of the title’s cadence and of Darling’s name fractures with the inclusion of her dying state. In her reclined pose, common to Hujar portraits, Darling looks as though she could be relaxing in her own bed if it were not for the strange sterility of the hospital room décor. With her perfectly applied make up and famously blond hair, Darling looks ready to go to a party, but upon remembering her illness, her dark eye make up and angular physiognomy turn her face into a skull, prophesying her impending death. The image complicates its viewing — continually shifting between seducing with its beauty and repelling with its morbidity. Darling lived and died in that space; when John Waters compared Darling to other transsexuals at the time he said: “The others were freakish and she was beautiful in a way that really put people off and drew them to her because she confused them.”

Hujar captured this confusion of expectation, reality, and fantasy that permeated Darling’s entire life with an eloquence that no one else could have matched. The combination of Hujar’s open-minded inquisitiveness with Darling’s undeniable magnetism infuses the image with a charisma worthy of them both. There is something magical that happens when a photographer and his or her subject share a generosity and willingness to be honest; it’s something ineffable that can only be felt, like the haunting sense of déjà-vu.

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Roberta Smith begins her review of “The Production Line of Happiness,” the Christopher Williams retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, by describing one of Williams’ photographs as an “act of elegant iconoclasm.” Based on her explanation and the exhibition itself, though, Williams more accurately represents a smug iconophilia. The photograph in question features a sliced-open wide-angle lens made by the renowned German manufacturer, Carl Zeiss AG. In the image, we see the lens’ “guts,” as Smith calls them, laid out in a pristine description of the device’s inner workings. Smith continues that, “Mr. Williams produced a big color close-up of a cross section that is as formal as an official oil portrait, as alluring as a high-end fashion shot and yet as startlingly exotic as an image from National Geographic.” This statement is problematic for a couple reasons. First, I like to think that we are past the knee-jerk reaction to compare photography to painting, as though photography still doesn’t have its own history of highly skilled execution, as exemplified by Williams’ impressive craftsmanship (or at least the craftsmanship of the studios he employs). Secondly, the exoticism and fetishization that Smith notes amplify the contrived perfection Williams supposedly undermines. He does include a few details that negate the shiny rhetoric of advertisements: an ill-fitting shirt, the dirty soles of a model’s bare feet, the naturally pendulous breasts of a Netherlands Playboy Playmate of the Year. But these slight indiscretions hardly count as subversions of commercial realism.

One reason for the images’ conceptual opacity is Williams’s highly considered use of the visual language of advertising, and what he, in the wall text outside the main exhibition galleries, called a “semiotic reduction” and the “strategic use of ambivalence.” The issue I have with this approach is that, at least in Williams’s case, his ambivalence begets the audience’s ambivalence, whether it is aimed at Williams as an artist, or at the exhibition’s subject matter. In Richard Woodward’s review of the exhibition for the Wall Street Journal, he questions Williams’s claim that the work critiques late capitalist society: “Don’t they actually function here more as promotional ads for the artist himself, proof of his cleverness, such as it is?” Woodward generally writes off Williams as an uninteresting photographer trying too hard to appear smart, and whom he doesn’t feel the need to consider further. This attitude would be fine if there weren’t a dearth of attention given to Williams’s elitist approach to complex issues, for which he offers no real alternative. As such, critics’ tepid dismissal or giddy celebration creates a volatile credulity.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in the writing on “The Production Line of Happiness,” is the relationship between white masculinity and the otherness of females and non-white males. The only portraits in the gallery are of women (often in “domestic” situations especially those involving bathing) and black men, while white, male fingers hold the camera — the power — both literally in the photographs, and figuratively in the authorship of Williams, a white male. He might say, Of course the images objectify women and “exotic” races, because that’s what advertising does — and that’s what he criticizes in his gesture to mock Capitalism. But the elitism of the exhibition’s presentation contrasted with the pedantic style of the catalog makes his commentary largely inaccessible. The irony would not be so troubling if it weren’t receiving such grand support: “The Production Line of Happiness” occupies half of the 6th floor of the MoMA, which he shares with the exhibition of Henri Matisse’s seminal cutouts, placing him temporarily at the top of the institutional art world. Has the urgency of socially and politically responsible artworks dissolved so much that the curators see no problem in celebrating Williams’s impertinent banalities? Or perhaps they were satisfied that he sits comfortably within the art-historical lineage of his predecessors such as Institutional Critique all-star Michael Asher. How he utilizes this pedigree to contribute to art or culture today is unclear. Just four floors below the Williams spectacle however, I found works that actually do something.

“Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor,” organized by Gober and the MoMA’s Anne Tempkin, has room upon room filled with evocative and politically charged works that do not let you turn away from the issues he addresses. Gober’s silk-screened wallpapers of a sleeping white man and a lynched black man stand as a prime antithesis to Williams’s startling combination of sugar coating and ostracizing. Gober plastered the walls of one of the galleries with the repeating pattern of racial injustice to remind us that our history contains the same pattern, regardless of whether or not we want to acknowledge it. Throughout the exhibit, he balances the straightforwardness of his chosen subject matter — sexuality, religion, politics, and the indelible scars they leave on American culture — with the bizarre lyricism of his objects and the materials he used to make them. Gober also embedded within the retrospective a smaller show he curated of works by artists Anni Albers, Joan Semmel, Nancy Shaver, Robert Beck, and Caty Noland. The humility of this gesture — in addition to his numerous curations of other artists’ works in the past — acts as a reminder that we are in this together, and that ambivalence is not an option.

One main difference between Gober and Williams is in the ways they communicate with their audiences. Gober invites empathy and dialogue. Williams delivers a message, which only after complex decoding reveals what he’s really getting at: an often-anticlimactic endeavor. Furthermore, Williams relieves himself of his responsibility as an artist to effectively convey his idea, saying: “Everything is interesting, and if it isn’t interesting, it’s more your inability to activate it.” If that isn’t an emperor exulting his new clothes, then I don’t know what is. Art need not be obvious or definite, but it should be generous in the way it engages its audience. Even if ambivalence is ironic, it perpetuates apathy instead of acting against it. In today’s tumultuous social and political environments, we can’t afford not to care.

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The room smelled like rain-softened wool and leather at Issue Project Room on Saturday September 13th. The tightly packed audience, half of them sitting and half standing — the chairs normally occupying the back of the space were cleared to allow for the performers’ mobility — waited in humming excitement for experimental composer Yoshi Wada, his son Tashi Wada, and their accompanying musicians, David Watson and Jim Pugliese. Yoshi, born in 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, studied sculpture at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts before moving to New York in the late 1960s where he joined the Fluxus art movement and studied with its founder, George Maciunas. Though Maciunas acted as a catalyst to Yoshi’s early experiments in music, Yoshi maintains that he did not carry the movement’s influence into his later career. In a 2008 interview with The Wire, Yoshi commented that Fluxus appealed to him at the time, however his independent interests in sound and music directed him elsewhere. His departure from Fluxus led him to study music composition with La Monte Young, and by extension North Indian signing with Prandit Pran Nath, and Scottish bagpipe with James McIntosh.[i] In Yoshi’s most recent work, Fluxus’ democratic consideration of the artistic potential in objects and actions, the tonal precision of North Indian singing, and the emotive qualities of Scottish bagpipes all merge into a sensory environment thickening with the sense of urgency and approaching danger.

The unnamed performance began with the sound of an alarm. Yoshi churned a low whine from a worn, metal hand siren, which grew to an anxious, undulating howl, then stopped abruptly. He then focused his concentration on a small switchboard. With each definitive press of a button he rang one of the alarm bells installed in various unidentifiable locations throughout the performance space. The warning sounds compounded further as Pugliese’s bass drum and Tashi’s organ drone joined in. Pugliese’s mallet attacked the drum in sporadic intervals while Yoshi watched avidly, waiting to ring the alarm bells precisely in or out of synch with the echoing percussion. Like the slow, elongated footsteps of a giant or an army marching in unison, the drumbeat spread ominously into the air as the shrill bells quivered erratically in sonic contrast. The hum of Tashi’s organ crept into audibility, seeming to emanate from beneath my feet. Watson exhaled a mournful note from his bloated bagpipe, which hung heavily in the air. Later in the performance, Watson and Yoshi — who began playing his own bagpipe — circled the perimeter of the space. As elongated tones followed them around the space like half-deflated balloons attached to their instruments, the growing amalgam of sounds created a formless narrative specific to the evening and location.

In addition to its inextricable link to duration — unlike static two- or three-dimensional objects that can be experienced at various points in time, we only hear sound while the sound waves vibrate — the performance of sound also greatly involves the space in which it is presented. At Issue Project Room, sounds bounced around the cavernous ceiling, and from where I sat, the reverberations created a spinning sonic halo above my head. Further amplifying the sensory experience, the room, crowded with radiating bodies, became gradually hotter and more humid as the performance went on. At the point of swampy discomfort, the climate heightened the effect of the instruments and I became acutely aware of my corporeal sensations: everything blended into a bath of perception. The bagpipe, siren, and organ combined into a polyphonic discord while the drum rumbled on the side. The tones resonated so deeply it became hard to distinguish whether they were being heard or felt.

Yoshi’s composition filled both the walls of the architecture and the bodies of the attendants as it wove periods of intensity with ones of meditative restraint. The interludes allowed my mind to calm and wander, but never for too long as Yoshi continually reintroduced the siren and the corresponding crescendo of the other instruments. The utilization of sound’s ability to resonate within the body, through both high and low frequencies, combined with sounds that connote impending danger, created a foreboding psychological event. The lack of contextualization further disconnected the audience from an opportunity to interpret the elements. The only specific information Issue Project Room gave about the nameless composition is in Yoshi’s words: “I search for deep and ringing sound that travels deep into my cells. Where does this sound exist?” The question posed by Yoshi requires a heightened awareness, not just of what we hear but how it feels to hear. By blurring the lines that distinguish individual senses, Yoshi created an open space for unadulterated sensory perception.

[i]Haynes, Jim. “Piper’s Lament.” The Wire June 2008: 20-22.

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