The Mask of Prosperity @ Gallery 400
Sonya Clark, cameron clayborn, Eli Greene, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Caroline Kent & Nate Young, Bouchra Khalili, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Carmen Winant, curated by Denny Mwaura
Art and inheritance go together like Italian beef and Turano rolls. The difference is that art seldom wants to advertise this relationship. Maybe it’s because inheritance feels too beneficent for particular individuals whereas art (or at least the art industry) lives off the fantasy of universality. As a result inheritance has been dressed up in noble, but mutable concepts like legacy, influence, and provenance. These signify historical chains of possession and relation that somehow, by virtue of art’s teleological transcendence, diffuse themselves from a private sphere to a nominally public one, –“promised gifts” – something everyone owns. At least in a saccharine metaphorical way that keeps the public grant money rolling in.
Inheritance is what happens behind closed doors, and as such it is attended to with a degree of lurid fascination. Post-opening conversations at bars and gallery dinners are borne on the whispers of where the wealth comes from and who in the room has it. The trades are full of features on art-dealing dynasties; litigation between second wives and children from the first marriage; obscure relatives that emerge every x-number-of-years like cicadas to claim the entirety of their dear, beloved, seventh-cousin (twice removed)’s estate; nepo-babies etc. It’s often messy, but what’s a bit of dirt on some Loro Piana trousers when a Bonnard is part of the equation? Inheritance in art is a publicly private matter, traditionally suited for print on pulp rather than the heavy, cream-wove pages of an exhibition catalog. God forbid such things be taken as serious objects of inquiry.
Yet, The Mask of Prosperity, a group exhibition curated by Denny Mwaura, at UIC’s Gallery 400 does just that. Under the aegis of the show’s ten artists, inheritance is decentered as a boon for the 1% and reframed as a political phenomena lived and suffered by all. Considered through a negative approach, inheritance for the many starts to look more like a common lack or have-not-ness that can, in spite of its immaterial nature, compound and remain more stubbornly than the material trappings most often associated with benefaction.
In any review of a thematic exhibition, a critic is placed in an awkward spot of trying to decipher the efficacy of the work against the broader programs of an individual artist’s practice, the exhibition at hand and art history. The Mask of Prosperity is interesting in this regard for how spaced out the work is. Save for Bouchra Khalili’s video (which holds the entire exhibition together) not one object feels particularly engaged with neighboring ones or anything else in the gallery. This results in the emergence of a piece-by-piece polemic that allows the contributing artists to avoid being homogenized by an ambitious curatorial thesis. Instead, the sparse installation permits the work to develop the contours of the show’s argument on terms particular to each artist.
S*an D. Henry-Smith documents a peripatetic existence. Evoking a form-of-life that is never quite at home anywhere, but also one that’s not exactly suffering for lack of warmth and kinship either. Henry-Smith’s five photographs are a series of backhanded triumphs, a sort-of freedom eked out of the Middle Passage’s historically incommensurate loss and savagery. The photograph of a spider trapped under a glass is the most bellicose, but others employ a Friedlander-like affinity for thresholds, transitional spaces, and the doubling effects where glass meets light, as if to be heighten the sensation of being all and no places at once, a belonging that can appear and vanish at will.
Nearby, Eli Greene’s horses, greene surgically reminisces over conventions of naming and memory across two different images presented on lightables at opposite ends of the exhibition. Indulging in the calligraphic undulations of her matrilineal surname Greene, the artist subverts hetero-patriachal naming conventions, selecting one pathway of inheritance for another. The graphite arabesques of the g and unfurling r’s repeat, each iteration both claim and aspiration to a belonging present in the immateriality of memory and name. Evoking the ways lovestruck romantics might catatonically trace out the last name of a crush they wish to marry, Greene’s drawings elucidate the eruption of a genealogy still in becoming with every signature.
Keeping it within the family, artists Caroline Kent and Nate Young have engaged in a collaboration beyond their marriage, presenting audiences with a tripartite walnut sculpture capped by a verdant house plant that will probably fare poorly in the dungeon that is Gallery 400. Each of the object’s three faces (an alcove for each child the couple shares) features two panels, one carved by Young and the other contains a painting by Kent. Untitled, is the only moment of the exhibition that explicitly considers the production and distribution of one’s own legacy to successors. There is a loving self-effacement to be appreciated in Kent and Young’s attitudes toward the bittersweet truth that parenting inevitably involves the absence of parents. There is a lucid generosity in treating their practices as something not-quite their own, but that generosity is not without its requests and expectations.
Inheritance can be contrasted to the act of gift giving. It exchanges the gift’s aleatory nature for an historically inflected obligation. But within the scope of duty and obligation there remains the agency to say “no” – or barring that, to subversively comply – which is what imbibes inheritance with its political character. Clinic Pictures, Carmen Winant’s archive of photographs from abortion clinics speak more so to the question of broader gender-based inheritance and the shared ethical field compelled by dispossession and precarity. Each image on the grid – haphazardly shot but studiously assembled – entails the necessity to assent to obligations that might be easier to refuse.
For all the varying interpretations of inheritance on offer, it is Bouchra Khalili’s The Speeches Series that holds the show together. The video is composed of three-parts: Mother Tongue, Words on the Street and Living Labour. Sadly, I have seen no evidence that Words on the Street or Living Labour are being played. For both of my ventures to the exhibition all that has been on is Mother Tongue, which was put on a loop instead of proceeding to the next section. That said, Mother Tongue is perfectly adequate at exacting a prescient critique of reaction, state-violence, dislocation and genocide by way of the thinkers quoted at length in each vignette. Passages from Aimé Césaire, Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, Malcolm X, Édouard Glissant, and Mahmoud Darwish reveal a world being striated and homogenized by Capital, and the particularities of place usurped by coercion. Within each speech, Khalili tracks the displacement of people into language.– the final frontier from which to begin a rootless offensive against dispossession. The lasting universal inheritance traced by Khalili’s readers therefore, is solidarity.
I’ll come out and say that I genuinely think Gallery 400 is an awful place to see art. The space feels overtly hostile to any kind of pleasurable viewing experience, so I have to applaud Mwaura for not only pulling off the difficult balancing act of making a salient argument without overdetermining his artists but also for making it a pleasurable viewing experience. When all is said and done, the constituent practices in The Mask of Prosperity compose a chorus boldly suggesting a politics advocating a mutually impoverished (and therefore eternally enriched) Cosmopolitanism from which new forms of life and systems of relations can be built. I for one could not agree more. Inheritance and duty might feel like dusty linguistic holdovers from the Gilded Age, but if the exhibition proves anything it’s that these are still lively and politically fraught concepts, that like all things worth fighting for, the “wretched of the earth” ought not concede so easily.
The Mask of Prosperity runs until August 03 at Gallery 400.