Female Guises: Suzanne Bocanegra at the Fabric Workshop

Suzanne Bocanegra, Installation view of La Fille, 2018

Suzanne Bocanegra has filled the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia with tongue-in-cheek meditations on the nature of womanhood in an exhibition titled Poorly Watched Girls. The title derives from 18th c. French ballet La Fille mal gardée about a young girl who manages to evade her mother’s gaze to pursue an unsanctioned love affair. Bocanegra’s girls are often invoked presences rather than actual people, for example in the costumed mannequins of La Fille (pictured above), which conceptually restages the inspirational ballet, or in photographs of Catholic nuns (pictured below) in Dialogue of the Carmelites. The highlight of the exhibition for me is Valley, featuring simultaneous facing projections of women mimicking an off-kilter Judy Garland. Posing women in many guises, and many situations: romantic, spiritual, or otherwise, Bocanegra suggests the unstable and circumstantial nature of the female condition, something that can be created or discarded, not unlike a costume.


Suzanne Bocanegra, detail,
Dialogue of the Carmelites, 2018
Suzanne Bocanegra, detail,
Dialogue of the Carmelites, 2018

If La Fille is deliberately and campily theatrical in its plays on costumes and stage sets, the installation Dialogue of the Carmelites creates a more contemplative, intimate atmosphere. Dialogue of the Carmelites is a 20th c. opera, which in Bocanegra’s hands transforms into an installation of book pages from the 1955 edition of Guide to the Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States. Bocanegra has embroidered the pages, causing the nuns in their orders’ habits to look even more alien. A sound installation haunts the room with the phrase “when I am alone.”

Suzanne Bocanegra, Valley, 2018

Valley recalls two different kinds of valleys: the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, for which Judy Garland did the awkward screen test that is recreated here by different actors, and the uncanny valley. Garland’s screen test is notable because of the deeply uncomfortable way she inhabits the space, twitching and laughing awkwardly as she models four outfits. She was later fired from the film. By this point in her life, the child star had become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and the screen test happened only a couple years before Garland overdosed and died at the age of 47. Valley sets eight projections facing each other down a long room, with benches in the middle for the viewer to engage with the different clips.

Bocanegra brings together creative woman from across the arts to mimic the unfortunate screen test: visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and Joan Jonas, choreographer Deborah Hay, actor Kate Valk, poet Anne Carson, dancer Wendy Whelan, singer Alicia Hall Moran, and writer Tanya Selvaratnam. Chosen by Bocanegra as “strong women artists,” they act out Garland’s wardrobe test convincingly to the last second and detail, each modeling the outfits that Garland wore (and which were recreated by Bocanegra in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop). It places these strong women artists in the vulnerable position that Garland had found herself. The uncanny valley is often cited as the unsettling feeling one gets when AI veers too close to the human. Here eight shining simulacra of Judy Garland are similarly unsettling in the close way that their gestures echo each other as well as Garland. Bocanegra has created a hall-of-mirrors effect as we consider the slippery, insubstantial projections and their tenuous relation to the original subject, who for most people exists, then as now, mainly on the silver screen. Garland, like her impersonators, was also putting on a guise for the camera, albeit with hints as to the strain it caused her.

Suzanne Bocanegra, Valley, 2018

Each of these installations, as well as a fourth work on view (Lemonade, Roses, Satchel) stems from a specific touchstone full of rich associations and with its own storyline. Moving easily through medium and with beautiful attention to textural details, Bocanegra provides a provocative, heart-felt, yet light consideration of what it means to be a girl, in culture. The exhibition Poorly Watched Girls is on view through February 17 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Daniel Small and Hiwa K: “74 million million million tons” at SculptureCenter

Detail from video in Animus Mneme (2018) by Daniel R. Small

74 million million million tons asks what kind of evidence, or bodies of knowledge, art can produce. This abstract premise touches on pressing issues, such as the illegal movement of bodies across borders, environmental destruction, the line between the human and the android, and much else. The hope, perhaps, for curators Ruba Katrib and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, is that an oblique perspective can effectively counter the dominance of narratives produced by larger societal forces. Ten artists (Shadi Habib Allah, George Awde, Carolina Fusilier, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Hiwa K, Nicholas Mangan, Sean Raspet and Nonfood, Susan Schuppli, Daniel R. Small, and Hong-Kai Wang) present distinct bodies of recent work. Because each of their works is a deep dive into a new terrain, it requires an investment of time and attention on the part of the viewer to take in this moderately sized show.

Installation view featuring Animus Mneme (2018) by Daniel R. Small, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

Daniel Small’s new work Animus Mneme (2018) examines the transhuman and the eternal with a mixture of video and seeming artifacts. In a riveting video, Small interviews Bina48, an android replica of a woman named Bina Aspen that was commissioned on behalf of her partner. The digital avatar speaks convincingly about the gap between machine and human experience. Bina48 asserts that she is evolving toward a human-like consciousness. Unlike the human she was based on, Bina48 can “live” forever. The people behind this techonology, the Terasem Movement Foundation, believe that a person’s consciousness can be transferred to another biological or technological form. Watch the video in full to hear Bina48 colloquially discusses what might seem impossible: her experience of pregnancy and the philosophical roots of evil.

Installation view featuring Animus Mneme (2018) by Daniel R. Small, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

Recreations of ancient computing specimens shift the timescale of the dialogue from the cutting edge to the ancient. Small also presents videos with footage of an ancient spiritual site in Mexico that add a melancholy and backward-looking tone. The ruins implicitly question what can remain of a human presence. The mix of imagined pasts and possible futures suggests slippage, floating free from our moment in time.

Detail, A View from Above (2017) by Hiwa K, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

Installation view featuring A View from Above (2017) by Hiwa K, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

In contrast, Hiwa K’s video A View from Above (2017) is squarely rooted in the present, albeit narrated through the veil of fiction. The video presents a first-person account of a refugee attempted to flee his country for asylum in Europe. Co-written with Abu Hamdan, a voiceover by Hiwa K narrates the impossible difficulties of navigating bureaucracy while the camera looms over a scale model of a desolate city. Crumbling and devoid of people in hues of sand, it evokes the destroyed towns of the Middle East, such as the one that the artist himself fled. In the video, the migrant is only able to achieve the legal standing worthy of migration by pretending to be from a town in the unsafe zone. Although this immigration story is not the artist’s own, migration here is personal, immanent, and rife with horror and stupidity. It speaks to the desperation that compels people to leave their homes. The current solo exhibition of Hiwa K at the New Museum touches on similar themes, particularly in Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), a 2017 work included in the last documenta.

Installation view, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

For me, other works of note include a project by Susan Schuppli that represents the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with such glistening beauty that in creates a troubling relation in the viewer to disaster. A striking Oculus Rift experience EVA v3.0: No right way 2 cum by Sidsel Meineche Hansen puts the viewer in the position of a female avatar masturbating, a position which graphically switches when the avatar faces and seems to ejaculate onto the viewer’s googles. The project intends to  challenging how women’s bodies are policed, specifically how representation of female orgasm is regulated by British pornography laws.

74 million million million tons is on view at SculptureCenter in Long Island City through July 30, 2018.

Fire, Humor, and Water: Videos by FX Harsono and the Propeller Group at Asia Society

Installation view with FX Harsono’s 1998 Burned Victims in foreground

Several provocative video works in After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History, on view at Asia Society through January 31, caught my eye, notably ones by FX Harsono and the Propeller Group. The curators chose the works in the exhibition not as a survey of art from Southeast Asia–there are only 7 artists and 1 collective from 3 countries–but because they speak to the role contemporary art can have in countries struggling with reform, free speech, and democracy. FX Harsono uses blowtorches and chainsaws in aggressive performances that express rage at political events in his native Indonesia. Of a later generation, the Propeller Group, a collective of three artist connected to Vietnam, use humor in their polished video works to point to lingering dissonances in contemporary Vietnamese society.

FX Harsono. Detail, Burned Victims, 1998. Burned wood, metal, shoes.

Destruction and Burned Victims are literal titles for these late ’90s video performances. FX Harsono performed Destruction in 1997 as a response to concerns about voter fraud under president Suharto’s authoritarian New Order government. In it, he destroys theater masks resting on three chairs, which represent the three political parties then vying for power. Couched as a piece of public theater–with Harsono in traditional make up and the masks referring to puppet theater–it was also an act of civil disobedience. At that moment, assembly of more than five people was illegal in public space. Harsono attacks and destroys the wooden masks, first by chainsaw and then by blowtorch, in front of onlookers.

FX Harsono. Still, Burned Victims, 1998. Performance video with sound; 8 minutes, 41 seconds.

FX Harsono. Still, Burned Victims, 1998. Performance video with sound; 8 minutes, 41 seconds.

Burned Victims memorializes a protest in 1998 against Suharto that turned violent–rioters locked civilians inside a shopping mall in Jakarta and set the building on fire. The sculptural installation is equally grisly–a row of charred, torso shaped pieces of wood suspended on metal frames, each of which has a pair of burned shoes at the end. The different pairs of burned shoes turn what might be a more abstract sculpture into something much more stark and horrible, reminding of the individuality of the victims of the fire. In the video performance, Harsono douses the torsos with gasoline and lights them on fire. Signs with slogans of Riot burn, and Harsono places another sign in front of the audience: “Who is responsible?”

The Propeller Group. (Still) The Dream, 2012. Single-channel HD video; 4 minutes, 20 seconds.

The Propeller Group, who had an exhibition last year at James Cohen gallery, strike a different tone. Their two video works use humor to critique society in a more distant and subtle approach than Harsono’s outraged cry. One, called The Dream, shows a Honda Dream motorbike that, strategically placed overnight on a city street by the artists, is dismantled of its parts by various thieves as the night wears on. The skeleton of the bike is on view in the gallery in front of a time-lapse video of the night. It is quite humorous to watch this ubiquitous Vietnamese status symbol disappear over the course of the night. Behind the joke, the Propeller Group also comment on the corrosive elements of capitalist change that has swept the nominally Communist state.

Installation view of The Dream at Asia Society, featuring stripped down body of Honda Dream motorbike in foreground

The second work that they show, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, consists of two facing monitors–one plays Viet Cong promotional footage from 19631 and the other shows present-day foreign tourists shooting old AK47s leftover from the Vietnam war. The tourists mug for the camera as they gleefully enacting war scenes. Both videos are about the Cu Chi Tunnels, underground passages used by the Viet Cong to combat the U.S. during the Vietnam war that are outside Ho Chi Minh City. The same soundtrack and captions overlays both, highlighting eerie parallels despite the disjunct in time and purpose. Both the old propaganda and the new tourist site are distant from the carnage and suffering that characterized the lived experience of the war, and indeed, instead seem designed to perpetuate such history as war games.

The Propeller Group. Still, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, 2012. Two-channel synchronized video installation with sound; 20 minutes, 4 seconds.

The Propeller Group. Still, The Guerrillas of Cu Chi, 2012. Two-channel synchronized video installation with sound; 20 minutes, 4 seconds.

From the far end of the exhibition galleries comes the sound of rushing water. Already, in contrast to blowtorches and AK47s, the use of water rather than fire or guns strikes a less violent note. In this video performance, Harsono writes his name in Chinese characters over and over again. The artist is ethnically Chinese, a minority in Indonesia, and in the face of discrimination against the language and culture, he only learned the Chinese characters of his name as an adult. We watch from the other side of the glass panel as the strokes of black paint begin to overlap and take up more and more of the surface, growing into a black mass. Suddenly water pours down from above, washing away the ink even as the artist keeps making the motions with his hand. Rather than water as a cleansing agent, here water is a deluge sweeping away the artist’s Sisyphean efforts in a show of force and might.

FX Harsono. Writing in the Rain. 2011. Video performance