Elizabeth Ashe
There are several, genre-crossing phrases in the art world that are truly definable. The Personal is Political was coined by the feminist movement. Realizing that politics crosses boundaries, from countries to families, Doris Salcedo, Jeffrey Gibson, and Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg are making work that underscores the personal as political, giving the viewer space to take the work personally, to participate, to see the human body through the artist’s politically charged statements.
Last year, Doris Salcedo traveled – from Uprooted at the Sharjah Biennial 15, to the Fondation Beyeler with eight rooms, to MoMA. and Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer) at the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Gallery, which also exhibited at Beyeler. Salcedo’s work is about the evidence of a body, a name, a conversation. Her politics puts the person into a symbolic role others may sidestep into. She leaves space to engage and pushes the viewer around uncomfortable layers that are difficult to ignore. Last year, a sculpture series at Beyeler, Untitled, had a row of seventeen rods, pierced through the breasts of ten stacks of plaster-imbedded shirts. Plaster and white buttoned shirts melded, each stack, turned each death appearing the same as the other. The deaths are old; blood has been bleached out as if the stacks were once painted marble. The sameness of stacks of white button-shirts become masses of fabric and plaster, turns them into an architecture of death, like cemetery stones. In common, they were worn by plantation workers, who all died. The mass of these pierced shirts did many things. The rods contained and gave structure to the shirts. The rods stayed open to the sky, like urban architecture in Central and South America, where concrete homes remain “unfinished”, with rebar reaching skyward. It’s a trend made with optimism for the future need for more generational space. But with Salcedo, the optimism shifts on a personal, bodily and spacial level, no matter what, more lives will stack, nameless, working, on top of these lives that came before. One column of Untitled has the same gravitas as seventeen. Looking at them dried out my throat. Each column is so pristine, minimal, intentional, a mark of nameless labor and an architecture kept tidy.
As these white shirts pierced through the chest, “Uprooted” also pierces. It juggles ecological, political and personal needs wrapped up together. The sculptural installation is made from many young trees, which evolve from an occasional placement to a thicket, to a home none can enter. The home is the size of a one room cabin, nothing luxurious. The trees, like the immigrants the piece is tied to have been uprooted from their home soil. Immigrants share basic, universal needs including shelter and safety. But when the forest is dead and cannot welcome life, when the trees don’t live long enough to provide good lumber for building, the troubles that push you to immigrate do not resolve in your new country. Immigration from political crises is a global issue with so many countries giving massive push-back right now.
Last year during Miami Art Week, Jeffrey Gibson was showcased at Marc Straus. Always After Now (2014) shows its body, cultural politics, cosmos at an altered scale. The booth had several works by Gibson, but for me, this piece was the distillation of everything; Native, Minimalist, both stitched into a modern figure lifted on not one but two, different pedestals. It sucked my breath away to spiral in through its one glass eye. It combined contemporary, natural, and more traditional materials, with various beads, yarns, threads, crystals, tin jingles, fur and rawhide, a wool army blanket. The beads in black and white linear patterns spiraled and shimmied, to accentuate the hundreds of tin cones on the hips, arms and shoulders of the sculpture. This child-sized doll dancer melded time and culture. Here is a child-sized doll, elevated to adult height, ready to be noticed with traditional and contemporary materials making each bead. The sculpture is large enough to showcase a range of assemblage skills, counting as instruction for a younger generation, large enough to show importance culturally, and as a dancer who could move. All he needs to do, is jump down off his block and pedestal. I had to fight the urge to sit down and just wait for it to dance, and I would have happily waited until the close of day. As a child size, it could be embraced, it could be a way to take up the march forward from the genocide and the barbaric re-education in schools that Native children were forced to attend. “Always After Now” changed up scale in a way the broader American public doesn’t talk about or certainly see their deep relevance in Native American culture. Native American artists are changing the course of contemporary art.
And then, 2024 saw Gibson as the first Native artist ever chosen as the solo representative of the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. The Space in which to Place Me was an installation that considered every aspect of space and set his Native and Queer identities at the forefront. The works were loud audibly and visually. As quoted in the New York Times on April 13th, “I’m kind of enamored by the challenges of practicing democracy,” which really fit the bill of his approach to Venice. He incorporated more elements, and used many direct quotes from earlier American documents, including the Constitution, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and writings of Booker T. Washington; words that spark a feeling in the reader, no matter what your deeper cultural connections are. Gibson even had jingle dress performers dancing in Venice. Grandiose pedestals painted in a solid red were a stage and a mountain in the open courtyard outside the Pavilion – and Gibson painted the external walls of the Pavilion as well. Like his work in Miami, he kept things in the round. He repeated one of his signature sculptures, a punching bag. This time, it reads “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and to read it, the viewer moves around it, not dissimilar to how a boxer moves around a bag in practice. He has upcoming works for Mass MoCA and the Met, as well as a book.