The Eagle, Bull, and Bear
xCurated by Elyse Mallouk
Artists: Christopher Robbins, Ghana ThinkTank, Brindalyn Webster, Carrie Dashow, Piero Passacantando, Patrick Hillman, Alyse Emdur, Molleindustria, and Hilary Pecis.
December 12, 2011- January 15, 2012
The Eagle, Bull, and Bear explores the political possibilities of myth making. The exhibition argues for a relationship between fantasy and pragmatic action by showing a spectrum of works that render the current landscape changeable. Strategies range from using themes and settings typically reserved for fiction to subverting expectations aligned with pop cultural forms. The title refers to a fable still in progress: one in which nationalism and capitalism have collided, and the health of the union is indistinguishable from that of the markets. In the absence of a succinct moral, the developing narrative calls for strategies that display and inspire unafraid thought. Building a plot from the ground up requires re-envisioning our relationships to one another, to work, and to leisure. It calls for humor, optimism, pragmatism, and persistence. Though fantasy has an escapist ring to it, it has a purpose: to create a break in deterministic logic, introducing alternatives never intended to provide solutions. Likewise, protest is a practical response to inequity, but it requires imagination: the ability to conjure an image of a society that does not yet exist.
Albatross House begins with an aspiration: “I’d like there to be a story about a man who made a birdhouse big enough for him to sleep in, and then dragged it to the ocean. And I’d like that story to be true.” During a residency at Ant Farm Nebraska, artist Christopher Robbins built a six-foot tall birdhouse using wood salvaged from a collapsed barn. He loaded it onto a found railway cart and wheeled it toward the Oregon pioneer trail. The video documents an action wholeheartedly undertaken in defiance of terrible odds; Nebraska is landlocked, 1500 miles from either ocean. The albatross carries on its eleven-foot wingspan a range of cultural associations. The seabird is fabled to propel ships and embody the souls of deceased sailors. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” turned it into a metonym for any self-inflicted burden. In Albatross House, Robbins sets out on a quest imbued with rugged individuality, but in fact impossible for him to carry out alone. Each obstacle confronted—a ditch, a hill, the wind—requires him to rely on passing motorists for help.
Though its approach is dramatically different, Mitrovica/ë also involves wholehearted investment in a seemingly impracticable dream. The Ibar River splits the town of Mitrovica in two. Serbs live on its north, Albanians on its south. As part of Mitrovica/ë, Ghana ThinkTank shuttled “problem cards” between the violently divided groups, asking them to share and solve each other's problems. The project offered an opportunity to air justified frustrations and irrational misconceptions alike, and identified points of mutuality. It involved storytelling; personal accounts served as starting points from which to begin the difficult work of identifying and dispelling divisive myths. It also produced a new narrative: Several people who had not traversed the river since the Kosovo War began in 1999 crossed it to work with the other side as part of this project. The river is equally a physical entity and an ideological construction; Mitrovica/ë asserts the possibility that the latter might be made to change course.
In Skidbladnir’s Figurehead, Gothenburg shop owners pose as the figurehead of the mythic Scandinavian ship, arching their backs and using Brindalyn Webster as a counterweight. In the Norse Eddur, Skidbladnir is a magical vessel that catches the wind whenever its sails are raised, folds to a size so small it can be carried in a pocket, and expands to hold all the gods of Asgard. Current conditions in Gothenburg call for such a boat; the rising waters that surround the city threaten to overtake it within the next 100 years. In these photographs, Skidbladnir becomes a symbol of escape and a metaphor for the ship of state. As part of the project, Webster produced a book that contains nineteenth-century photographs of the city’s canals and steamers, protest slogans used during the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference, an interview with a landscape architect about plans to build protective walls around the city, and a proposal outlining the boat’s contemporary reconstruction. Documentation, fantasy, and protest are used in combination to suggest that a problem as abstract as climate change requires not only loud voices and a long historical memory, but also the resuscitation of a tangible, inhabitable fable.
Mass Ventriloquism makes use of another such physically–inhabitable icon. In 2010, fifteen women climbed inside the belly of the world’s only taxidermically–preserved blue whale and read a play by Brindalyn Webster narrating its story. Beached south of Gothenburg, Sweden in 1865, the whale was killed by two fishermen and acquired for Göteborgs Naturhistoriska Museum by the museum’s curator, August Wilhelm Malm. Believing he had discovered a new species, Malm named the whale after his wife, Balænoptera carolinæ, and directed the task of gutting and stuffing her. He outfitted Carolina’s interior with benches and tapestries and installed a hinge in her upper jaw, allowing visitors to enter through her mouth and descend into her belly. Mass Ventriloquism begins where Malm left off by anthropomorphizing the whale, depicting her as a civic servant who dutifully hosted visitors and represented her country. The word val means both election and whale in Swedish, and the pun has led to a tradition of erecting a voting booth in the whale’s stomach. Though she is silent most of the time, Carolina speaks on Election Day, when “Sweden speaks through her.” The play and video piece use ventriloquism as a metaphor for representative democracy, raising complex questions about the relationship of speech to power. With the amplified voice attributed to her in the space of the performance, Carolina becomes visible as a puppet, a mute symbol. Mass Ventriloquism emphasizes speech as a sign and demonstration of agency, while also suggesting that the forceful projection of one voice often demands and enforces another’s silence.
As Yesiree the Public Notary, Carrie Dashow uses her certification as a notary public to solicit statements from Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. She not only records the diverse desires of the people present in Zuccotti Park, but also shifts those hopes into legibility and legality. As a notary, Dashow performs her appointed function; administering oaths and affirmations and issuing protests are among the tasks assigned to the role in the state of New York. But as a protester, she occupies her authorization. Her actions create a structure within which incipient wishes for the movement can be recorded and validated on behalf of the same governing bodies that provoke them. Dashow’s use of a uniform document ensures a lack of sensationalism and acts as an equalizing constraint; each participant fills in the same fields. In their relative quietness, these statements speak to the aspirations behind the movement clearly and distinctly, acting as a foil to news media portrayals. These documents are directed both inward and outward; participants assess their own reasons for being present while articulating their visions for the common.
Piero Passacantando’s paintings attest that there is a kind of dynamic agency in self-willed, reflective quietude. In Geometric Commons of Imagination, an introspective process forms the foundation for a collective vision. From 2009 to 2010, Passacantando formed a studio with professional Thangka painters in Kathmandu, Nepal. Thangka paintings are traditionally used as guides for contemplation designed to aid their creators and viewers in the search for enlightenment. Passacantando’s translations of the form meditate on finding meaning in the process of making. They are documents of focus collaboratively applied, undirected toward an ultimate goal. A commitment to process is also evident in Patterns, a series he began upon moving to New York. These flat, brightly colored paintings are made entirely by hand, without tape. A pared-down palette and approach create a space for reflection and stability in the midst of political and economic volatility. The selection of colors provides a productive constraint, while pattern making becomes a tool to create internal order through action. The practice of making patterns is ubiquitous across centuries and cultures. These paintings redefine the form’s significance for the current moment, and inhabit it in search of its strength.
Staying Positive confronts the reality of two bodies—one physical and one political—under strain and in flux. In the short digital video, Magic Johnson repeatedly professes his contentment through a scrim of rainbow-colored static. Patrick Hillman created the fictional document by patching together fragments from a real event, the November 7, 1991 press conference in which the iconic basketball player announced that he is HIV positive. The video is broken into thousands of multicolored pixels and its rhythm is separated into four short sections, exposing the recombinant method that created it. Positivity takes on a dual meaning, referring to the fact of infection and to Johnson’s chosen outlook, hyperbolized in the video. The clip’s looped repetition introduces a vulnerable stutter into the invented affirmation, while assuring that it will insistently re-emerge.
In Fountain of Youth, an affirming ritual is inflected with the fantasy of a panacea. In the single, ten-minute long shot, Alyse Emdur participates in a water aerobics class alongside Canadian and Eastern European retirees, immersed in the legendary waters that Ponce de León sought in the 16th century. The spring today, which boasts the highest mineral content of any American body of water, is an 87-degree, 1.4-acre, 250-foot deep sinkhole operated by the Warm Mineral Springs Spa, Inc. Hopes that the mythic water will alleviate illness and restore health attract thousands of international tourists to the spa annually. Fountain of Youth looks at the attempt to escape from aging bodies, and the irony of combating life’s only certainty: We all die. Though the idyllic landscape looks like a daydream, the class’s participants take practical (if cursory) steps toward wellbeing, one hip circle at a time.
The dream of a magic salve is also present in Something Small. The video explores the desires of supermarket shoppers (including the artist, Alyse Emdur) during Little Tokyo Marketplace’s Grand Opening Sweepstakes. The 16-milimeter film opens with a classical film score, dramatizing the activity of selecting items off supermarket shelves. A straightforward account documents Emdur’s receipt of a sweepstakes ticket, which in turn initiates a dream sequence in which she basks in the possibility of a win. When the winner is revealed, the fantasy of escaping the monotony of daily life drops out, and the focus shifts toward the awkward intricacies of awarding the prize. Something Small was simulcast on 27 flat screen televisions at the supermarket in Los Angeles where it was filmed, showing shoppers the holder of the winning ticket.
The Free Culture Game takes root in the same setting: the scarcity-driven economy. In the participatory game, players battle the mechanism that imbues products with artificial value and sweepstakes with irrational power. A mysterious Pac-Man–like device named “the vectorialist” defends and manipulates the market, commodifying ideas (represented by yellow light bulbs) and turning active producers into disengaged consumers. Players use the cursor to defend knowledge from copyright and liberate consumers from the market, keeping ideas inside the common where they are cooperatively created and shared.
In Greenpoint Twinkie Safari, Brindalyn Webster overlays vehicles in the existing Brooklyn landscape with a national icon. The Twinkie represents, among other things, chemically altered, mass-produced food, a national addiction to snacking, and a dubious defense, deviously scrapped together. The video addresses none of these metaphors. Instead, cars are turned into snack cakes, asking only that viewers play along by exercising their ability to jam together two distinct concepts. The video brings viewers along on a hunt, turning each yellow car into a prize. It also lets them in on a secret; the cohesion of each shot depends on single-point perspective, eluding passersby and coming together only when viewed from just the right spot. In its playfulness, Greenpoint Twinkie Safari speaks to an innate capacity (exercised in childhood but often neglected in adulthood) to reimagine a place.
Hilary Pecis’s composite images also integrate the real and the invented. She samples pictures from Internet sources and recombines them into anarchic fictional landscapes. The chaos of these scenes depicts an alternate, exaggerated reality. It also reflects the ways in which media-induced over-stimulation might influence the capacity of individuals and publics to imagine. Each frozen scene depicts a landscape perpetually on the brink of self-destruction. While they display apparently irreparable states of turmoil, their collaged construction also suggests mutability. The narratives they indicate are already in full swing; viewers stumble into them in medias res. Without introduction or denouement, there’s a sense that though sky might fall down in one image, it could serve as the ground in the next.
The inclusion of a live feed from the Occupy Movement in New York asserts that despite frustrations, disagreements, emerging bureaucracies, and disappointments, protest is an imaginative activity. Like many of the artworks included here, the movement’s General Assemblies and demonstrations point to myriad problems while asserting—and sometimes performing—the idea that other possibilities exist.
Elyse Mallouk is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles. In February 2011, she launched Landfill (thelandfill.org), an online archive, print journal, and material quarterly that chronicles and redistributes ephemera from socially engaged artworks. In addition to writing regular features for Art Practical, she has published texts through the Wattis Institute and CAA.reviews, and has presented her work at exhibitions and academic conferences in Portland, San Francisco, New York, San Diego, and Venice, IT. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.
