I recently gave an art-tour to a group of graduate design students. It was the week of the Climate Strikes, Greta Thunberg was at the UN, and our President was mostly skipping school for a discussion of "Religious Freedom" (unless you're Muslim, I'm assuming).
After some soul scratching, I decided to twist the classic theme of love and death, in a way that spoke to this week. Here are a few stops in the tour, From Eroticism to Extinction.
The first stop is Greene Naftali gallery, where we see Paul Chan's The Bathers Dilemma. Industrial fans blast air upwards into nylon air dancers, which dramatically stiffen and wilt, over and over again, in a simulation of sex and flags and, hey, let’s say freedom (religious or otherwise).
In other words, they respond to pressure by dancing.
The androgynous bather's tiny (tiny!) suits draw attention to what is hidden (the tiny, but oh so important, bits these turgid tube balloons definitely do not have). "Progress takes a toll, especially on those who want it most," writes Chan. From his statement:
Resistance wears down the spirit, and makes a mess of the body and mind. It is a shame that it feels natural to expect suffering in oneself for the sake of ending it in others, and commonplace to accept this terrible symmetry as the price one pays for progress.
The bather in art breaks with this terrible symmetry by offering an image of another way forward. Works that take up this motif invite us to reflect on how pleasure renews us. They are reminders that pleasing and being pleased – without aggression or guilt – expands our capacity for fellow feeling.
This "other way forward" channels the words of poet Audre Lorde, who said in 1978:
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
The most-discussed piece is an air dancer in a glass case. Is it happy, my students want to know? Is it trapped in the display, or does it enjoy being watched? We spend a moment watching the wiggler in its double bikini bottoms, contemplating our own gazes. It feels like we are in school and getting away with something.
We end with a passage from writer, scholar and activist adrienne maree brown (from Pleasure Activism). "Feeling good is not frivolous," writes brown. "It is freedom.”
The exit leads through a beach installed outside the gallery. Our feet crunch in the white sand. Across the street, we climb up to the High Line, Chelsea’s award-winning park, built on an old elevated freight rail line.
Ruth Ewan's monumental Silent Agitator is installed at 24th Street. It celebrates historic labor victories, like the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. (Victories being eroded by the decades-long right-wing assault on labor unions and the more recent rise of the "gig economy”)
Ewan’s installation is inspired by Ralph Chaplin's classic turn-of-the-century illustration for the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. They feature a call-and-response, echoed in Ewan’s work: "What time is it? Time to organize!" The illustrations were distributed as “stickerettes” (drawings and slogans printed on small slips of gummed paper), which were also called "silent agitators."
Ewan’s Silent Agitator is funded by members of the Mugrabi family, whose 5-billion-dollar empire and aggressive art-trading and market-making (think: 800 Warhols in a warehouse) pretty blatantly undercut the idea that an hour's work entitles a laborer to a fair slice of our planet's finite wealth and resources.
Speaking of the planet's finite resources, we are now on to the Extinction part of the tour.
Earlier that day, a group of artists (full disclosure: I regularly see one of them naked in my apartment) had launched ClimateClock.world, an effort to put carbon budget countdown clocks up all over the world. Responding to a special request, they’d also custom-built one of these clocks for Greta Thunberg, but when she attempted to bring the physical clock into the UN for her speech, it was confiscated by security. (It did, after all, kind of look like a bomb.) Anyway, the clock is up and running here. It's open-source, so you can install the digital clock widget, or use the maker-kit to build your own physical clock.
This climate clock was erected in Berlin by Fridays for the Future just a few weeks ago.
Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931 96
My students love clocks. They love Dali’s Persistence of Memory. They love Ewan’s Silent Agitator. Since they were young, they've been told they were going to "save the world." How about a clock for that?
Event: Tomorrow at 6pm, comedic performer Morgan Bassichis will host an event at the Silent Agitator monument, called "There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?" The title is taken from Dolly Parton's 9-5. The event will feature Tayo Aluko, Ruth Ewan, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva. It will celebrate "the uplifting significance of song in the exhausting work of labor organizing,” and it’s billed as an “evening of fun, lively performances” that “invites musicians and organizers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play."
Credits:
Paul Chan, installation shots from The Bather's Dilemma
Ruth Ewan, "Silent Agitator," photo by Timothy Schenck
Fridays for the Future, carbon clock at the Gasometer, photo by Euref AG/Schwarz
#ClimateClock widget available here
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