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The Usable PastGlenn Ligon

The Usable Past

By Sarah Myers on October 19, 2017

The Usable Past: “The concept that a self-conscious examination of historical figures, moments, and symbols can shape current and future political formation.”[1]

This is how the Whitney defines the title of one of five galleries in their ongoing permanent collection exhibition An Incomplete History of Protest. The works in the gallery present memory and nostalgia as both powerful and yet often insufficient vehicles to re-experience the past. Sharing tropes of obfuscation and anonymity, the works materialize the incomplete nature of memory and documentation.

Annette Lemieux
Black Mass, 1991, Annette Lemieux (1957-). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau © Annette Lemieux

Annette Lemieux’s painting Black Mass (1991), in which she replaces the protest signs in a civil rights march with black, empty squares, hangs across the room from Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (Speech/Crowd) #2, a photograph of the Million Man March which Ligon has blurred and layered with coal dust. These works recall acts of censorship and evoke the fading hope of social change in a world where battles for civil rights must be repeatedly fought. However, the works in the exhibition that truly express the concept of “the usable past” are those which feature the museum as their main subject.

Lining the walls of the museum’s new Meatpacking building, a multiplicity of letters of protest written to the Whitney by artists and organizations related to the institution emerge from the Whitney’s archives. In a letter from 1971 addressed to former director John I.H. Baur, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition announced their opposition to the 1971 exhibition Black Artists in America and declared their plans to demonstrate on the museum’s premises. Their initial discontent stemmed from the Whitney’s seemingly empty promise to hire and consult with black art leaders for the curating of the show. The BECC’s correspondence with the Whitney attests to the fact that the institution has dealt with issues surrounding the cultural agency of marginalized groups in an art context. Alongside this letter, dozens of other requests from artists implore the museum to remove their work as acts of protest or solidarity during moments of political unrest, and urge the museum to take a stance on current socio-political debates.

The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Black Artist’s Correspondence, 1969-1971. Eight sheets. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives
Housewife: Jennifer Rubell’s Conceptual History of the Modern Woman

Housewife: Jennifer Rubell’s Conceptual History of the Modern Woman

By Brontë Hebdon on March 30, 2017

Jennifer Rubell’s Housewife, an installation at the Sargent’s Daughters gallery on the Lower East Side, attempts a conceptual history of modern femininity. In the simplest terms, the show is a meditation on the seeming universality of white, middle-class femininity. However, to critique Rubell’s stark visual vocabulary in this way fails to acknowledge that her work nevertheless touches a certain comprehensive psychological experience, which is both explicit and all-inclusive. From the 1950s housewife to contemporary dating and the difficulties of being a modern woman in the workforce, Rubell’s four pieces ­­– Pedestal, Vessel, Partition Paintings, and Threshold ­– visualize the precarious nature of a femininity defined and circumscribed by others.

Jennifer Rubell, Pedestal, 2017. Photo courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters.
Jennifer Rubell, Pedestal, 2017. Photo courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters.

Three steps into the gallery space and the viewer is confronted by Pedestal, an industrial-quality vacuum cleaner placed next to a polished pair of red patent-leather heels fitted atop a heavy square platform. The glaring absence of the female form (the immediate assumption being that the empty space is, in fact, female), registers instantaneously. The effect is an invitation for the viewer to come closer, to slip on the heels, to grip the vacuum and fill that empty space. Although no apron or string of pearls is provided, the associations Rubell creates resonate with clarity. The piece references the commodified feminine ideal of the 1950s housewife who vacuums in her heels, has a hot meal on the table by six pm, and is ready for romance every night. However, because Rubell empties out that visual space, the viewer subconsciously fills it with her own form, which in return highlights the falsity and psychological dangers inherent in such mediating feminine perfection.

Sondra Perry: Resident Evil

Sondra Perry: Resident Evil

By Jared Quinton on February 13, 2017

Resident Evil, Sondra Perry’s first solo institutional exhibition, fills the second-floor gallery of The Kitchen with a handful of video works made in the past year. Each is “immersive” in one way or another, deploying tactics of spatial activation and coercive, embodied viewing to force visitors into visceral engagement with the screens and their troubling content. These strategies of discord and discomfort mirror the works themselves, which center themes of police brutality and other racialized violence, examining how images and narratives of these issues circulate, distort, and abstract in the digital realm.

Installation view of Resident Evil at the Kitchen, New York, 2016. All works courtesy the artist. Photos by Jason Mandella.
Installation view of Resident Evil at the Kitchen, New York, 2016. All works courtesy of the artist. Photos by Jason Mandella.

The first work one encounters in the exhibition is netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 1.0.3 (2016), set into its own tiny black box. In the video, Perry draws a provocative parallel between the “blue screen of death”—the infamous error screen in Windows operating systems—and the “blue wall of silence,” an unwritten oath among police officers not to incriminate one another in cases of excessive force, brutality, or even murder. At one point in the video, footage of Bill Gates and other Microsoft executives dancing on a convention stage is dubbed over with a deadpan, computerized description of the unwritten officer’s code of conduct (perhaps a double entendre with the computer code that later scrolls by). Another passage features images of women killed by police set to the same voice describing the blue error screens in banal terms. Though intentionally ambiguous, the video uses montage to suggest that capitalist systems and their technological agents are intimately connected with, if not responsible for, the violence wrought against black bodies in neoliberal America.