"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
In Alan Martín Segal’s short film Incomplete Disappearances (2020-21), a hand reaches down beside a wooden table and slips an object—a button, a folded scrap of paper, a patina-green die—beneath its uneven leg. The repeated gesture functions as a visual metaphor for the myriad patchwork solutions to systems that, on a whole, have fallen short of their ideal function or, perhaps, were never competent in the first place. My first encounter with Segal’s uncanny film took place at the dark terminus of a long, arched corridor on the lower floor of SculptureCenter in Queens, New York. The film was projected behind a sheet of scratched glass, giving it the eerie feel of a signal left behind from a distant apocalypse.
The exhibition, curated by In Practice curatorial fellow Camila Palomino and on view from May 12 to August 1, 2022, was fittingly titled Literally means collapse. The show featured newly commissioned, site-specific works by eleven artists, all attending to the theme of ruin. Situated mainly in SculptureCenter’s bunker-like lower level exhibition space, the works in the show evoked the precarity of built environments, social norms, and systems of exchange. Yet they invited viewers to think through and beyond the quick fixes we impose on our collapsed and collapsing environment. In the face of entropy, the artworks called for collective maintenance—in the forms of research, reenactment, and reconstruction.
In her writings on the exhibition, Palomino refers both to “the promiscuity of order” and to “the patina of order.”1 Evoking order as a concept both transient and external to form, the curator makes an argument not against the inevitable obsolescence of political and social systems but against those who stubbornly believe in their permanence and authority. The relationships between the pieces chosen for the exhibition were, likewise, more associative and poetic than they were historically or geographically bounded; their juxtaposition ultimately eschewed cohesion in favor of friction and paradox. According to Palomino, “Maintenance and entropy affirm each other. To maintain, then, is a spiral choreography of contradictions.”2 Working from this premise, Palomino and the team at SculptureCenter narrowed down a list of open call submissions to eleven artists whose contributions included:
A hand-carved roof ornament on an aluminum offering table (Allen Hung-Lun Chen)
A cash booth containing twenty-dollar bills and rose petals (Monsieur Zohore)
The doors of safes, jars of water, and a thick hand-bound book (Marco Barrera)
A wall sculpture made of knotted polyurethane tubes (Violet Dennison)
Planar sculptures painted blue and outfitted with minuscule conductors and filaments (Stella Zhong)
A film about rituals of maintenance in the city of Buenos Aires (Alan Martín Segal)
An interactive soft sculpture made to resemble the base of a Christopher Columbus statue in Astoria, Queens (Jessica Kairé)
Wall-mounted assemblages depicting public plazas in Mexican cities and towns where colonial struggles took place (Enrique Garcia)
A collection of wristwatches marking the times at which an event recorded in CIA documents occurred (Ignacio Gatica)
A heated stone bench and a miniature domicile made of drop ceiling tiles (Cherisse Gray)
A film that exposes discriminatory urban planning practices through historical reenactment (Fred Schmidt-Arenales)
Although Palomino’s idea of ruin is far removed from the eighteenth-century notion of picturesque travel destinations, ironic traces of romanticism can be found in Marco Barrera’s installation Reservoirs (2022), a collection of steel doors detached from safes once used in businesses as well as in homes across the U.S. When they were produced at the turn of the twentieth century, the insides of these safes were sometimes decorated by artists—whose identities are no longer known—with miniature paintings depicting idyllic pastoral scenes replete with flowing water. Barrera purchased and transported these painted doors—some weighing up to five-hundred pounds—from various locations around the country where they had fallen into disrepair. On the four doors that made up Reservoirs, the paintings were scuffed and peeling, faded and marred from casual handling and nearly illegible in the dim light of the basement corridor. Although the interior of a safe might be a space associated with protection and preservation, such images of ruin—for instance, two cows grazing by a river in a yellowed landscape beneath a gashed sky—brought into focus the delusion and absurdity of accumulation.
Farther down the hall, Barrera presented a second installation, in many ways a sister to the first, titled Drawing a line backwards (2022). Here, four shelves displayed jars of water labeled with the locations from which they were sourced, including sites around the city of New York such as Empire City Casino, Rikers Island, and a sewer on Canal Street (where the water runs pink). The installation was created in collaboration with—and previously exhibited at—the Canal Street Research Association (CSRA), a roving pop-up founded and maintained by artists Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky, who wrote an essay titled “On Water” for the installation's accompanying publication. This hefty tome rested on a wooden chair across from the shelves, its homey set-up beckoning viewers to sit and read.
According to Palomino, Barrera’s water archive is a means of self-education—an attempt to understand the city in a personal way—and his collaboration with CSRA puts forth a view of research as dérive, or meandering, as method.3 Early on in the pandemic, CSRA occupied a storefront on Canal Street and invited artists like Barrera to contribute snapshots, artifacts, and stories of the thoroughfare’s history, including the pollution and eventual burial of the canal underneath the present-day pavement. Drawing a line backwards is a direct extension of this project. As for why the artists chose water as the subject of their research, Lin and Tatarsky argue in “On Water” that urban development suppresses the way water flows and meanders, mistaking this imposed rigidity for progress.4 When research is conducted for the purpose of maintaining collective memory, the promiscuous patina of order is rubbed off, exposing the fluid forms and living histories beneath it.
On the opposite side of SculptureCenter’s labyrinthine basement—which, for this exhibition, was designed to be circled infinitely, yielding multiple narratives of ruin and revival5—was a single-channel film by the artist Fred Schmidt-Arenales titled Committee of Six (2022). In this film, actors playing University of Chicago officials and community organizers re-stage a tense closed-door meeting regarding the university’s southward expansion that took place in 1955. The neighborhood in question is Hyde Park, where the university sits today, and the members of the “committee of six,” as they are called, discuss an “urban renewal program” that would displace Black communities so as to attract white buyers. The appointed actors, who are performers, academics, Hyde Park residents, and activists, play it straight for the first few minutes of the film: dressed in suits, cardigans, holding padfolios and clicking ballpoint pens, they present the original arguments from the 1955 meeting with convincing candor. One member of the committee, whose name plate reads “Levi,” remarks, for example, “Numbers are not really the issue. The issue is cultural and economic compatibility.” To have Black and white families “knocking heads,” Levi argues, would be “too much shock to the system.”
The exhibition posits this type of gentrification, this supposed lessening of shock and disorder, as a harbinger of societal collapse. On a formal level, this argument presents itself in the film shortly after Levi delivers his searing and epiphanic line: the scene suddenly cuts to a shot of the conference room empty save for the meeting’s stenographer. From there, we hear, in voiceover, a conversation between the present-day actors, which, as we find out, takes place mid-pandemic at a picnic table in a park. The actors deliberate how to best deliver their lines, as well as how to interpret the nearly seventy-year-old script in a way that makes most sense to a contemporary audience. Later parts of the film show the actors in plain clothes rehearsing the script on set. Every so often, they all burst into laughter.
By collapsing time in the film and by letting the present mediate the past via reenactment, Schmidt-Arenales re-presents history with a critical difference, offering visitors a means to think through and beyond ruin. Similarly, Jessica Kairé’s Folding monument (Christopher Columbus Statue, Columbus Triangle, Queens, New York) (2022), a soft sculpture made to resemble the plinth beneath a controversial local sculpture, invited visitors to unfold and, using a system of pulleys and cords, collectively raise the base of the charged symbol. For context, the original—and extant—statue is a WPA work erected in 1941 in Astoria’s Columbus Square park. The statue is bronze and sits on a cast stone base. According to City of New York Parks and Recreation, the plinth is meant to resemble the prow of a ship, and it was this prow-like base that visitors reconstructed at SculptureCenter.
During the Second World War, the statue was removed from view so as to prevent it from being scrapped for metal, meaning that for some time during the forties, the plinth stood by itself in Columbus Square, representing the famous figure without bearing his likeness. In the summer of 2020, when protestors called for the removal of monuments commemorating proponents of genocide, slavery, and white supremacy, the statue was given twenty-four hour protection by two patrol officers from the 114th Precinct.
As in Committee of Six, the collective gesture of raising Columbus’s plinth was not merely a reprisal or return but, instead, reconstruction with a difference. For one, Kairé remade the base using upcycled cotton canvas. The material—pliable and unable to stand without the labor of at least four participants—undermined the height and authority of the monument and, by extension, its cultish power over collective memory. The artist’s choice to have participants raise the plinth and not the figure of Columbus himself also called back to particular periods of history when the plinth stood alone. After meditating on power ad absentia rather than on the obvious face of the atrocities, the next question became, naturally, what exactly the officers from the 114th Precinct were sent to guard in 2020.
Kairé, who quite literally placed the fate of Folding monument in the hands of the participatory public, implicitly wagered that such a gesture would translate into political knowledge: That which is raised, the sculpture suggested, can also be lowered. However, when I first encountered the sculpture, it was hanging like a lopsided spider in the center of a narrow passageway, without anyone to activate it (only during a subsequent walk-through with the curator did a large group gather around the work, at which point four of us hoisted the corners of the plinth high above our collective heads). During that first visit, the sculpture read not as pedestal but as impediment; ducking and folding my shoulders so as to pass beneath the limp canvas cords without disturbing them, I was perplexed by their cold indifference to the space. But when I realized that the deflated form was in fact an action previously completed, I came to understand another kind of ruin, that which exists when the fruits of collective action are abandoned by their publics, who mistakenly believe their creations to be eternal.
Is a sustainable structure, then, simply a shaky table under whose short leg we periodically—lovingly—slip a token of support? The exhibition obstinately refused to give a straight answer. Like the ring shape of the space, the conceptual undercurrents of Literally means collapse called for infinite circulation, analysis, and speculation. Nevertheless, at a time when, day after day, our social, political, and environmental systems teeter on the brink of collapse or actually collapse before our eyes, and when nothing better seems to be coming to take their place, art that records the kernels of difference generated in or in spite of each iteration of maintenance can provide a measure of comfort. If anything, it reminds us that we won’t step in the same river twice.
| 1 | Camila Palomino, “In Practice: Literally means collapse,” In Practice: Literally Means Collapse (New York: SculptureCenter, 2022), 2-3 |
| 2 | Palomino, “In Practice,” 2 |
| 3 | Conversation with Camila Palomino, 29 July 2022; Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky, “On Water,” Drawing a line backwards, ed. Canal Street Research Association (New York: Marco Barrera, 2022), n.p. |
| 4 | Lin and Tatarsky, “On Water,” n.p. |
| 5 | Conversation with Camila Palomino |