Gallery 400

Soheila Azadi in "Gush"

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 13:02:00 -0500

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s 2015 Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibitions are underway, and I was granted the opportunity to learn more about one of the ten newly minted masters featured: Soheila Azadi. An interview’s catalyst is to delve into the mind of the subject, and I wanted to identify the process that Azadi took in producing work for her thesis exhibition.

Azadi exhibited her work during the first installation entitled Gush. The intent of Gush was to explore elements that touch, congeal, and drip from above, and Azadi’s performance video and interactive installation pieces delivered a powerful and humorous manifestation of this. Through her use of oppressive images, textiles, and subtle comedic hints, elements converged and defied boundaries.

Azadi is a storyteller, and through her performances traces of those who influence her become apparent: family, and in particular her mother and her two older sisters. Since growing up within a theocracy, then living in the U.S. as an adult, Azadi has needed her mother and sisters’ love and support not just as family, but also as women.

Soheila Azadi's artistic practices have changed and developed since she began the MFA program at UIC. “My work has changed dramatically,” she says. “My performances were dark, angry, provocative, and excluded men. Now, my work is humorous and all-inclusive.” The emotional, and now comedic, aspects of her work combined with her familial and gendered influences led her to create two innovative works for Gush.

The first piece was a video installation in which the viewer witnessed ironic situations with subtle tones of theocratic oppression. The video provoked the viewer to experience an internal gush of emotions from enjoyment and humor to surprise through her visual use of textiles and music to illustrate cultural customs. After the initial gush, a second gush activated heightened awareness surrounding political, religious, and gender-based oppression.

Contrasting her video installation, Azadi’s second piece Ball Swing allowed the viewer to interact with it physically. Her incorporation of different textiles and materials allows the elements to touch physically while defying conceptual expectations. Azadi explains, “My work isn’t consistent with form and material, but I use a lot of fabrics and textiles because they are domestic, gendered, they classify you, oppress you, liberate you.” In Ball Swing, the viewer is able to touch and feel the different materials, a key component in Gush. Azadi wanted the viewer to enjoy and have fun with the piece, while understanding the seriousness and raise awareness of life under a theocracy, and the gender boundaries within society.

As Azadi begins her career, she has a parting message for emerging artists, whether undergraduate students or next year’s MFA thesis students. “Have an open mind, be open to change, and constructive criticism. Not everyone will love your work, so listen to the constructive feedback and critiques, but if you hear anything negative or not constructive, just disregard it.”

More information and works by Soheila Azadi may be found at her artist page:
http://www.soheilaazadi.com/

Written by Communications Intern Nick Hancock

Patches Aren't Just for Girl Scouts: A Review of Trevor Paglen's "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me"

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 13:37:00 -0600

Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me – Emblems From the Pentagon’s Black World attempts to uncover the material culture of the military’s “black world” by highlighting a series of uniform patches belonging to top-secret divisions of the military. The emblems on the various patches, which display cartoon-like figures or amusing mystical symbols, represent the Pentagon’s most classified programs and were worn on the uniforms of military personnel. In his book, Paglen highlights about 40 different patches and speculates about their undisclosed meanings.

Among the insignia is “Alien Technology Exploitation Division,” a patch designed for a limited number of people working in a special facility at Air Force Space command. The small patch includes an embroidered alien with a collar and chain leash around its neck. “Don’t Ask!” is scrolled across the bottom in Klingon, the fictional Star-Trek language. While this patch was created unofficially and more as a lighthearted gesture, others were not. “Tastes Like Chicken” pays homage to a series of flight tests featuring a B-2 Spirit. The aircraft, also known as a stealth bomber, is capable of ruthlessly deploying nuclear weapons. This patch also features an alien, which refers to the 509th Bomb Wing that originated in Roswell, New Mexico. “Classified Flight Test,” now replaced by “To Serve Man,” was originally written across the top of the patch. Military officials demanded that the phrase be removed, as they believed the patches posed threats to the mission.

A man of many talents, artist and author Trevor Paglen received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley. He has written five books, and has shown work in solo and group exhibitions in major museums around the world. Now based in New York, Paglen devotes his artistic research to revealing different modes of perception through means of science, journalism, contemporary art, and geography. He uses these outlets to emphasize the manipulation of perception by the military, politics, and cultures. The works by Trevor Paglen that are on display in Visibility Machines at Gallery 400 are no exception to his provocative style. His innovative photography techniques seek to bring to military secrets to light through observation and infiltration of the “black world.”

Although Paglen is able to explain the content and significance of a handful of the patches in I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me, we are still left partially in the dark. The collection of iron-ons seem to taunt us through caricatures of skunks and smiley faces. The fact remains that a vast amount of information about the military's classified missions is still unknownable, and the people involved will likely take these secrets to their graves.

Written by Communications Intern Rachel Gonzales.

An Interview with Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 10:38:00 -0600

Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker's Art & Exhibition Hall Lobby Installation, Thing-stead, is on view through the end of April at 400 S. Peoria St. In this interview, they talk about the concepts and inspiration behind their ongoing artist book publishing endeavor and the accompanying print installation.

What was your motivation to begin publishing artist books?

C: I’ve had a longstanding interest in artist’s books. I wrote my master’s thesis on Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press (published beautiful books by John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Merce Cunningham, just to skim the surface), which, arguably, set the standards for the approach to artist books today. To me, the "artist book” isn’t any different from the artist’s anything else. I imagine artist books as I would any other medium, the difference being its harder to put a painting or a sculpture in your book bag.

A: Something that I'm always grappling with is distribution. What's the form of the project and how does it potentially circulate? The lobby is a somewhat unique space in that there is a lot of foot traffic, most of which is consistent from day to day. I'm a fan of captive audiences. The opportunity to create a series of works/texts/happenings that built off one another seemed ripe. Chris and I have a shared love of the small press books and zines. Half Letter Press has and continues to be a big influence, as does Ooga Booga, Primary Information, Dexter Sinister and, of course, Something Else Press. In our case, the self published booklet provides a handy platform for these collaborative projects that combine some of the rigor of historical, critical research with some of the invention of art making, a hybrid that we are both fond of tinkering with.

How did you conceptualize and produce the different works?

C: I think conceptually all of the content has come out of some facet of interest or research we’ve had with a certain subject or author. This forum (self-publishing) gives some allowance towards experimentation that is maybe not so available in other more traditional publishing endeavors. This is also the first time Aaron and I have worked together on a project like this so it is also a kind of process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, both conceptually and on the production line.

A: Four of the five publications were conceived specifically for this project. Two are written by other artists, Arthur Brum's Oulaf Volumes 1 & 2 and Ryland Wharton's Legend and History. Arthur's Oulaf was written in 2011 and circulated among friends as a PDF but never saw print form. This text became a focal point around which several of the other booklets were conceived. The books are united in their embrace of structural and conceptual restraints. Each text practices this differently and has it's own area of investigation. Oulaf smashes together elements of Pataphysics with the form of the travel memoir where Exercises In the Chicago Manual of Style plays out Oulipo prompts through a maze of academic footnotes. Exercises is seven stories told through the same humorous set of prompts where Oulaf tries to tell one story but keeps getting sidetracked, absurd and somewhat brazen in it's complete lack of editing.

The five publications are unified by the use of excursus. Why did you select this technique? How are digression, invention, and play important to your work?

C: Excursus in a text is interesting in that, by its design, it is ultimately an arrow leading you away from the main idea to something else. Unless it is designed otherwise (usually in fiction in the case of something like Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine), it kind of has this two-fold oxymoronic relationship as a wholly necessary afterthought. I think in a way these books are an exercise in seeing what happens when you flip the role, when digression usurps the main idea and itself becomes the main idea. So in a way it becomes this kind of textual emancipation for the footnote or digression, but on the other it becomes a restraint of sorts, which makes you realize how difficult destabilizing a structure can be. The trick, really, is how to keep a restriction in writing (or in art with a capital “A") from becoming meandering, and this is where play comes in. I learned long ago that the best way to tinker with presenting potentially difficult ideas to others is to gift it as something enjoyable.

A: Each of these booklets could be seen as individual digressions all stemming from a shared argument, an appeal for a more hybrid space. In a sense you could call a few of these books creative art historical writing. They are research-informed texts that seek a poetic form, that want to put the ideas entertained into practice as means of both investigation and expression. They are also meant to be funny.

What has been people's response to the installation? Are they confused or do they take the publications?

C: We’ve debated putting up a “take me” sign. The books inevitably disappear through their display cycle, but I do sense a reluctance to pick them up and take them. To “touch” or “gift” art is still, despite a lot of avenues in art that promote such a thing, a taboo proposal. Some of the books have popped up in the stalls of restrooms in the 400 building so I know at the very least they’re being read somewhere.

A: It seems to me that often when you ask for more than passive viewing, those engaging with the work are likely to get confused. The two of us are always looking for take-aways and constantly trying to put our hands on or interact with artwork, so we figure we're not the only ones. Hopefully these little booklets find their way out into the world.

The prints on display are pulled from the various publications, giving the installation a transitory and growing quality. Can you say more about the idea behind this?

C: It seemed important, if having a restraint based upon excursus in the books itself, to play that out in a visual way on the walls surrounding the book. The idea was that we directed, however ambiguously, some of the ideas within the book into the visual field to mirror this strategy. Our first publication, Exercises in Chicago Manual of Style, had the Chicago Manual of Style as a main idea and as a restraint, so it made sense to hang up a Chicago Manual of Style as both things on the wall surrounding the main event— the publication itself. Ultimately all of the visual ephemera that has been attached to each book will find its way back on the wall, mirroring this further.

A: We envisioned the print installation accompanying each of the books as a studio wall, a place for test prints, nixed content, and playful arrangements of excerpts and enlarged quotations.

Images: Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker, Thing-stead, 2015, print installation with take-aways.

Highlights from the Reading Room

Thu, 11 Dec 2014 15:24:00 -0600

Gallery 400’s current exhibtion, Here, There, Everywhere, features works by both individual artists (Lara Almarcegui, Guy Ben Ner, Ramiro Gomez and Alevtina Kakhidze) and collectives (The Beehive Collective, Ryan Griffis & Sarah Ross), who focus their work on the effects of the modern global economy. The gallery’s Reading Room is a public space filled with books and essays related to the show’s topic and recommended by local artists, historians, economists, and professors within the UIC community. The Reading Room actively works to supplement the viewer/reader’s experience of the show. For Here, There, Everywhere, the gallery decided to reach out not only to UIC faculty but also to graduate and doctoral candidates in the Art, Art History, and Museum Studies programs. The reading lists compiled for this particular show are thoughtful and diverse; we are excited to share a few of them with you.

• Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond (Feb. 2014).

Part of Chris Reeves’ reading list, Informed Agitation is a collection of essays. Edited by Melissa Morrone, the book focuses on librarians and archivists using their skills in research and curation for activism and social justice. Reeves suggests one essay in particular, “People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street,” which focuses the reader’s attention to the library and archival work surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement both in its active state and in the aftermath. The book itself is in keeping with the Beehive Collective’s mission to educate through data curation and mapping. This act of mapping and curating leads to the group’s creation of visual information systems as a means of education and activism.

• "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" (1991).

Recommended by Soheila Azadi, Kimberle Crenshaw’s essay deals with psychical and structural violence perpetrated against women of color. It can also be read as a part of a broader discussion of systemic violence, discrimination, and silence against people of color and the working class. Similarly, Ramiro Gomez’s work focuses of the invisibility of people of color within the white male-dominated economy of luxury capitalism.

• Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (2007).

Most conversations about architecture, specifically architecture built as a part of the globalized economy, work under the premise of a “globally legible” world as the ideal model. Recommended by Johnathan Mekinda, Keller Easterling’s thesis resists this idealized dream and instead reveals the segregation and vulnerability that this idea and the resulting architectural spaces create. Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross explore the interconnectivity of a small town in Illinois and its place in the global economy.

• ABC of Anarchism (1929).

Therese Quinn suggested the ABC of Anarchism by Alexander Berkman. The book’s call to anarchism is similar to the workers in Guy Ben Ner’s video work, “Foreign Names.” Although Ben Ner does not overtly call for the overthrow of the establishment and full anarchism, he does force the workers appearing in his video to pronounce “names.” These “names” make up a statement by the artist taking a por-labor position and eschewing the established norms within modern western society, especially that of Israeli society.

• The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (2003).

While The Organizational Complex deals mostly with corporate space, the ideas set forth by Reinhold Martin can also be applied to model homes in New Zealand. Taken out of their original context, Lara Almarcegui’s Relocated Houses juxtaposes the minimalist rows of corporate office buildings, often called “glass boxes” with rows of small model homes removed from their original locations and arranged meticulously for sale.

Written by Gallery 400 Archive Intern Melissa Nunchuck

An Interview with Fall 2014 Lobby Installation Award Winner Timothy McMillan

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:57:00 -0600

Timothy McMillan is a current MFA candidate at UIC and winner of the Fall 2014 Lobby Installation Award co-organized by Gallery 400 and the School of Art & Art History. This competition showcases the work of BFA and MFA students at UIC. Once per semester, the committee selects one student to exhibit a site-specific work in the Art and Exhibition Hall lobby. Timothy McMillan's installation If Not Whatever, Why Now? is on view through December. In this interview with Gallery 400 communications intern Eric Perez, McMillan shares some of the inspirations and processes behind his work.

Your installation draws from mythological and religious symbols. Why is this a source of inspiration for you?

I want to create new mythologies and fables that suit to insert magic and fantasy into our contemporary world. Myths should be constantly created and re-imagined and passed down to future generations to describe our contemporary world within the fantastic blanket of allegory. Are my figures a complete representation of the 21st century? No. Just fragments of the puzzle. It's up to the viewer to fill in the blanks.

How are your own personal experiences reflected in or related to folklore and mythology?

I grew up going to church. So my childhood was filled with what I now consider fantastical stories. Now that I'm an atheist ( that's still weird to say) I find equal meaning in religious fables and secular fables, like Aesop. It's like knowing that there really isn't a plump old man with a toy factory on the North Pole, but seeing the beauty in the ideology of unwavering generosity.

What is the role of fragmentation in your work? Are you interested in reconstructing fables through collage, or does your work resist narrative?

This show originally existed as a series of dioramas at QUAID gallery in Tampa, FL. The figures were more interactive this way, which led to more implied narratives. However, the narratives were still fragmented. It was like a series of puppet shows frozen in time. This show at Gallery 400 is a fragmented fragment so the narratives are even harder to imagine. I suppose a more apt title for this display would have been "If Not Whatever, Why Now? Again?"

Why do you work with craft materials and found objects?

I want my work to have an inherent resourcefulness and feverish intent. They are like dreams that needed to be written down quickly before they faded into oblivion.

How would you describe the experience of sorting through your grandfather's notes and sermons? Was that a cathartic process, even if not religious?

My grandfathers mental health had been demolishing before he passed during the making of this work. It was interesting to actually read through his notes and sermons to understand his fluctuating opinions and beliefs. To me the sermons give purpose to the bizarre and fantastic implied narratives of the creatures. There is an implied morality that overshadows the fantasy.

Images: Timothy McMillan, If Not Whatever, Why Now?, 2014, mixed media installation

I’ll make you a blog after I eat (an interview of sorts)

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 15:37:00 -0500

Anthony Romero and Josh Rios curated I’ll make you a movie after I eat, a series of screenings, talks, and performances that took place between September and October 2014 at Gallery 400 and Comfort Station. The screenings, a celebration and investigation of Chicana/o moving images, function as a kind of preamble to an exhibition of collaborative works at Art In These Times opening November 14, 2014.

Josh and Anthony enter and sit in front of a table that holds a pack of flour tortillas, a warming basket, and a hot plate with comal. They are already in conversation.

Josh: One thing I noticed was how the screenings were accompanied by a lot of different activities: lectures, readings, performances, and discussions. What was the purpose of all that excess?

Anthony: (Turns on hot plate) We wanted to provide some specific contexts around the films. So the whole thing would be more than a screening; it could be a presentation of research, ideas, and a conversation. The performative lecture has been a part of our previous work, so this idea of a performative screening seems to be an extension of that. This conversation. This performance. This play. This interview.

Josh: That’s an interesting thought. (He scratches his chin and looks into the rafters) Maybe we should talk about what happened at the specific screenings and what those moments of excess did.

Anthony: Leonard Ramirez, coauthor of the book Chicanas of 18th Street, joined us for a post-film discussion after Yo Soy Chicano and Chicana. He really grounded the films in experience, which was nice, given how early Chicana/o media often featured circumstances that many of its audience members had first-hand knowledge of.

Josh: But we also wanted to do more performative actions as well, to respond to the specific circumstances of the screenings.

Anthony: (Licks finger and quickly presses it to the comal’s surface. It sizzles. While speaking he unwraps a pack of tortillas and begins to warm them) Would you say that was part of the reason for splitting the series up between the two: Comfort Station and Gallery 400? To deal with context and to point the works or aim them at each location.

Josh: I would. I think working within each context we were able to facilitate not just different kinds of interactions but different kinds of situations. So at the Comfort Station we could present a kind of performance, and at Gallery 400 it could take a more formal shape with a presentation from Lisa Junkin Lopez on the transnational development of ceramic aesthetics between Chicago and Mexico.

Anthony: I agree, and I think it says something about how Chicana/o peoples have to navigate context. (Throws a kitchen towel over his shoulder and continues to warm the tortillas)

Josh: (Picking up Anthony’s thought) And, in turn create contexts. For example, we hung a friendship flag on Comfort Station for Born in East L.A., a film very much about the not-so friendly relations between Mexico and the US. But for Frontierland we hung the Aztlán flag, which was a very symbolic way of claiming Logan Square for the Chicana/o. Even if it is rhetorical and temporary, this kind of gesture is very useful. It opens the possibility to imagine a different kind of future, to speculate.

Anthony: I’d like to return to a broader question that maybe speaks to some larger context. Why these films? Why now? (Hands Josh a warm tortilla)

Josh: (Clears throat. Holds tortilla up and begins reading it in a formal tone as if delivering a speech) Issues of reflection and absence are especially meaningful to certain factions of the public. Regardless of who has the power to shape the world, everyone with the means and desire to look to the screen longs to encounter a reflection, to feel the shock of recognition, whether aesthetic, economic, cultural, or experiential. We want and need to see our worlds and the positions from which we make meaning confirmed. As we know, something which haunts us as an absence is very much present. (Places tortilla on the table)

Doors open. Audience enters.
Anthony: (Stands and addresses audience) Thanks for coming. Thank you to Anthony Stepter and Gallery 400 for allowing us to hold half of the series here and thank you to the UIC Latino Cultural Center for co-sponsoring these screenings, and to Heather Radke and the Jane Addams Hull House Museum for loaning us their ceramic wares, as well as to Lisa Junkin Lopez for taking the time to share with us some of the history of the Hull House Kiln program. Also to Jordan Martins and everyone at the Comfort Station. Last but not least Leonard Ramirez for sharing your wisdom and experience with us...

Images courtesy of Anthony Romero and Josh Rios.

An Interview with Sheila Bapat

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:58:00 -0500

Author and advocate Sheila Bapat talks with community engagement intern Maxim George about her recently published book Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers' Rights, her work for justice on behalf of vulnerable workers, and her upcoming event with Gallery 400. Please join us Thursday, November 6 at 6pm for Solidarity & Struggle for the Rights of Domestic Workers, a public conversation in partnership with Sheila Bapat, Arise Chicago, and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Maxim George: How did you become invested in domestic workers rights? Was there one event or story that made you begin to advocate for the cause?

Sheila Bapat: There wasn't a specific event that led me to this topic; rather it was a more the result of a meditation throughout my adult life on the different roles women and men play within family relationships. I observed throughout my life how hard the women in my family work— cooking, caring for everyone in the household, cleaning up after everyone— and yet all of these women remained economically vulnerable while their husbands controlled the family's wealth. As I grew older, I learned there is a whole field of study, feminist theory, that is focused on understanding why the very hard work of the domestic sphere is deemed unworthy of economic value or protection. I've been obsessed with this issue since.

MG: What led you to work with ARISE Chicago and why was Illinois the next place for you to campaign?

SB: In writing the book I connected with Ania Jakubek and spoke with her a few times about progress on the Illinois legislation. I think there is a lot of potential to discuss this issue in large cities where we see nannies so often on subways and in parks yet they remain so invisible, and I am very glad ARISE is bringing the issue of domestic workers' rights to the fore in Chicago.

MG: Do you feel the fight for domestic workers rights is finally making progress, and if so why?

SB: The domestic workers' movement is, quite impressively, fighting the centuries-old legacy of excluding domestic work from basic labor protections. It seems impossible to uproot such deeply systemic trends, and yet that is exactly what domestic worker advocates are accomplishing through state legislative campaigns, direct representation of domestic workers, and other strategies that shines a light on how critical caregiving labor is. It is a well-funded movement because the advocates at the top, like Ai-jen Poo and many others, are so effectively conveying the message of why domestic labor is so crucial. I hope it continues to be well suported. It is brilliant, triumphant activism that we should all be paying close attention to.

MG: Have you gained much support from people who employ domestic workers?

SB: The domestic workers' movement has gained support from employers, which is a very happy development and not common globally. Hand in Hand, the domestic employers' association, is a great resource to look at— this group is organizing, educating and mobilizing employers of nannies and caregivers to advocate for domestic workers' rights.

MG: What do employers gain from not paying their workers a living wage and not providing them with suitable living conditions?

SB: That is a great question. Who knows what anyone gains by denying wages or failing to pay what they promised. I think at its core this is a failure to see domestic workers' rights as a systemic issue affecting millions of women. I met a woman recently who is an attorney and her husband works in technology. She was filled with indignation that she and her husband have to pay their daughter's nanny overtime. I was saddened by her indignation. It was a real reflection that many don't see this as a systemic issue that needs to be addressed for many women.

MG: Why did you want to partner with Gallery 400? How do artists come into play with the campaign?

SB: I am deeply honored to partner with Gallery 400. Art, poetry, other creative expressions add so much depth to any social justice topic. I've actually been hoping for an opportunity to incorporate art into my book tour. I think art enables us to explore the core values at the heart of any work, and I am looking forward to doing exactly that at our event on November 6, 6pm! More»

Image: Sheila Bapat, Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers' Rights, 2014. Brooklyn, New York: Ig Publishing, Inc.

My Barbarian at Gallery 400: Interview by Ionit Behar

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:45:00 -0500

Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse is My Barbarian’s first solo show in Chicago. Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade constitute the energetic artist collective. I was delighted to have the chance to chat with the artists during their visit for their performances of The Mother. Among many things, we talked about their “imaginative reenactments,” alienation, and appropriation.

Ionit Behar: Many aspects of your work include references to the past. The reinterpretation of Brecht’s 1930 play The Mother that is based on Maxim Gorky's 1906 novel of the same name is one example. In your video Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, you collaborated with an older generation of women: your mothers and artists Eleanor Antin and Mary Kelly. And the use of theatre as a tool for change seems to be rooted in the past as well. Why is this important for you?

Malik Gaines: We always use historical settings in one way or another. In earlier works, we chose theatre genres from certain periods like antiquity or classical theatre. Using this modern theatre language is related to that, but it has to do with a few other things I think. One is performing social and historical power relationships. Sometimes the present feels too encompassing, but when we use a historical setting those relationships become easier. When you reenact things it seems anachronistic, but you can have critical distance which can be playful and funny and serious. All of the things that the present overwhelms. Usually we are projecting contemporary problems and ideas that still feel important onto the historical setting. In this play, the Marxist critique is outdated in terms of its language and its location; but the problem of capitalism feels completely the same, even if the factory is not the setting anymore. So it creates an allegorical comparison that allows you to think about current conditions through this other kind of setting.

Jade Gordon: It’s interesting reenacting this particular work of Brecht’s because he did that himself. He would place his plays in other times, far away, like this one during the Russian Revolution. It’s as if we’re adding a second layer to that.

Alexandro Segade: Which was a strategy that you find in Shakespeare— ways of talking about the current moment through the lens of another time period or another site. There were different political reasons for Shakespeare’s choice, but it has reverberations in the way that other cultural producers have approached how to explore theatrically various social and political conflicts by taking them out of one site and placing them in another. I think for us another issue is asserting historicity and a lineage for ourselves. Think about the terms that we identify with— queerness or non-maleness, non-whiteness— all these ideas outside of our hegemonic historical trajectory. Within art history, the kind of canonical understanding of art history as an oedipal relationship between men. We’re using those strategies inverted and saying that we do have a lineage, that performance art did not come out of nowhere; it is actually connected to things like theatre, like Brecht, Mary Kelly and Eleanor Antin, and a lot of other people who helped form it. Although we think that is well proved, if you look at the way art history is written, it’s not actually part of that [canon]. We’re always interested in things that are suppressed or overlooked, and we identify with those things. So we’re calling them up and attaching ourselves to them.

JG: In terms of the personal, we’re looking as a collective at our influences. With our own mothers obviously and our own histories, and with artists Mary Kelly and Eleanor Antin that are part of our groups. This video is the first time we used our actual mothers. I was a little bit nervous about doing that. The personal in the past with other pieces, especially the one called “The Pagan Rights,” was looking at the California hippie culture as where we came from, where we were raised. Through this utopian fantasy, we are looking at that history as well as being critical of the idealistic or utopian idea [of mother].

AS: Maybe, essentialist. There are a lot of historical projects that are in some way or another reasserting the position of the mother figure or the matriarch. We didn’t want to do anything that was essentializing. That is not the kind of training we got from people like Mary Kelly or Sue-Ellen Case. What we found was that looking at our own mothers was a way out of that.

MG: Especially because we don’t have one mother. We have three in these very different scenarios. And then Mary and Eleanor appear in the same chapters of art history but very different projects. So we could look at this personal relationship to history in an intimate, specific way, but at the same time think about how it plays out so differently. It doesn't create a total idea of the mother. The mother is a varying role just like in the play we all play the mother.

JG: But what does it mean to be that caregiver? The person that is going to make the sacrifice. What does that mean to take on that role?

AS: Responsibility to the community, which is what Mary points out in our video.

JG: When we started working on this piece, I just became a mother. It was nice to also have Alex and Malik to get to play the mother role and question what that means.

IB: Do you think that these different perceptions of what a mother is, or what motherhood is, are connected to alienation? You were talking about Brecht and Artaud, how you’re in conversation with both of them. I’m thinking about how these differences in the definition of a mother, and at the same time your avoidance of a “total definition,” might relate to alienation. A second question would be, how are alienation and appropriation related to each other, if they are?

MG: You think about all the influences that have come from queer performance or…

AS: Identity art.

MG: Having a generation ahead of us with approaches to alienation that are much more wrapped up in desire, identification of problems being legible— we are in a messier area, different than Brecht’s, which is “You are here, the character is here, and here is where Marxism happened.” That project has been very inspiring, but is coming from his masculine directorial vision and through camp or other theatrical moments that have more to do with the ‘60s and later. Alienation can be for us a complicated area that doesn’t necessarily create a kind of mathematical equation (that this proves that) but that all of these forces are happening at once; you’re alienated because you can’t fully identify yourself with the terms, even of this play. This revolutionary mother is obviously very… Brecht has this idea of a mother that is totally idealistic.

JG: When we started working on the play, we hadn't built in all of the interruptions yet and it seemed like there was something missing. Like we needed an extra layer of alienation or an escape root from the structure.

MG: Where we become ourselves. Which is maybe that kind of ‘60s anarchistic theatre where we don’t quite know what's going to happen— and leaving space to even be critical of Brecht.

AS: Like in reality TV, the confessional moment when you get to be yourself and just talk directly to the camera. I think it’s interesting that you bring that up, that this is alienation at the same time that it is appropriation. It functions to expose the apparatus, the way the Brechtian model works, but at the same time it actually makes us connect directly to our own lives and to the audience.

JG: But those moments aren’t completely improvisational. There is another layer that is the scripted improvisational moments where we riff off the outline.

MG: It’s a complicated question. There’s that moment in the movie where my mother is talking about the party they had after they’ve done this totally alienated performance, carnivalesque, white-trash party. They are sitting there and she says something super sentimental right into the camera. Like, “I can’t imagine ever…” From there we go straight to us singing a ‘60s girls group song, “You can never go home anymore.” We always have to keep this personal, affective, intimate relationship that we are really interested with each other, in conversation with alienated performance.

JG: It’s almost like it contextualizes; it gives it a container. The sentimentality doesn’t really ever exist.

AS: We only started working with appropriation directly very recently. This last summer, every project we did was some kind of reenactment of a historical text or situation. I don’t think we’ve completely worked out exactly how reenactment works in term of theorizing. Our next project is one where we are adapting a Fassbinder piece and looking very closely at the Fassbinder actors as part of the anti-theatre. We’re not just taking the text and thinking about Fassbinder as the author, but actually we're interested in how those actors interpreted it. There is something very important with estrangement in our work and its relationship to reenactment. I would use that term [estrangement] more to define what we do than appropriation. In the past, the way we approach a kind of appropriative model was to make our own version of things. So rather than do an ancient play, we would write our own piece that actually brought all these strips together but was reformed around our own aesthetic sensibility and our own language. And now we are very interested in direct quotations, but also always adapting it. This play for example, it’s not the original. We bring up the power dynamics, the language— all that can actually be clearer.

IB: Maybe appropriation is not the right word, but there are many aspects of your work that have this characteristic. The title of your show, for example, where you borrow from the post- World War II document the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” (co-authored by Eleanor Roosevelt) and Melanie Klein’s 1929 essay “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and the Creative Impulse.” How would you define that?

MG: It’s exactly that, appropriation.

AS: You can call it collage, pastiche, assemblage. All of those terms I feel more comfortable with than appropriation, and I think it is because of the ways appropriation plays out in the visual field as this sort of taking and displacing, reframing. That’s not exactly what’s happening with us.

JG: It’s more along the lines of the camp model. Even like the drag model, like taking a…

AS: Taking a popular song and rewriting the lyrics.

JG: Or taking a popular figure and…

MG: Satirizing.

JG: Yeah, exactly.

AS: We make more direct appropriations. We are going to do a Brecht play.

MG: Rather than, we’re doing a Baroque-style play.

AS: What we found is it does speak to audiences more directly in the currency of those figures. Cultural capital. They understand. When we do our own version of Fassbinder without saying it is Fassbinder, for example, people get the feeling but they don’t get connected to that particular lineage and doesn’t function in the same way. Maybe because we’re more mature and confident as artists we feel we can address these big guys of history.

JG: In a way, it historicizes our own practice by setting ourselves alongside them.

AS: That is what I was saying about Mary Kelly. When we asked her to play Mary Cassatt, which was totally a crazy thing to ask her to do, and she was down from the beginning. I didn’t even say Mary Cassatt, I said painter, an impressionist woman painter… and she was like, “I’m playing Mary Cassatt.”

IB: The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition at Gallery 400 is the triangular stage covered by beige carpet, the same color as the Gallery floor. The stage is built site-specifically every time the show travels, and the aesthetics change slightly. In terms of reception, many visitors ask us what this is for, why this stage is standing in the gallery. Besides the answer, “This is where the artists perform, and they will perform on this and this date,” I wonder if it stands for something else?

MG: The proposal is that it is a site for action of a different kind; so people recognize that and would think, “Where is the action that I’m missing?” But maybe the action is just being there. The drawings are used in the background for the slideshow, and the masks are used in the play. The objects get incorporated in a higher level of activity, but they also are installed. The stage is pointy, and people would accept it as a large sculpture in the middle of the room. So that anxiety of the viewer of, “What kind of space am I in?” has always been part of our set of questions when doing performance in a visual arts space.

JG: Showing a stage and showing masks are like quoting: “This is an object,” “This is a stage,” “This is a theatrical object,” and “This is in a gallery.” In a way, [the stage] exists on its own, but I think the triangle also skews the idea of what a stage should be. The height of it is special and the fact that the three points reference us.

AS: Anxiety is important here. Theatre can function in a number of different ways, but in a gallery or art context it always seems to provoke a kind of anxiety.

JG: They think they’ll have to participate.

AS: And also the fear of missing out— you don’t really have access to us. But the way this particular installation works, we do have for the first time the documentation of past performances so there is a kind of detective work that the viewer can do to become an audience member. It is also about these different ways in which the spectator is formed in different types of art. On the one hand you have an audience that is a communal viewer, and then you have this viewer who is supposed to wander around galleries alone. So I think it does provoke crisis even if it’s subtle.

IB: Maybe that is part of estrangement.

JG: I hadn’t thought about this idea of the individual lone spectator versus being part of an audience. Because it really feels different when you are sitting down with a group of people and having this collective response and experience.

MG: But everything, the amount of time you are supposed to spend, the way you experience the lights, the way time passes, all of that shifts based on what you think is supposed to happen in the room.

AS: I do think that in this particular installation, the confrontation with the empty stage is pretty stark. In others there has been more space before the stage comes, maybe the masks were what you first saw. Here it actually is even more of a provocation.

MG: You go up the stairs, you look up and then…

AS: You see something, but then there’s emptiness. It’s something we’re going to work through in the next piece where we are thinking about how we are going to install performance aspects. And we are thinking a lot about stages as sculptural installations.

IB: We need to wrap up because you’re about to perform The Mother here at the Gallery. But I wanted to ask, how do you prepare for the performances? Is there something that you religiously need? Are you yourselves on the stage? How is this performance different from the one you presented at the Whitney Biennial this year?

MG: I think we are all a little bit different.

JG: I use some vocal warm-up.

MG: There is an element of theatre where you need to get your body ready to perform and focus. It’s different than what we played early on in rock shows, where you can just run on stage and…

JG: and be drunk! This is not that kind of thing.

MG: And it’s a little different than a cliché performance art, where you come and rehearse action in the gallery. For that, you need to go in the zone; but this really requires a lot of negotiating text and body.

AS: Something that is important for us is that we are ourselves when we are performing. We use the mask as a representation of how we think about performance: as something that you put on, but you are always yourself under it. Which connects back to the alienation effect that Brecht saw in our own estrangement. You always remember who you are, so that you use yourself to be the barometer of how you feel about the character you act out. It’s funny— the way this play starts is with us sitting on the stage just talking to each other. We are often running lines, which means going through to make sure we remember how the scenes go and talking to each other so we feel like ourselves.

JG: It’s a normalizing exercise. It’s not a solo performance, so we need to connect.

AS: We don’t stare at a mirror for half an hour.

JG: We’re not saying, “Are you nervous?” But we’re connecting.

AS: At the Whitney when we did this piece, it was daunting. We need to connect to each other because the audience started to fill and you see all these people…

JG: It’s frightening.

MG: That is why it’s good to be a team.

AS: And we all say to each other, we got this.

From the Archive: Kara Walker's Voices lecture at Gallery 400, 1997

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 15:08:00 -0500

Left: Gallery 400, Voices Lecture Series Posters, Photo credit Sarah Murphy, 2014.

Since 1993, the Voices Lecture Series has marked Gallery 400’s ongoing commitment to present and support dialogue on contemporary art, architecture, design and theory. An integral part of both the city of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s art scene, the gallery hosts Voices lectures in support of its mission to connect the art of today with contemporary scholarship. Presenting dialogue by artists, critics, designers, curators, and historians to the public, Voices has become a premier forum in Chicago for discourse in the field of art and design practice. In the last three years alone, Gallery 400 has hosted AA Bronson, Triple Candie, Margaret Olin, Clifford Owens, and Stephanie Syjuco, to name but a few influential speakers.

Now 21 years old, Voices has had quite the coming of age. Looking back, each year included speakers who were not only active in their field at the time, but many who are still contributing to the dialogue today. Even in its early years, the selection of lecturers proved to be a prescient look at current dialogues and exhibitions. Take as just one example Kara Walker and her Voices artist talk and slide presentation on Monday, January 13, 1997.

Left: Spring 1997 Voices Poster, Gallery 400

Spring of 1997 was a full semester for Gallery 400. The gallery opened three exhibitions and, in addition to Kara Walker’s talk, hosted eight Voices lecturers including Karl Wirsum, a major force of the Chicago Imagists; Gabriel Orozco, the internationally known Mexican artist whose mid-career retrospective began at MoMa in 2009; and Byron Kim, who returned to the gallery a year later for a residency and participant-activated project, Deposit . For each of these artists, the seventeen years since their 1997 lecture has been defined by increased productivity and engagement in the global art world. For Kara Walker, the events of 1997 marked an important shift in the critical and public reception of her work.

In the dusty, basement Gallery 400 archive, among the ephemera from the lecture itself is an introduction written for Kara Walker’s presentation. “I would first like to thank Jack Lemmon for introducing me to Kara Walker a few years ago when she was in Chicago working on a print suite for Landfall Press,” the speaker wrote. “As a way of an introduction, I would like to read a piece written by Thelma Golden in the September 1996 Issue of Artforum, where she wrote for a project Kara was Commissioned to do for the magazine:

Left: Kara Walker, The Renaissance Society, 1997 Installation View.

‘Kara comes from the South, Atlanta actually, though by 1969, when she was born, the city had overcome, had become part of the New South. This is critical to the rest of the story, which, like the slave narratives Walker borrows from in her black paper cutout silhouettes, provides equal doses of startling fact and necessary fiction. Leaving, “escaped” as she puts it, to study up North, Walker is fleeing Atlanta’s proximity to history, the Black History Month exhibitions, the racial uplift esthetic, and a segregated art world. Fleeing the old, tired stereotypes of the Good Negress and the African-American artist, which combined would leave her nowhere. When she gets here (there) she sets about creating an esthetic within the context of her emancipation. She embraces the unspeakable and she speaks. Her sources are clear: the Civil War, historical romances, slave narratives, the 19th century medium of paper cutouts. Her subjects are even clearer: race, sex, violence, and their innumerable permutations.’

… at this point I will let Kara take over, after I thank Susanne Ghez and Hamza Walker of the Renaissance Society for their assistance in bringing Kara and her work to Chicago. Please help me welcome Kara Walker.”

As the introduction mentions, Kara Walker’s presentation corresponded with an exhibition of her work at the Renaissance Society of The University of Chicago from January 12 - February 23, 1997. The exhibition, Kara Walker: Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured For The Benefit Of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, featured 67 black paper silhouette cut-outs entitled Works of a Certain Interest… and 21 framed watercolors entitled Negress Notes.

As described by Gallery 400’s press release for the lecture, “[Walker’s] work often includes sexually explicit images, black paper cut-outs adhered directly to the white walls of the gallery. The artist's world is quite frankly black and white. Walker's refusal to acknowledge shame when dealing with issues of race and desire set within the context of slavery allows her to challenge, indeed taunt, our individual and collective historical imagination. Her bizarre, beautiful, and violent imagery reflects the paradox of what it means to be human; taking into account pain, parody, pleasure, poetry, and ultimately the perverse. The height of the cut-out genre's popularity was between 1770 and 1850, but it was destined to become the poor man's portraiture—silhouettes deemed a craft rather than art form. Walker has exploited the irony inherent in the medium.”

Left: Kara Walker, The Renaissance Society, 1997

Yet, Kara Walker’s work is not only ironic, claims Hamza Walker, in the exhibition essay, but simultaneously relentless, joyful, shameless, and imaginative. Even the invitations Kara Walker designed for the exhibition reinforce Walker’s unique form, content, and overall historical narrative. “The invitations,” Hamza Walker describes, “were done after a combination of typographical designs for posters announcing 18th and 19th century spectacles as well as the deigns for the title pages of slave narratives. In this instance, Walker has aimed her wit directly at the audience. By extending this invitation under the assumption that you are indeed one of “our Negro Brethren,” Walker…is asking ‘Is you is, or is you ain’t.’ Perhaps less subtle is the blurring of her own name with that of W.E.B. DuBois and Madame C.J. Walker…Maybe the issue is not whether some imaginations are more active than others but what some imaginations are willing to wield and therefore yield. Needless to say, in Walker’s mind, a Harlequin Romance becomes a deadly weapon.”

Left: Kara Walker, Invitation to Kara Walker: Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured For The Benefit Of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997.

Five months after Kara Walker’s exhibition and lecture, she became the second-youngest person to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” Since 1997, Kara Walker has continued her compelling artistic practice and has had several solo exhibitions including those at The Walker Art Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Liverpool, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, UCLA Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, the 25th International Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil and more. Just this past spring 2014, with much critical and public attention, Walker installed her first large-scale public project in the Domino Sugar Factory in New York. Presented in collaboration with Creative Time, “her physically and conceptually expansive installation–a massive, sugar-coated sphinx-like woman–responded to the building and its history.” 2Walker’s work is titled “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant” The work included 35 tons of sugar, 210 volunteers, 32 crew members, 9 weekends, 130,554 visitors and was completely free to the public.

Left: Kara Walker, “A Subtlety” at Domino Sugar Factory, Photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic, 2014.

Walker continues to sharpen her focus and work, and stands as just one example of the many artists, designers, architects, curators, and historians whom Gallery 400 has hosted in their continued efforts to foster dialogue from a diverse range of artistic practices and positions.

Written by Sally Eaves, a current Curatorial Intern at Gallery 400.

See current events and Voices lectures here.

i. Walker, Hamza. “Cut It Out.” January 1997. Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1997.
ii “About the Project.” Creative Time. http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/. i. Walker, Hamza. “Cut It Out.” January 1997. Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1997.
ii “About the Project.” Creative Time. http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/.

Interview with Ramón Miranda Beltrán, Standard of Living Reading Room Contributor

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 16:30:00 -0500

As a supplement to Standard of Living: Art and 21st Century Economies and Work, Gallery 400 has created a Reading Room with articles, videos, publications and web resources. Exploring the legacies of industry, immaterial labor, service work, invisible labor and more, the texts and resources in Gallery 400's Reading Room articulate a variety of responses to the relationships between labor, economy, and politics. Gallery 400 Curatorial Intern, Claire Kissinger interviewed artist Ramón Miranda Beltrán, included in the Nice Work If You Can Get It exhibition, about his contribution to the Reading Room.

Ramón Miranda Beltrán

Claire Kissinger: Why are the texts you selected important for you?

Ramón Miranda Beltrán: I selected Puerto Rico's law 160-2013 passed December 24, 2013 that cut benefits on teachers' pensions. This austerity law was fought with a general strike by teachers in PR. In a similar way to the teachers' strikes in Chicago, the public conversation was revolving around government funding. To me, the lack of political will to extract revenues from the wealthy has become a global trend and global solidarity and direct political engagement are our weapons to fight. This is why I choose The Holding Pattern from Endnotes. This essay touches on the current austerity struggle and it helped me understand and realize that the walls dividing our struggles need to be taken down.

CK: How are "work" and "art" related?

RMB: I will distinguish "labor" from "work" and say that "work" is effort, I say effort to eliminate the hierarchies of wage associated to the word "labor" also to include all the types of work that can be possible with the intention of including all genders and all regions of the world. In this sense "art" is just one manifestation of "work". In the current configuration of our world I believe that we all have to bring the conversation of putting human needs in front of capital in every aspect of our lives, in order to change our culture from capitalism to a human culture.

CK: What can workers in your field do to support workers in other fields?

RMB: With solidarity, from making art work that engages with struggles elsewhere to activism locally and internationally, there are people needed in every aspect of our struggle.