Like everyone else, the art world is obsessed with
naming. In an age of finance capitalism, names brand; in an era of social
media, they tag. They are sources of authority—of authorship—delimiting
property, possession, and identity. What would it mean to remove one’s name, I
have often wondered? What would it mean for proper names to be removed from a
discourse about contemporary art?
Encountering Julie Ault’s Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart this past February at Artists Space,
I was reminded of these questions. Upon entering the exhibition space, I was
confronted by a video about the pianist-showman Liberace playing from a monitor.
As I continued into the space, I faced a wall. One of the things I have always
liked about Artists Space is its expansiveness. It is a large, open space with
white columns and tall windows, reminiscent of a bygone SoHo loft culture.
Different curators/artists do different things with the space, often altering
it completely. Ault, of Group Material renown, produced a partial enclosure
within the gallery, upon which much of the show was hung.
As I walked outside the enclosure with a friend, he and
I recognized many of the works, which were by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Moyra
Davey, Paul Thek, Andres Serrano, Nayland Blake… But here I go naming names, when
what mattered most to us was the encounter with a semi-anonymous ensemble—the
force of this encounter with namelessness. What also mattered, undoubtedly, was
knowing that the works had been donated to Ault (or traded, or bartered) by her
friends and loved ones. Michel Foucault once wrote that the history of
homosexuality embodied a “politics of friendship.” Remembering Thek,
Gonzalez-Torres, Liberace and others who have died from AIDS-related illnesses,
I imagined Ault lovingly placing certain works next to each other, framing
affinities, relationships, perhaps even conflicts. Mourning the dead, albeit
belatedly. Fashioning a shrine by gathering their works together.
When Ault participated in Group Material, she and the
other members would hang works by contemporary artists besides popular (i.e.,
‘low’) cultural products and works by non-professional artists often from
communities who the group wished to include, if not serve. A similar strategy
is operative in Ault’s curatorship at Artists Space, only on a more personal
scale. Whereas Group Material strategically took aim at the gentrification of
the Lower East Side, and later such loaded political subjects as the history of
US military involvement in Latin America and the AIDS pandemic, Macho Man is micro political as it
investigates what it might mean to historicize through the trans/personal,
inter-subjective, and communal. Furthermore, it demonstrates that when macro
political processes fail (and they obviously continue to fail in countless ways)
one can still express a political practice through the cultivation of certain
habits of attention, behaviors, and gestures.
Rounding the corner, my friend and I dwelt on a bag of
marbles pinned to the wall with a single playing card. Why can’t more artists do things like that?, he lamented. Rounding
another corner, we marveled at the presence of the works brought into proximity
with one another. There, did you see the
light bulbs? So engrossed in the atmosphere—the mood of intimacy and delight
established by Ault’s collection—the iconicity of autonomous works seemed to
disappear—the sense of signature, or brand. But then there were pieces we also
loved and couldn’t attribute. Like the painting of a girl washing a floor; all
that water represented in bold, athletic strokes of green paint; the way her
labor was desultory, joyous.
The current (art) world could learn a lot from Ault and
the practices of Group Material, who continue to demonstrate a unique ability
to inhabit curatorial modes and put forward models of exhibition which
effectively resist art’s property value, if only at the level of a
phenomenology—an experience of attending art—rather than through institutional
critique or intervention per se. Of all the ways to level culture, and to
critique its most entrenched practices, what better place to start than with the
withdrawal of our society’s most common tool of exchange and valuation: the
proper name?
