TEXTS

Studio Visit with Crystal Z. Campbell
Studio magazine, Winter/Spring 2012
Studio Museum of Harlem

If memory is “produced through objects, images, and representations,” the practice of multidisciplinary artist Crystal Z. Campbell (b. 1980) complicates an already murky relationship by privileging sound and abstraction over representational imagery. Recently on view at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross Galleries in the exhibition Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay (2011), curated by artist LaToya Ruby Frazier), her video Witness (2010) picks up where Vito Acconci’s Claim Excerpts (1971) or Chris Burden’s TV Hijack (1972) leave off, using confrontation and anticipation of violence to disturbing effect. I sat down with Campbell, a recent graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, to discuss her interest in the act of witnessing and how this position forces simultaneous negotiations of the imaginary and the real, past and present, personal and cultural.
Central to Witness is audio taken from a 2003 police recording of a “suicide by cop” confrontation between Deandre Brunston, a 24-year-old Compton resident, and Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies that ended in gunfire. Campbell uses the audio recording, a widely circulated example of excessive police force, against an abstracted, unintelligible image inspired in part by filmmaker Derek Jarman’s 1999 film Blue, in which a static image is scored by a feature film’s worth of background sound. Brunston, it was later found, was unarmed, posturing with a flip-flop hidden in the side of his T-shirt. “I found [the recording] so disturbing…, I felt I had to do something with the video to purge the [act of] violence, but it was difficult, because you have to replay it, you have to relive it each time,” says Campbell, who received the video three years ago from a friend. The incident is a footnote in an unfortunate history of police interventions gone awry, with law enforcement asserting privilege over how their identities are constructed—as heroic in a time of perceived crisis—and the alleged criminal not having the luxury of fair representation after death.

The act of witnessing an event becomes what Michel Foucault called a “subjugated knowledge”—that is, what is considered fact becomes shadowy terrain, subjective perception, and hence can be seen as an unreliable source of information and can subsequently be read back into the margins of history or, worse, forgotten alongside countless other news stories. Campbell states that “memory and visuality are linked in such a way that sound becomes secondary.” Long before the post-9/11 24-hour news cycle and social networking, or television coverage of major national events such as the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, the Columbine shootings, or the Oklahoma City Bombing, people received a fair amount of news by radio. Campbell’s work asks a viewer to relate to events in a similar way.
Remembering becomes a substitute or surrogate, another theme Campbell explores, for participation or presence. In the video A Dark Love Story for Clowns (2011) (and in her site-specific installation for Project Row Houses in Houston), the act of memorializing takes on symbolic form. Inspired partly by William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and the Yoruban practice of ere ibeji, Clowns uses an abstraction of audio and visual information to underscore the narration of a personal account by a recently widowed woman. On screen, a female clown attempts to resuscitate or revive her partner by engaging the surrogate body in daily rituals. While working on her installation Passing: The Evidence of Things Not Seen (2010) for Project Row Houses in Houston, Campbell attended funerals for both her grandmother and uncle in the span of a week. She incorporated materials inherited from both relatives—mismatched jewelry, a six-foot set of wind chimes fabricated from metal shower curtain rods—into the work, creating a space of remembrance and grief that suggests corporeality through objecthood, a nod to the practice of conceptual artist Felix Gonzales-Torres.
“A certain kind of community comes out of grief,”# she says, and the desire to preserve and mobilize this community to actively remember events and those no longer with us becomes apparent in Campbell’s body of work thus far. Using sound as a point of entry, she challenges viewers to recalibrate their participation when vision fails. Campbell insists that the act of bearing witness has the potential to be active, even when the information arrives through questionable channels or manifests in unpredictable ways. Evidence left behind by things not seen—the sounds, suggestions of presence, marks and traces suspended in time—relocates absent bodies in an ongoing dialogue on personal and cultural tragedy, encouraging us to actively confront the ease and lure of forgetting when met with distress.


Material Issue and Other Matters
Canada: 55 Chrystie St., New York
9 September-10 October, 2010

“De-emphasis on material aspects”, particularly “attractiveness”, cited in critic Lucy Lippard’s definitive text on dematerialization,6 Years, was a response, in part, to the commercial appeal of much postwar art. The familiarity of materials used in Material Issue and Other Matters at Canada, the appearance of being “humble and forlorn”, though trending towards monotony, does not breed contempt here. The choices made by the participants seem to be less a matter of irony or purposeful reduction, and more a symptom of our “trying times”.

Something like Suzanne Goldenberg’s Korsakov’s Skirt spurs much confusion. Skirt, a shredded, inverted printer ink box with Sharpie markings, with a granola box-top handle, is visually unremarkable. There is no perceptible charge or deception inherent in this piece; devoid of distractions and humor (save for the audacity of its asking price), it’s the piece that best sells curators (and CANADA artists) Michael Mahalchick and Wallace Whitney’s contention that the exhibition is a drama of materials. Goldenberg’s Belle du Jour is more complex in its composition, its scale dwarfed by its placement on the floor adjacent to Leif Ritchey’s wall piece. An L-shaped wall bracket, and a sundae cup lid form a pedestal from which everything else dangles: errant jewelry, a bramble of cardboard, magazine clippings, and squares of construction paper. References to Tuttle and Rauschenberg are obvious, but the latter artist’s oft-stated approach—using what is at hand, be it in the studio or found out in the world—is relevant here, even though one can be hard-pressed, at first glance, to definitively call what Goldenberg shows sculpture. It defies medium in its humble form, its viewing complicated though the object itself is not—another nod to the transformative power of context.

Lauren Luloff and Jess Fuller’s contributions are more straightforward in their references. Luloff’s two pieces are largely indebted to the practice of painting—the presence of rabbit skin glue, stretcher bars, usage of paint. But in choosing to have the work free-standing on triangulated supports, with a 360° view, the work collapses the primary distinction between painting and sculpture—the ability of the viewer to walk around it, their perceptions shifting with every step. For Pale Parachute, Luloff employs rabbit skin glue, used to prime canvases for oil painting, to appliqué fabrics to the substrate. On one side, presumably the rear, things are flat, shellacked down with the glue, lending a plasticky translucence to the bed sheets, windbreaker nylon, and a few inches of lace trim. The front shows Luloff using the rabbit skin glue as a sculpting medium to shape bulging hemispheres. She also paints, but sparingly; streaks, splatters, watercolor-like staining, the paint less tentative in some areas. There is an airbrushed effect on the stretchers, and especially on the supports holding the frame—moving the painting, and attending conversation, beyond the canvas.

Decidedly more understated, Jesse Fuller’s two wall hangings are comprised of large swatches of canvas, ombréd with washes of gold, purple, peach and various shades of gray. Fuller slices into the canvas a few inches from its bottom, carefully pulling down the frayed threads so they hang like a series of gray necklaces. The top of Lunar Episode mirrors the bottom edge, the weight of more severe fraying causing the top to sag, distending the shape.

Lippard’s writings on de-materialization detail a fracturing within “traditional” media. Given the cyclical nature of all histories, something was bound to happen again. Then, it was a response to the market; now, we have work that given the timing addresses similar anxieties, whether intentional or not. These objects unstable and not beautiful in a traditional sense, beg continued contemplation as they elicit considerable confusion, analogous in some respects to questions of materiality (and thus validity) about online/virtual art-making. One wonders how a work can successfully and harmoniously exist in context if what it is, not necessarily its content, cannot be easily characterized or discerned.

The works in Material Issue successfully occupy the shadowy space around form, material, and value. If nothing else, we recognize that in some way, they are culled from reality. A plastic bag’s silhouette, a woven rug, bed sheets, duct tape—each object co-opted here was apart of the everyday material world before entering into and becoming forever abstracted by the art world.

Rashaad Newsome 
Standards
Ramis Barquet: 532 W. 24th Street 
22 October-25 November, 2009

He had me at Soul II Soul.

In February, I attended the premiere of Rashaad Newsome’s Shade Compositions at The Kitchen. The performance, comprised of 20 women of color, arranged into vocal sections, conducted, live tracked and manipulated by Newsome (with a Wii controller), with video accompaniment, was unlike anything I had theretofore experienced. After it dawned on me what “shade” in the performance’s title referred to—the art of giving attitude, as detailed in Jenny Livingstone’s 1987 documentary Paris is Burning—I was completely consumed. The sounds and gestures that I had come to recognize, and on occasion use, had been successfully elevated from the finger wagging and head swiveling warm-up to any girl on girl fight to a thoroughly brilliant performative moment.

Artists across disciplines have mined the sights, sounds, and drama of black popular culture. From graffiti pioneer Rammelzee’s sculpture and writings from a position of extreme, almost alien, otherness, to Kehinde Wiley and Fahama Pecou’s portraiture, rap and hip hop in particular are sources not yet exhausted. What is interesting about Newsome, like Kalup Linzy, with whom he shared the Kitchen program, is his engagement of queer and female subjectivities—with Shade Compositions and Untitled (Banji Cunt), his video and photo series featuring Vogueing extraordinaire Shayne Oliver, he sets himself apart from his contemporaries whose work resonates with pointed masculinity (i.e. early Rashid Johnson, some Hank Willis Thomas).

In Standards, his first solo exhibition at Ramis Barquet, urban signifiers become urbane. Status Symbols, a series of works abstracting images from black music and fashion magazine, Newsome furthers collage as a manner of critique; ostentatious symbols of gross materialism and product lust mingle with luscious bodies and “Dragon Lady” acrylic nails. Newsome here is referencing Heraldry, or coats of arms, updating the pre-Modern practice with 20th/21st century visual ephemera. What Newsome uses as “representative social, economic, and warrior related symbols” in his collages brings to bear the disparities between astronomically wealthy rappers and their listeners who buy into the romanticizing of street life. Newsome handily transmutes the hardness and inherent violence of status driven, “C.R.E.A.M.”* psychology into graceful cut forms.

Separating the front gallery from the projection room and anterior room are two exquisitely carved gates, outfitted with thick necklaces and chrome rims. The two featured videos, Fortuna Imperatix Mundi (“Fortune—Empress of the World”): O Fortuna and Fortuna Plango Vulnera are the first in a six part video installation aptly titled The Conductor, as Newsome is primarily known for his experimentations with sound and composition. The videos are montages edited from various hip hop music video footage (“5000 individual frames…enlarged and repositioned”, according to Newsome’s statement for the show), focusing on the hand gesturing of the performers. The score is a composite of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1935), comprised of five sections based on a collection of medieval poems chronicling the travails of secular life, mashed with samples of selections from New York hip hop radio. The scenes not tightly framed on hand gestures are ubiquitous—a parade of parties, rappers reclining showing off their bounty of expensive liquor and jewelry, gyrating video girls, luxury cars cruising—illustrating with contemporary visuals the source text’s frank discussion of morality and sin.

The audio and visuals are seamless; Newsome, like Christian Marclay (Video Quartet comes to mind) or D.J. Spooky, is sampling, cutting and mixing visual information, interchanging contexts high and low. The body of work in Standards explores an all-encompassing cultural force with a criticality that has been approached by talking heads and theorists since its inception; the difference here is Newsome’s capacity to synthesize recognizable forms, retain their universality and mass appeal, and bring them to street level with a concise visual language.

more on Rashaad Newsome at rashaadnewsome.com

*a reference to “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)”, the 1993 single from Wu-Tang Clan’s landmark debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)