under construction :-)
The effemination of the males had continued with quickened tempo. His depressing and erudite productions possessed a strange enchantment, an incantation that stirred one to the depths. This room, each of whose sides was lined with mirrors that echoed each other all along the walls, reflecting, as far as the eye could reach, whole series of rose boudoirs…made fragrant with the odor of mint emanating from the exotic wood of the furniture. Aside from the sensual delights for which he had designed this chamber...there were other, more personal and perverse pleasures which he enjoyed in these languorous surroundings—pleasures which in some way stimulated memories of his past pains and dead ennuis. For the delight of his spirit and the joy of his eyes, he had desired a few suggestive creatives that cast him into an unknown world, revealing to him the contours of new conjectures, agitating the nervous system by the violent deliriums, complicated nightmares, nonchalant or atrocious chimerae they induced. [1]
Taking turtles for urban strolls had become enormously dangerous for turtles, and only somewhat less so for flaneurs. The speed-up principles of mass production had spilled over into the streets, waging ‘war on flaneurie'...On the boulevards, the flaneur, now jostled by crowds and in full view of the urban poverty which inhabited public streets, could maintain a rhapsodic view of modern existence only with the aid of illusion, which is just what the literature of flanerie—physiognomies, novels of the crowd—was produced to provide. If at the beginning, the flaneur as private subject dreamed himself out into the world, at the end, flanerie was an ideological attempt to reprivatize social space...The flaneur had become a ‘suspicious’ character. [2]
Facing off with some of civilization’s most pressing exigencies—class, economics, divisions of labor and leisure, and the politicization of how a body appears or is represented—is a shimmering, misty reflection that peers disquietly into the potency and latency of what Marcuse called “The Aesthetic Dimension,” one in which desire and death, fetish and commodity, material and meaning are circulated in a continuous dance. At this site of intersection, art, design, and fashion are jointly mapped across a volatile bourgeoisie: consumption comes under scrutiny, rapt negotiations between ‘high’ and ‘low’ are processed, and beauty finds itself an ever moving target contingent upon dominant power structures and popular ideologies. It is through the densities of these atmospheres and their attendant affects that RUSCHWOMAN flutters as an all too interested passerby. As flanêuse, as dandy, as artistic interlocutor, the gallery and her audiences daydream their ways among shirts and the torsos who wear them, perfumes, millinery, and comportments both sophisticated and foreboding. These phantasia and what mysteries they betray about our cultural value systems rest at the heart of a paradigm wherein decadence, luxury, self care, and eccentricities are mapped relationally.
Convulsions of attraction and repulsion upset time as it attempts to pass across these eccentric bodies; entanglements emerge that tie bows into the linear order of unidirectional chronology. Fashion does that. Trauma does, too. Something returns. And before you know it, you’re ensnared in a trap of your own predilections: held as a potion in a bottle, drawn underwater by sirens and their cannibalistic festivities, or lost—as a white bunny might be—in the endless caverns of a magician’s hat. This exhibition invites repose and dreaming vastly about eventual demise and the decadent pathways that unfurl toward those horizons. Glittering jewels, dazzling rhetoric, hushed inferences, glinting objects of erotic longing: you’ve discovered a darker world just behind a secret trap door. Please make yourself comfortable.
[1] Joris-Karl Huysmans. Against the Grain. Translated by John Howard. New York: Lieber & Lewis, 1922. Print, pp. 16, 28–29, 90, 101.
[2] Susan Buck-Morss. “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique, Autumn, 1986, No. 39. Print, pp. 1-2–103.
It is wrong that we walk into walls for life. That we type with broken wrists. That the soundtrack to the day is an engine scraping the last oil off its crevasses. That the small voice barely heard in the grinding will break itself to feel approximately free. That to appear healthy a gummed-up drive will surely reappear as desire.
–Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. “Suicidiation Nation.”
Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
The Hundreds. Print, p. 61
And they did this with the buoying political lessons of writerly style—style as praxis, as a way of doing political thought by critical worldmaking…asking much of us, by engaging us in the work as comrades, felt intimates, potential or actual friends. Their sentences are wound tight, portable, quick in their punch but longing for a slow unpack.
–Jill Casid. “They Did What They Could Do at the Time: Thinking with and after Lauren Berlant.”
Art in America. July 20, 2021.
I feel that understanding is an unnecessary violence I do to the work of art. I live in a secular, liberal society. I can do what I like, but I am not interested in exerting control over the ideological content of my work. I let my community do that. I exert a lot more control over the material form my work takes.
–Mike Cloud in conversation with Andreana Donahue.
Maake Magazine. Issue 13, 2022.
https://www.maakemagazine.com/mike-cloud
To inscribe language (back) into painting as a surface, form, object, process, habit is an erotic struggle, an episode of mud wrestling, slippery grey clay and limbs akimbo, a battle between longing for legibility and an expansive, encroaching capacity for jouissance: ecstatic cathexis, orgasmic dazzle of materiality feeling, developing feelings for, itself. Oriented toward a deliberately limited palette on the one hand and the centering of excerpted text on the other, Zachary Rawe’s new groups of paintings on panel align to the affect of rambling text messages, faded street signage, and a struggle toward everyday poetry that might mark out post-industrial urban epicenters like Rawe’s homebase of Philadelphia and RUSCHWOMAN’s Chicago. Erudite yet squishy, contemplative and tragi-comedic, Rawe’s grey paintings are, in a sense, epitaphs both for hyper specific losses such as longtime inspiration to Rawe’s work, Lauren Berlant (1957–2021), and for more abstract visions for social transformation recently under fire in a political realm of alternative facts, under researched conspiracies, and culture wars waged around the use of fundamental language structures like pronouns and other tools of identification.
In a practice that works the conventions of picture-making toward an invested engagement of a social sphere that extends beyond art worlds proper, one can situate the burgeoning bibliography indirectly implied in the last few years of Rawe’s paintings alongside projects including bread being baked and distributed, grants for rest residencies in sleeping bags the artist sewed, and prototype garments demonstrative of a latent political philosophy that eases zen and Marxist positions into smooth relation. In this sense, Rawe’s paintings swirl their own materiality and traditions in with models for posters and propaganda, signs, aphorisms in the key of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and, well, books.
Collapsing library and gallery, the dialogical aspects of Rawe’s paintings show his attempts to bridge the pitfalls that lie before an approach toward an/other. To do so, past and present are bundled into juicy aspirational matter by which paintings, their borders, and their own closed captioning are manifest. Looking backward, the achievements of Abstract Expressionism were already feeling a little unsatisfactory as the world settled into its new reorganized configuration post-war. Certainly gesture, spiritual symbolics, and a widened field of materiality had been asserted, but it proved difficult to contextualize with a more sedimentary account of everyday ‘modern’ life. The restless and petulant twin step children Minimalism and Pop Art came into focus as indispensable means of situating art praxis in relation to a world superpower’s industrialized society of spectacle: manufacturing to begin with and consumerism to follow. This historical moment of interchange may be thought of as the ‘origin of the species’ of work that Rawe proceeds from. Within the struggle of art relating to the everyday, it seems, is a particular tension about language—speech acts, text, communiques running through the otherwise sensual fields of cunningly painted surfaces. Twombly romantically smeared; Johns stenciled ironies and strategic evasions; Ree Morton blends diaristic aphorism into public discourse; Mira Schor aches in phrases; Roni Horn shivers snippets of poetry; Kay Rosen rules the run-on sentence, word, and phoneme; Cary Leibowitz camps it up in offhanded mopey confession; Mike Cloud gums up the works of systems with carefully devised philosophies whose edges have gone mushy. It is into the fray of this chatter that Zachary Rawe’s paintings draw together quotes, echoes, responses, and dialectical mishaps into a murky and marvelously greyscale field of poetics.
In gesture, workflow, and aesthetic decisions, this new body of work signals to earlier projects Rawe has pursued over the past fifteen years, such as a series of grey t-shirts pieced together in oversized patches redolent of cartoon hobo clowns or the irregular compositions of Gee’s Bend Quilts. Those were assemblages, and so too are the panels RUSCHWOMAN presents, but in Rawe’s shift from the sartorial to the bibliographic as the basis for his integration of fragmentary pieces and parts, the artist stages a nimble collision between body and language, logics by which we are constituted and made to matter. A 2011 painting titled it feels like failure, eponymously inscribed onto a tenderly grubby white monochrome offers an early counterpoint to Rawe’s newest text-based paintings. Slight, humble, and yet glimmering with bits of plastic foliage coated in silver glitter and a single metallic jingle bell appear as a protean form for the ways the artist coaxes so many muddy neutral hues into an enlivened, shimmering plane on which words float freely.
Titled with a twisty paraphrase after one of Ree Morton’s complex installations that evolved from earlier efforts in painting and drawing, RUSCHWOMAN is honored to host the premiere presentation of Zachary Rawe’s most recent bodies of work.
I Live in a Box of Paints
(I'm Drawn to Those Ones that Ain't Afraid)
Noelle Africh | Roshini Agarwal | Louise Fishman
Suzanne McClelland | Jared Packard | Julia Rommel | Carrie Yamaoka
RUSCHWOMAN
2100 S. Marshall Blvd., Suite 105
Chicago, IL 60623
January 8 — February 19, 2023
“…I need another world/
this one’s nearly gone/
Still have too many dreams/
never seen the light/
I need another world/
A place that I can go….”
–Anhoni. “Another World.”
Antony and the Johnsons. The Crying Light.
Secretly Canadian: 2008.
“I would call them manic mourners. Their return to painting, as though it were an appropriate medium for what they want to address, as though the age of the simulacral could be represented, comes from the feeling that since the end has come, since it’s all over, we can rejoice at the killing of the dead. That is, we can forget that the end has to be endlessly worked through, and start all over again.”
–Yves Alain-Bois. “Painting: The Task of Mourning.”
Painting as Model. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Print, p. 243.
“I try to take the painting by surprise… It’s hard to paint, and it can be impossible if you don’t recognize your own trickery. Handling your unconscious with firm but caring hands, fully conscious about your work process, is absolutely necessary.”
–Louise Fishman. “How I Do It: Cautionary Advice from a Lesbian Painter.”
Heresies #3: Lesbian Art and Artists. Vol. 1 No. 3, Fall 1977. Print, p. 74–75.
It is difficult to attempt imaging what lies beyond thresholds of catastrophe. What is visible in the aftermath of death, in the hours then years that follow upon a death? Joan Didion described her ‘Magical Thinking,’ loosened from time, ice skating backwards along jittering graphite lines made just before the event. Mirrors spark a similar uncertainty: what is affixed by a camera remains liquid, moving, hunting in the periphery through a Looking Glass or some shiny enough substitute. Elsewhere Joni Mitchell personifies this nascent view in a woman she met, one full of resemblances who did not shirk the intensity of the moment: ‘Be prepared to bleed.’
Image. Visibility/vision. Looking. View. Resemblance. It’s as if uttering these sounds that correspond to the dazzling problem of sight calls out to reprobate chroniclers, those very queer constructions whose eyes and hands aren’t precisely mirrors, but their purpose is to show you what they’ve been shown.
Painters.
It’s with great admiration and devotion that RUSCHWOMAN places these paintings and painting-adjacent projects into public view. This is a group of risk takers spanning generations. Women who have kissed and who have loved women. Identities that have undergone as extensive of deconstructions as their paintings have. They’ve flown across oceans, drinking in the powerful liquidity that is a fact of our environ.
What is the starting place for articulating anew the visible codes by which a social landscape might be organized in the aftermath of, say, years of destructive national leadership or of war or of natural disasters so elemental and totalizing that even the most foundational conceits of a prior visual culture have been utterly disoriented?
In the fallout following a loss of trust, what is perceivable and how are those perceptions recorded or relayed into stable communiques?
How does the world appear, phenomenologically, when more than 6,670,000 of its human inhabitants have died from COVID-19 in the past three years? And how do artists see ourselves in light of more than forty million HIV related deaths since the early days of the epidemic? What advances forward into recognition as the rest disappears?
This isn’t about optics in the sense of rhetoric—fuck the spin and keep on riding. And yet, this project is fervently optical, desperate to trace the drama from surface registration and light beams to blinking through tears. On view is a series of resultant objects that attempt to convey looking, seeing, and some doubt-filled earth-shaken apprehension of a view of another world for which we are in dire need. Perhaps limping, perhaps lunging, a group of painters have attempted to give form to a process ongoing, one that does not stay still the way most of the paintings appear to but risk charging their leavings with the testimony of what things could look like beyond this point. Glistening sirens announce swamps ahead; wade in, shall we?
I need [to see] another world.
[I’m] nearly gone.
You have come to ask me the relation of dressmaking to art.[1]
A society can be so stone-hard
That it fuses into a block
A people can be so bone-hard
That life goes into shock
And the heart is all in shadow
And the heart has almost stopped
Till some begin to build
A city as soft as a body [2]
This city-within-the-city provided necessary refuge for dreamers, artists, idlers, faggots, communists, lady lovers, and all others determined to fashion a life not brutally constrained by the color line, not broken by servitude, not cowed by white violence, not dominated by a man. [3]
Girded in courage and anticipatory of wild passion, RUSCHWOMAN announces her forthcoming solo exhibition with maven of studio arts and letters Lise Haller Baggesen. The Painted Book of the City of Ladies Wear follows on Baggesen’s inclusion in the 2021 group exhibition The Red Wedding at the Irving Park Ruschman location, and certain curiosities are further expounded in this installation of new works: what if the best painting you see this year is arrayed across a homemade prom gown? And in further proposition, the painting gathers and ruffles into a tent à la Magiciens de la Terre, circa 1989—couture cradle of civilization—a birthday party backyard bouncy castle kind of architecture—a levitating fairy godmother canopy last spotted in Agnes Varda’s 2015 Les 3 boutons—pass through Tchaikovsky Mother Ginger curtained skirts into a lengthy gallery tunnel (birth) canal. The flâneuse’s promenade, the dandy’s arcade, and the 1990s pop-punk aesthete’s now obsolete shopping mall all converge as architectural hauntings over an elaborate window display-cum-island of forgotten dreams adrift in the witchy swamps of RUSCHWOMAN’s program.
Interrogating the part of textile in the traditions of painting finds Baggesen drawing the medium par excellence into close range of tailoring, dressmaking, and fashion styling. The pattern panels of a dress awaiting assembly become supports for a rush of highly chromatic, gestural abstractions. Baggesen proposes a categorical dissent from painting’s hardened machismo, preferring instead a political stance comprising the limp (like delicate tissue silks or some wrists), crushed (like disco velvet), fallen, and languid. Such positionalities are not without precedent, but as of yet have resisted (or perhaps been prevented from) coalescing into an organized discourse that draws together vestigial commonalities from post-minimalist, expanded-field painters such as Sam Gilliam and Lynda Benglis, architectural (and by extension social) reimaginings like Faith Wilding’s Womb Room, 1972, and perhaps even more transgressively, a fiercely liberatory reclamation of the padded rooms and corresponding restraining garbs that characterize the aesthetics and functions of a hysterical diagnosis forced upon female populations throughout the lifespan of chauvinistic psychological sciences.
The softening city that Baggesen erects is constructed with the painted gesture as a basic building unit, one in which the possibilities of person and place meld together into an always hybridized, more-than-individual sociality. A moment redolent of the collapse of fashion modeling and High Modernism captured in Cecil Beaton’s 1951 photograph of Dior and Pollock for Vogue. Stains, flurries of marks, impasto, and flirtatious interactions with found prints are assembled into compositional fields mapped across bodices, skirts, puffed sleeves, bonnets, and other paraphernalia. An open question floats about these hand-painted couture items: are they costumes? Uniforms? Props? Daily dress? Utility wear? Riot gear? Club kid nostalgia?
The ready reply is that these are first and foremost paintings. And in their convulsive forms, contingent upon either body or architecture, they serve as revealing measures for precisely the extent to which gender and sex and desire and aesthetics and the class systems that mobilize and regulate such categories are situated into the visual cultural field. Lavish and punk like a Vivienne Westwood, Baggesen melds the boutique with a battle barracks from which a luscious pleasure activism on behalf of women, femmes, mothers, daughters, witches, crones, dreamers, artists, and lady lovers may be waged. Indulgent and outraged, Baggesen’s sumptuous dressing room is an expansion on the interior life spanning girlhood into womanhood; her most recent tableau signal back to Baggesen’s Refuseniks, Lipstick Brutalisms, and Mothernism moms, in an intergenerational assembly haunted by suffragettes, Womanhouse avant garde, and other ghosts of feminisms past.
Accompanying the (un-) wearables are painting-cum-makeup palettes that have been translated into a bouquet of loosely defined and residual protest signs. Lilting lyric fragments and heartfelt declarations are inscribed into painting surfaces that more often than not glimmer with Tiepolo-tinged cotton candy cloudscapes dusted in shimmer powders and highlighters. If there is a milieu to which Baggesen’s studio work adheres, it is cosmetic warpaint adorning a futurism edging toward cultural collapse.
What will you wear to the apocalypse? Fantasy fashions and dystopian science fictions have long pervaded in Baggesen’s research, so much so that deliberating on the styles one might wear while the world expires deepens from superficiality to a crucial ethics, one that acts upon the troubled veracity of appearances. Picking up the thread, so to speak, from Sonia Delaunay’s bespoke Modernist ensembles, to the Parangolés of Brazilian Hélio Oiticica, Louise Bourgeois’ clothes rack installations, Andrea Zittel’s A-Z Uniforms project, the Victoria & Albert’s landmark David Bowie Is exhibition in 2013, Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, Lily van der Stokker’s prints for couturiers Viktor & Rolf, Palais Galliera’s 2018 Margiela retrospective, Lucy McKenzie’s clothing brand Atelier E.B., in collaboration with Beca Lipscombe, Walter van Beirendonck’s Antwerp boutique in the early 2000s, and at close range, his partner Dirk van Saene’s hand-painted dresses are just some of the contemporary projects that serve as context for Baggesen’s exploration of the wearable as an active unit within a field of sensuously material and lively intellectual operations.
The installation Baggesen has prepared for RUSCHWOMAN crosses creamy pastel satin gowns in Watteau paintings with the resplendent horror of Mad Max Thunderdome antics, all readied for consumption in a liminal wonderland between haute couture and art market capitalism. Says the artist, “To me this body of work is a very American beauty -- like if Kenneth Noland went to prom -- inscribing/saturating this polyester satin with a kind of colourfield brushstroke, the river is oil and the boat is oil.” Undulating dance steps guide these painted dresses into-and-through all of the contradictions bound up in the worlds to which they are oriented. Coquettish and brazen, voluminous and mythic, these painting wearable hybrids are in movement toward a world of always already pluralism that exceeds the human, the patriarchy, and the present day strictures of capital, looking outward toward nascent high femme ecologies in which to thrive.
Christine de Pizan penned The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 after she was visited by a grouping of three shimmering apparitions, ladies who she said comforted her in her pain by offering a vision by which a future feminist utopia might be structured, one built upon virtues demonstrated by a pantheon of goddesses, literary heroines, and “princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts.” The luminous display of disembodied paintings on dresses that Lise Baggesen provides us functions likewise; they carry with them all sorts of historical legacies and many of the female characters who have populated the artist’s prior bodies of work. Here, she has made a place for them to reside, from which to practice their magics that would see the world before them turn soft.
Lise Haller Baggesen (1969) is a Danish-born, Amsterdam-raised, Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist. Her hybrid practice includes writing, installation, performative, sartorial, and textile-based work. Her book and multi-media installation Mothernism (2013-) toured extensively, staking out the “Mother-shaped Hole in Contemporary Art” at The Poor Farm (WI), The Contemporary Austin (TX), VOX Populi (PA), A.I.R. Gallery(NY) and spawned the international symposia The Mothernists. refuseniks (2017) materialized at the residency “Body as Site” at The Banff Centre (AB). The portable and wearable TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones) visited The Suburban (WI) Le Confort Moderne (F) 6018 North (IL) and most recently the MCA Chicago (2021). HATORADE RETROGRADE (2016) debuted at Threewalls (IL) with an Artforum Critic’s Pick: “As if the world had fallen apart but the party persisted, this moody boutique peddles a survivalist feminism that cuts across styles, layering glam with grunge, pop with punk.” HATORADE RETROGRADE: The Musical (2019) was produced and presented by Southern Exposure (CA) and Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago (IL). It was reviewed in Art Practical: “blending 1960s counterculture nostalgia and futuristic fiction, the performance imploded the boundaries between speculative narrative and the surreal elements of reality.” Upcoming shows for summer 2023 include APOCALYPSTICK at Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers (F) and A Space Where Your Voices Can Live for Malmö Konstmuseum (S)/Roskilde Festival (DK)
____________________
[1] Jeanne Lanvin. The Christian Science Monitor. October 1, 1930. Print, p. 8.
[2] Inger Christensen. “ LOGOS: ACTION, symmetries 8” from the poetry collection IT, 1969. English translation by Susanna Nied, 2006.
[3] Saidiya Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome men, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019. Print, p. 300.
There has been in recent years a revival of a political shorthand that “representation matters.” But does it? And in what way? Taking each word on its own and then in combination, a proliferation of possible implications flood into the gaps where the sentiment has yet to justify itself. Did presentation matter before this, or is it only in the re-presentation of a given concept that it accrues importance or value? Is the degree to which representation comes to matter one that accounts for basic survival, for legislated rights, for economic and class mobility, for the means to thrive in excess? Is the representation done on behalf of a larger special interest group or ideology? Onto what may that responsibility—metonymic, ambassadorial—be bestowed? Often asserted in the context of visual and popular cultures, but so too levied at a need for the individuals who comprise governments to serve as an equitable reflection of the makeup of those governed, it may be that the act of representing is the means by which matter, that is the material conditions and realities of a given situation, come to take on form, weight, and a commensurate degree of significance.
In other words, when a representation matters, it is an object, contested within a field of play by an array of the subject/ed. Common parlance uses the word ‘object’ to denote a nonhuman, inanimate thing: a kitchen table, a basket, a soda can, for instance. Yet when psycho-analysts say ‘object,’ they mean the foiling, complicated counterpart to subjects (a subject being one who acts upon the world around him, extending himself from interior consciousness into his surroundings). The demarcations of subjects’ relationships to objects is not simple, and yet power has a history of being produced coextensively with the positions of subjects, favoring them at the expense and disenfranchisement of his related objects. This text and the exhibition which it accompanies doesn’t easily distinguish between these uses of ‘object’; instead a curiosity propels both toward how artists as object-makers might intervene into these power relationships and redefine how an object is understood.
But to approach a working provisional apprehension of objects per se, one invariably lands at a troubling if not also thrilling intersection—a crisis between what we call objects and what we call images. Herein lies a further complication in what is intended through the assertion of representation mattering. Treacherous things, images; and perhaps even more so when an object is re-presented as an image of sorts, that is, when an object serves as a representative on behalf of. The disenfranchised object (that is, any object that is not a subject) possesses intriguing capacities for stubbornness, reticence, and refusal—a kind of material opacity that pressures any projected capacity for the object to mean or signal anything beyond its own physical traits. And yet, when placed within a matter that starts with representation, the relative (contingent) ease by which an object may act as a device of subterfuge, drag, camouflage, and misdirection comes into focus.
It’s within this borderspace between the potential of objects and images that RUSCHWOMAN proudly presents A woman with a baguette. Another one. (An object that was lost upon your entry into language is visible in its bruising.) The artists and works comprising this group exhibition aim to underscore the mercenary veracity with which objects act in the world, testing the tensions by which matter is tethered to thought, belief, memory, and power. The title of the exhibition brings together one of Georges Perec’s observations in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (the Marc Lowenthal translation, issued by Wakefield Press in 2010) with a paraphrased passage of Hito Steyerl’s 2012 essay “A Thing Like You and Me,” infused with vaguely Lacanian sentiments. Variously solaced and whimsical, sober and impassioned, an array of objects and photo-based artworks arranges itself within RUSCHWOMAN as a field of play.
Bonnie Lucas: Girl with Purse
RUSCHWOMAN
June 26 – August 21, 2022
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
Behind skeletal trees of tiny leaves a man leaves, he is totally
white, shakes a fist at nothing, pisses on the tiny white garden
stones, oh I am lonely, again departs, precautionarily walking
around this lawn … another man rises, totally red-faced, his lips
are rosy and soft as a baby’s, he had me when I was encased in
prison. I am not. Thousands of fuchsias surrounded me: ivy, soot,
gook made out of begonia petals by her nervous fingers because
they know they’re almost out-of-existence like the marks of
hopscotch on a bombed-out street. The man I know is getting near
me but now there are detours, this is a miniature golf course …
and another man sticks his leg through the window, bewildered
face like a lunatic’s, palms vertically flat beat the air, froth comes
from his mouth.
‘Bastards. They’ve stolen me.’
–Kathy Acker. from “Translations of the Diaries of
Laure the Schoolgirl.” (1983) Essential Acker. New York: Grove Press, 2002. Print, p. 175.
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
For over forty years, Bonnie Lucas has been constructing a beyond-the-pale through-the-looking-glass realm populated by enforced tropes of femininity exaggerated to be their most perverse and decorated with glimmering, magpie-like trappings of runaway rampant, mass-produced globalized consumption. RUSCHWOMAN is humbled, honored, and deeply pleased to present a rarely before seen yet key body of low relief wall sculptures the artist produced in 2006 and 2007. Each found portal composite is filled to overflowing with vestigial trappings of Lucas’ lifetime of collecting; the artist is revealed, in a sense, to be a Bo Peep who sheperdesses a shopped vocabulary of seeming rococo frivolity into a mindful mission of earnestness and absolute care.
Lucas’ appreciation for her assemblies of talismanic feminine figurines is expressed through her rescue of them from the nonchalant sense of disposability of sales bins, notions sections, and clearance racks. The artist’s affection directs her to gather these ornaments and oddities into an alternative value system that reconsiders a thing’s worth. But the adoration Lucas reserves for her objet is legible most of all through her repurposing—a necessary detachment from their intended uses wherein Lucas forces form and meaning open through a dismembering that combines a Destroy-She-Said-Marguerite-Duras capacity for joy with an elusive notion Freud observed in his 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten,” that within certain violent fantasies the being beaten also stands for being loved.
These topsy-turvy, twisted love-fueled recovery efforts serve as antidotal counterpoints to the already everywhere means by which hatred for a woman and her body is continually signaled within a cultural marketplace stocked with tropes of gender but also their intersections with taxonomies of sexuality, class, age (of consent, of obsolescence, of expiration), relative autonomy, and the stagnant fairytale of a racialized whiteness circulated by our age’s most powerful storytelling apparatuses (Disney, et al). Among other oddities, to wit: plastic dolls, porcelain figurines, rag dolls, ringlets of glossy acrylic hair, dissociative mile long stares caught in an icy blue eye fringed in a drag queen’s improbably long lashes, costume jewelry, christening gowns, baby clothes, lingerie, underwear, sewing kits, miniature stiletto heels, plush toy animals, silk flowers, machine lace doilies, yarn, Japanime, something phallic, something old, and something new.
Lucas aggregates a pasture of pastel pinks that range from blush to bashful, confectionary, youthful, romantic, and demurely flushed. Sickly, radioactive greens—the unnatural growth of astroturfs, artificial pistachio flavoring, artificial mint flavoring, artificial matcha flavoring, the preponderance of fluorescent green goops as a science fiction trope—compliment, a formal allusion to the brisk violences that are everywhere suggested in Lucas’ oeuvre.
Lucas’ cut-and-paste psycho-erotics proceeds from the legacies of women-fixated Surrealists who emphasized the unlikely assemblage of gender as a process. Her constructions share a rapport with the jumbled accretions into which the confessional is secreted in mélanges of pop cultural detritus made by early-adopters of collage as a strategy including Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Meret Oppenheim, Carol Rama, and Eileen Agar. These lady pioneers not only disrupted the pervasiveness of a male gaze as the burgeoning art world’s de facto point of view, but went so far as to question the stability of binarisms or inherent traits that are presumed in that predictable mode of looking. As with these artists before her, Bonnie Lucas addresses the state of fragmentation and shimmering elusiveness of the Surreal female subject as she appears in, say, the reveries of Paul Delvaux or in Magritte’s deconstructed female nude The Eternally Obvious, 1930, or Shéhérazade the recurrent disembodied facial features trimmed in pearls. While sharing traits of deliberate brokenness and ornamental excess, Lucas consistently brings a literal and psychological depth to her densely layered doll parts and textile accoutrement.
Lucas’ work achieved maturity in the late 1970s in step with the legitimacy gained by a generation of New York artists who reclaimed sewing, fiber, and other material techniques historically relegated to women through their recontextualization in post modern developments like third wave feminism and a critique of capital that anticipated Reagan and his subsequent lackeys, pitting the tenderly handmade against mass production and even more immaterial economies of goods and services. And yet the Bad Seed stylings of her impish worry dolls and worldly Lolitas have been found obscene even in the populations at the margins. As her surrounding society struggled to reckon with demands for a total divestment from the conventionally feminine all the while measuring what is retained aesthetically, ontologically, and politically in the project of women’s empowerment, Lucas playfully persisted in her flirtations with girlish, coquettish deviance. In subsequent decades the pressures of her stand off with regulated female comportments have pushed through phalanx clichés into an expanded language of figuration: a mutant-monster pleasure-ravenous vector of plant, animal, baby doll, and supremely Id crystalline facets.
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
Twirrly – whirrly – green-gem-studded-deep miriardbreasted –
spume milk laced – carbonpaper – tinsel – tinfoil tinted –
frothknit – crochet – scallop filigree – galloping – stamping
horse –
Race glass sea – agog! Boundless – abounding –
Gog – agog! Cradle beloved bronzed – steel orb adventure!
Tall salt sea mate sweetheart – silver arrow beflitt by
Rocking – dipping carmine eyed – beaked – tied –gulls –
Bride – beauty gala – galore – – –
Pearl mother Aprhodite’s
Diamond nostrils ejaculate
Brilliant carouse!
Mine – thine –
To home!
–Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven. “To Home.”
Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag
Loringhoven. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2011. Print, p. 185.
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
Please find me a thread near the river
a ribbon for my throat
Is this hope in my cup or a sock?
This would be Red.
Incessantly stripped world must I enter
your chamber/I live in the morning’s attic
Am I poor or wise?
Am I awake?
Am I bride or nun?
What is fun?
I know I am strange and fake
Must I go to the spot where the man is?
I’d rather not
This would be White
–Ann Lauterbach. “A Clown, Some Colors, a Doll, Her Stories, a
Song, a Moonlit Cove.” If in Time: Selected Poems 1975–2000.
New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Print, p. 53.
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
“The prettiest in-crowd that you had ever seen /
Ribbons in our hair, and our eyes gleamed mean /
A freshmen generation of degenerate beauty queens….”
–Lana Del Rey. “This Is What Makes Us Girls.” Born to Die.
Interscope Records, 2012
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
Several months into the disarray brought into the world with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Will Heinrich interviewed Lucas for the New York Times, mapping the ways she responds to the difficulties in the world through her complex material strategies. In their conversation, Lucas observed, “You know, this is a little tool for sewing [pointing to a needle], but made useless — it’s too small. But I feel like, by poking and spearing, I’m using it in a clever and wonderful way that emotionally is very rewarding to me. It’s tiny and strange and mildly violent to pierce things. Especially things that are so feminine, so loaded with prettiness…I’m yearning to make a small, beautiful universe that’s filled with the reality of the times — which is that things are dismembered and cut up. Because what’s going on outside is so scary and dark and worrisome, my little universe will reflect all that.”
Read the full article here.
Compounded in Bonnie’s bricolage arrangements are pointed characterizations aplenty that punch holes through romantically conservative narratives of girls maturing quietly into compliant women. Sweet and nasty, Lucas mines the potential for a contrary capacity for resistance on her own terms amidst anxious compilations of high femme performances as they’ve been remembered in toys and tchotchke. Barbies and cartoon princesses, emancipated Britney shopping at Target, next-gen gender-flex JoJo Siwa, femme queen ballroom categories, puckering Lana Del Rey, fae Cara Delevingne, Bratz dolls and Lizzo’s big Grrrls, the ladylike, razor sharp battling of Barbara Cartland and Jackie Collins, Eve and Villanelle—the latter clad in a voluminous Molly Goddard gown in hot pink tulle—it girls of the so-called “dirtbag left” Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, Charli D’Amelio and her coterie of tiktok influencers, Poppy: these and more anecdotal positions within or adjacent to white feminism are all brought under the sway of Lucas’ inquiries into the how and why such standpoints have been maintained in our civilization.
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
The city I dreamt of: it was here that I heard the voice of Mary the
Whore Who Gave Her All For Love, here I stared at the beautiful
look of Violette injected by the blackest ink, here finally Justus and
Betelgeuse, Verax and Hair and all the girls with the names of the
stars the openings of doors magnetized the young girls. They no
longer know what they’re doing. Invisible rays make this
nothingness where everything is possible, possible.
Anonymity by imposing no image reveals space.
This is the beginning of love. For you it’s of no importance but for
me it has every importance.
You also said: ‘You don’t understand why I’m bothering with you
because I have so much to give and you have nothing to give.’
I’m not bothering with you now.
–Kathy Acker. ”Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl.” (1983) P. 178.
🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷 🌷
Justin Chance, Mark Harris, E. Jane, Nyeema Morgan, Jimmy Robert, Edra Soto
The Green Gallery
19 May – July 2, 2022
“This memory does not strictly belong to me.” 1
“Where am I? She repeated, looking at the pink jug, for it all looked strange.” 2
“Rosé Rush edp, 1.5ml. This came with the Edwige Fenech perfume I got a while back, so I got two starlettes for the price of one. Very giggly, the scent of a champagne gelatin mould taped to a paint shaker. ‘Candy bento boxes.’ Salad bars.” 3
“I can’t remember
School, lavender, butter, wood, etc… and
violent love, brutal more like, behind closed doors.
But having learned to kill, I learned to write. First my name…
Yes madam. I
am here to respond to the signals. I am a signal.
Object Metal Spirit Object Metal
Image Telephone
covered in words object
Metal” 4
“The terror of return and renewal are ours to join and to enjoy, as an irresistible violence to narration.” 5
“...who is handsome, who would have complete confidence in me and be the accomplice of my loves, my thefts, my criminal desires; though this does not enlighten me about such friendship, about the odor, in both friends, of its secret intimacy, because I make of myself, for the occasion, a male who knows that he really isn’t one.” 6
“II. A Hostess Gown. Gray Russian satin. Its tight-fitting vest in the same shade ornamented with the new steel sequins.
III. A Frock for Paying Calls. Plum-colored faille skirt, panels of the same fabric, with diagonal velvet stripes of the same shade, continued on the matelassé tunic; bias-cut strips of velvet extend into the iridescent feathers at the hem.” 7
“Maybe wearing me then becomes an act of love, like ‘I will carry my sister’s body with me.’” 8
“Name us.. You, so much of whose raspberry laughter…
Name us.. So that Love winged with a fan
Might paint me there, the flute held in my fingers, lulling the fold,
Princess, name us the shepherd of your smiles.
[Nommez-nous.. Toi de qui tant de ris framboisés…
Nommez-nous.. Pour qu’Amour ailé d’un éventail
M’y peigne flûte aux doigts endormant ce bercail,
Princesse, nommez-nous berger de vos sourires.]” 9
“The lesson offered by their example is vexed and contradictory, because return and remaking, or restoration and transformation, can’t be separated into tidy opposing categories. Sometimes going back to and moving forward coincide.” 10
“‘Where am I?’ she repeated.” 11
_____________________
1 Marcel Broodthaers. “Where Does This Begin, ca. 1961.” Collected Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polygrafia, 2012. Print, p. 84.
2 Virginia Woolf. The Years. Boston: Mariner Books, 1961. Originally published 1937. Print, p.p. 49–50.
3 Kashina. “Paris Hilton – Rosé Rush.” illicium.verum.nova. Instagram. 27 March 2021.
4 Marcel Broodthaers. “The Telephone, 1966.” Collected Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polygrafia, 2012. Print, p. 161.
5 Fred Moten. “Erotics of Fugitivity.” Stolen Life: Consent Not to be a Single Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Print, p. 266.
6 Jean Genet. Our Lady of the Flowers. Paris: Olympia Press, 2004. Originally published 1943. Print, p. 26.
7 Stéphane Mallarmé (under the name Marguerite de Ponty). “New Toilettes.” Mallarmé in Prose. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. New York: New Directions, 2001. Print, p. 86.
8 die ok. “An interview with E. Jane.” AQNB. 16 February 2016. <https://www.aqnb.com/2016/02/16/an-interview-with-e-jane/> Accessed 2 April 2022.
9 Stéphane Mallarmé. “Futile Petition [Placet futile].” The Poems in Verse. Translation by Peter Manson. Oxford: Miami University Press, 2021. Print, pp. 20-21.
10 Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. P. 96.
11 Woolf, p. 45.
Special thanks to Company Brewing for contributing to the exhibition.
Melanie Flood: Notions
RUSCHWOMAN
April 10 – May 22, 2022
A digital catalogue has been made on the occasion of the exhibition, with essays by Katie Rauth and Matt Morris.
I’m redecorating the bed
sink seafoam in shallow
darling, who cares
if desire is only desire
for repetition
begin again on that
who can say by what
a life is wasted?
suit my air satin
I fantasize a bedroom
mouthing must it look good
feel good to be pleasure…
each time I desire
not an exact repetition
but a rehearsal
of air
crescendo rolling
and stopping rococo….”
–Excerpted from Rachel Rabbit White’s “Infinity Spring,”
Porn Carnival. Wonder Publishing, 2020. Print, p. 193.
“Of course I was then losing her twice over, in her final fatigue and in her first photograph, for me the last; but it was also at this moment that everything turned around and I discovered her as into herself . . . in a sense, I never ‘spoke’ to her, never ‘discoursed’ in her presence, for her; we supposed, without saying anything of the kind to each other, that the frivolous insignificance of language, the suspension of images must be the very space of love….”
–Excerpted from Roland Barthes’ “The Little Girl,” Camera Lucida. Print, p. 71–72.
“He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space. In the bathroom, running the faucet to cloak the sounds of his search, Peter Sissen found Mary Lisbon’s secret cache of cosmetics tied up in a sock under the sink: tubes of red lipstick and the second skin of blush and base, and the depilatory wax that informed us she had a mustache we had never seen. In fact, we didn’t know whose makeup Peter Sissen had found until we saw Mary Lisbon two weeks later on the pier with a crimson mouth that matched the shade of his descriptions.
He inventoried deodorants and perfumes and scouring pads for rubbing away dead skin, and we were surprised to learn that there were no douches anywhere because we had thought girls douched every night like brushing their teeth. But our disappointment was forgotten in the next second when Sissen told us of a discovery that went beyond our wildest imaginings. In the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls. Sissen said that he wanted to bring it to us, that it wasn’t gross but a beautiful thing, you had to see it, like a modern painting or something, and then he told us he had counted twelve boxes of Tampax in the cupboard.”
–Excerpted from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides
Since she was young, RUSCHWOMAN always wanted a sister. She remembers sitting in a public library one summer reading about quantum physics and imagining that plumes of this fugitive energy would manifest in shades of purple, fuchsia, and pink — a super spectrum that had washed special effects scenes in \Ghostbusters movies and X-Men cartoons.
RUSCHWOMAN is giddy to announce a forthcoming installation of recent photographic works by the Portland-based artist and gallerist Melanie Flood. A friendship that began as penpals exchanging letters, expressing wishes, and admiring the purple-throated-purple-hearted project of Flood’s called Notions, that series has been reconceived to respond to RUSCHWOMAN as a site, made to hold the achronological and fleeting encounters with cultural institutions and technologies by which the feminine is produced, by which (certain) bodies are made to perform the feminine.
In textile markets, the “Notions” section denotes where one can find trimmings, buttons, embroidery flosses, fasteners, needles, thread rippers, sequin fringe, or lace. A compelling argument for the space occupied by femininity within our society advances from this terminology: simultaneously (quantum) both the finishing touches and also the most foundational, initial moves toward form. In Melanie Flood’s Notions, new experimental studio photographs are placed in hushed conversation with re-photographed images from various stages of the artist’s life. School dances, ripe orchard branches, distorted nude shower scenes, undergarments, and a softly touch-and-go sign chain of other delicately aloof sidelong glances into the mechanics of womanhood populate the project.
In Girls (Self Portrait), 1996/2020, the artist herself is depicted as adolescent, seated surrealistically on the steps of a building that has been inscribed as an/the institution for “GIRLS.” In Long Beach, WA, 2020, a disheveled clothing boutique with an exterior colored in several clashing shades of magenta has named itself with an awning slogan: “THIS SHOP IS EVERY HUSBAND’S NIGHTMARE.”
When RUSCHWOMAN opened her doors in 2021, it was with a posthumous display of the artist Chiara Fumai’s photograph featuring text from Valerie Solanas that read: “A MALE ARTIST IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS.” Issuing from the consecration of a pastel witch sisterhood, for these coming months, RUSCHWOMAN celebrates Melanie Flood, her keen conceptualism, and her stirring affect by becoming a shop that is every husband’s nightmare.
Lead on, lavender lady, lead on.
About this project, the artist writes: “Over the last two years, I've mined my own photographs, made from 9 to 42 years old, to construct a personal timeline of aging, femininity, self-awareness or lack thereof, and humor of feminine demands. These photos taught me that my experiences are not unique; my frustrations are universal. In the arrangement and editing of my images, I find my voice. When I look back, I realize that I still struggle with the same exact things: body image, male gaze, sexual shame, frivolity/necessity of gendered garments. Not much has changed in three decades of ideals; there is always something on our bodies to improve. My newer work exploits my own teenage naivete to investigate self-representation, self-branding, self-discovery and melts it with the insecurities of middle age. I've made my private teenage moments of expressing agency and exploring sexuality public by presenting images I made as a young girl. Juxtaposed with all my photographies, I don't aim to create a linear body of work; everything is a notion, a suggestion, a nod, images come in and out of the final edit, images are fluid.”
on my block, a gate
on my block, a tree smelling
of citrus & jasmine that knocks
me back into the arms of my dead
mother. i ask Ross how can a tree
be both jasmine & orange, on my block
my neighbors put up gates & stare
don’t like to share, on my block
a tree I can’t see, but can smell
a tree that can’t be both but is
on my block, my mother’s skirt twirls
& all i smell is her ghost, perfume
on my block, a fallen orange
smashed into sidewalk
its blood pulped on asphalt on my
block, Jordan hands me a jasmine
by the time i get home
all its petals are gone
—Fatimah Asghar. “Smell Is the Last Memory to Go,” 2019
I am her ‘she,’ and she is the ‘I’ slipping
from despair to the hope that changes into despair.
My roads do not lead to her door.
My ‘I’ had flown away. For there is no ‘I’ but ‘I’…
We gnawed on stones to open a space for jasmine….
—Mahmoud Darwish. “The Hoopoe,” 1993
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
It is with actual years of built-up anticipation that RUSCHWOMAN announces an exhibition of conceptual photographic work by the Bengaluru-based artist Surekha. Surekha’s Fragrance of Jasmine, 2002, comprises up to hundreds of photographs in the artist’s archive, and RUSCHWOMAN will host the latest site-responsive installation of this project. The images in this work were collected by the artist from photography portrait studios in Mysore, India that have been operated by three generations of male photographers from the 1960s onward. The collection of images shows portraits of young women—sometimes children—whose hair has been braided with jasmine blossoms cascading down their backs; a mirror directly behind the posed figure shows off the floral arrangement. This play of mirror and the ways a portrait becomes fragmented with multiple views of the same figure are formally striking in ways that correspond to experimental photography throughout the twentieth century onward: other image makers like Florence Henri, Man Ray, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Rachel de Joode serve as compelling context for this phenomenon Surekha isolates from her immediately surrounding culture. The artist also probes into complex gendered power relationships—those between the young female models and the men photographing them, and also these visual artifacts’ relationship to the female artist who has appropriated them.
Installations of this project have been presented internationally at the Musée Guimet (Paris), Ecole de Beaux-Arts (Paris), the Borås Konst Museum (Borås, Sweden), and was also included in the exhibition Post Date: Photography and Inherited History in India, which traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose) and the Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita), and for which a beautiful exhibition catalogue was produced. An edition of the work is also held by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi/Noida).
For this iteration of Fragrance of Jasmine, RUSCHWOMAN has invited Field & Florist to intervene in the exhibition space with floral and fragrance interventions.
Surekha is a contemporary Indian artist who has worked extensively in video, photography, installation, and other media for over twenty years. Her work investigates how tactics of the visual may bear impacts on discourses dealing with gender, ecology, socio-politics, and negotiations of public and private spheres. Her exhibition record is prestigious, extensive, and international, including Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin), the Haus der Kultern der Welt (Berlin), Kastrupgard Samlingen (Copenhagen), Royal Academy (London), Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern), Musée d’ethnographie (Geneva), Aboa Arsanova/Lappenrenta Museum (Finland), Chancery Lane Gallery (Hong Kong), Max Mueller Bhavan (Bangaluru), among many other exhibitions. She was a founding curator of the Rangoli Metro Art Center and a founding member of Bar1, an artist residency in Bengaluru. She has presented on her work broadly, including at the Tate Modern (London) and the Voland Art Academy (Sweden). Surekha received her MFA in Visual Arts at Viswabharati University, while also completing studies in Science and Film. Surekha lives and works in Bengaluru, India.
Field & Florist is a purveyor of flowers and other goods connected to a farm based in Chicago, IL, and Harbor Country, MI, where a tremendous amount of the specimens that go into their designs are grown locally and seasonally. Founders Heidi Joynt and Molly Kobelt have striven to build a program that reveals the networks and interconnectedness that gives shape not only to the flower industry, but to production and consumption, per se. Their Wicker Park premises serves as a workshop for their floral designs as well as a neatly curated store of artist-made and artisanal goods. In 2021, F&F opened a second location Field & Florist Monadnock, which not only extends their flower business, but also hosts a selective inventory of niche perfumery from around the globe. With hundreds of rare, iconic, historically significant, and small batch perfumes on offer, RUSCHWOMAN is thrilled to work with Field & Florist to bring the fragrance of jasmine into Surekha’s installation.
Bells For Her:
Ále Campos
Marylu E. Herrera
Alayna N. Pernell
RUSCHWOMAN
December 12, 2021 – January 23, 2022
“Offering an alternative way of witnessing these scenes produces a hermeneutic
refraction that allows us to ethically account for these extinguished lives,
although it cannot fully subvert the power of the archive to silence and
commodify...This is a matter not only of reading along the bias grain, but also
explicitly demonstrating how power works in making certain historical subjects
invisible, brutally hypervisible, and silent. This is an effort to (re)construct another
kind of history that does not reproduce colonial (and disciplinary) power.”
–Marisa J. Fuentes. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the
Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Print, pp. 128/142
“What errant thoughts and wild ideas encouraged her to flout social norms and
live outside and athwart the law in pursuit of pleasure and the quest for beauty?
Or to never settle and keep running the streets? Was it to experience something
akin to freedom or to enjoy the short-lived transport of autonomy? Was it the
sweetness of phrases like I want you, I go where I please, Nobody owns me
rolling around in her mouth?
...She well understood that the desire to move as she wanted was nothing short
of treason.”
–Saidiya Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of
Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2019. Print, pp. 225/230
“And through the portal they can make amends…
Can't stop what's coming
Can't stop what's on its way”
–Tori Amos. “Bells for Her.” Under the Pink. Atlantic Records, 1994
RUSCHWOMAN’s second chapter comprises the reenactments, recuperations, confabulations, and liberatory interventions to be found in the practices of Ále Campos, Marylu E. Herrera, and Alayna N. Pernell. These three artists entangle themselves in the partiality of archives, be they personal, cultural, or institutional. Questioning the violence and loss bound into the project of history building, they develop an array of tools for memory work as a form of repair. In the counter narratives they produce, shifts in power around point of view in storytelling—particularly the dignity assigned to being empowered to speak for oneself—are variously celebrated and mourned. Self-possessed fugitivity is here understood as an affront to systems of control, and yet at RUSCHWOMAN there are sightings of a discrepant She (angelic radio wave visitations, emancipated women, maligned goddesses, Celeste, anonymous untold stories) who approaches and withdraws of her own volition.
Speculative Magenta Hauntology
RUSCHWOMAN
September 19 – November 28, 2021
Marcel Broodthaers, Judith Brotman, Chiara Fumai, Marcia Hafif, Mark Harris, Kelly Lloyd, André Marin, Eliza Myrie, Nat Pyper, Zachary Rawe, Christina Zion
Excerpts from these artists’ rigorous and playful practices have been brought into dialogue in order to inquire into the means by which DISCOURSE is constituted, maintained, and supported. In the process of building this exhibition, DESIRE and LANGUAGE have been shown to be significant axes in the development of discursive meaning production. Strategies of quotation, citation, appropriation, divination, recycling, translation, political organizing, confession, and fragmentation carry with them references to pop lyrics, affect theorists, radical feminists, lesbian collectivity, critical race theory in the diaspora, and vaulted pieces of classic literature. Therein the potential for encouraging doubt as a means to proceed positivistically is explored. And with it, an interrogation into what role the historical construct of the ‘feminine’ may serve as it is dis/located within a condition of otherness and directed toward the as yet uncertain. As a discussion, as a total composition, Speculative Magenta Hauntology seeks to substantiate the implications of Karen Barad’s notion that the epistemological and the ontological are coextensive; an upset in the rigid assumptions of how identity and agency operate is inevitable.
The Red Wedding
RUSCHMAN
May 8 – July 3, 2021
Lise Haller Baggesen, Emmy Bright, Vaginal Davis, Fatemeh Kazemi and Yasmina Hashemi, Evan Kleekamp, Dorrie Lane, Adam Milner, Jeffry Mitchell, Catie Rutledge, Alexandro Segade, Barbara T. Smith, Karinne Smith, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Laurie Stern, Ryan Wilde
The Red Wedding marks the nuptials between the department store and the boudoir. Grand spaces of commerce are annexed with the softening of inner sanctums, are slinking spectrally toward obsolescence, are spreading out beside Benjamin’s arcades and his dandies. Here there be psychological corridors in which the feminine is practiced, maintained, regulated. Ancillary spaces occur: an adolescent bedroom, perhaps a closet, a wedding with no groom, the transactional zones of the art and cultural marketplaces. The works assembled throb with curiosity over the ways that identity has been produced as an effect of capital and exchange. Vestiges of gender conventions and the unstable ways they have been historically mapped across the category of Womxn lounge and languish around this public toilette. In no particular order: evening gloves, effusive perfumes, bonbon wrappers, flower bouquets, millinery, magazines, twirling ribbon, an electric vibrator, dressing gowns, gowns, protest signs, false lashes, wives’ tales, blouses. Perhaps blouses most of all.
The Red Wedding is an exhibition on its period. It’s the Scarlet Witch. It’s a means by which we might m/other ourselves. It’s a beauty routine imitative of flushed desire. Under its auspices, the erotic as power and the valences of flirtation, fetish, sex education, feminist consciousness raising, drag, camp, queerness, and kink are arrayed as a brave if not sometimes unsteady politics. decoration / identity / storage
The Red Wedding is a gathering of Lipstick Formalists, agony aunts, Aunt Flo, former lovers of mine, faggots, frippery, adolescence reminiscence, beauticians and the beasts that dwell herein, former students of mine, Instagram crushes, analysts, the artists at the center of my twin sibling’s dissertation, the artists who produce the podcasts I listen to, the artists who produce the perfumes I wear.
The title of The Red Wedding is drawn from two simultaneous sources: first is the series of novels and HBO TV show Game of Thrones. It's not a property I'm very familiar with, but I remember how evocative that bit of phrasing was when it circulated through pop culture. The Red Wedding was also the title for the first year of ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Love Art Laboratory project to which we extend an indebted wink and nod. When I was still a young witch in training, among my earliest memories of attending exhibition openings or anything in any sort of “art world” were the annual Venus Envy shows in Baton Rouge, a satellite project for those developed by Mallarie Zimmer in Saint Louis; The Red Wedding is modeled after the future-oriented feminism that was demonstrated for me in those spaces.
Décorientations
SIBLINGS COLLECTIVE
December 13, 2019 – January 18, 2020
Roshini Agarwal, Faysal Altunbozar, Cindy Bernhard, Théo Bignon, Kyongsim Chang, Comme des Garçons, Em Marie Davenport, Maddie Gournay, Kimberly Tingyi Guo, Yumin Kang, Justin Jung Won Lee, Alex Paik, Maddie Reyna, Samuel Schwindt, Aram Han Sifuentes, Yujin Song, Ruby T, Sofia Wehrle, Michael Winfield, Jade Yumang, and Mora Zhu
“But more than naming a symptom, it identifies a process whereby personhood is conceived and suggested (legally, materially, and imaginatively) through ornamental gestures: gestures that speak through the minute, the sartorial, the prosthetic, and the decorative. Ornamentalism is thus an admittedly rather inelegant word that describes a very elegant (that is, seamless) alchemy between the borrowing properties of thingness and personhood…the flesh that passed through objecthood needs ornament as a way back to itself.”
—Anne Anlin Cheng. “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” pp. 429, 445
The space that houses Siblings is a home that is made to function as a site of display. It is into this confluence of the domestic and institutional, the private and public, that this group of artists explore the potential for decoration, ornament, and abstraction to catalyze new sensitivities around the ways that geopolitical power has been sorted into East and West, haunted by those desiring, appropriative impulses of orientalism. Projects based in painting, textile, and installation draw from aesthetic traditions that transgress borders between interior decoration, art historical canons, fashion, and craft in order to develop a discourse that acts promiscuously in relation to genre and category, while advancing an ethics that is inclusive of beauty, labor, and the means of production. The resulting exhibition is a feverish, heated interplay among tropes of geometric abstraction, sexual politics, cosmetic confections, and intricate handicraft. Embodiment is made to return, transfigured into pattern, decoration, and far-flung abstracted entities.
Casting Inside
ADDS DONNA
November 17 – December 16, 2017
Phyllis Bramson, Josh Dihle, Cathy Hsiao
Casting Inside
ESSEX FLOWERS
June 29 - July 29, 2018
Phyllis Bramson, Josh Dihle, Cathy Hsiao
In the dream, I walk across a parking lot and into a brick corridor. Gaps in the masonry permit shafts of light to glint in. The path wraps around the exterior of a building before turning inward. I enter what appears to be some kind of Asian restaurant. The space is mostly darkened, and in puddles of light I see a koi pond, several miniature gardens, and a series of sliding doors through which one dining room proceeds into the next.
“Incorporation denotes a fantasy, introjection a process…That fantasies are often unconscious does not mean they pertain to something outside the subject but rather that they refer to a secretly perpetuated typography…Why are some fantasies directed at the very metaphor of introjection?…Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation mea ns channeling them through language into a communion of empty mouths.”¹
The first room is set up with a long banquet table full of people I recognized. I hear one say, “A paradox is involved here, in that in this initial phase the baby creates the object, but the object is already there, else he would not have created it. The paradox has to be accepted, not resolved.”² I am invited to sit and eat with them, but think better of it. I am trying to find somewhere quiet to make notes about a dream I’d just woken from.
In the second room I pass through, dinner guests read from large, laminated menus, spiral bound and covered with full color photographs of the items available for order. I look down across someone’s shoulder and see a page of the menu that shows paintings for sale: modestly priced, seemingly ink on silk, mostly depicting flowering trees. I wonder where they are stored.
The third room is noisy and crowded. An elaborately carved bar stocked with shelves of bottles takes up nearly half of the space. Many people are inebriated, slurring loudly. I notice some glasses of beer sitting on the floor amidst the feet of those seated and standing; I make sure to avoid knocking them over. I worry that I will forget the details of the dream of which I aimed to make a record. As I make my way to enter a fourth room, the bottom edge of my jeans catch on several shards of broken glass that are sticking up out of the floor. I struggle to free myself.
“But what was this other adventurous self? Certainly the idea of everyone having an imaginative body as well as a physical one seemed likely to be connected in some way with the transfiguration of the object in the light of one’s own dreams…These questions brought me back to thinking more about the phenomena of spreading the imaginative body to take the form of what one looked at. For might not this power to spread around objects of the outer world something that was nevertheless part of oneself, might it not be a way of trying to deal with the primary human predicament of disillusion through separation and jealousy and loss of love?”³
¹TOROK, MARIA AND NICOLA ABRAHAM. THE SHELL AND THE KERNEL: RENEWALS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS. CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1994. PRINT, PP. 125, 128.
²WINNICOTT, D. W. HOME IS WHERE WE START FROM. NEW YORK: W. W> NORTON & COMPANY, 1986. PRINT, P. 30.
³MILNER, MARION. ON NOT BEING ABLE TO PAINT. NEW YORK: INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, 1957. PRINT, P. 36, 55.
Alex Peyton-Levine: Trappings III
Terrain Biennial
October – November 2017
”Miss Prism says that all good looks are a snare.” [1]
The woman dressed in blousy pink upon which Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Happy Accidents of the Swing, ca. 1767, centers, spreads herself across the secret garden that entangles her setting. From now on, her form is a verb form of her environment: she landscapes. Consider the wide stance in which a seated man poses—the manspreader—and witness her spread yet further: leaning in, spinning out, going high when they go low. She is grassroots activism colored by the enduring dream of being a ballerina. Tinged with the flushed shades of frustration when she’s told, “You’ll never catch yourself a man that way.” Rococo, Persephonic excesses. A wild indistinction between nature and nurture (and artifice and frivolity and grabbing back). The flow of Peyton-Levine’s Trappings III issue from Krista Such and Jayna Zweiman’s Pussyhat Project that overtook International Women’s Day in March of this year. Then in July of this year, Maren Hassinger restaged her 1982 public performance Pink Trash in which she gathered white pieces of litter, carefully painted them pink, and returned to scatter the altered detritus back into the landscape. Likewise, Trappings III is an altered state—orifices woven into a canopy, a compound of pleasures and tensions spread across the flower beds.
[1] Wilde, Ocscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Originally published 1899.
Let Me Be an Object that Screams brings together a range of works by contemporary artists in order to test psychoanalytic concepts of “subject-hood” and the ways a subject’s counterpart, the “object,” is animated by artistic and exhibition practices. The exhibition proposes subversions to how political and psychic power have been traditionally and consistently distributed in accordance to who is perceived to operate with agency and thought, in contrast to the disinvestment of groups and communities read as “other.” Particularly, the persistent privileges of white masculinity are problematized across feminist, queer, and racially critical inquiries. Through sculpture, installation, photography, and video, historical counter-narratives and accounts of the artists’ own lived experiences shift emphasis off of the typical subject, while elsewhere projects reject subject-hood in favor of stranger possibilities of an object that misbehaves—or “screams,” as the exhibition title (quoted from Ukrainian-Brazilian author Clarice Lispector) describes.
In Let Me Be an Object that Screams, typically tidy conceptual divisions between how humans and objects exist are troubled. Alternative strategies of resistance to dominant systems of power are formed in the materials of the artworks themselves. All the while, this group of artists hold close to the difficult memories that, according to scholar Uri McMillan, “our history is one in which humans were reduced to things (however incomplete that reduction)” through slavery, xenophobia, sexism, and other systems of oppression, many of which are ongoing.
Through a curation supported by close examination and critiques of psychoanalytic theory developed by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Bion, the artworks in this exhibition look beyond the strictures and symptoms of a present-day oppressive society for yet unexplored psychological and political possibilities in and through objecthood. To do so, the exhibition will develop ideas across three sections: one in which the content of so-called “object relations theories” are reconsidered, a second that fantasizes the erotic possibilities of preferring to be an object, and finally a group of artists whose works question the object’s function within exhibition design, supported by more recent philosophical developments of “thing-theory” and “object-oriented ontologies.”
It will be more like scratching than writing
Goldfinch
May 6 – June 10, 2017
Paintings by Caroline Kent, Sofia Leiby, Suzanne McClelland, and Emil Robinson
Within these paintings, a syntax of abstraction is examined, not only for its potential to organize into language but to question how such language is used. The paintings in this exhibition deal with surface as a site for incident, working across more than into a picture plane. Taken together, these painters de/construct a psychological logic for how mark-making is accreted, gestures recorded, and spaces of the audience press up against the fronts of their canvases. The title of the exhibition is drawn from a line in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. in which a domestic existential crisis dismantles the protagonist’s relationship to language, humanity, selfhood, and matter. While place, text, and means of apprehension are suggested in these works, they are suspended in tension with painting’s directness—a scratching that looks past communication and toward a potential to trouble the structures by which the world around these paintings is organized.
a sudden and peculiar pleasure, a feeling of protection
Lovey Town
February 18, 2017
André Alves, Claire Arctander, Emmy Bright, Robert Burnier, Jenny Crowe, Molly Donnermeyer, Mohamad Kanaan, Judd Morrissey, Aay Preston-Mint
For this exhibition, Lovey Town has become a hideout for tenderness amidst a shifting, scary social and psychological climate in our world. This is a place for compartmentalized affect, little feelings, sad pastel colors, subtle nuance. As these artists have drawn their practices and thought lives down to the intimate scale of the gallery, a love language has formed from material and incident. This syntax of form—an "emotional minimalism"—works against repression, goes underneath the brutish handling of words and people's differences that we witness too often these days. The title is drawn from a passage from Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure, in which a slight, emo-queer boy hero named Orvil carries around a broken saucer in his pocket, “pressing gently against his side,” giving him “a sudden and peculiar pleasure, a feeling of protection in an enemy world.”
In 1969, feminist theorist Monique Wittig published Les Guérillères, an epically poetic novel that uses experimental writing styles and fantasy narratives to depict a society of women that serves as an alternative to phallocentric, aggressively masculinist culture. The ‘feminaries’ are textual social primers that figure in Wittig’s story; while these texts have been instrumental for the community to construct vocabularies by which to characterize femininity, the women eventually decide “to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them.”[1] The title of Wittig’s book is an invented term, and the title of this exhibition is itself a permutation that draws out the effeminate alongside the feminine as culturally constructed problems of form.
Mincing, limp wristed, light in his loafers: the dominant culture finds ways to call out physical gestures performing transgressively gendered affectations. Effeminate bodies are marked and targeted for a particular violence that emerges from the mutually constituted forces of misogyny and homophobia—a violence toward traits attributed to being a woman compounded with a violence toward physical traits thought to be side effects of nonnormative sexual acts. While it might be that a precondition of effeminacy is maleness, the construction and subsequent deconstruction of effeminate gestures and the consequential feedback they elicit is work shared across genders.
One of the things I’ve found about gender and even violence against sexual minorities or gender minorities—people whose gender presentation doesn’t conform with standard ideals of femininity or masculinity—is that very often it comes down to how people walk, how they use their hips, what they do with their body parts, what they use their mouth for, what they use their anus for, or what they allow their anus to be used for. There’s a guy in Maine who I guess he was around eighteen years old, and he walked with a very distinct swish, you know, hips going one way or another, very feminine walk. But one day he was walking to school, and he was attacked by three of his classmates, and he was thrown over a bridge, and he was killed. The question that community had to deal with, and indeed the entire media that covered this event, was ‘how could it be that somebody’s gait, that somebody’s style of walking, could engender the desire to kill that person’? That makes me think about the walk in a different way; a walk can be a dangerous thing.[2]
The exhibition Effeminaries explores where gestures in artistic production—composed from abstract form, particular materialities, and quoted fragments of language—carry with them codes of gendered behavior. Once given physical form, these questions cut across intersecting problems of race, biologically assigned sex, class, and the autonomy of a discrete subject. Effeminaries is an assemblage of gendered cultural artifacts drawn from iconic female protagonists in film, interior decoration and lifestyle brands, propaganda from liberation politics and consumer goods. Each artist shows how the culturally constructed forms of gender are always monitored and regulated through clear or subtle threats of violence.
[1] Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Print, p. 49.
[2] Butler, Judith, and Sunaura Taylor. "Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor on Interdependence." Examined Life: Philosophy in the Streets. Directed by Astra Taylor. Zeitgeist Films, 2010. DVD.
Miss Kilman and She Were Terrible Together
Hills Esthetic Center
May 10 – June 6, 2014
Shinsuke Aso, Luis Miguel Bendaña, Poy Born, Alex da Corte, Dana DeGiulio,
Hunter Foster, Jesse Harrod, Richard Hawkins, Matthew Landry, Tony Luensman,
Miller/Shellabarger, Ulrike Müller, William J. O’Brien, BD Pack, Daisy Palma,
Eric Ruschman, Ryan Shubert, Amy Sillman, Joan Snyder
Claims:
1. The epistemologies typically attributed to an analysis of the material conditions of an artwork’s production are almost always available through a phenomenological encounter with the art object itself.
2. Black is back.
3. There is a space beyond explicit depictions of same-sex coital encounters where eroticism and desire take other forms. Overturn anything and you’re bound to find sex.
4. For a period of time in the late 1950s, Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly’s studios adjoined one another, and on most mornings they breakfasted together. This matters.
5. Coalitions across lines of difference are preferable to the eradication of nuanced subject positions.
6. Codes, closets, and separatism continue to be useful both as historical points of reference, but also as formal moves of constraint to play against the limits of painting.
This exhibition marks the completion of the first iteration of ‘Painting Queer,’ an undergraduate multi-level studio course Matt Morris taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.