An Error of Identification

Anton Perich, Victor Hugo Rojas, 1978. Screen shot.

This text is the outcome of an error. Anton Perich’s video Victor Hugo Rojas (1978) was included in Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc., the group show that Nick Mauss put together at Basel’s Kunsthalle. While watching the piece, I thought I recognized for just a fleeting moment another video seen elsewhere the day before, The Spark between L and D (1988) by the artist Kathleen White. Spark was part of The Making of Husbands, Christina Ramberg en dialogue, curated by Anna Gritz and mounted at 49 Nord 6 Est - Frac Lorraine in Metz. Although these two works feature a comparable mummification scene, in reality they largely diverge in terms of narrative and atmosphere. All the same I would like to believe my mistake wasn’t completely by chance. This feeling of déjà-vu was suggested by the exhibitions in question, which brought together in dialogue format historical and recent works of art. So I am going to use that initial error of identification as a method of investigation and consider the current culture wars in light of those that raged in the 1980s.

Kathleen White, The Spark between L and D, 1988. Screen shot. 

The shows from which the works of Kathleen White and Anton Perich are drawn explore the body’s relationship to architecture and the institution from a queer and feminist perspective. The AIDS crisis and the way it reconfigured representation is one of the narratives that inform those shows. For me it is interesting to question the contemporary rereading of the art of that period by cultural institutions just when they have been called to think about the forms of exclusion they perpetuate.[1] To better grasp the position of cultural institutions vis-à-vis questions of identity, this text will mix periods and political struggles, acting as if 2020 were 1988.

While this approach may flatten out historical differences, it is nevertheless based on certain parallels. Like AIDS, which decimated vulnerable communities in the 1980s and ‘90s, in particular gays, the novel coronavirus is provoking in the United States a higher death rate among African-Americans. AIDS brought to light systemic homophobia and racism. The former was vigorously combatted by numerous artists and activists. The latter remains a major problem with serious health consequences. Proof of this lies in a petition[2] by Black Lives Matter in which the movement demands additional means of support for persons of color, who find themselves on the front lines of the crisis because they are lacking social security coverage, exercise at-risk professions, and are more likely to suffer from comorbidities. The police violence that set off today’s wave of protests is part of this deeper system which the Covid-19 has shined a light on. So it seems to me quite productive to think about these historical events, and their repercussions on practices of making art and mounting joint exhibitions, by taking as my starting point that moment of ambiguous pleasure I experienced when my mind superimposed two rastered video images in Basel.

Detour by a long hallway

Before analyzing Anton Perich’s and Kathleen White’s works, I am going to allow myself a digression on the American artist Bradley Kronz’s show called Long Hallway, which I cocurated with Nicolas Brulhart at Forde in 2018. In that exhibition, Kronz explored the dizzying feeling viewers experience when facing intertextuality, and proposed a deviant system of identification which will guide me in my approach to the works and shows that interest us here. During our preliminary conversations, Nicolas and I asked Kronz about a minor esthetic pattern of contemporary art (ca. 2017), which we nicknamed Hüttenästhetik. In a troubling way, varnished wood, half-timbering, and exposed beams were emerging in his works at the very same time they were appearing in exhibition design and display in German-speaking Europe. It eventually became clear to us, this visual trope pointed to two distinct elements, i.e., the neo-Tudor style in fashion in New York suburbs over in America, and the Germanic medieval folklore dear to Tomi Ungerer along the Rhine. One was appropriating pompous kitsch while others were doing sniggering antimodern throwbacks to the authentic. Without going into greater detail, I shall simply note that Donald Trump spent his childhood in a half-timbered house in Queens that is now an address listed on Airbnb.[3]

Bradley Kronz, Long Hallway, Forde, 2018. Photo: Julien Gremaud. Courtesy Forde.

For his Long Hallway show, Kronz exhibited a series of painting-collages made up of embedded squares like Josef Albers’ series Homage to the Square (1950-1976). Each work constituted an enigma, referencing mostly minor figures from the culture industry and the history of art. Kronz thus reintegrated in Albers’ supposedly closed neutral system meanings and fragments of identity, including Albers’, an artist who came out of Bauhaus and fled Europe for the United States, where he taught at the protohippy Black Mountain College in North Carolina before joining Yale’s teaching staff. Albers was thus one of the passengers of that long hallway connecting European modernism and the American counterculture. In Kronz’s work, art practiced as heretical reading thus involved an ironic reassignment of the biographical in the work of art.

View of the exhibition, Bradley Kronz, Long Hallway, curated by Sylvain Menétrey and Nicolas Brulhart, Forde, 2018. Photo: Julien Gremaud. Courtesy Forde.

At the center of the Forde space, a television set looking like a piece of sculpture was showing a video made up of fragments of feature-length fiction films in which various characters, facing a pile of photographs, suddenly experience a revelation. The video made possible a transference of identification between these stories of an epiphany and a public investigator who had to reconstruct a certain meaning from a forest of signs and leads which the artist had dissolved in the geometrical gradations of his paintings. Watching the two underground scenes of mummification mentioned above within a number of hours of each other reminded me of that same excitement and dizzying realization in searching for meaning within the system of modernity and its contemporary echoes. Yet, just as Kronz’s paintings summon us to understand it, identification is a mug’s game that opens onto the abyss of another enigma. It is that gap – which we viewers can fit ourselves into – that the shows mounted by Frac Lorraine and Basel’s Kunsthalle deepened. 

Inaugural scene

In the video documenting her performance piece The Spark between L and D, Kathleen White is dressed as a nurse and seen hastily applying bandages to her aching body. She hums George Benson’s On Broadway until a bandage is stuck to her mouth, reducing her to silence. Perich’s video is likewise the recording of a performance piece, or more accurately a ritual, which also contains his mummification scene. The performance artist Victor Hugo Rojas, naked and lying on his stomach, has his body anointed with shaving cream and talcum powder, then wrapped with strips of toilet paper by two beautiful bare-chested young men. Those in the know will recognize the future mustachioed gay porn star Chad Douglas[4] looking on in a thong and leather boots. This video is better known for its final scene, during which Rojas destroys a painting by Andy Warhol.[5] The series of occasionally obscure acts carried out by Rojas is accompanied by disco and soul hits, including – still another echo – a song by George Benson, This Masquerade.

Over a period of ten years how have they evolved, the emotions summoned by these similar acts and documented by the same medium, video, that medium of intimate theater and the small screen? Why are these historical works of art reappearing at the same time in group shows? How does one explain these two exhibitions’ common exploration of the dialectics of the home space as a place for the development of a personal imagery and mental and physical confinement, curated by the artist Nick Mauss in Basel’s Kunsthalle and the curator Anna Gritz[6] in Metz? What does this rereading of the domestic in light of contemporary body and identity politics teach us?

Ironically the art centers focused on the interior for a few weeks only before they, too, had to shut their doors due to a health emergency that forced us to confine ourselves to our houses, work remotely and be consumers online only. Has the Covid-19 epidemic come to symbolically complete the arc of the contemporary rereading of the crisis of representation induced by AIDS? How does one reinvent the promiscuity[7] that Douglas Crimp asserted had saved«us», whereas we are enjoined to keep our distance? 

Reparing the body

In 1978, the year Perich’s video was made, New York’s underground scene was beginning to feel the devastation of the real estate speculation that followed the city’s near bankruptcy. I am thinking of the Whit Stillman film The Last Days of Disco, which recreated in the late 1990s the end-of-a-cycle atmosphere from the start of the preceding decade. As far as I know, no one has ever chattered as much in a disco film. It is as if, conscious of having shown up late to the game, the film’s characters, young white Ivy League graduates – the archetypes of the yuppies whose financial domination pushed out much less affluent groups to the city’s margins – were warding off their ghostliness.

The Last Days of Disco, Whit Stillman, 1998. Screen shot. 

Perich’s video precedes the arrival of these living-dead who cannibalized a culture and usurped urban space. Perich films the sex appeal and insolence of disco through the body and gesture of the Latino performer Victor Hugo Rojas and his friends. The body is a weapon aimed at the symbols of wealth. The performer slashes Warhol’s painting, then runs a dildo over it. This iconoclastic final scene is complicated by the symbolic murder of the father. The body is cultivated, fetichized, even embalmed in an utterly mad pharaonic vision. The mummification freezes time in a cult of youth and deification while sacrificing the carnal envelope, which is transformed into a relic.

The bohemian apartment of Perich’s video gives way, ten years later, to the clinical space of a studio where Kathleen White, a nurse without borders, is seen busily working alone. She gives herself several blows to the head, licks her own blood, ties her own legs to the legs of a chair like an enraged madman, feels her organs, and covers herself with strips of gauze. The body is ill. «On Broadway,» the song she is humming, becomes the mournful lament of the superstars of the underground. White embodies and entwines both the battered body of victims and the body of the survivor, she who provides care and dresses wounds in a possessive relationship similar to the one Elisabeth Lebovici displays when she writes,«…what AIDS has done to me.»[8] Rage, suffering, powerlessness, and the absurd all mix in this desperate attempt to care for her skin while making it disappear. In these artworks, separated by a decade, mummification mirrors the act of preserving the medium of video in a desire that interweaves life, death, and survival. The strips of cloth run through the story and its catastrophes, and are transferred from skin to skin, male to female. They thwart identity, which they replace with concepts of recognition and transhistorical promiscuity. 

Storming the walls

View of the exhibition Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. curated by Nick Mauss, with (foreground) Georgia Sagri, Deep Cut, 2018, and (background) Ketty La Rocca, Comma with 3 dots, 1970, Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel.

The two shows which featured these videos explored the body’s relationship to the institution according to apparently inverse modalities. In Mauss’s exuberant version, the subjectivities go beyond their limits and reconfigure the environment. At the entrance to the show there is a gallery of characters from Ray Johnson’s artist’s book Ray Gives a Party (1955); the book is presented in a film in which we see its pages being turned. These figures announce the parade of ornamental and eccentric works to come. Using collage, Johnson illustrated the costumed attendees, scroungers, celebrities and unwanted guests of an imaginary party that has been shut down, as any good party should be, by a police raid.

The show is haunted by traces and clues left behind by outstanding guests. There was the PVC sculpture in the shape of a J by Ketty La Rocca, which you might read as a French je, or “I,” whose referent remains to be determined. On the other side, a comma followed by three full stops make the connection with the surroundings. Bea Schlingelhoff pays homage to the activist Anne-Marie Im Hof-Piguet with the design of a typeface bearing her name that has «colonized» the exhibition as the font used in an accompanying leaflet and on the institution’s website, where it can be actualized as a free download. The sensuous, ethereal sculptures of peach and mauve veils by the 1970s American artist Rosemary Mayer call forth powerful women like the Roman empress Galla Placidia with their titles, while their broad shapes elicit freer associations that range from the long pleated dresses of Madeleine Vionnet to female genitalia in a subtle semiotic play of the particular and the general. The signature these works reference does not reconnect with the heroic link between expressionist painting and its mark on the canvas. That is, disguised, fantasized, collective, or temporary, the singularities that are invoked are also those of people other than the artist – as in Bea Schlingelhoff’s case – and each viewer is free to appropriate them.

View of the exhibition Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. curated by Nick Mauss, with Rosemary Mayer, Galla Placidia, 1973, Kunsthalle Basel, 2020. Photo: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel.

The Frac Lorraine show, The Making of Husbands, Christina Ramberg en dialogue, took shape around a group of paintings on Isorel (a natural fiberboard) and drawings of the American artist Christina Ramberg (1946-1995). Ramberg focused on the mechanisms that mold and shape the body, either standardizing or singularizing it. In particular, the artist used patches of uniform color in a palette of nocturnal hues to paint a series of streamlined busts sheathed in corsets. These body-machines, the stuff of Ballardian science fiction, give off a troubling erotic imagery, where the subjected female body becomes dominant.

Christina Ramberg, Tight Hipped, 1974. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg, Courtesy of the Collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism. 

The works of the other artists «in dialogue» disseminate through a series of everyday objects and technologies the questions of social control at the heart of the powerful Rambergian matrix. Like Alexandra Bircken’s Löwenmaul, a dark colored wig sewn to a bra, some works go off in pursuit of a phantasmagorical and sexual vanishing point. Others, like the low gates that Ghislaine Leung has set up at the entrance to several of the galleries for her Gates, conjure up the idea of domestication of our earliest childhood. These gates, which have to be pushed open to enter the galleries, make visitors aware of their movements in the institutional space. The variety of manifestations does have the virtue of not reducing Ramberg’s work to a mere feminist reading while also tending to create a catalogue effect that lightens the tension and desire haunting the pieces individually. 

Contemporary catharsis

Beyond their own qualities, these two mirror exhibitions work to open a negotiation between the body and its domestic environment, or more broadly between singular desires and social control. The strips of cloth, wigs, corsets, samples of «bizarre» 18^th-century silks from Lyons, and sumptuous dresses are as much instruments that train and mold bodies as vectors of emancipation that render them unconventional through ornamentation. This approach based on masks, disguise, constructed settings, and the heightened body reflects forms of disidentification that act on visible embodiments as well as at the level of the link with their creators. Ramberg’s busts are devoid of a face, even gender for some. Schingelhoff’s font refers to an activist figure that becomes a collective text, infinitely modifiable. Identification is held in check. It all plays out in the materiality, the image of White’s and Perich’s cocoons of bandages or toilet paper, into which the body can slip to be preserved, repaired, or transformed. The repetition of these rituals of mummification works like a rallying sign, a subterranean code, spanning the ages, and getting transmitted within a community. They indicate a collective belonging, even if they are loaded with different affects according to the context.

View of the exhibition The Making of Husbands, Christina Ramberg en dialogue, curated by Anna Gritz, with Diane Simpson, Vest – red/gray, 2008; Richard Rezac, Lancaster, 2004; Gaylen Gerber, Backdrop, 2020; Ghislaine Leung, SHROOMS. Frac Lorraine, 2020. Photo: Fred Dott.

 This resurgence of exhibitions with queer and feminist strategies offers a counterpoint to the contemporary modes of singularization. Before both the paradox of the spectacularization of queer identity that is being essentialized, and the heroization of the self on social networks, these shows offer singularities in movement, where the binary logic of identity and identification never completely coincides. The gap they produce can be embodied collectively.

What remains to be understood is where the institution stands vis-à-vis these processes of deterritorialization. Through these shows focused on the relationship between identity and architecture, the institution seems to perform both its function and structure. It duplicates in miniature or otherwise its dual role as site for the expression of radical subjectivities and a space of normalization. Its model would be the «solitary retreat» where Des Esseintes, the antihero of Huysmans’s novel Against Nature (1884) creates, places beneath a bell jar, and embalms his singular, highly aestheticized reality. A retreat that also echoes our contemporary lifestyles of confinement to our rooms and projection in the world of representation behind our Retina displays. Running through this model just beneath the surface is the figure of the dandy in which the art institution seems to recognize itself. They cultivate their superior detachment, however much they subvert the standards. This position continues to overlook it all, even though we are experiencing a strong politicization of the social and cultural field.

Over the past few years the controversies touching on identity (for example, those involving cultural appropriation) have evinced the atomization of the public sphere and the growing difficulty of holding a democratic debate when each individual becomes their own online medium, whereas video used to be a collectively experienced one. Cultural institutions that are supposed to play a mediating role are helpless when it comes to taking part in these debates. They do not know how to relay them other than from this position of withdrawing to the comfort of their theoretical house, or the position – which they rightly reject – of a performance of supposedly authentic identities, whether it is connected with Hüttenästhetik or with the inclusion of artists according to their race or sexual orientation. This impasse is partly due to the fact that they have been unable to integrate diversity at the very heart of their structures. To devise a salutary promiscuity in a time of pandemic crisis and political demands, and to become credible with respect to these questions of identity, cultural institutions must undertake the process of examination they have been invited to by, for example, the collective called the Black artists and cultural workers in Switzerland.