- Alpesh Patel is an
author, art historian,
theorist, critic, and curator.
He's an Associate Professor
of Contemporary Art and Theory
at Florida International
University in Miami.
Redefine queer,
anti-racist, transnational,
and practice-led approaches
to contemporary art,
Alpesh bringing visibility
to the queer and marginalized
in art history is what
connected me to him.
His monograph, "Productive Failure:
writing queer transnational
South Asian art histories,"
which was published by
Manchester University Press
in 2017 provides original commentary
on how queer theory can deconstruct
and provide new approaches
for writing art history.
He has contributed to journals
and helped edit scholarly
books on the relationship
between queer feminist
Chinese art histories,
queer and haptic brown
Atlantic civic spaces,
failed de colonial
spictacles and the erasure
of homosexuality in contemporary
art history and criticism.
As a curator, he has organized exhibitions
in the United States and in Europe.
He's helped establish
Florida's International University
Miami Beach Urban Studios
as a junior cultural anchor
in Miami Beach in 2012.
In 2007, he produced the
British Art Council-funded
and multi-sited project, Mixing
it Up: Queering Curry Mile
and Currying Canal Street in England.
He's assisted a number of
contemporary art exhibitions,
symposia, publications, and feature films
while working in New
York from 1998 to 2005
at the Whitney Museum, Clinica Estetico,
Magnet Entertainment, and the New Museum.
He is also a frequent
contributor of exhibition reviews
to international art
magazines, such as Art Forum,
Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Frieze.
Please join me in welcoming Alpesh Patel.
(audience clapping)
- I'm going to break down this title
into three different subsections
to give a better sense of what I'm doing.
First of all, in terms of
surviving election night,
what if things don't go the
way you'd liked it to go.
This is, I think, the
biggest fear or concern
for many, or definitely for me.
What do we do at that point
besides mourn and have some drinks?
Where do we go from there?
I'd say for all of you that
are artists in the room,
you are already doing
what you need to be doing.
You make worlds, you make
amazing worlds with your works.
You connect other people
to them, and I think,
in many ways, you just need
to continue to do that.
In a similar way, I feel
like, as an art historian,
I like to think that I also make worlds,
that I connect different
sites and places together,
that I basically allow us to see,
or allow me to see a kind of art history
that may not be there,
but I'm gonna up the ante.
I realized this morning that world-making
maybe isn't enough, that what needs
to happen is constellation building.
We need to have
connections between worlds,
and I want you, as artists, to be for sure
to be thinking about on a
very simple level what works
of art your own practice connects to.
Make those bridges, create
those constellations,
and create lots of
them, so today I'm going
to be presenting my own
constellation in the form
of an art history that
is connected to my book,
titled "Productive Failure:
writing queer transnational
South Asian art histories."
The first thing to say right away is
that the subtitle makes it appear
as if this book will be
very niche, that it will be
about a very specific audience
for very specific kinds
of art works, and that's exactly
what I didn't want to do.
I was really interested, instead,
in building world networks
into places that may not seem
logical or even appropriate,
lets say, for a queer transnational
South Asian art history.
The Productive Failure then,
before the title, is meant
to announce this idea, that
if you think you're going
to have one type of art
history from me here,
one that's based on genealogy
or blood lines, or where someone's from,
you're probably not going to get that.
In fact, throughout the book,
each chapter is me productively
failing over and over again
to create an art history.
I want this to be one of 20 books
on queer transnational
South Asian art history
because that's how many
I think there could be.
That's how many worlds need to be built.
I've built about six or
seven in the form of a book,
and I'll be talking
about some of them today.
One of my chapters deals with the work
of Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar.
In particular, I look at
their works from the 1960s.
This is an installation shot
of a gallery exhibition here
in New York City that
showed Bhavsar's works
a couple years ago from the
1960s so you can get a sense
of the immenseness of these works
and the abstraction that
he normally works on.
Now, Bhavsar actually moved to
the United States from India
in the '60s, and he's been
here ever since that time.
In the '60s, his work
really didn't fit into,
not surprisingly,
Greenbergian modernism mostly
because he was brown.
All of the people that were
in Greenberg's fold were all white,
so there was no way Natvar was
going to be part of any kind
of artist circle world at
that time any way in New York.
At the same time post-Partition
India was itself trying
to build itself as a
world and nation, and part
of that meant thinking about the culture
that connected to it,
so most of the culture,
or at least sort of at the very beginning
after Partition was
creating figurative works.
Eventually, that started to wain
and there was an interest in abstraction,
and so, again, we might think
that Natvar's work could potentially fit
into an Indian National art history.
Not the case.
Once again, he was
really not Indian enough.
He spent too much time in the West,
and so his abstraction
could no longer be seen
as useful for a country
trying to build a nation,
not a trans nation, transnational format,
so his works don't fit into
these clunky categories
we often use to contain
work, and that's a lot
of what I'm gonna try to
discuss dare to move away from.
In particular, the experience
of looking at these works,
I think, gives you a sense
of the kind of approach
that he has maybe to identity and,
in particular, with these abstract works,
you've got a cacophony of color here.
It's very bright, there's
a lot of activity going on.
As you get closer to this canvas,
and you move beyond the
surface or the optical,
you actually realize
there's an incredible depth
to these canvases, not from glaze down,
layers of pigment,
different types of colors,
sometimes over 100, so there's this shift
from the optical to the haptic,
or the body as you get closer.
There's also this connection to something,
that when you start looking at it,
you can, maybe, see what could be,
and I think, maybe, you
can see this more here,
but this idea that are we
seeing worlds being formed.
Is this the Big Bang, the
beginning of the Big Bang?
Is that what we're looking at?
Or, is this subatomic particles?
It could just as well
be that, so he toggles
between these two that
seem kind of irreconcilable
on some way, so I came
up with a theme or frame
to kind of think and organize his work
that didn't completely dissolve
or this is all to a very stable identity,
and that frame ended
up being queer is zen.
The experience of viewing
his works often can lead
to a sense of contemplation,
but there's also a very
sensuous quality to these works,
so once again, there's this
really interesting pull
or tension between the sensuous
and you might say the
mind as opposed to body.
With this kind of in betweenness,
what's interesting is
the works themselves.
They're titled in ways
that very specifically
do connect them to the subcontinent.
He's using neologisms of
Sanskrit, so in some sense,
there is a clear connection to South Asia.
The pigments also do
the same thing for us.
They are connected or
sourced to South Asia,
but the experience of this work
isn't giving us a bounded sense of nation.
In fact, it's giving us
something more in between.
Maybe what we might call
now a transnational kind
of subjectivity, one that
exists in multiple locations,
a kind of subjectivity
that wasn't gonna work
in American Greenberg modernism
or Indian national art
history, but works now,
so you could say his work was pre-figuring
what is now called transnational theory,
and I think for many of
the artists in the room,
I do really feel like a
lot of what you're doing,
we're not gonna have
words yet to put to it,
and this is a very fascinating example
for me of an artist creating condition
in his work that we don't necessarily have
the language for until many years later.
Because of that, not
necessarily being historicized.
Now, Natvar's had a lot of success
in terms of the commercial sphere.
He's shown at some museums,
but he has not been
in any art history textbook
including one on Asian
American art history,
interestingly not, so again,
this was part of my way
of including him, and at the same time,
suggesting that what he's doing pushed
beyond these categories that we often fall
into when we're looking at work.
So, what ended up being
a strange bedfellow
for my examination of
Natvar Bhavsar was looking
at the works of Cy Twombly.
Twombly was making works around
the same time in New York
that Bhavsar was, so I chose some works
from that time period, and
what I found really curious was
that Roland Barthes, of all
people, who doesn't really write
about art, wrote two essays on Cy Twombly,
and I was very intrigued by this.
Why was he writing about Cy Twombly?
And there's one interesting connection
that I think that's worth talking about.
Barthes was often
maligned when he was alive
that he wasn't a part of
the Gay Rights Movement.
He wouldn't identify as gay
in the same ways Twombly himself
did not necessarily
identify as gay either.
He did have same-sex relationships,
but this is not about outing this artist.
Instead, I think this
work prescinds the kind
of worlds I think Barthes wanted to see,
one that was in between
or that didn't pivot
on one pole or another, and
if you look at this work,
on the upper left-hand corner,
yeah, upper left-hand corner,
what you're looking at
could be a pair of breasts.
It could be a pair of balls
with a shooting penis,
or it could be ass cheeks.
There's a kind of fluidity with
the kind of signifiers used,
much more so than with Bhavsar,
and we get more connected to,
maybe issues of gender and
sexuality through that,
but again queer zen
seemed to be a great way
of thinking about what
these works were doing.
They're presenting a
kind of in-betweenness
of an identity that couldn't be fixed
in one pole or another,
so in my constellation
of a queer transnational
South Asian art history,
I think Twombly fits in quite well.
Another artist that became very important
to this constellation
that I'm talking about was
the work of Mario Pfeifer.
Mario Pfeifer was born
and raised in Germany,
and he was actually hired by two artists
to come to India to edit a
film around the late 2000s.
He had never been to India, and he decided
that what he wanted to do was
to actually experience
the culture for himself
instead of read about it.
Once he did do that, he was quite excited
by the sights and smells,
let's say, that he saw.
He wanted to share that with
us, the rest of the world,
so he created this work
called A Formal Film
in Nine Episodes, Prologue
& Epilogue that would show,
what appeared to me when I first saw it,
as stock photography of
South Asian signifiers.
You had heavy South Asian jewelry.
You had almost Bollywood
romance, you had a Hijra.
You had all these tokens,
that when I first watched
this installation,
I was really confused.
I was confused how a person
who was white, Mario
Pfeifer could make a work
like this knowing the history of the West
and how they have
mythologized South Asians
as objects on the screen, so
this was sort of my thinking.
I was with a colleague
when I saw this work,
and he actually thought
that I should look at the
work a little bit more,
that maybe I was more consumed
by his authorship, and I was.
I couldn't think beyond
who he was as a subject,
that he was white, so what was interesting
about what Mario does,
and I'm gonna show you
some stills from this work here.
This is the head of a
young man, the eldest son
of a family whose father has died
and a ritual connected to
this is shaving of your head
and putting this yellow sand
paste color on your head.
This is a color or ritual that Pfeifer saw
but actually had no idea
what it meant at the time,
but he was attracted by these colors,
and these are the kinds of
things he wanted to share,
so there's a strong interest
in color in the work.
I want to come back to
that in just a second
after I show you these stills.
To come here, so it turned out
when Mario had put
together this exhibition,
he also produced a critical
reader, a 300 page book
in Hindi and English that
actually addressed all
of the concerns that I had.
He worked with all the most
important South Asian theorists.
He worked with Raqs Media
Collective, and he really,
in other words, understood
that his subjectivity
as a German, as a white male
was gonna be potentially problematic
and instead of avoid
that, he created a lot
of discourse and language around it.
I feel that this reader
is part of the work,
that without it, the
work reads, potentially,
a little differently, and I
was really amazed by the kind
of work that he put into
putting this together.
Now, that I'm no longer
looking at his authorship,
and I've calmed down a
bit, I decided to go back
and look at the work a bit more
to see if there's anything
formally happening
that can help us understand
what Mario was doing on a visual
or aesthetic level, and
what became clear was that
in the strong associations of color,
which were often connected to
very significant signifier,
like a yellow sandalwood placed,
which connected to a very specific ritual.
The way in which he installed this work,
which I haven't discussed
yet actually allows
for that color to potentially
escape its referent
and become something different.
Natasha Eaton, who's an art
historian in England talks
about the nomadism of color
and the vijivity of color.
We all know color can fade over time,
but it also is something that escapes us,
that we can't really grasp it
at any moment, and when you go back
and look at the film, you do get the sense
that there are moments
when the color detaches
from the subject or the screen
and there's this possibility
or moment where it can become
something quite different,
which was, I thought, very
productive in a lot of ways.
One of the reasons I was
excited about bringing in Mario
into the project was because
I was very interested
in thinking about how someone
who is white dialogues
with a South Asian art history.
What is the correct way to do this?
Is there a way to do this?
I wasn't really interested
in maybe the simple answer,
which is if you're white,
you can't touch certain
kinds of signifiers.
It just seemed way too simplistic.
What I found in Mario's work
was a really smart, sophisticated way
of approaching thinking about that
and not really moving
away from the problems
of him connecting to these signifiers.
Another work that I discuss
in the book is the work
of a collective: Sphere.
Sphere is a collective that
actually was composed of women
of South Asian descent, mostly Muslim
who were also queer-identified
from the Northwest of England
in Manchester, so you'll see
on this map just to get a sense
of where Manchester is in
the center of the Isle there,
so these women came
together in this collective
and it was a way to
make themselves visible.
I wanna give you a sense of
the type of the work they did,
my response to it, and what happened
from our conversations about the work.
The first thing to understand is
that Manchester has had
an incredible evolution
in terms of how it's identified itself.
It used to be, or still is known
as the first industrialized city,
something that they may
not wanna be known for,
given all the problems that
became associated with that.
In the '80s, Manchester became
known for punk and new wave
and interestingly, in the '90s,
they became the post-millennial capital
of commercial gay culture
in maybe all of England,
but definitely the Northwest,
so there was a concerted
effort by the city
to promote the Gay Village in the city
as an important place for people to come.
This was one of the ways that
Manchester actually moved out
of the recession, and I
just wanna show you a couple
of shots of Canal Street here.
Get a sense, Canal Street is
the epicenter of the village.
Lots of transparency, lots of light.
This is a different kind of space
than what you might've seen in the '80s
in the same location,
where there would have
been darkened windows
or no windows at all.
But for Sphere, what they felt
was a kind of invisibility.
The Gay Village, Canal Street is largely
a gay white male affair, and they wanted
to make themselves present
in some very significant way,
so as part of Queer up North in 2006,
they put together an art project,
a really fantastic
site-specific installation
that was at a park right
next to Canal Street.
It was meant to dialogue
with the Canal Street that was there.
It's a circle of about 12 or 13 beds,
each bed representing one of
the women that was involved
in the collective, and
they're all very individual,
representing the concerns of the women
that were creating these beds.
They're also very open,
so here you have beds,
a very intimate sort
of thing to begin with,
but as you sort of see on
the right, these are beds
that are inviting, bringing
people into the subjectivities
of these queer South
Asian, mostly Muslim women.
What became very clear to me,
obviously, from this, I think,
was that gender was a really
important part of thinking
about a queer transnational
South Asian art history,
and this was part of me thinking
about what a feminist queer transnational
South Asian art history might look like.
The headboards are very
creative using the bar doors.
They're multilingual, alternate
English in here, and Urdu.
There's also poetry being
piped up from under the beds
and incense in many beds as well,
so the work is working on
a very synesthetic level.
I was mentioning earlier with Canal Street
that it's a very transparent space now.
It's a very optical space,
one that privileges vision
over any other sense.
It's all about cruising and looking,
and Sphere's work was slightly different.
They were bringing up a
multisensory approach,
a full person if you will.
This is what's called a rangoli ritual
in the Hindu tradition
where women will make marks on the ground,
and it's very colorful, in
some ways very reminiscent
of Bhavsar's work, for instance.
The work wasn't just
connected to Hinduism though,
and I think that's important to mention.
It was slightly more expansive.
I'll give you a sense of that in a minute.
When these beds eventually
left that space,
they were just there a couple of hours,
which I thought was unfortunate.
It was such a powerful
and interesting work.
It's just sad that it didn't seem
to have a more of a life than that.
The beds eventually were dispersed
into two sites: a museum and a coffee shop
without much context actually,
which is something else
that I want to kind of think
a little bit more about.
Not all these beds as you can
see here are about pleasure.
This is slightly more about death.
Underneath this bed,
there's a shrouded figure.
In the Hindu culture, a woman stepping
into the home that she's just
married into will dip her feet
into a red paste and then walk
into the home and mark it.
Of course here, this kind
of mark making has a
very different resonance,
given we're talking about queer folks,
a non heteronormative couple.
So, on this bed you can
see like the cross just
to indicate that these beds
were as much about Christianity,
let's say, as much as the
Hindu, Jane, and Muslim faiths,
the ohm signifier here connects
to all those different ones.
The beds could not be reduced
to a queer feminist transnational
South Asian subject.
They were just much too complex,
they were very individual.
I thought that was sort
of the beauty of the work,
that it referenced this,
but the works themselves
were all very, again, individual
that reflected very specific
people and their concerns.
There's another area in
Manchester called Curry Mile.
It is about a 12-minute bus ride
from the Gay Village, and
Curry Mile is so-named
because of the number of
South Asian restaurants
that are in that particular neighborhood.
Chicken tikka masala is the
number one fast food in the UK,
so it has a very different
resonance, I guess is my point
when we're talking about
curry in the United Kingdom,
and what I was really interested in
was why Sphere didn't decide maybe
to put this work there
in Curry Mile or near it.
It would've had a much different resonance
being near this space.
The conversation would've been
more about South Asianness
and less about queerness,
and when I spoke with
a number of the women,
they said, they felt really
uncomfortable on Curry Mile.
They felt it was a very
misogynistic space,
a very homophobic space for them.
They felt threatened, and
what was kind of interesting
to me was that there was not necessarily,
this is just a map giving you a sense
of the distance between these two,
but there's not necessarily
any overt crimes happening
on Curry Mile that would reflect
a very specific homophobia or misogyny.
So I was curious how does this happen?
How does someone begin
to feel like they did?
I completely believed them when they said
that they felt this way,
and I was very interested
in how this begins to happen.
How do you begin to have
these kinds of feelings
of unbelongingness as opposed
to being part of a space?
To answer that question I sort
of did this whole auto ethnic
Raqfic walk down Curry Mile,
where I take out different visuals,
very specific ones to
come up with an argument.
One of them is that as you're
walking down this mile,
you're gonna see a lot of
stereotypical signifiers connected
to India: the elephant,
the cobra in the name
of the restaurant here in
the lower right-hand corner.
These can be quite troubling,
and it's important, first of all, to say
that these restaurants are doing
what Gayatri Spivak would
call strategic essentialism.
They are giving people
what they think they want,
and I think that's important to point out,
but what they're projecting
eventually begins
to become troubling for, let's
say, a queer woman of color.
In the restaurants, at
least in one place anyway,
you see these paintings,
very bucolic scenes
that seem kind of timeless.
It's not clear when these took place.
This was a classic way that
British colonialism worked.
It pushed South Asia and
their subjects into the past
as being naive and primitive
as opposed to the Brits
that were sort of upright, you could say.
It's interesting, these
visuals kind of, I think,
connected to this
unfortunate re-inscription
of what British colonialism was about.
In the restaurants, there were
often a lot of, or only men,
men who were serving,
so here you have spaces
that are only full of men
that are giving out food.
Not to mention, outside the restaurants
there are men beckoning
people to come in to eat,
and it became clear to me
that there's a very subtle
and complex way through
all of these signifiers
that one can begin to feel unwelcome,
and it's not something that's
obvious, you could say.
Now Pierre Bourdieu would say
this is a kind of symbolic violence.
It's a violence that takes
place over time quietly.
As you're walking down Curry Mile,
this is a well-trafficked street
that these women probably
went down many times.
They're going to be going
by it over and over again,
and each time adds a layer
of, let's say, unbelongingness
that eventually results this kind of idea
of not being a part of that community,
but I really wanted to see these beds
at Curry Mile for my own
purposes on some level.
I wanted to also think about
how these beds could work
in different kinds of
spaces because I felt like,
unfortunately, these works
weren't seen as art objects
and they were, so I
wanted to position them,
with the work of the Sphere
Collective into other sites
as sort of another life for their works,
so I organized a project there in response
to all that I've just told
you called Mixing it Up:
Queering Curry Mile and
Currying Canal Street.
That took place in various
sites in Manchester.
It took place in Curry Mile, it took place
in the Gay Village, and
in spaces in between
where there are a lot of
actually university institutions.
This is my postcard, which I love.
I love this postcard that
was done for that project.
A list of the various projects.
I worked with two other
collaboratives beyond Sphere
that were also producing
different kinds of projects.
I'll just talk about maybe one or two
of them, not all of them,
but I wanna go back to what I said earlier
about these works being
seen as art objects.
That was one of the things that
really annoyed me the most.
They were thrown into a museum
actually without any kind
of context beyond it
being an ethnographic kind
of object connected to a
queer transnational woman,
so the Woodward Art Gallery,
which is located right
at the head of Curry
Mile was putting together
an exhibition on the body.
They were actually bringing in work
from their collection
there, and they have a lot
of wonderful works on paper
mostly by European masters,
so not surprisingly, all
of these works are what,
they are by white males,
and they are about white
women, they are usually naked.
This is not so unusual, we
see this, unfortunately,
all the time in the
history of art history.
That's what we have here, and I thought
it was very interesting to
insert one of these beds
into this exhibition, a bed
that would be made not by men,
but by a woman and that would
be doing a self-portrait.
It wouldn't be of someone else.
It would be of herself,
to kind of bring attention
to these unfortunate
dynamics that have existed
for a long time in art history
between white men and women
as essentially objects to be seen,
yes to be seen I would say.
This is the bed that
ended up being put in,
and this bed was authored by Kole Beshear,
and she was the only woman in the group
that actually wanted to
identify herself with the bed.
She worked in corporate America,
and so her bed is like this kind
of a corporate boardroom
table under which,
you might say, she's
stuck and moving out from,
so it's a very complicated piece,
and it's a self-portrait.
Again, I just love this idea
of this work being positioned
in the history of art
rather than only being seen
as an ethnographic object.
Here, we have, again, the
artist portraying herself
rather than a male portraying
a woman, often naked.
This is a very abstract
contemporary version of this,
so the project went in
lots of different spaces.
Another work was a huge mural
that Sphere put together, very colorful.
You can't take your eyes
off of it, in a way,
when you see it in a crowded street.
It's made out of these neon colors.
What you'll see embedded in
the neon is the silhouettes
of these women that were part of Sphere.
At the time I did this
project I actually thought
that was one of the
weaknesses in their work,
that they'd gone so far in
making themselves visible
that they stopped short
at this one moment,
and presented us with silhouettes.
I've since then changed my mind actually,
and I have a very different interpretation
of what's going on
that I wanna talk about
a bit throughout the rest
of this lecture, but I'll
mention it right here.
It's connected to the
writing of Édouard Glissant
and his notions of opacity,
and Glissant is one
of the few people who
believes that globalization,
which he calls globality is possible,
that we should be all interconnected,
but he has a very different way
of thinking about how that would work.
He has written that if this
is going to work, it's going
to happen through opacity, that
different subjects are going
to be able to not necessarily
have to reveal everything
about themselves, and this works
against the way the
Western world operates.
They're very invasive, and
they have to know everything,
to see everything, so
this is a different idea.
Opacity doesn't always mean being opaque,
but it is this idea
of having the right to
not divulge information
or who you might be, so I came up
with a very different
understanding of this later,
and this is something I'm more interested
in in my next book, which I'll talk
about just a little bit later.
One of the lessons I
learned form this project,
and there are many, this
project was not just
about producing these works,
but looking at their effects,
looking at the feedback
and trying to get a sense
of what happened and what didn't happen.
I won't describe this work in detail.
What I wanna talk about
is that three women
of this collective,
the Doorstop Collective
that I commissioned to do work
for the exhibition had
presented their work
at a conference in Manchester.
It was an academic
conference, so art historians,
for the most part, were there,
other academics in sociology,
and they were sort of
pounced on right away.
It's sort of like what are
these three white middle class
British women doing working
on a queer transnational
South Asian feminist project.
They explained right away.
They said that they'd
been commissioned by me,
and that sort of placated them
in some way, and that was enough,
which was also kind of strange
because I felt like I was naturalized
in some way in that whole process.
The point for me is that I
really wanted this project
to be for people that
weren't necessarily queer
or South Asian in any sort of way at all.
I wanted it to be much broader than that.
That was the hope, and that's
why I actually invited artists
that weren't necessarily
queer and South Asian,
but I realized that that wasn't enough.
If I really wanted to deal with whiteness,
the works themselves had
to deal with whiteness,
and that wasn't happening
in these projects,
so this is where the
project with Mario Pfeifer
that I mentioned earlier
becomes so important,
really interrogating, thinking
about how the work itself deals
with whiteness beyond authorship.
This was a very clunky way
of me dealing with that
of me trying to bring everyone together,
only to not really think
about what that means
on an aesthetic level.
Another chapter brings
together three events
and three specific art
works connected to them.
September 11th, which
many of you will know what
that is, I think, 7/7 which relates
to the bombing of the
Tubes in London in 2005.
That was known as 7/7,
after 9/11 in a way,
and also the death of Trayvon Martin.
You can already see right away
these are very different kinds of events
and things that have happened,
so how are these connected,
and I think this is what
becomes quite interesting,
that there's a way to
bring these together,
and these events, and the
visual culture connected
to them are a part of the art history,
again, that I'm building.
The art history that I'm
interested in is not one
that necessarily only looks at art works,
but visual culture as well, so
the first poster that I want
to show are cartoon really, which I think
is actually really an art
work by Carter Goodrich.
It was on the cover of
the November issue in 2001
after the September 11th attacks,
and when I saw this particular
cover, I felt so calm.
I lived in New York City
during this time, during 9/11.
I had been egged, eggs were
thrown at me during this time,
which is, of course, very
embarrassing and not something
that was fun to even share, but I felt
like looking at this allowed me
to have a different understanding, maybe,
of what even happened to me.
First of all, as you're
looking at this poster,
you've got what looks to be a
Muslim or a Sikh taxi driver
that is anticipating, being
misidentified as a terrorist,
and so to deflect from
that, he's included all
of these exaggeration panoply
of different American flags,
so what I always find very
interesting is that this work is
about that moment before
something happens.
Nothing's happened yet,
it's between what we think
is gonna happen, let's say,
and this is a productive space.
This is a space where the
future can be different,
where it doesn't have
to necessarily end up
being the way we might
think it's going to,
and this is why I found
this poster quite powerful
and productive for me, that it allowed me
to see that there could
be different futures
as much as allowing me
to see why what happened
to me happened to me.
I was also misidentified in
some ways, and I was only egged.
I didn't lose my life
like many of the people
that were of South Asian descent,
especially those wearing
turbans were at that time.
The second work I wanna
bring up is a memorial
of the young man that was killed
in the London Tubes on 7/7,
Jean Charles de Menezes.
Jean Charles de Menezes, when
he was killed, it was tragic
for all sorts of reasons,
but one of them is that
it was so senseless
in a lot of ways.
It was based on visual evidence,
which is kind of horrifying
to think, the London
police looking at images
and deciding that this person matched
who they believed was the person
that was responsible for these attacks.
He's actually a Brazilian electrician,
or he was a Brazilian electrician,
so when he passed away,
if you look up his name on the internet,
you're gonna see tons of
very specific kinds of images
of him, often ones where he's not smiling,
where he is marked, and there's this sense
that there's so many images
of him that are out there
that one wonders where
his own subjectivity is
in this mess of imagery that's out there.
This is where this
memorial gets interesting,
and it's my take on it.
Its not necessarily, I think,
the way everyone would read it,
but when I had a friend of
mine take photographs of this,
they came back and said,
"I need to go back again
"because the photographs that I took,
"they're really kind
of indistinct, unclear.
"It was a cloudy day, maybe
I need to go back again."
He did go back again, and
when he came back, he said,
"Actually, these things are indistinct.
"That memorial, that image
of this man is blurry."
I don't know if this
was on purpose or not,
but I began, again, thinking
about this idea of opacity,
this blurring that's there
allows us potentially,
or allows him to have
a kind of subjectivity
that he doesn't have
really anywhere on the net.
There's a slowing down, the
blurriness slows you down,
and there's this moment of in betweenness
where something else can
happen, where he might be able
to kind of have his own subjectivity
that's kind of recovered in some way,
so this is the way I
wanted to look at this.
The third work I wanted
to bring up is Adrian Piper's
really wonderful digital work
that's meant to be downloaded,
and you can download it yourself.
It's part of the work, it's
meant to be circulated,
just to circulate it as much
as Trayvon Martin's image was
at that time in 2012,
so when Piper put this,
again, you have a literal obscuring here.
You don't really see
Trayvon Martin at all.
He's kind of a faint haze in the back.
He's sort of there, but
he's not, and again,
there's this moment because
his image, too, was circulated
as much as Jean Charles' image,
and one wondered again where's
Trayvon Martin's subjectivity
in all of this, so the
slowing down kind of allows
for a potentially other kind of reading,
where Trayvon Martin is not an object
but potentially a subject.
In fact, Adrian Piper asks us
to imagine what it was like
to be me, so now you're in
the place of this object,
and you obviously, consider
yourself a subject,
so that changes the terms of
our understanding, and maybe,
again, allows for recovery in
some way, for Trayvon Martin.
That's the kind of productive
I we want to think about this,
so these three works I
brought out, they all deal
with this indistinct, in between space
where something hasn't quite happened yet,
though the image of Trayvon Martin here
isn't necessarily the one
that we've seen all the time.
We haven't gone there yet.
There's this moment of pause and potential
for a different kind of approach.
I wanna end, actually, with
presenting a case study
for the new book that I'm working on,
that is in very similar
ways interested in this idea
of constellation building,
and tentatively called
"Transregional Entanglements:
Sexual Artistic Geographies."
I'm very interested in
bringing together works of art,
especially from places that
aren't necessarily always
in the West, that deal
with sexuality and making connections.
The unfortunate thing with
works that are made by people
of color or that deal with
issues of color that deal
with sexuality, other kinds
of identity is that their work
gets coded and marked off,
so there's an impossibility
of building a bridge
to something else, and
that's not something
that I'm really interested
in, and I wanna, again,
allow there to be conversations
happening across the globe.
The brief case study I'm
gonna show you is one
that connects the work of Jaanus Samma
who is a gay-identified Estonian
and Tina Takemoto, an Asian
America lesbian in the U.S.
There's no reason when
hearing these kinds of ways
of me describing them
that they would make sense
to even be in the same project,
and that was what was
sort of exciting for me.
I was asked by a book by the name
of "Globalizing East European Art History"
to contribute a chapter,
and so my chapter was one
in which I included
Tina's work with Jannus's,
and I just loved this
idea that Tina's work is
in this book about Eastern
European art history.
It really just befuddles,
challenges, it allows her work
to be read beyond the ways in
which we might normally think
of it within the context
of Asia America. let's say,
or with an American sexuality,
so I'll talk about the two
works and what connects them.
The first work is by Jaanus.
Both artists are looking at archives.
Archives, in the case
of Jaanus of the Soviets
that had previously occupied Estonia,
so these archives were still
there, and Jaanus went in
and sort of found all of the very kind
of graphic material connected
to the incarceration of
homosexuals by the U.S.S.R.
His work starts there.
It begins with looking at
these archives, which again,
don't tell us anything about
the individual he's looking at
who goes by this name The Chairman,
and that title reflects the
fact that he was the head
of a collective farm, collective
farms that were set up
by the U.S.S.R. in Estonia,
forced really, set up as well.
So, one of the first
things that you'll see,
this is his installation
in the Venice Biennale
He's done this in a different place
at the Museum of Occupations
in Talinn in Estonia, but here,
when you come in, you
see a number of images.
Eyes are sort of blocked
off, and again, we can think
of this as a way of hiding,
or we can think of this
as a way of providing subjectivities
to have their own space
on some level, but more
importantly, for me,
I'll come back to this,
is just that there are
all these, potentially,
they're supposedly documentary images.
They're not documentary
images, they're propaganda
that the Russians produced
to show that there were
happy Estonians farming,
so you've got all of these
photographs that are seen,
or, at one point, were seen as documentary
that are actually now seen more
as the propaganda that they were,
so you come in seeing
this fiction right away,
and what becomes clear is what is truth
in fiction is always at
play in Jaanus's work.
How do we know what's in the
archives is telling us anything
of value or any kind of truth?
Whose truth are we seeing on some level?
The installation included
two films as well.
One of them recreates the
scene of the chairman's death.
The chairman was killed by a prostitute,
and it's not quite clear
about the exact events
that took place, but he kind of recreates
that scene in one of the videos.
Another one really brings attention
to sex acts that might
be seen non normative
to some like watersporting,
so here he turns these kinds
of practices into sights of pleasure.
They're not ones to be
shied away from at all.
This is the kind of equipment
that might have been used
to invade the body of the
chairman by the Soviets,
and I spoke to Jaanus about this.
I was like, "Are these the types
"of actual clips, et
cetera that were used?"
and he said, "I don't really know."
This is an imagination as well on his part
of what they might have been.
It is sort of just a representation
of what he believed happened,
which is quite heinous,
and that these kinds
of pieces connected to that heinousness.
The work included also gloves,
other kinds of material,
also fictional, not really
connected to the chairman.
They're probably what the
chairman might have worn,
so throughout all of this
work, there's a threading,
a blurring of truth and
fiction that comes through.
The work ends when you go up a staircase
and you look out the balcony
where an opera is playing,
and there's just nothing to look at all.
I feel that this is the moment
where he recovers the chairman's opacity.
There's nothing to see, you're
not gonna get to see it.
All these things in the archives are
so invasive as they are.
This is the moment where
he returns, I would say,
his subjectivity back to him
that he never really had.
Tina Takemoto did a five-minute video
that I'm gonna show you
that connected to archives
in the Gay and Lesbian
Center in San Francisco.
She was actually asked, or
it was kind of a blind date,
where she was connected to the work
of a gay Japanese male
living in San Francisco,
his archives, so she had the
archives in her possession.
She looked through them,
and she became fascinated
with them, and one
of the things that she
was really intrigued by
was that it looked like this
Japanese man was actually
in the internment camps,
and that just blew her mind.
How did a gay Japanese male deal
with being in the internment camps?
That begins the process of
her dealing with the archive
in a way that is tangential you might say
and brings out actually a
broader sense of sexuality
and gender as well, but one
thing I wanna point out,
just quickly is one other connection just
I am telescoping out
between these works is
that what was happening with the chairman
and what was happening to Jiro Onuma,
the name of the Japanese man whose archive
she was looking at was at the same time,
so they're happening at
different parts of the world,
but they're happening at the same time
and they're happening at
very interesting moments when
in the U.S., homosexuality
was seen to be sort
of a communist act and the
reverse was the case in Estonia,
where homosexuality was seen
to be a vice of the West,
so this funny kind of flipping
that's occurring in different parts
of the globe that deal with
very much the same thing,
and of course Jiro was doubly marked.
He was not just homosexual,
but he's Japanese,
and there was an incredible
amount of xenophobia,
which is why he was in the
internment camps to begin with,
so I'm gonna end this presentation really
with allowing Tina's work to
do her magic, you might say.
I'm interested in it closing
this presentation out
because she builds
constellations, ones that connect
to her own performances
that she does that connect
to documentary footage
of the internment camps,
again propaganda of documentary footage,
documentary footage, of also
the Japanese-American Army,
so at the same time that the
Americans were putting Japanese
in interment camps, they
were also asking them
to serve in the Army, such is the paradox
of the U.S. it seems.
- [Audience Member] I have
a question, in terms of,
I was curious with the
project with Curry Mile
and the Gay Village, because
you were talking about a lot
of the artist responses to those spaces,
and I was wondering how
your responses to both
of those were different or
similar to the artists like
in terms of feeling external
or all those types of things.
- I definitely felt sort
of the whiteness of the Gay Village.
That was definitely something
that was pretty palpable,
but I didn't feel the
homophobia or misogyny,
but I think partly that's also
because I was a visitor there
so I was there living in
Manchester in 2005 and 2008
as a graduate student.
I had very little at stake compared
to these women who actually lived there,
so I'm wondering if that's part
of the reason why that
didn't affect me as much.
- [Audience Member] I was curious,
you mentioned some
people today making work,
they may be making work that
doesn't have a language yet,
and I think Tina Takemoto
is probably a great example of that.
I'm curious if there's types
of language you think about
that are coming up today
that could be useful
for describing work that's being made now,
or if there's other artists
you think are making work
that we don't yet have a language
suitable to describing it?
- First, I'd say that probably
Mark Tribe will kill me
by saying that you guys,
someone else will do the work
for you and put words to your work.
I know in art school,
that's what you do is talk
and discuss your work,
so continue to do that,
(audience slightly laughing)
but outside of that, I think there's work
by the queer art historian David Getsy,
who writes a lot on queer
form and looks a lot
at abstraction, which is
pretty powerful and amazing.
He actually spends a lot of time talking
about John Chamberlain's work, folks
from the '50s and '60s
that you would never put
in the context of
transgender subjectivity,
but he finds a very
compelling way to do that,
so I think he's definitely
someone who is putting some words
to what's out there,
and also Johnathan Katz has been someone
for a long time that has
been really exploring
quite bravely the work of people
like Cy Twombly and Robert
Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns,
and John Cage, all of whom
had same-sex relationships.
He's been really looking at
the work for quite a long time,
not again to out these works or them,
but to show how the works actually show
a very complex subjectivity within them,
so he would be a really
interesting person to look at.
- [Audience Member] Would you mind sharing
with us a bit about your background?
Because all we know is you're a professor
at Miami University and
sort of your background
of how you came to be
interested in these issues,
and what you just talked about.
- Yeah, that's--
(audience member yells off mic)
No, no, it's fine, it's funny
because you had my, unfortunately,
very long bio, which tells
you nothing really, right.
(audience laughing) in the end.
I think, actually, I was talking to one
of you in the studios today,
I felt like, I think I was
talking with you actually
about how there was a point
when I was living in New York
and working in the art world
where I wasn't really dealing
with issues of race or sexuality
in an overt way in my work,
and there just felt like
this moment where that had
to change, and even what
happened to me, 9/11,
things like that made me
really think more clearly
about how subjectivities are formed,
and they're done in very complex ways,
so there're events like that.
Again, it's hard to bridge these worlds,
at least they were for me.
One of my favorite stories
now, just growing up
in Central Florida in a town
where in their holiday parade
in 1991, they allowed
the KKK to have a float,
very open, apparently, that way.
(audience laughing)
The KKK was distributing
these cards that said,
"We're dreaming of a white Christmas,"
which for my friend and I,
we were just laughing ridiculously,
like what is this?
But, coming from those
moments, they're in my head.
We're seeing lots of
changes now in the U.S.
The website of the
United States government
no longer has any information
about LGBTQ rights at all,
and transgender as a
word and category is kind
of being removed too, so
that's something happening now,
so I guess, these moments in
life that I don't even know
if I can process or understand completely
how I've come here, but I
know that's where I keep
on working, why I have
to do this other book
because I feel like I
haven't figured things out,
and there's more connecting
that I want to do.
Writing, for me, is my way of connecting
to things like Twombly, to Mario Pfeifer
that may not seem like they
make sense, but actually do,
so I wanna continue to do
that kind of world building
and constellation building
that I'm encouraging all
of you to do as well.
- [Audience Member] You
mentioned Jonathan Katz
and David Getsy, can you talk about,
it seems like you're unusual
in making these connections
because you're bringing
these artists together
to make art history more inclusive so
in your current research,
who else is doing that?
And how is art history changing?
Is that happening more and more?
Or, are you just an anomaly and
doing this solo by yourself?
- I'll try to answer that two ways,
so one, on the level of
pedagogy, or what's being taught.
Nobody wants to teach Intro to Art History
in any art history
department as I've found out
in my own department, so
then whoever's teaching
on Art usually are folks
that aren't invested
in art students in some way,
and what they teach is
very sort of cookie cutter,
very Euro-American art history,
and so that's where I think
the biggest battle is.
At those intro level courses,
nobody's even seeing
different worlds there,
so why would they even
think that it's possible.
The last time I taught Intro to class,
which actually is telling,
was when I was an adjunct,
so that tells you something as well.
That class might've been
interesting actually
because I brought in
all this kind of madness
into looking at Euro-American art history.
There are tons of new voices and voices
that have actually been
around for a while too that,
I think, are trying to make some inroads,
and that's something,
actually, tomorrow night,
at the New York Art Academy,
I'm gonna be talking about
with Yasmin Siddiqui and you Sharon Lavin,
about these other voices that
are there and how we deal
with this problem of art
history, so there are, and yet,
again, from the level of pedagogy, none
of that's trickling down quite yet.
So, did I distract you enough
from the election results?
For a little bit, yes.
(audience clapping and cheering)
That's a real measure of
success if I did that.
Thank you very much.
