Final Installment of The Kitchen L.A.B.: Regeneration
By Alison Burstein, Curator, Media & Engagement
Inaugurated in 2012, The Kitchen L.A.B. is an annual series that brings together artists, writers, and other practitioners with audiences for monthly conversations about a single term. Over the course of a year, these L.A.B. events invite artists to exchange thoughts with one another about their understandings of this term as it relates to their work and to broader culture. A key feature of this series is the opportunity for the participants to be in dialogue with audience members: after the artists offer brief initial presentations, the programs open onto question-and-answer periods that often spark extended discussion around ideas from the audience.
Between September 2019 and February 2020, we convened five L.A.B. programs around the term “regeneration” (a series of posts highlighting these events is available here). Come March, we postponed the sixth L.A.B. of the year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and we began to rethink how it would be possible to preserve the spirit of the series within the digital realm.
What follows is the result of our invitation to three individuals—artists Martin Beck and Narcissister and art historian and critic Jeannine Tang—to write texts that would be shared with one another. We asked each participant to reflect on the word “regeneration,” recognizing that, at the time of the invitation in June, this term had taken on added layers of significance in the context of the unfolding pandemic and global protest movements. Each participant wrote an initial piece engaging with the word, and they then had the opportunity to read one another’s writing, along with a few questions that I posed in order to further the conversation. To complete the process, Beck, Narcissister, and Tang drafted a second text in response to these collected materials.
One key insight that emerged from this process is that the balance between the institution’s and participants’ voices becomes differently weighted in this kind of written format, without the possibility for sustained conversation among the participants beyond the texts they submit or the presence of audience members who may offer additional viewpoints. In this case, my contribution of prompts in response to the first round of submissions shifted the course of the exchange by placing added emphasis on the institution’s voice rather than on the perspectives of the participants. This lesson is one that will inform our future choices of how we facilitate text-based conversations among groups of practitioners.
As the final installment in what ended up being an abbreviated season of L.A.B. conversations, the pieces below add to the thinking that the participants in the previous five programs generated collectively around the term “regeneration.” We will be drawing on the ideas that the artists and writers proposed across this year of discussions—both about the word and about the L.A.B. format—as we develop a new approach to our next L.A.B. season, which will be further tailored to address the ongoing realities of digital and socially distant programming. Additional details on when the series will begin and what form it will take are forthcoming.
Initial Texts by Martin Beck, Narcissister, and Jeannine Tang
Martin Beck: “one thing to learn: revolution is sometimes circular”
When playing used vinyl records, a few things can happen. The record can be in perfect condition, and play with full clarity. It can be a little dusty, and the needle picks up crackles that merge unfavorably with the sound. Used records can also have more substantial imperfections. These include spots where the needle encounters a minute obstacle on the record, picks up a popping sound that gets louder then decreases and, after a few revolutions, disappears. An unfortunate scenario occurs when the needle encounters an insurmountable hurdle and skips back into the previous groove. The sonic experience is then trapped in a repetition of whatever is stored in the groove of a single revolution. The only way forward to hear the rest of the record is to intervene, to lift the tonearm manually, and to place the needle on one of the next grooves. However, there is no guarantee that, a few revolutions inward, the record won’t hit another snag and skip again.
I started thinking about these hiccups when reading The Kitchen’s prompt for addressing the term regeneration, as an artist concerned with “re-purposing historical issues or material” … “as it intersects with the historical question of whether to bring about change through revolution or reform.” While revolution resonates as the radical approach, the term’s history unveils a linguistic shift during the seventeenth century, when its meaning broadened from a repetitive mechanical movement to a political rupture with no possibility of return. Christopher Hill elaborates that the “shift from circular motion to a one way ‘change of government’ … could happen only if politics passed out of the control of those holding government office.” [1]
While gathering these thoughts, I reread the archival documents that are the foundation of my 2008 exhibition project Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes …” The historical narrative therein illustrates both sonic experiences: the loud pop and continuing, and the skipping and locking into a loop, without ever manually advancing the tonearm.
A little more than fifty years ago, on June 14, the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado opened to discuss the theme “Environment by Design.” The annual conference was inaugurated in the early 1950s to foster dialogues and relationships between design and industry. In addition to gathering venerable figures of modern design and their business relationships, the 1970 edition included environmental collectives and activist architects as well as a group of French designers and sociologists from the Utopie group. Over five days, instead of the high-altitude exchange about the relationship of design and ecology the organizers aspired to, the conference became a site of conflict about communication formats (who speaks and how); about design’s complicity in creating waste and aiding defense industries; and about inclusivity, disenfranchisement, and racism. The conflict escalated when the so-called French Group argued that the conference’s newfound interest in ecology masked the larger political struggles of the time: by diverting ideology “onto rivers and national parks” rather than “class discrimination,” “wars” and “neo-imperialist conflicts,” the conference bypassed the real challenges to society. [2] In addition, some activists forced a vote on resolutions addressing broader political issues, including “that Federal, State, and local governments recognize and enforce the right of peoples to live in various lifestyles that do not necessarily reflect the mainstream of American society, and stop the persecution of the Blacks, Mexican-Americans, longhairs, homosexuals, and women.” [3]
In the aftermath of the conference, the all-male and, except for one member, all-white IDCA board was clearly shaken by what had happened and discussed options to go forward. The conference president, Eliot Noyes, opened the meeting by stating that the events of those few days “indicate with great clarity that conferences in the form we have held them in the past are no longer workable or acceptable.” [4] Realizing that they were out of tune with the changing times, the board struggled to forge a way forward. Noyes argued that the conference “should either fold up” or “be radically changed” and acknowledged his inability to make that change: “I feel that I, myself, am now pretty stale for such a new effort.” [5] A vote was taken to restructure the board, bring in new and younger voices, rethink more inclusive programming, and develop new formats of communication as well as address the role of design in relation to contemporary social challenges.
Organizing the 1971 edition fell to Richard Farson, dean of the School of Design at the newly minted California Institute of the Arts. Farson’s program, titled “Paradox,” placed emphasis on participation, holding workshops rather than lectures, “consciousness-expansion sessions,” and an instant feedback loop produced in the form of a daily conference newspaper shepherded by graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Farson’s attempt at regenerating turned out to be a mixed bag: “No matter how creative Farson’s ideas were for his ‘high-risk design conference,’ and no matter how many diverse groups he brought in to lead happenings, he was ultimately the ringmaster of the project, and in many respects had to follow IDCA protocol.” [6] Over the next three years, the conference reversed its course again, and despite integrating some lessons learned, reinstated the lecture format and re-focused on a much narrower conception of what design’s role in relation to social issues might be.
The urgency of change set loose in 1970 and the resulting drive to transform itself had run up against the institutional foundation of the conference—its organization and funding structure, its means of communication, and, ultimately, its rooting in a hierarchical modernist tradition.
Narcissister: Untitled (The Tunnel)
I would like to propose this collage Untitled (The Tunnel) as a jump-off for thinking about the concept of regeneration. I created this image in March 2020 while I was traveling in Europe to perform as Narcissister as the realities of COVID-19 were just beginning to set in. The Pompidou Centre in Paris was still open; every seat of their main concert hall was filled for my performance. The Box in Soho, London was characteristically packed with debaucherous night revelers. I was the only one wearing a mask—my Narcissister mask.
Also at this time in March, the second wave that would hit us worldwide—this wave of undeniable racial reckoning—was gaining momentum, although less perceptibly (at least to most of us who are privileged enough to live apart from a daily, life-threatening embodiment of race).
This image, Untitled (The Tunnel), could be seen as a sinister portrayal of this historical moment, a moment in which we are faced with a dim, dank, scary passage with no view of the other side. The woman’s expression could be read as foreboding. And she is indeed white—is she blocking the entrance to all or just to some? Once in, would she trap us inside?
The image is of a portal, a portal to a tunnel through which I/we all must pass to get to the other side, to get to a place of fully realized regeneration. Rather than sinister, I see this woman, who I clipped from a found porn magazine, as kind of Goddess/Keeper of this portal. I see her gesture as a necessary, fertile component of what makes regeneration possible. And I trust that the little lights at her heart center are clear guideposts along the way, lights that we can each find in ourselves. Her facial expression is determined and beckoning. She has let us in.
And so, where are we in this proverbial tunnel? When will we turn the corner and arrive at the light of day, open space, and sustainable new growth on the other side? We don’t know. What’s clear to me however, is that this is absolutely a journey of regeneration on so many levels. This period of shut-down and of racial reckoning has forced me and so many of us to engage in a valuable questioning of who we are, what we want for ourselves and for the world around us, how we can restore our bodies and spirits, and what the triumphs and failures of our generations are. What does regeneration look like? More hopefully and importantly: what will regeneration look like?
Jeannine Tang
Thinking about regeneration relative to exhibitions and curatorial history calls to mind curating’s frequently cited etymology—rooted in the care and guidance of souls and parishioners, prior to its more recent focus on the safekeeping and preservation of artworks and collections, the conceptualization and oversight of exhibitions. Its earlier meaning comes to mind today, in a period when monuments to white supremacy are dismounted and removed, and institutional leadership and systems of abuse are widely held to account for decades and centuries of structural racism. How has curatorial care also focused on those artists, histories, and constituencies whose lives and bodies have been the ground of extraction, exclusion, and marginalization? And how has care itself assumed the form of aligning institutions (themselves contradictory assemblages of people, objects, resources) more deeply with pre-existing or potential democratic or decolonial missions?
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, following widespread disinvestments in welfare and social support leading to and deepening precarity, there has been a resurgence of care-themed exhibitions and readers. The projects I’ve been inspired by the most have not addressed care thematically, but were themselves organized in ways that rethought those material structures that socially reproduce uneven distributions of life and practice. The length of some projects has exceeded those typical temporal parameters of an exhibition’s open and close. In doing so, they arguably intervene within durational time—meaning those everyday, never-finished activities of reproductive labor maintaining embodied social life, or those rhythms and structures of power invented by racial capitalism, that are continuously refined and regenerated into the present.
These might include such projects as the Afterwork exhibitions curated at Para Site by curators Freya Chou, Cosmin Costinas, Inti Guerrero, and Qinyi Lim. Although traveling exhibitions typically adapt their checklists and installation in response to the variables of their physical sites, the research scope and accountability of Afterwork also involved the migrant worker communities at its Hong Kong, Malaysian, and Indonesian venues. In doing so, it mapped those classed and racialized migrant labor conditions spanning Southeast Asia, and called into question prevailing representational frameworks enframing migrant workers. The curators also published an important anthology of migrant and domestic worker literature, focusing on workers as subjects and authors, and spanning fiction, poetry, and criticism by established writers and those publishing for the first time.
If Afterwork stretched across geographic space, curator Meg Onli’s Colored People Time (2019) unfolded across time, by way of three exhibitions, Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, and Banal Presents at the ICA Philadelphia. The exhibition gathered work by a generation of younger artists to plumb the insidious afterlife of slavery in the present. Summoning the challenge of the vernacular “colored people time,” the exhibition staged “a refusal to disavow our embodied sense of time, beyond capital’s demands.” [1] Against prevailing Western temporalities of timeliness and punctuality, as an exhibition Colored People Time encompassed three presentations appearing over a year, committing an exhibition in the museum’s project space to the longevity of an annual exhibition program. Through its selection of work, the exhibition also linked the ICA Philadelphia (as a non-collecting kunsthalle devoted to temporary experimental shows) to the ethnographic collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
In doing so, CPT connected the futurity and presentness of contemporary art by Sable Elyse Smith, Cameron Rowland, and others to the ongoing history of racial capitalism, and its violent appropriations of Black culture, bodies, and geography. [2] An artist in CPT, Carolyn Lazard, notably produced the crucial Accessibility in the Arts guide, and has contributed work to important exhibitions materializing and manifesting the temporalities of disability and illness, such as Taraneh Fazeli’s Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying curated by Taraneh Fazeli at EFA Project Space (2017). [3] The highly usable guide includes recommendations for childcare, communications, and more and is founded in an important paradigm shift—away from a juridical, liberal, complaint-driven model of disability, and towards a disability justice perspective understanding “disability to be unevenly distributed, primarily affecting black and indigenous communities, queer and trans communities, and low income communities.” [4]
These examples intervene into moments of repetition in curating that are sometimes taken for granted, or moved through in customary ways—whether in the travel of an exhibition, the relation of exhibition to program or an institution to its neighbor, or what even constitutes an invitation. These projects rethink practice to reproduce more consciously and capaciously those fundamental questions of who is behind an exhibition, who is within it, what is the research object or subject upon which it relies, and how their lives might be respected, beyond the value of their labor. As Lazard writes in Accessibility in the Arts, “this guide is in no way meant to be comprehensive, but will hopefully change the institutional landscape of the arts. Accessibility is a promise, not a guarantee. It’s a speculative practice.” [5]
Prompts from Alison Burstein
You each reference the relationship between regeneration and temporality, calling attention to different directions of progress that can happen over time and to the different durations over which generation (or regeneration) can occur. Could you comment on these multiple temporal possibilities in relation to one another, and on what it might mean to hold open the potential for them to exist at once?
Considering the institutional examples that Martin and Jeannine raise alongside one another, to what extent do you think that it is possible for those involved with institutions (curators, artists, administrators) to recognize or leverage the ways in which any given project can impact what Martin refers to as the “institutional foundation”?
Responses to Preceding Texts and Prompts
Martin Beck
Having started my earlier contribution with an analogy from the process of playing records, I want to stay with the theme and bring in the terms rhythm and flow. To sustain a rhythm, a musician has to commit to a structure, to repeating a pattern of sounds over a period of time. A rhythm can be simple. It can have a four-to-the-floor structure common in certain dance music genres; or, a rhythm can consist of multiple sound patterns, layered and intermixed to form a polyrhythmic structure. In either case, ideally, they stimulate and arouse movement. To sustain listeners’ interest over time, the pattern needs to be ruptured, at certain points, which is often done by changing the tempo or breaking the rhythm down into its constituent parts. With that, the listener gets a clearer understanding of its components and the role that flourish-like detours fulfill. When the rhythm is built up again, after a break, the listener is able to gain a deeper understanding of the structural forces that generate a song’s excitement.
Taking this thought to the arena of institutions would require the agents that compose the institution—staff, artists, audience, board, funders—to recognize when methods become routines, when institutional exhaustion or paralysis sets in.
Here, I want to connect to Narcissister’s metaphor of moving in a tunnel, as it strikes me as precisely that institutional moment when, in order “to reach the light,” the way forward appears to only be possible by staying in the tunnel. But, maybe, there are cracks or junctions along the way, only visible by slowing down and looking closely at the composition of the tunnel. Such fissures (or breaks) may offer glimpses of light and detours into unknown territory. Jeannine’s examples are valuable here, as they illustrate that changing pace and moving sideways can generate such openings. Although they are context-specific solutions, they demonstrate what breaking down patterns, rupturing routines, and shifting perspectives can accomplish.
Narcissister
Thank you to Martin and Jeannine for your thoughtful and well-written texts.
My response to Prompt 2 is that the extent to which any given project can impact what Martin refers to as the “institutional foundation” is only possible to the extent that institutions are willing to give a platform to projects that will genuinely shake the institution’s foundation. I am not referring to projects that bring controversy or generate press, as to me in the end this kind of attention only strengthens, rather than threatens, the institutional foundation. In my experience in the art and performance worlds thus far, the examples of artists or projects that intervene in or alter structural characteristics of institutions are rare to non-existent. I would love to hear a list of examples of artists or projects that have in fact intervened in or altered structural characteristics of institutions if anyone would like to compose one.
Regarding these prompts, I would like to respectfully point out that the language of these prompts is dense with the kind of institutionally embraced “art speak” that leaves them almost incoherent, even to me. This kind of language is one of the main tenets of the pretentious and uninclusive side of the art and performance worlds that, in my opinion, alienates many people and upholds the institutional standards it seems we are aiming to trouble, and that I personally choose to not align myself with. I propose we all speak in simple terms that all can understand.
Thank you for the opportunity to dialogue with you all.
Jeannine Tang
To the question of temporality, I think that multiple temporalities always co-exist at once, even within an institution. I find Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis helpful, which he coined to articulate how the rhythms of urban space—produced and imposed by society—discipline and manage the biological rhythms of lived experience (one’s circadium rhythms or the structure of a working day come to mind as examples). But these rhythms are never absolutely or uniformly experienced—for Lefebvre there are secret rhythms, social ones, fictional and dominating, cyclical and alternating rhythms, and more. I don’t personally think of Colored People Time as fully outside the temporal structures of the institution but rather offering a set of alternatives inside and surrounding it—the show brought together artists working in different cities, but also included collections, works, cultures, histories, artists, and ideas that had been in Philadelphia, at Penn and in the US all along. CPT was also inside of an institution slowly changing and internally debated—the ICA Philadelphia had been in a process of re-examining its overall budgets and fee structures relative to the volume of shows and programs it was doing.
And so, to the other question of institutional change: I don’t think that any one project can change the institutional foundation on its own, because transformative change requires the confluence of so many people and desires beyond a single temporary project. Martin’s point on the IDCA’s change being reversed due to “its organization and funding structure, its means of communication, and, ultimately, its rooting in a hierarchical modernist tradition” points to deep-rooted questions of who funds and founds institutions, how they think collectively, and their politico-aesthetic cultures. Even so, such experiments can change perceptions and practices of what’s possible—sometimes well after their initial failure—which is why it matters that such examples are kept in circulation.
I appreciate Narcissister pointing to the necessary and “valuable questioning of who we are, what we want for ourselves and for the world around us, how we can restore our bodies and spirits, and what the triumphs and failures of our generations are.” To her question of not only “what does” but “what will regeneration look like” – while I can’t pretend to have answers, I’m admittedly full of feelings as institutions everywhere face drastic cuts or closures and are forced to stop, question, and rebuild themselves. So many lost people, jobs, opportunities, crucial resources. I’m scared for myself and terrified for other people.
And so my guides that prefigure a future I want to be in include Julie Tolentino sending art in the mail that I’m supposed to burn; the space and guidance for heartbreak, loss, and grief by What Would an HIV Doula Do; and the artist-organized Crip Fund supporting disabled, immunocompromised, and chronically-ill people through this pandemic. It’s GLITS Inc. successfully obtaining leases and permanent housing for Black trans people in NYC, and Meg Onli putting her curatorial prowess to work in rapid response print fundraisers (as Art for Philadelphia Community Bail Funds) for Amistad Law Project and Hearts on a Wire. It’s the Brooklyn Liberation March bringing thousands out into the streets for Black Trans Lives, and the ongoing, life-sustaining work of The Okra Project, Marsha P. Johnson Institute, For the Gworls, and Black Trans Femmes in the Arts working everyday, behind and alongside that historic march.
Regeneration for me feels like people transforming their relationship to everyday life and space, with compassion and urgency. So many people have leapt into and received welcome doing mutual aid, phone banks, jail support, rent strikes. So many are testing real material alternatives to policing and incarceration in their neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and schools. My colleagues are fighting to take no step in their institution that would harm the most vulnerable among us. Anything less feels unbearable. Miss Major and Angela Davis’s recent talks reminded me how this moment has been decades and centuries in the making: that even though we can’t predict when such flashpoints become available, when such moments arise they must be seized and transitioned into longer-term networks and organizing. And, how respite, pleasure, hopefulness, and joy are part of this work (as Major said this past June: “you need to feel good to do good”). I don’t know what regeneration will be, but for now, where I’m standing, this is what it feels like to try.
Images: 1) Martin Beck, still from The Environmental Witch-Hunt, 2008. HD video, 10 min. 2) Narcissister, Untitled (The Tunnel), 2020. Courtesy of the artist. 3) Colored People Time: Banal Presents, 2019. Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo by: Constance Mensh. Courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.4) Martin Beck, still from Last Night, 2016. HD video, 13 hours 29 min. 5) Colored People Time: Quotidian Pasts, 2019. Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo by: Constance Mensh. Courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
Footnotes:
Martin Beck: “one thing to learn: revolution is sometimes circular”
[1] Christopher Hill, “The Word ‘Revolution,’” in Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler (eds.), Revolution: A Reader (Paris: Paraguay Press and Publication Studio, 2012), 41.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, “Statement by the French Group” (1970). Reprinted as “The Environmental Witch-Hunt,” in Reyner Banham (ed.), The Aspen Papers (New York: Praeger 1974), 208.
[3] Resolutions brought to the conference by Michael Doyle of the Environment Workshop. Reprinted in Martin Beck (ed.), The Aspen Complex (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 96.
[4] Eliot Noyes, “Conclusion,” in International Design Conference in Aspen 1970 Report. Reprinted in The Aspen Complex, 66.
[5] Eliot Noyes in Minutes of Meeting of the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Saturday, June 20, 1970. Reprinted in The Aspen Complex, 105.
[6] Alice Twemlow, “‘A Guaranteed Communications Failure’: Consensus Meets Conflict at the International Design Conference in Aspen, 1970,” in The Aspen Complex, 129.
Jeannine Tang
[1] Meg Onli, curatorial Statement, gallery notes for Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts (February 1 – March 31) and Banal Presents (September 13 – December 22, all 2019). Chapter I gallery notes available at: https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/colored-people-time-mundane-futures-quotidian-pasts-and-banal-presents. Chapter II gallery notes available at: https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/colored-people-time-quotidian-pasts . Chapter III gallery notes available at: https://icaphila.org/exhibitions/colored-people-time-banal-presents/.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Carolyn Lazard, “Accessibility in the Arts: A Practice and a Promise,” 2019. Published by Common Field network. Download at URL: https://www.commonfield.org/projects/2879/accessibility-in-the-arts-a-promise-and-a-practice
[4] Ibid. Also see materials for Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism's Temporal Bullying, curated by Taraneh Fazeli at EFA Project Space, 2017. Available at URL: https://www.projectspace-efanyc.org/sick-time.
[5] Lazard, “Accessibility in the Arts,” p. 10.