We make the image in real time: a viewing log by Rhea Anastas

We show up to look. [Also, We look to show up.]

homage I

Showcase, 2003. Written by Richard Maxwell, New York City Players, performance, Millennium Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, December 11, 2016.

What I liked about this theater: there was neither proscenium staging nor a single point of view to focus the eye / Why can’t we seem to make more or less than artist, object, and viewer out of viewing—properties separated, justified, and rationally ordered?

D37. Cameron Rowland. Exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 14-June 24, 2019.

note 7. For reflection on Rowland’s captions, see Irene Sunwoo’s review of D37, “Burden of Proof: Cameron Rowland’s D37”: “Meticulously researched and written in unembellished prose, his captions are intended less as interpretive description existing in parallel to the work than as an aggregate of information that is, for the artist, as essential to the work and its interpretation as its year, title, and dimensions: data that is typically provided by object labels.”

[back to Anastas] This caption is remarkable for artists’ writing. Facts and short summaries of research, the artwork itself, and direct quotations from Rowland’s historical sources coexist in the text on equal footing…Depreciation is something that Rowland did for the experience, rather than for its making or its formation of an argument…Rowland stays mute, letting the authority of state government and legal infrastructure—and of the engagement of the company 8060 Maxie Road, Inc. with these structures—speak, as it were, as he carries out the purchase and covenant and frames the documents for exhibition.

keyon gaskin. Performance, Ludlow 38, New York, May 23, 2017.

When Rowland writes captions for his work and gaskin uses these words, they insist on alternatives to presence as the first order of experience for an exhibited artwork.

Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals. Exhibition, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, October 21, 2016-March 5, 2017.

I feel certain that Buchanan’s work did and does resound clearly, both when it was shown and supported in public and when it was not. To speak of this position outside external forms of recognition is to hold it apart from the familiar binary of center and margin.

Buchanan’s archive defies the formations of language/biology/history/society/modernism/museum that marginalized her work. The display counters the notion that external recognition and its tools are value giving, conferring value on things theretofore deprive of it.

“standpoints” (used by BB - optimal viewing positions) and non-prioritized perspectives - [also, think standing place] — the “sonic standpoints” in Burris and McArthur’s videos

Dinah Young, artist’s work, 35 mm color slides (1997-2001), and webpage. Photographs: William Arnett.

[read Theophus Smith on Young - “Perhaps the most transformative art is the art that craftily conceals itself while waiting for an age that has the wisdom and integrity to finally appreciate it.” ] - Moten says, “She’s into something deep, which I wouldn’t want to disturb unless she wanted and needed for it to be disturbed.”

When I first viewed Arnett’s photographs, I made a mistake: I resorted to the habit of thinking about what I was seeing as art and about the person who made what I was seeing as an artist. What I was after was some true splitting apart of what Arnett made from what Young made.

A VIEWING LOG

Afterward [in full]

Keeping to short sections, this essay mixes writing about performances, photographs, and exhibitions by a theater company, several artists, and a dancer. Each of the essay’s moments takes us into locations and stories of property within the US caste system that expose its structural racism, out American legacy of slavery, and settler colonialism. I express a great deal of discomfort with our fixation on individuation and singularity, a major premise of the artist’s and viewer’s agency. We see this individuation in the three positions that structure how art is received—artist, object, and beholder. These positions derive from property relations and individualism (subjectivity) within an ordered, rational-modernist language in aesthetics and contemporary-art discourse about the world and social behavior.

Undeniably, viewers are free to make their own images. All images tend to split us between two kingdoms, the visible and the invisible. What is not visible is an active part of the images. Aesthetic judgment can come across as a kind of false racial neutrality. We look for ourselves, as ourselves. History and circumstances surely also constrict us. We shouldn’t worry about look for ourselves, but we shouldn’t pretend to look for everybody. As Elizabeth Hardwick has written, “The true prose writer knows that nothing is given, no idea, no text or play seen last evening, until an assault has taken place, the forced domination that we call ‘putting it in your own words.’”

homage II