In the tradition of usually secular people who practice the rituals of their faiths' high holy days, many apolitical Americans became avid, almost obsessive news junkies during Barack Obama's race to the White House. Along with highlighting Americans' fundamental desire to experience hope, purpose and faith in their political process, the just-past election raised profound questions about what it means to be a politically responsible citizen.
Despite having a parent involved with government and politics, I tend to feel that an on-going interest in the news is an interest like any other, and not the distinctive mark of a more ethically engaged individual. I read the news and stay informed about what interests me. But I believe that every citizen has an obligation to vote and necessarily has a moral obligation to be informed enough that their vote sufficiently represents their beliefs. But even while knowing which candidate would get my total support in his run to become the 44th President, I was breathlessly glued to the news media during the campaign and fascinated by my own fervent fascination with the unfolding process.
At London's Brown Gallery, American artists Bradford Bailey and Rutherford Chang opened separate but complementary shows soon after the election which addressed issues of politics, media, rhetoric and personal investment.
Bradford Bailey's white on white "Empathy Equation" paintings present the abstract language of social change as a glaring opposition to complicated lived reality. Though the New Jersey-born and London-based artist's paintings are minimalist and monochrome, they focus on life's grey areas. In them, Bailey maps out areas of London according to instances of "anti-social" behaviour. As Martin Coomer writes in Time Out London, the project's unspoken theme is Russian Suprematism meets the Neighbourhood Watch."
In "Dead Air," Chang splices George W. Bush's hour-long 2003 State of the Union address into a half-hour theatre of pauses and applause. He also showcases newscasters' verbal ticks that pad endless chatter on news stations, which John Stewart likens to "the bus in the movie Speed. If they stop talking for a second, they think they'll blow up."
The Beijing-based artist earlier poked fun at a more austere and stately news institution when he painstakingly alphabetized the entire front page of the 12 May 2004 edition of the New York Times as an artist project for the prestigious Cabinet magazine. This ironically political piece took no dogmatic position, and instead just played with the dry, formal, objective attitude taken by the renowned Grey Lady of journalism.
Here we conduct a conference call-style email interview at the close of their Brown exhibition to parse the particulars of when political white noise becomes deafening, and the rare historical moments when cynicism seems unrealistic and out of touch.
Stills from:
Rutherford Chang, "Dead Air", 2003
Ana Finel Honigman: How involved were you, emotionally and actively, in this past election?
Rutherford Chang: I actually have not been following American politics closely, which is perhaps why I was surprised to find myself feeling quite emotional this last Election Day.
AFH: How does your work function together?
Bradford Bailey: I think it might be important to mention that prior to this show, Rutherford and I did not know each other and were unaware the other's work,. Nor was the show itself any kind of collaboration between us. The decision to show us together, and the credit for any successes resulting therein, entirely stem from curatorial decisions made by Kimberly [Brown Gallery's director.]
AFH: Rutherford, how do you respond to Bradford's work?
RC: I like Bradford's bad ideas.
AFH: That's beautiful. What do you think were Kimberly's reasons for bringing you together?
BB: As far as our work functioning together, it is not as easy a question to answer as you might think, nor is it one that inspires as direct an answer as you might hope for. One of the things that excited me, when Kimberly proposed the show, was the fact that there was a certain amount of friction between his work and mine.
AFH: Yet, your subject matter and aesthetic approaches seem very compatible. As Kimberly's press release succinctly states, you are "two American artists who address ideas of media, politics, language,
society and culture through systematically defined and minimalistic processes."
BB: That there might be a superficial link between certain interests and concerns, but as artists we occupy very different territories, which are not entirely sympathetic to each other.
AFH: Rutherford, do you feel England is a particularly compatible place to show your work about American politics?
RC: I am not trying to make any particular comment about American politics. The content of the videos is certainly political by nature, but I treat it more as cultural phenomenon.
AFH: Why did you select this cultural phenomenon, instead of something more pop and without the loaded implication of political material?
RC: The projects could probably work with other country's television programming as well, but American television is the most iconic.
AFH: What news medium do you follow and trust?
RC: Any news source can be good. I like The Sun, though I don't understand most of the articles. The Wall Street Journal is a good source for bad news.
AFH: Has your work received a surprising or expected response outside America?
RC: Americans are more attached to the specific personalities. Non-Americans view the works more conceptually.
Stills from Rutherford Chang "NBC Nightly News (June 14, 2004)", 2004
AFH: Bradford, can you explain the "minimalist" aspects of your shared practice?
BB: One of the things that I think does link Rutherford and myself is a kind of re-evaluation of the ordering system in which an artist might produce work. I think in a lot of ways, we both have reacted
very strongly to the last couple of decades, during which the dissemination of post-modern thought in the art world has pushed the artist as a personality towards primacy. I think in both our cases there has been a systematic removal of self or touch from our work to direct the reading back towards the ideas that originally generated it. For me it is a kind of acknowledgment that the artist can be a kind of obstruction between the work and the person reacting to or reading it. Obviously in our respective bodies of work, this comes through in a lot of ways, but it think it is most apparent through our mutual attraction to and use of systemic process. Though the key, I think, is in the nature of the systems and the question of control. We both observe a situation over which we have no control, but have a distinct reaction to, and apply a system to it. Within the system is embedded a structure of ideas, through which we try and bring a greater sense of understanding to the given situation. The important thing is, that neither of us is really in any more control of the final result in the work than we are of the observed situation, beyond setting the constraints of the applied system. As much as I imagine both of us hope to anticipate certain aspects of how a work might operate, the final result is very much out of our hands, and at least in my case very rarely what I expect, thus letting the system and thus the structure of ideas have primacy.
AFH: Rutherford, do you see your 'Dead Air' video as responding uniquely to Bush or to political performance in general?
RC: These works are appropriate for anyone familiar with American television.
AFH: Bradford, how do you decide what areas to investigate for your white-on-white paintings?
BB: I don't actually choose the areas that generate the "Empathy Equations". The way I order things within my practice, despite trying to drive a tangible reading of my personality out of it, is almost entirely self-reflexive. Practically speaking, the work is generated by negotiating the schisms between what I am intuitively disposed to, what I believe to be true, and what I observe, and forcing these things to cohabit. So in the case of the "Empathy Equations," they come out of a thread within my practice, which involves careful observation and notation of things I do outside of the studio. Thus the notation of a situation depends on its happening, my witnessing of it, and my interest in it, regardless of a given geography. Ultimately they are an abstract, and thus to certain degree it is arbitrary. Had I been spending time while I walked through the city looking at tin cans on the ground, or people in suits, I would have been forced to contend with this. The action of observation and notation is central, but the collection of information finding a final form within a body of work is entirely dependent on my interest
in and understanding of it, as well as its flexibility and usefulness in its application to a greater structure of ideas which is at the core of what it do.
AFH: What qualifies as "anti-social or deviant" behaviour? Where are these definitions coming from?
BB. Anti-social and deviant behavior, have pretty open definitions. I have not defined them, nor was it for my benefit that they have been defined with the open structures with which they are. Despite my
empathy, observation of and participation with many of the situations that fall into these categories, I admittedly would not have found an effective set of terms to negotiate, or even become aware of my
participation with and relationship to such a varied set of behaviors without the help of the government and the media. It is through the uses of these terms by these establishments from which I have drawn my definitions.
AFH: What personally brought you to this subject?
BB: One of the things that made me start to take a great deal of notice and interest in this, was how certain behaviors or situations that both the media and our government found problematic or threatening would be discussed using different terminologies or categories, but would have fundamentally the same definition and proposed reaction to them. There was this point about a year ago, when there was a real spike in the amount of media attention being given to gang and youth culture in London. Concurrent with this was a discussion about isolated ethnic communities within the UK, which were believed to, through their self-imposed isolation, be possibly fostering the next generation of home grown terrorists. Again roughly concurrent with this was a discussion about the ills of drinking alcohol on public transport. These are all categorically different behaviors all coming out of different situations, none of which are inherently bad. There are isolated and specific situations where undesirable situations can grow out of them like anything else, but fundamentally an ethnic community with little contact beyond its borders, a group of teenagers testing their boundaries, and a can of lager on the tube are not bad unto themselves, nor are they the same thing. Ultimately these things were roughly classed as "anti-social" and in turn the target of initiatives to ban or break them up.
Drinking on public transport is now illegal, I watch what seems like any group of teenagers over four or five strong get hassled or chased by vanloads of police officers, and immigration laws are rapidly
changing to force integration. Ultimately the terms anti-social and deviant are used decisively for their disposition to open application to negatively categorize anything that stands outside a comfortable
middle class idea of what behavioral norms are.
AFH: And you're using these definitions to highlight their stringency or arbitrariness?
BB: I have used these definitions as I have found them, just with a certain amount of celebration and empathy in place of distain.
AFH: Do you admire these behaviours as rebellious?
BB: I guess within this there has to be a careful amount of distinction, because of the fact that my structure of definitions is determined by an established order, which is faulted by its lack of specificity. I personally have a principled distain for the status quo as an ordering system for control and a limiter of choice. My decision to draw attention to that which stands outside of it is rooted in a belief in the potential of choice to do so, my choice of specific behaviors and terminology though based on an observation of an intuitive response, is calculated to draw attention to how such choices are viewed and reacted to. The "Empathy Equations" are ultimately celebrations of the moments in life, which are lived
without order and without fear.
AFH: What were your expectations about clusters of anti-social activity and were they proven correct by the data you collected?
BB: I guess in a way this continues from where I left off. I don't, nor can I really have, any expectation of what I will encounter because it is entirely based on chance. There are whole days when I log nothing that can be classed as anti-social or deviant. There are days in which, within the course of five minutes, I see enough to make an entire painting. The only part of the system that generates the
"Empathy Equations" which changes from painting to painting, is the time that they depict and the area that they cover. In a way this is what I feel determines the subject of each painting. You have a different kind of reaction to and curiosity about a small number of notations against a cluster of them; they ultimately tell you very different things, even if only left to intuition. What made me aware of what I had been spending so much time looking at, was quite simply how much of it I was seeing. Obviously if there is a real spike in a behavior pattern within a certain geographic boundary it can tell you a lot about the culture of people which occupy it. It raises a certain question about the nature of categorization, borders, and the relativity of law and judgment. The nature of a negative categorization relies of the presumption of a minority. If there is majority participation, by the basic nature of a free democracy, an action can no longer be categorized as a negative. If this is not the case, then technically speaking we do not live in a free democracy. The "Empathy Equations", because they as a totality are collections of data depicting so many situations falling under a blanket negative categorization with so many participants, are positioned as a kind of question of and a challenge to the nature of a free society and whose values it actually represents. I for one worry a great deal about the
slippage within the legal system toward a general social belief that if you participate in situations or behaviors that stand outside cultural norms, thus the middle class status quo, you waive your indelible rights as a member of society. This is a problem unto itself, but even more so because in all probability the majority of people at some point or another, if not regularly, participate in something classed as anti-social, and thus as such have the potential to loose their indelible rights, and in turn their rights to be classed as a human being. The situations thus the people demarcated in the paintings are those who are riding this perilous line despite its risks through some kind of self-conscious choice.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a Berlin-based critic and curator. She writes on contemporary art and fashion for publications including Artforum.com, Sleek, V, TANK, Art in America, Artnet.com, Art Journal, Whitewall, The National, Dazed & Confused and British Vogue. As a Senior Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine, Ana contributes exhibition reviews from Berlin, New York and elsewhere, as well as an interview series. To contact her, email anahonigman@hotmail.com
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