Tough Stuff

Collection of Thoughts on Land that have crept up during the semester 1. Friends of mine recently asked me if I wanted to join them doing a work-share at the Black Creek Community Farm so that we could “queer up the place”. This was after reading Geotheorizing Black/Land: Contestations and Contingent Collaborations, by Tuck, Smith, Guess, Benjamin and Jones. The Black Creek Community Farm was created as an urban garden space created by and for the people living in Jane & Finch, or the neighbourhoods surrounding York University.  I wonder if the desire to queer up the place comes from “lack of descriptive work about how Black people defined their own relationships to land” (55), where the narrative about this work being by and for a community of primarily BIPOC folks can so easily be forgotten or taken for granted. 2. This article also roused connections to a walk lead by Camille Turner entitled BlackGrange. Thinking through how “colonial geographies required Black displacement and placelessness” (65) that render black geographies “unintelligible”. Camille Turner’s walk as a part of Indelible Refusal marks the “unexpected” urban places of historical black life and community in downtown Toronto. The piece did the work to contextualize, historicize, emplace, and flesh out the stories of the black community in Toronto, those of us who walked were given the opportunity to challenge the narratives of home, place, photography, history, and futurity laid out in the colonial Canadian narrative of itself.  3.  I can't stop thinking about the fact that the messiness of land, nature, and vital living things are only allowed into museum spaces through technologies of capture (painting, photography). Projects exist that try to bring the museum out to nature, but the physical/structural limitations of the museum, as mentioned in my other post, also do this work to disconnect art, celebrated art, high society, etcetera away from the land. Away from the possibilities of smell or the “lesser senses” (as we briefly discussed in class). Would a disability futurism (or dis-topic  or a decolonial/indigenous futurity or a queer utopian or a black (flexible) afrofuturist lens offer a shattering of the museum that would open up the possibilities for more work with more materials and more humidity or more bugs?  4. The Sexomuseum in Amsterdam didn’t find its place in any of these blog posts and it is a space that I had found disruptive and dangerous about its treatment of non-normative sex acts, bodies, and gender identities. Which I hated as a queer sex educator person But I also know that one of the reasons I found in so annoying was because of its display of these pathologies on a middle-school presentation worthy cork board. Similarly, i was irritated that the AGO had so many work-in-progress construction spaces happening during its regular operational hours - which I attributed automatically to the museum shirking the value of visitors excited by Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrors. So maybe I have to challenge my ideas of an acceptable museum in and of itself too. 

**Infinity Mirrors, Identity, and Self-serving Nods to Representation  I spoke briefly during my pop-up lecture about the media fire and general energy and hype about Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibition . It has the AGO shaken, shifting, and changing the rest of the space up, almost as though they can use the shining glitz and glamour of the long-awaited works as a distraction from other changes taking place within the institution. I feel this is odd, given that I would have thought using this highly-public travelling show would give the AGO the opportunity to reach folks who do not normally access the museum in the same way that say, AGO member do, but equally important to consider is the fact that my critical take on changes made at the AGO uphold it to a standard in which it can't crack, or can’t shift and change.  WHAT I AM MOST CURIOUS ABOUT, HOWEVER: a statement made by a friend and conversation within the communities I find myself living, loving, and working in:  Criticism of the Kusama exhibition based in claims that nowhere in the gallery space does the AGO choose to discuss and/or unpack Kusama’s relationship with mental illness, ‘madness’, or institutionalization.  I am finding the discourses in representation and claims to identity ever-increasingly difficult to come up against within some of the structured institutions that I find myself participating in (gallery/cultural spaces, academic institutions, government funding bodies).  I struggle in particular because conversations lead exclusively in terms of representation and visibility within institutions leave no room for people in positions of marginalization or subject positions within a white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal, colonial, and able-bodied system of order to exist and create or to gain legitimacy for their work without it speaking explicitly about how their identity relates to power.  In the case of Kusama’s exhibit, thinking through Amanda Chachia’s writing on disability and access, where she asks, “What would happen if the museum began to re-think of itself as an institution for sensorial culture rather than purely visual culture?” where access is more than a tack-on but rather a lens through which the museum and artists generate new ideas. I believe there is  a place within Infinity Mirrors to hold all of the complexities of illness, trauma, or loss that can be experienced or felt without the assistance of a placard that so explicitly divulges the artists’ entire life’s story.  And in any case, should it, or was it, Kusama’s narrative to control anyhow?  Right now, in every well-meaning and NECESSARY attempt to speak truth to power and elevate the voices of marginalized folks by offering funding, offering space (some, kinda), institutions demand our disclaimers or qualifiers before our words, our creativity, or our input can be understood as valuable to the institution - they ask us to bleed on paper before our voices are legitimized within the institutions (as it had come about in a conversation with artist Shannon Gerard for The Pedagogical Impulse Project in the Fall of 2017)  Even though we can understand that representation in art and media changes and saves lives, how can we treat it like it isn’t a check-mark but rather one way to grapple with, affirm, and relate to and identify with each other- a way to shift how we think in this world.  In keeping with Ng, Ware and Greenberg’s work, “those who are most affected by marginalization are in the best position to articulate how and what their liberation should look like”, and in understanding that, this can work by “amplifying individual voices rather than positioning an individual as a representative for an entire community (150)”. In such a framework it is vital for those with decision-making power to critically examine whether or not attempts to allow marginalized folks speak to their liberation demand a huge amount of labour in order for them to justify their visions of liberation.  This leads me only to more questions: how do we create measures that level playing fields without requiring folks to constantly use their identities as a justification for their positions or their successes? How do we do this work that take queues from folks who are leading movements and speaking from experiences of marginalization without asking continuously for the labour that comes with qualifying everything that we say through our positionally?  How do we create systems that instead of just saying “SSHRC welcomes applications involving Aboriginal research,” on funding guidelines, that these agencies can also promise that when these scholars arrive, that there is a place for indigenous ontological work and scholarship within academic institutions? How can we justify the fact that the AGO recently acquired a new Andy Warhol piece but have only a handful of lesbian/queer women artists in their entire collection, and a handful, if that, of trans and non-binary artists and their works.  We can’t use identity as a litmus test, a hoop for marginalized folks to have to jump through, or as a requirement for their work to be seen as valuable within arts, academic, or creative communities. When we do, we re-affirm that people living outside of the benefits of cis-white-colonizer-hetero-patriarchy must somehow always prove their/our deserving of a seat at the table where/when others never will.  (footnote: this leads me to thinking more about this wonderful piece on the fall of mediocre (white) men, by Denise Balkissoon) 

“Lack of …” Erika Iserhoff, 2016 [photo credit here]  **ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CULTURAL APPROPRIATION 

For this post, I want to provide an online annotated list of readings that I have read, liked and favourited over the years about cultural appropriation along with matters including call-out culture and critical self-reflection in activism, and put the links in conversation with a number of our class readings.  the art & politics of cultural appropriation  This piece pulls apart the discourses of whiteness and appropriation in cases of white artists making art about violence enacted on the bodies of black youth. Kenan Malik writes that “cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing field, but is shaped by racism and inequality”... while also arguing that “preventing Dana Schutz ‘profiting’ from painting Emmett Till protect the Emmett Tills of today.” - calling for a mass mobilization of public/social campaigns to do this work.  Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to action  if you feel like you for whatever reason cannot get through the entire TRC report, read about what needs to be done, what is being done, and how indigenous sovereignty must be at the forefront of policy and law in this place that we live.  Guide to illustrating Black/ POC characters risking appropriation doesn’t mean writers and illustrators are off the hook in terms of speaking to, writing about, or creating complex, full, and meaningful POC characters in their work. This guide not only breaks down those ideas but also encourages illustration styles that work best in creating POC characters  Restorative Justice Posters These pieces offer reflection points about survival and solidarity- primarily by offering questions about what happens ‘after’ an instance or event has occurred to build stronger movements. 15 Indigenous Feminists to Know, Read, and Listen to  Listening to the communities that have been exploited through colonialism, helps to complicate understandings of the  networks of state, social, cultural violence that are enacted when indigenous artworks and culture are commodified for and by white settler people.  Fake Love: It's Time To Stop Celebrating Appropriation Masked As Representation Because of this work, I have been able to think through how faulty or disingenuous representation (representation for the same of publicity) (on TOP of the case of the blatant stealing the work of black creatives and artists) can actually be understood as an piece of the conversation about appropriation. 

From radical black feminism to postfeminist hashtags: Re-claiming intersectionality   This piece re-frames a conversation about ‘intersectionality’, a “displacement of the focus from the individual to institutions” and discusses the fault-lines as intersectionality has become a catch-all term and/or adoptable (appropriated) identity marker for white feminists. 

Decolonial Love: A How-To Guide

Belonging: Alas, A Lack.  (Queer Interventions in Museum Spaces)

This semester I was able to take a 12-day working-vacation after being accepted to present on my thesis research at the INSEP - Institutional Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics 2018 Sexual Revolutions and Sexual Politics conference in Ghent, Belgium. 
I spent most of my time on this first visit to Europe in Portugal, with a layover long enough in Amsterdam to visit the Stedelijk Museum.  From January to the end of this semester, I’ve walked the halls of the AGO, the Stedelijk Museum, the MAAT (museum of art, architecture and technology) Lisbon, the Gulbenkian Museum Lisbon, and other smaller galleries in Toronto, constantly seeking out the political, the queer, the difficulties. After visiting the spaces that I did, I was left frustrated with the lack of overtly political and paradigm-smashing work at the AGO (outside of the now-closed Canadian contemporary exhibit, or the hall now dedicated to Annie Pootoogook), leading me to question how and whether queer and/or political artists, artworks, and ontologies have any (permanent) place within the walls of the AGO. 

 Nam June Paik’s ELECTRONIC SUPERHIGHWAY at the MAAT Lisbon opened with a Zach Blas’ work in Queer technologies. 

The above tableau offer’s Blas’ approaches to the ways in which technological interventions in and around the queer body serves to uproot understandings of biological essentialism, identity, scientific advancement, and modes of surveillance.

Most strikingly for me, Blas’ work in Facial Weaponization Suite - aimed at challenging digitization facial recognition softwares. This video in particular works with the Fag Face, a collective work and amalgamation of many queer/gay faces gleaned from biometric facial identification technologies.  the fag face is at once an amalgamation of many faces as it is a representation of using the technologies of securitization and social order to actually subvert them and render them useless (the Fag Face can no longer be recognized through the technology that was used to build it).  

Here, Blas works in “displacing queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident, assemblages allow us to attune to intensities, emotions, energies, affectivity’s, textures as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities” (Puar p.128) If we read Blas’ Fag Face as a queer assemblage, the Fag Face  (which he might understand to operate very much like the SoftQueerBody:  Multitude, Swarm, Virus, or Pack, using the words in his also-featured book Gay Bombs). The Fag Face is a collective iteration of abjection which intervenes with the subjectivising power of the technological regulatory systems.

What is produced as abject in the process of bodily materialization- read as what does not belong- serves at once to be the foil in which normative bodies are produced and re-produced against. In writing the abject, Kristeva writes “disturbs identity, system, order” (ibid). As such, the abject serves as a foil while also inevitably fleshing out its own space - one of rupture, collective explosion, the sticky goo of thousands of faces rendered unintelligible to normative society. Renedered impossible to detect or surveil. Rendered a threat.

Gay Bombs were an actual US-made pheromone based theoretical chemical warfare bomb aaimed to make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other…. released in 2005 Berkeley’s Sunshine Project (The Guardian, BBC News). These are the foundation of Blas’ instructional radical queer interventions in tech.  In Queer Assemblages. Puar cautions that “ we must [not] engage in the practice of excavating the queer terrorist or queering the terrorist” understanding instead that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist. The terrorist does not appear as such without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance, deformity” (Puar p.127)

As such, a reading of the queer body as one able to destabilize that state and/or regulatory technologies is insufficient. The logics of surveillance and subjectification instead always employ queerness in the regulation of the state. For this reason, I choose instead to mobilize Puar’s understanding of surveillance as “as not only responsive and thus repressive, but also as pre-emptive and thus productive. And many of these forms of surveillance appear in neo-liberal models of security, model-minority racialization, proper modes of masculine and feminine gender conformity, educational mandates, and patriotic citizenship.” (interview). Facial Weaponization Suite (not the tableau featured at the MAAT, however) also features a conglomerate of biometric facial data gathered from women wearing burqas as a response to the ban on religious wear in France - a cutting into the system that understands burqas as a threat by creating a collective face that would, in turn, have the power to throw their system. Similarly, Blas’ creation of a conglomerate biometric face of black and racialized men signals the ways that racist security technologies often fail to recognize the faces of people of colour all together.  In reading Blas’ work through Puar’s understanding of surveillance technologies - productive surveillance is not undone by queerness alone, however, the mobilization in Blas’ work might be understood as weaponized embodied (or at least faced) assemblage of the abject forces and faces of queerness that then serve to not break, but work around technologies of surveillance.

Parikka points out that “from a societal point of view, you need a face, an address, and a net password to exist. . . . Subjectifcation works through assigning faces to otherwise anonymous preindividual flows.” ( Blas, p.51)  The Fag Face is at once a part of the mobilization of the  SoftQueerBody. A fake face can individualize the multiplicity of theSoftQueerBody to allow for unhindered movements throughout the grids of capital.”

The Fag Face can thus be understood as an abject disavowal to the techonogies of the state.

some of the questions that have come up for me as i put this piece in conversation with the AGO:  Are artistic interventions in technology useful? Do they actually serve to disrupt the realm of either art or technology? What is the role of cisgender/white artists in publicising and politicizing messages about terrorism, racism, gender, identity or marginalization outside of their own experiences? Where is the queer representation at the AGO? In the AGO’s online collection? Where is the black and trans and POC presence at the AGO? Are they just rejecting and usurping us all - rejecting technologies of surveillance? Why is Warhol still a celebrated acquisition, like really?    Why are queer/trans/black/ POC artists only ever featured in temporary exhibits? Why does the AGO’s one exhibition dedicated to tech STILL feature classical art? Why did I have to go to Amsterdam to see work by General Idea? Why did I search over 70 queer woman artists in the online collection to find one?

**CAMERA TRAP: on looking I caught Mariana Silva’s Camera Trap on the last day it was exhibiting in the Gulbenkian Museum Lisbon Modern Collection Project Space on February 26th, 2018. 

Camera trap is, according to the artists’ statement: “a reflection on the mass extinction of the animal species and the practice of taking images in natural habitats….[where] ecological failure appears in the exhibition as fiction and document, narrative and reflection, past and future, past and post-humanity.” 


Mariana Silva uses two circular screens (circular, like a camera lens) to introduce us to a speculative future in which people are no longer able to access the natural and animal world due to ecological devastation and extinction. In this world, people rely on digital image / virtual reality representations of nature, bugs, and animals - all but domestic animals - the two women featured in the video do have a house cat.



 This story stops and starts again, is interrupted by images as they appear on the screen adjacent to it. Bees. Bugs. Birds, sometimes spanning across the entire visual field. They exist in image or digital representation if not exclusively, than heavily protected from the public. 

Speculative fiction can be understood as a medium that allows for a reflection on social crises, but following Munos, among other scholars in queer theory, disability, and diaspora studies,  “Futurity can a problem” (2009, p.49) because futurity invokes ideal that seeks to very explicitly and implicitly eradicate signs of difference, particularly violent iterations of difference that are read as ‘suffering’ to those invested in white supremacist, heteronormative and embodied/neurotypical standards.
 We have to caution that the work of dystopia often re-inscribes structural violences “as white characters toil under the hardships that brown and black people experience acutely in real life” (Angelica Jade Bastien 2017). 


I believe that Silva is doing more here, as she works in a critique of colonizing technologies throughout the piece.  The story is told through conversations between these woman, who I will go ahead and assume are a lesbian couple given that they share a home and bed. 
One character is struggling with insomnia, anxiety and stress, which is resolved when her partner comes in to offer a virtual reality head set through which she can enjoy a virtual nature. Integral to this is a notation that she is a black woman, a figure who is markedly uncomfortable adjusting to the particularities of this unfolding “future”, perhaps because of the colonial and violent implications that have come with the fraught interaction with nature that come with a preservation-based approach to interacting with the natural world. In Rice et. al, they consider Garland-Thompson’s critique, where “the disjuncture of misfitting that exposes the privileges and fragilities of fitting also produces critical consciousness from which a crip politics and praxis of time might emerge”. What does this figure’s unease with this photograph-informed future leave with us with when we walk out of the room? These are technological interventions in nature and digital representation of a future in which human interaction with any world outside of domestic urban life is based only in images and representations: 



The nature of the photograph as a regulating technology is central to this piece, in which we have archival text and videography juxtaposed with the futuristic digital images employed in the story. As a technology of capture (Sontag, 1977), “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed”, and Silva’s piece does a lot of work to unpack the ways in which technology, when used as a device of capture and containment - the only version of nature accessible to those existing in this world- creates particular forms of global, ecological, and human violences.

No Saying Yes / Nao Dizer Sim

Rui Toscana (1970)

Portable radios displayed with pre-recorded audio saying ‘yes’.

[At the Gulbenkian museum of modern art, Lisbon, photo credit: me]

this piece only made me angry Of course some modern art dude would want to infer that a negation could be an invitation. If the doublespeak is intended critically or ironically it certainly doesn’t ring through

I am dealing with a whole slew of difficult conversations with different men while working on public workshops in sexuality and consent and.

**CRISIS AND CHANGE: financial crisis and activist re-writings [12 Short Songs (2009) by Jorge Macchi. Photo credit: me]  At the MAAT Lisbon, I had the chance to witness a large video survey featuring different artists’ takes on the 2008 financial crisis to now, called Tension & Conflict. 

Pedro Gadanho, the exhibition curator, notes that “video becomes much more challenging, because people are not used to the fact that, rather than just glimpsing at a work, they have to be there for five, six, seven, 10 minutes” in an interview with Sarah Rose Sharp about the exhibition (2018). The range of difficult subject matter, heavy content, war, and violence were engrossing, at times disturbing, and in other instances, inspiring change - curated in ways that offer “the terrible gift … the task of inheriting the troubling consequences of ‘the otherness of knowledge’(Simon, 2006)(Simon, p.435)”.

Within the exhibition, Mario Pfiefer’s #Blacktivist, 2015, [photo credit: me] is a dual-screened video installation, one featuring video interview and cell phone footage of black arms activists engaged in legal battles for releasing private files about firearm production to the public, displayed beside a music video for Flatbush ZOMBIES’s song, ‘blacktivist’.   The juxtaposition between the two highlights the ways in which hip hop and music creation serves as a tool for sharing and highlighting issues of political, structural, or state violence. 
The “The “otherness of knowledge” featured in this work, unlike the historical pieces set out and examined in Simon’s work, offers a reminder that the aforementioned knowledge missing from public discourse and dialogues about race and systemic historical violence is not only affective, but simultaneously a matter of civil / public rights to information exposed by activists working to disrupt national security narratives embedded with systemic racialized violence. The piece can be understood as a creation of culture, an example of flexible black creativity, a display of resistance in the form of a PSA, and a political movement & moment all at once.

(Flex, Conjure, Crack: Flexibility and the Uncertainty of Blackness, Treva C. Ellison, C magazine, 2017) Melanie Gilligan’s Crisis in the Credit System (2008) haunted me as I went through a 3-day improv-based professional development course at Second City training centre a few weeks after I saw the video installation  (a course priced at $2000! I was invited for free because they needed an even number). The 6-part series satire featured a number of wall-street executives getting together and using improv and scenario-based approaches to solving the mess of the crisis. As I sat through this training where we were offered office-management scenarios of our own, Gilligan’s work served as a reminder that under neoliberal capitalism, it is only the high-paid executives that can shell out $2000 for 3 days that will ever win (and have access to things like arts learning to help them make more money). What I do with this renewed sense of injustice at our urban social-enterprise focused arts-based complacency is yet to be established.