A History Made Present: The Power of Absence Through Reference & Address
May 16, 2017
Alfredo Jaar, This is what happened, Miss Simone, 2015
During the summer of 2016, Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, the co-founders of the first artist-run super PAC, For Freedoms, curated an unabashedly political show of the same name at Jack Shainman Gallery. Amongst the many works in the show and displayed in a ten-foot by ten-foot room off the main exhibition space was Alfredo Jaar’s rather subtle and simple work, This is what happened, Miss Simone (2015). The work consists of two parts: on the wall is a black-framed, 30-inch by 30-inch, black poster divided vertically into five, 2-inch columns, each with four dozen repeating lines of white text hung against the white gallery wall. A few feet in front of it, on the black matte gallery floor, a 3-foot-tall stack of identical posters – only these are in the negative: black text on a white background. In its density the stack appears to be a solid white cube; however, the slight differences in alignment of the posters’ edges make the sides ridged and announces its true form. Jaar’s This is what happened, Miss Simone concatenates textual and formal, cultural and historical references in a configuration that muddles delineations between past and present, artist and viewer, to offer the absence of violent representation as an ethical mode of showing.
From afar, the repetition of form makes the content of the poster appear fuzzy, producing a disorienting and dizzying effect that obscures the text’s clarity. To the distant viewer, each of the five columns appear as rows of purely geometric form: a thin line followed by a thicker line, except for the first line in the top left corner which, instead, is just one long, thick line. However, this deviation from the otherwise rigidly followed grid structure rewards closer attention – the lines are not just shapes, but are in fact text in all caps. Stepping in to take a closer look, viewers enter into a space of tension: the distance between the stack of posters and the framed poster on the wall establishes a dialectical object relationship that highlights viewers’ own corporeality as their body prevents their ability to see both elements simultaneously. It is within this space that the text becomes clear; the first line reads: “MISSISSIPPI GODDAM,” while the rest of the several dozen line segments in each column repeats: “___________ GODDAM”. What had previously seemed to be an innocuous abstraction becomes ambiguously troubled under the force and urgency of the capital letters and soft profanity.
Offering little else to look at, the work relies upon viewer participation to decipher the accumulation of meaning generated through textual and formal reference. As such, the title (This is what happened, Miss Simone) and the textual content (Mississippi Goddam) become clues and entry points into the work. In 1964, at her concert in Carnegie Hall, for a largely white audience, the African-American singer and pianist, Nina Simone, performed “Mississippi Goddam.” The piece was a fierce response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that resulted in the death of four young black children. With this new cultural knowledge in mind, the work’s initial, purely formalist reading becomes imbued with the targeted and racialized violence committed against people of color during the Civil Rights Movement. The distant text in its fuzzy obscurity now reads as rows of piano keys; the blank underscore appears as the line between the white keys of a piano, while the bold, condensed font of “GODDAM” is thick and raised like the black keys. The stark contrast of the black text on white paper embodying Zora Neal Hurston’s oft-cited quote, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” [1]
The work’s title, This is what happened, Miss Simone, close resemblance to the Netflix documentary, “What Happened, Miss Simone?”, released just the year before in 2015, cannot be mistaken. The documentary’s title was, in turn, a direct appropriation of a quote from Maya Angelou’s 1970 article in the magazine, Redbook, in which she asked, “But what happened, Miss Simone? […] What happened to you?” [2] While Angelou and subsequently, the Netflix documentary pose a question to Nina Simone, hoping for her to answer from beyond the grave, Jaar reformulates this question into a declarative statement directed at rather than about her. The title exclaims, “This is what happened, Miss Simone” as though to gesture towards an answer, yet the this we are left with is almost literally, quite empty. “This” is column after column, row after row, of blanks followed by the solemn, frustrated, rage-filled “Goddam” on the framed poster, in addition to the endless (and endlessly reproducible) stack of posters just a few feet away. In reconfiguring the grammatical structure of Angelou’s query and presenting the viewer with blank spaces, This is what happened, Miss Simone situates the viewer in the position to address Simone and provide her with an answer.
Alfredo Jaar, This is what happened, Miss Simone, 2015
In sitting with the blank list and searching for an answer, it becomes more difficult to ignore the resonance between the poster and #BlackLivesMatter protest signs of the names of people of color killed by the police. The poster’s list is also reminiscent of Claudia Rankine’s in her book, Citizen, that begins each line with “In Memory of” proceeded by the names: Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sr., Myra Thompson, Sandra Bland. [3] Several more lines continue with the text, “In Memory,” followed by blank space while gradually fading as though trailing off into both infinitude and exhaustion at the anticipation of more to come. Each name memorializes a person of color who died at the hands of unjust, racialized police violence, and it is their names and their cities whose spectral presence are called to occupy the blank lines of This is what happened, Miss Simone. Just as Rankine fulfills James Baldwin’s call to “bring out your dead,” the blank lines beckon viewers to do the same. [4]
excerpt from Citizen by Claudia Rankine
As the text situates the work within an accumulation of meaning through cultural reference, the work’s formal qualities does so through (art)historical reference. Nancy Princenthal writes that Jaar’s work “is firmly grounded in the present, and its orientation is squarely face-forward. But it is also based, as it has been from the start, on the assumption that political attentiveness cannot be dissociated from historical awareness…” [5] Throughout the 1990s Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced a series of stacks of paper that were often simple in form – with either little to no text, color, or figurative representation. For example, Untitled (Passport) (1990), consists solely of a 4-inch stack of 2-foot by 2-foot white paper, placed directly on the ground and against a wall. Despite being visually minimalist, or perhaps precisely because of it, his paper stacks become complex in their ambiguous open-endedness. Their visual simplicity redirects attention to the interaction between the works’ title and its physical object quality, the work and other pieces in the space, and the work and viewer participation. Gonzalez-Torres’ paper stacks reference in turn, the stark, geometric form that characterized 1960s Minimalism. However, by emphasizing viewer participation and imbuing his works with a politically charged rather than neutral, universalized content, Gonzalez-Torres reinvigorated the radical potential proffered by the contingency of perception. This compounding of art historical references proves to be profound when considering the coetaneous reality of the life-threatening urgency of Simone’s lyrics in contrast to Minimalism’s cold, apolitical and supposedly content neutral work.
Another work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which in its explicit content is somewhat of an outlier for him, is the paper stack Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990). Organized within a gridded matrix, each paper poster provides the name, age, and face of 464 individuals killed by bullet wounds in the span of a week in the United States alone. Though This is what happened, Miss Simone and Untitled (Death by Gun) share an obvious formal relationship as paper stacks, considering these two works as they converge and depart from one another surfaces a generative analysis. While neither are rigidly didactic, the title and visual, photographic representations make explicit the subject matter in (Death by Gun), while This is what happened, Miss Simone purely vague textual content is ambiguous. In the case of Untitled (Death by Gun), viewers are encouraged to learn about gun violence and perhaps even become advocates of gun control. This is what happened, Miss Simone, on the other hand, asks that the viewer contribute to its message.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Passport), 1990
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990
While This is what happened, Miss Simone utilizes the same on distribution strategy, it expands the viewers’ participatory role in creating meaning. Through its form, it operates as what Umberto Eco calls an ‘open work’ in his essay “The Poetics of Open Work.” [6] The posters are ‘unfinished’ until the viewer interacts with them – whether physically altering the surface of the poster, or even mentally filling them in. Rather than being a transparent transfer and dissemination of information like in Untitled (Death by Gun), the list of blanks is intentionally absent of information as an invitation, or perhaps a challenge, for the viewer to actively unravel its references and then to contribute to the creation of the work. While no writing instrument is provided, the blank line preceding each “GODDAM” compels viewers to fill it in by recalling a site of racialized violence against people of color from the expansive reservoir provided by America’s history. In fact, in speaking about his practice, Jaar said, “if the media and their images fill us with an illusion of presence, which later leaves us with a sense of absence, why not try the opposite? That is, offer an absence that could perhaps provoke a presence.” [7]
In her song, “Mississippi Goddam,” Simone sings, “You keep on saying ‘Go slow!’//But that’s just the trouble//’Do it slow’//Desegregation//’Do it slow’//Mass participation//’Do it slow’.” [8] Challenging white America’s insistence on a slow, progressive narrative of change Simone pointed to the racialized violence in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama as evidence of the failure and myth of gradual change. Rather than presenting a completed list, This is what happened, Miss Simone relies upon the viewer’s own knowledge of racialized violence to fill in the blanks. Through this process, rather than recalling historical events from the 60s or 70s, the cities; Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Beavercreek, Baltimore, Houston, Santa Rosa, Washington, D.C., and their associations with police violence against people of color rush to mind. As a result, the temporal gap between the 60s and the present collapses under the present-day reality of racialized violence, echoing Simone’s message that little has changed.
During the 1960s and 1970s, in the hopes of democratizing access to viewing, making, and owning art, artists (and the work they made) explored and developed alternative distribution strategies. In his seminal 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin anticipated that technological advancements in photography had the potential to catalyze such a radically democratic movement within the artworld. Benjamin believed the reproducibility of images made possible by photography troubled notions of originality and uniqueness liberating “the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.”[9] Because a reproduction could be made, the cult value of an artwork diminished and its exhibition value increased, as viewers no longer had to travel great distances in order to experience the work.
By attempting to eliminate the art object itself and instead provide instructions or mass-produced and disseminated work Conceptual Art of the 1970s continued to decenter the authorial artist and deemphasize art’s cult value. Such strategies of mass dissemination informed Gonzalez-Torres’ paper stacks, and consequently, This is what happened, Miss Simone, as it is fundamental to the form that the work and its message can reach an audience beyond those who visit the gallery. While the dissemination of Gonzalez-Torres’ work is often read as the spread of a virus in the context of HIV/AIDS, the dissemination of This is what happened, Miss Simone brings to mind the viral sharing of photographs and video – particularly that of racialized police violence – by media outlets and social media. Yet, unlike mass media’s uninhibited sharing of spectacular violence (often upon minoritized bodies), this work does not subject viewers to the spectacle of violent imagery.
In the mid-1960s, forty years after Benjamin published “The Work of Art…” the Land Art artist, Robert Smithson, produced a body of work based on his theorization of Site/Non-Site works of art. The former being “the actual site” from which the natural materials came and a place that could be traveled to while the latter is a container, a representation of the original site. By exhibiting photographs and maps of the original site Smithson produced a dialectic tension between Sites and Non-Sites, both linking the two and placing them in contrast to one another. Through this body of work – the sculptural abstraction of the Non-Sites, the photographic and geographical representation, and the Site – Smithson incorporated the natural landscape into the space of the gallery. Reading these works alongside Benjamin’s essay highlights the ways in which Smithson negotiates and upholds the aura of the Site as original, as something different from its reproduction as a Non-Site, while simultaneously applying a unique status to Non-Sites as well. In doing so, the work becomes diffused across its many elements and an experience of any one element is not elevated above others as more or less “authentic.” This is what happened, Miss Simone operates similarly if we are to read its installation at Jack Shainman Gallery as the work’s Site, and the distribution, displacement, and relocation of the white posters from the stack as its Non-Site. In this way, the white posters become the excavated material standing as a representation, map, guide to the Site – not the piece itself, but an element of the work. Those who take a poster from the stack do not own the work itself, but an element of it.
Robert Smithson, Oberhausen (Ruhr, Germany) Non-Site, 1968
A cynical reading of this work might understand the black framed poster to simply be a product of the art market’s demand for scarcity through the editioning of unique works of art. While this market-driven reading may also be true, a formal consideration of the black framed poster remains generative in its own right. The framed poster and the stack of posters share identical textual content and layout; however, they differ as visual inverses and in viewer accessibility. The monochromatic use of black and white in both posters and the distance and quantitative difference between them alludes to asymmetrical racial division. The glass frame of the black poster physically demarcates it as a work of high art and prevents the viewer from affecting its surface while the white poster is available for the taking. While the black poster is unique in its singularity, the white posters are seemingly endless – an infinitely reproducible list of blanks waiting to be filled in with another city, another name, another act of violence, by a dark pen against the sleek, glossy white background.
While the work is not so much engaged in the lineage of antagonistic, or even relational, aesthetics – that is, prompting relations of conviviality or antagonism amongst viewers in a shared space – it does create an informal, nebulous, anonymous collectivity through shared “ownership” of the work. By taking a poster from the stack, viewers do not violate the work but rather participate in its dissemination – hanging it in their homes or relocating it to the street – and become intertwined with one another through collective ownership. Moreover, by providing the blank space, the form of the work invites viewers to become not just an owner of the piece, but a collaborator and participant in the work’s meaning, and to share a degree of authorial status with Jaar. Admittedly, though an ‘open work’ in its prompting of viewer participation, the degree to which one can alter the work’s meaning is rather limited – in fact, any addition to the blank space could be understood to be a fulfillment of Jaar’s meaning for it rather than the viewer/participant/creator’s own, altogether different meaning. Nevertheless, these uncertainties and confusions are indicative of the work’s disruption of any clear distinctions between artist and viewer, instead highlighting the fault lines that run along them.
While technological advancements brought about the proliferation and democratization of photography and mechanical reproductions, the ethics of figurative representation were troubled during the 20th century. In the wake of photojournalism’s documentation of wars and its atrocities, Susie Linfield writes, “photographs have robbed us of the alibi of ignorance… [However,] the belief in the saving power of exposure qua exposure can no longer be sustained.” [10] The knowledge and representation of international horrors was and is not enough to catalyze change in and of itself. In fact, the representation of the brutalized or traumatized Other is often complicit in the production of the Other as a victim or otherwise inferior, becoming a re-enactment of violence against them. In “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” Rey Chow also denounces re-presentations of the Other that infuses them with subjectivity, because “defilement and sanctification belong to the same symbolic order.” [11] That is, the order of representation, which leads to a second order of violence. Jaar experienced his own crisis of representation on his trip to Rwanda in 1994 during the country’s genocide against its own people. After returning home to create work about his time there, any attempt to represent the experiences of those he met and what he saw felt inadequate and a failure.
Given both the ethical dilemmas and sheer inadequacy of figurative representation to translate experience and catalyze social change, Jaar has developed an aesthetic practice of “not the production of images, but the creation and choreographing of the viewer’s encounter with and reflection upon the encounter with images…” [12] Rather than enacting a second order of violence upon black bodies through figurative representation, This is what happened, Miss Simone uses the amalgamation of textual and formal, cultural and art historical references to call for an end to police violence. It is through absence rather than presence that This is what happened… provides entry points into the work and necessitates viewers to become active. Jaar does not depict violated black bodies, but instead provides oblique references and absence to compel viewers to become enraged by their own repository of imagery. It might be argued This is what happened… is simply displacing the violence of representation from the work on to the viewer, as the imagery and memory is recalled in the viewer’s mind. However, as Linfield writes, artists are “responsible for the ethics of showing, but we are responsible for the ethics of seeing.”[13] This is what happened, Miss Simone demonstrates an ethical mode of showing violence that leaves the viewer to decipher its very absence by gesturing towards it through textual, formal and cultural, (art) historical reference. While in 1965 Nina Simone sang, “…everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam,” today Beyonce’s “Formation,” J.Cole’s “Be Free,” and The Game’s “Don’t Shoot,” suggest that we now say “…everybody knows about Ferguson Goddam.”
Footnotes
[1] Zora Neale Hurston, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” The World Tomorrow, May 11, 1928, 215-216.
[2] Maya Angelou, “Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul,” Redhook, November, 1970.
[3] Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press, 2014), 134.
[4] James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York City: Henry Holt & Co, 1985:1995), 39.
[5] Nancy Princenthal, Alfredo Jaar: The Fire This Time: Public Interventions 1979-2005, ed. Emily Ligniti (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2005), 25.
[6] Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 22.
[7] Rubén Gallo et al., “Representation of Violence. Violence of Representation” in Trans (New York, 1997), 59.
[8] Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddam, MP3, Philips Records, 1964.
[9] Walter Benjamin, “The work of Art…,” ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24.
[10] Susie Linfield, “Photojournalism and Human Rights,” in The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 46-47.
[11] Rey Chow, “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 146.
[12] Griselda Pollock, “Not-Forgetting Africa,” in Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images, ed. Nicole Schweizer, trans. Gauthier Herrmann (Lausanne, CH: JRP|Ringier, 2007), 132.
[13] Susie Linfield, “Photojournalism and Human Rights,” in The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 60.
Bibliography
Angelou, Maya. “Nina Simone: High Priestess of Soul.” Redhook. New York City: Hearst
Corporation, November, 1970.
Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York City: Henry Holt & Co,
1985:1995.
Benjamin, Walter. “The work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
Writings on Media.” Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Chow, Rey. “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” In Displacements: Cultural Identities in
Question. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Eco, Umberto. “The Poetics of the Open Work.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Gallo, Rubén, Hal Foster, Alfredo Jaar, and Sylvère Lotringer. “Representation of Violence.
Violence of Representation.” In Trans. New York, 1997.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “How it Feels to Be Colored Me.” The World Tomorrow. May 11, 1928.
Linfield, Susie. “Photojournalism and Human Rights.” In The Cruel Radiance: Photography and
Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Pollock, Griselda. “Not-Forgetting Africa.” In Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images. Edited by
Nicole Schweizer. Translated by Gauthier Herrmann. Lausanne, CH: JRP|Ringier, 2007.
Princenthal, Nancy. Alfredo Jaar: The Fire This Time: Public Interventions 1979-2005. Edited
by Emily Ligniti. Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2005.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press, 2014.
Simone, Nina. Mississippi Goddam. MP3. Philips Records. 1964.
Spector, Nancy. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York City: Guggenheim Museum Publications,
1995:2007.
Nyberg, Patrik, and Jari-Pekka Vanhala, ed. Silja Kudel, Eva Malkki, Jyrki Lappi-Seppälä,
Patrik Nyerg, and Jari-Pekka Vanhala trans. Alfredo Jaar: Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. Porvoo, FI: Bookwell Oy, 2014