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Dancing about architecture: performative interrogations of the body in the built environment
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Dancing about architecture: performative interrogations of the body in the built environment
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Content
Dancing About Architecture: Performative Interrogations of the Body in the Built Environment
By
Johnny Nawracaj
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(FINE ARTS)
May 2020
Copyright 2020 Johnny Nawracaj
ii
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all of the faculty, staff, fellow students and beautiful friends and family that continue to
support my work. Special thanks goes out to Amelia Jones, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, Andy
Campbell, Karen Moss, Jennifer West, Edgar Arceneaux, Suzanne Lacy, Mary Kelly, Paul Donald,
Brian O'Connell, David Kelley, Thomas Müller, Ruben Ochoa, Jean Robison, Holly Willis, Ana Briz,
Paulson Lee, Casey Kauffmann, Dulce Soledad Ibarra, noé olivas, Loujain Bager, Joseph Valencia,
Juan Morales, Haven Lin-Kirk, Penelope Jones, Robin Romans, Gordon Alemao, Elżbieta
Chrupczalska Nawracaj and Gambletron.
iii
Abstract
In this thesis I analyze works of performance that put the human body in dialogue with architecture as a
means to question the construction of paradigmatic social structures reflected by and reinforced
through the built environment. As a performance artist, I will also analyze my own use of cheap
materials ubiquitous to contemporary building styles in North America. I view my performances with
materials such as metal studs and drywall as a lens through which to disarticulate a logic of looking at
the body as a discrete and gendered occupant of space in favour of a relational perception that
complicates understandings of the body's entanglement with the built environment.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iii
List of Figures v
Introduction 1
A Brief History of the Perpetual Now 5
Encounters with Drywall 9
Dismantling Architectures: Building Anti-colonial Perspectives 15
Unbinding Materiality: Toward Queer, Feminist, Nonbinary Construction 26
Conclusion 33
Works Cited 45
v
List of Figures
Figure 1. Monica Bonvicini, Plastered, 1998 34
Figure 2. Monica Bonvicini, Plastered, 1998 34
Figure 3. Monica Bonvicini, Plastered, 1998 34
Figure 4. Oscar David Alvarez, Gridded, 2018 35
Figure 5. Alvarez, Gridded, 2018 (finale) 35
Figure 6. Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala,
The Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017 36
Figure 7. Monica Bonvicini, Hausfrau Swinging, 1997 37
Figure 8. Monica Bonvicini, Hausfrau Swinging, 1997 37
Figure 9. Rafa esparza, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014 38
Figure 10. Rafa esparza, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014 38
Figure 11. Michael Parker, The Unfinished, 2014 39
Figure 12. Rafa esparza, cumbre, 2018 39
Figure 13. Rafa esparza, cumbre, 2018 40
Figure 14. Paul Donald, UNsettler, 2019 40
Figure 15. Beatriz Cotrez and rafa esparza, Nomad 13, 2017 41
Figure 16. Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947. 42
Figure 17. Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Untitled (Studs), 2018 43
Figure 18. Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Untitled (Studs), 2018 44
Dancing About Architecture: Performative Interrogations of the Body in the Built Environment
Introduction
Architecture prescribes the movement of our bodies in space. The built environment is prescriptive of
and determined by social codes that attempt to define where people fit in both physically and socially
through interactions that are classed, raced, and gendered. As a nonbinary performance artist who has
worked as an “unskilled labourer”
1
I am particularly invested in the ways architectural systems and
building materials interact with the human body. I look to other artists who explore architectural styles
ranging from Mayan Temple to colonial homestead to Brutalist block through contemporary drywalled
dwelling by means of performance. These works of performance put the human body in dialogue with
architecture as a means to question colonial and capitalist paradigms of extraction as well as presciptive
models of identity reflected by and reinforced through the built environment. I will also analyze my
own use of cheap materials ubiquitous to contemporary building styles in North America. I view my
performances with materials such as metal studs and drywall as a lens through which to disarticulate a
logic of looking at the body as a discrete and gendered occupant of space in favour of a relational
perception that complicates understandings of the body's entanglement with the built environment.
Polyvalent in its objectives, which range from pragmatism to ostentatious iconicism,
architectural strategy always centres the body, “[for] it is by means of the body that space is perceived,
lived – and produced.”
2
Architecture as a “spatial practice”
3
constitutes the augmentation of space
shared by human and non-human bodies through processes of sheltering, fragmentation, ordering,
imprisonment, and so on. The body is the primary node around/for/and by which any built environment
is created. It follows that architectural space reflects the dynamism of the physical and social body
1 Unskilled labour is a term that allows folks without specific contracting licenses to work on job sites. It also
marginalizes those same workers in a low wage system.
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd,
1991), 162.
3 Ibid., 25.
1
whose processes assemble, are contained by, and act upon the built environment. The product of
physical and intellectual labour, architecture remains “in process,” supplying social arenas whose codes
continuously shift with sociopolitical developments. Meanwhile, physical deterioration of the built
environment constantly engages human actors in processes of repair and renovation, decisive inaction
precipitating obsolescence, or peril to their health and safety depending on their socioeconomic status,
which in turn determines their relationship to the architectural spaces they inhabit and/or control. In a
myriad of complex ways, architecture simultaneously operates as “medium” and “artifact” of social
relations.
4
This dual modality framing the relationship of the human body to architectural space has
been the preoccupation of various artists whose performative approach has resulted in particularly
visceral articulations on the subject.
The body's relationship to the built environment has been taken up by artists whose physical
entanglements with architectural materials and imagery become allegorical of social systems
articulated through human engagement with constructed space. Through the amalgamation of the body
and elements of the built environment artists illustrate how architecture acts upon the body, producing
or reinforcing systems which empower or disempower. Simultaneously, many artworks explore the
body's impact on the built environment, often directly enacting this impact in order to imagine new
possibilities for critical coevolution of the constructed and the embodied. Through the analysis of
several such works I hope to locate my own performative preoccupation with ubiquitous commercial
building materials in a larger discourse devoted to the constantly shifting relationships, both symbolic
and real, between bodies and buildings.
As a means to order to investigate structural precarity, some artists invite material decay into
their work. Monica Bonvicini's work with drywall exposes the material precarity of the contemporary
built environment. In the piece Plastered (1998), Bonvicini installs a drywall floor into the gallery
space so that audiences, inevitably busting holes into the work with every footfall, become implicated
4 Christien Klaufus, “Architectura de remesas: 'Demonstration effect' in Latin American popular architecture,” in Ethno-
Architecture and the Politics of Migration, ed. Mirjana Lozanovska (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 100.
2
in a processual disintegration of the space. (Figs. 1-3) This simple yet impactful inversion directly
illustrates structural vulnerability in a manner that can be taken both literally and allegorically,
especially when viewed alongside Bonvicini's other artworks that bring into questioned architecture's
psychosexual entanglement as well as its role in the construction of gender. Material decay also plays a
role in the work of Oscar David Alvarez whose messy drywall reconstructions of the urban panopticon
provide a furtive performance arena wherein the artist lavishes in ironic espousals of reverence for the
late capitalist condominium fetish, in one iteration reading text that sounds like glossy advertising copy
from inside a shoddily constructed drywall replica of a high-rise. (Figs. 4-5)
Another strategy for critically framing architecture has been to make visible the labour it takes
to construct it. Rafa esparza and Paul Donald anchor their work in the performative construction of
architectural elements, literally manifesting the labouring body and its role in the physical production
of socially affective space. Both Donald and esparza are also among artists who address architecture's
role in colonial as well as de/anti-colonial place-making. In Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa's Breve Historia
de la Arquitectura en Guatemala (2010), three twirling dancers dressed in models of a Mayan pyramid,
a colonial church, and a modernist block collide into one another in a succinct visual metaphor for
ideological and colonial conflict as expressed through architectural iconography.
5
(Fig. 6)
Feminist approaches have brought forth artworks that imagine new possibilities for the
subversive insertion of bodies into symbolically overdetermined environments. Bonvicini's Hausfrau
Swinging (1997) questions the production of gender through architectural associations (Figs. 7-8). In
my own work I enact absurd, potentially hazardous combinations of my own body with steel studs and
drywall screws as well as femme tropes like high heels and pantyhose in order to disentangle each
symbolic set—one related to construction, the other to femininity—from straightforward readings. My
nonsensical yet measured actions propose new and fantastical meanings for stagnating symbols and
5 Amara Antilla, “Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (Breve Historia de la
Arquitectura en Guatemala).” Collection Online, The Guggenheim Museum, accessed February 28, 2020,
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/35294
3
imagine bizarre new purposes for banal objects easily sourced from any chain hardware store with the
option to purchase online. Late capitalist frameworks for home renovation collide with tropes lazily
typifying gender norms as I ask audiences to suspend their evaluation of what each object in the scene
might mean in order to pay attention to the precarious predicament of my body. By staging my work as
absurd actions applied to everyday construction materials I aim to turn attention away from the
tendency to rely on codified meaning; in this way, I hope to bring focus to questions around the very
construction of meaning. I believe this aim is met by all of the works I will discuss here. Before delving
more deeply into these works, I will briefly contextualize them within state of the built environment
extant in much of the so called “developed” late capitalist urban world where the works have been
shown.
4
A Brief History of the Perpetual Now
One of my earliest memories as a six year old immigrant to Toronto is of my father revealing cracks in
our damp, carpeted little rented bungalow. “The walls here are made of paper,” he said. Having trusted
the thick concrete and plaster of my Southern Polish, Socialist Realist tenement experience of home in
the Soviet-style industrial suburb of Nowa Huta, I didn't want to believe him. The memory is faint but I
can recall is his ominous tone as he ripped the paper from some exposed drywall. I remember being
shocked and a little bit scared. Though my father was kidding, my adult experience of urban dwellings
has encouraged me to reconsider the dismissal of my childhood fear of drywall.
Bodies in urban North America move through the architectural environment with varying
degrees of awareness of its of its constituent materials and their fragility or environmental impact.
I would argue, however, that this kind of awareness is necessitated for people who are marginalized,
living in more affordable urban structures. The material vulnerability of drywall becomes painfully
apparent when cheaply made and badly installed structures begin to take on mould and collapse from
the weight of leaks gone long unattended by neglectful landlords. The impermanence of this cheap and
persistent face of walls ubiquitous in post WWII American dwellings
6
becomes a burdensome expense
for many. Fast decay crumbles shoddy plaster jobs and black mould crawls all over the easily rotting
drywall homes of those who cannot afford to constantly renovate their homes, which have built-in
precarity. Meanwhile, for those who can afford it, late capitalist markets have turned buildings into
products. Like all products “reduced to the common measure of money,” to borrow the words of Henri
Lefebvre, buildings in capitalism “use their own language [...] to tout the satisfaction they can supply
and the need they can meet [while dissimulating] not only the amount of social labour that they contain
embody, not only the amount of productive labour that they embody, but also the social relationships of
6 The lathe and plaster used in builds prior to that time in cities like Los Angeles and Montreal were sturdier. In my
experience renovating homes in Montreal, these somewhat sturdier older walls have the unfortunate drawback of not
having been sufficiently insulated for the cold and are therefore often replaced. The savings on heating a newly insulated
apartment must unfortunately come into balance with the use of toxic insulation and other unsustainable building
materials- not to mention the possible exposure to asbestos when opening an older wall.
5
exploitation and domination on which they are founded.”
7
Of course, the Soviet tenements of my
childhood were equally emblematic—in this case, not of the promise personal wealth and satisfaction,
but of the supposed common good that came from labouring for the state. In the case of Socialist
Realism, labour itself is monumentalized, belying oppressive power dynamics between the labour force
and the state in order to glorify a form of state capitalism masquerading as ideologically communist. In
a sense, the same language has been projected onto the late capitalist condominium and the Nowa Huta
tenement block alike, as well as onto architectures across varying regimes throughout history. It's a
language that obfuscates the material consequences of the built environment on the everyday lives of
individuals while memorializing power.
8
As I write this in the city of Los Angeles, I am compelled to
refer to the role played by the ideology of obsolescence in the construction of today's built
environments—not only the physical but also the digital.
Cheaply built and easily demolished, sprawling cookie cutter homes and glass glad
condominium prisms with identically drywalled interiors have hastened the shift of images alighting
respectively on the suburban and urban architectural palimpsest. Drywall interiors ease the cost and up
the speed of new builds and quick overhauls of interiors, greatly contributing to a persistent mode of
turbo contemporaneity. Planned obsolescence has introduced a new temporality to the domain of North
American architecture. Time is flattened into a perpetual now. As Daniel M. Abramson states,
“obsolescence is [...] principally engaged with the temporality of use- and disuse” stemming neither
from social ideas about a building nor from its structural decay, but from corporate pressures bolstered
by economic interest in redevelopment.
9
During the mid-twentieth century, the idea of obsolescence
was increasingly imposed on historical, often industrial era, architecture. Alison Isenberg does not
mince words on the subject. “It was the concept of obsolescence that redevelopers wielded as a weapon
7 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 80-81.
8 Antilla, “Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en
Guatemala).”
9 Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
2016), 4.
6
to remake downtowns.”
10
Today, the persistent condition of planned obsolescence has created a cycle
of endless repairs as well as complete tear-downs facilitated through box-store building styles that
anticipate overhaul. This trend has persisted since the 1950s when suburban cookie-cutter housing
trends de-centred downtowns.
11
But downtown revitalization developers made a comeback with their
own version of the cookie-cutter phenomenon: the glass tower condo. The much anticipated New
Millennium rolled out its own multitude of monuments to a forever now. The now ubiquitous
downtown tower reflects the sky and against it, the familiar sight of a dozen cranes cranking out ever
new steel skeletons for future sky-compartment living.
12
This new temporality in the built environment is simpatico with the increasingly rapid
upgrading and consequent cycles of obsolescence in the realm of the tech market. As Giles Slade
argues, “[p]lanned obsolescence is the catch-all phrase used to artificially limit the durability of a
manufactured good in order to stimulate repetitive consumption.”
13
This process has been in operation
since the 1930s when manufacturers in the United States began building products from materials whose
eventual failure was precisely mapped through scientific testing developed specifically to determine
component longevity—or lack there of.
14
Today digital technology provides a whole new arena in
which to stage the perpetually new. The head-spinning influx of brand new apps and devices is as
prevalent in the daily life of an urbanite in North American as is the continual replacement of badly
insulated, paper-thin, paper-clad walls. A new phone is always coming out. Soon the newest operating
system will refuse to talk to my current computer and I will be “forced” to get a new one. My screen
cracks. I replace it. The walls crack. I renovate. Everything around me seems fragile, cheaply made,
imminently replaceable.
10 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made it (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 193.
11 Abramson, 108-109.
12 This skyscraper condo phenomenon is acutely visible in Canadian cities, which saw much of their major growth
throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
13 Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 2006) 5.
14 Ibid.
7
This proliferation of the new, enforced by built-in material fragility, has spawned a method of
navigating the world through constant renewal—or viewing the world as constant renewal. The social
media feed is refreshed ad nauseam each night beneath my eternally scrolling finger. The rampant
disregard for finitude of natural resources is galvanized by evidence of supposed abundance
constructed through a consumer culture that ignores the damage of imminently breakable products in
favour of the exhalation of the idea of their temporariness. This phone is new and the next one will be
newer. Meanwhile the social media feed refreshes. Ads roll in and flash the latest, lightest, flattest of
screens. Screens beget screens. We stare into online interfaces and send out versions of ourselves in
multiple. Sock puppet accounts and face-finding filters help users produce disposable selves from
behind so many disposable walls. These are some of the conditions through which I navigate as a face
in a screen, a body between thin walls.
8
Encounters with Drywall
A sloppy drywall prism commands a tight gallery space of Last Projects for the 2018 LA Queer
Biennial. The shoddiness of its construction resonates with comical effect. The thing is this hot mess of
a facsimile of a high-rise just large enough for someone to hide inside. The builder in me is cracking
up. I'm watching documentation of Oscar David Alvarez' performance, Gridded. Although I wasn't
there to see the work live, the vertical phone video documentation I have obtained courtesy of the artist
is taking me there.
15
Somehow the slightly lurching footage is a fitting way to take in the central
structure in Alvarez's performance space. It's a Thomas Hirschhorn-esque constructed environment,
emanating a paradoxical luscious crappiness. Though potentially immersive as an installation due to its
dominating proportions in the small space, everything about the environment's construction reveals its
artifice and, in turn, that of the surrounding room. Alvarez has left the edges of the drywall and the
screws holding it together exposed. The bottom third of one of his “walls” has been cut out and leans
against the opening it's left behind. The opening is made jagged at one of its corners where a piece of
brittle drywall has cracked and pops off from the construction at an angle. A fraying swath of astroturf
cushions the haphazard tower against the gallery's concrete floor. My eye follows the bare materials to
their ragged edges, finding stains on the gallery's drop-ceiling tiles and imprints on the concrete floor
that my imagination immediately marks as possible evidence of the room's commercial past. Typical of
a gallery's display space strategy, a partial wall frames the performance zone. Though perfect in
contrast to Alvarez's odd, unpainted use of the material, the common detonator between these two
iterations of wallness becomes quite striking. Watching this work, I can't help but fixate on the
probability that the entirety of Last Projects is clad in drywall. This is the heart of my fascination with
Alvarez's work. So much of the North American daily experience is spent surrounded by drywall. Rural
or urban, we live and work in boxes within boxes made of compressed powder between sheets of
paper. Alvarez' representation of this reality is anxiety inducing. Burn marks form a strange grid across
15 The fact of the phone feels important. I am relating to this work that calls to mind obsolesce in its the use of drywall
mediation of a smartphone screen produced within the same ideological framework.
9
his “building's” surface. Actual commercial pigeon spikes cling precariously to its drywall “roof,”
clinching the architectural reference. I'm transported to my own experience working on home
renovation projects in both dilapidated turn-of-the-century Montreal townhouses and brand-new
condos. Corners are often cut to expedite construction and common problems crop up fast. Too-thin
coats of plaster along drywall joins begin to crack. Moisture seeps in behind improper seals and mould
easily devastates the walls. Condo owners learn that quick construction makes for shoddy new builds in
need of constant repairs. Meanwhile, monstrously mushrooming condos in so many major cities in
North America continue to be peddled with the promise of luxury.
From inside his Gridded tower Alvarez' amplified voice makes syrupy promises: “Apartment
amenities that have nothing to hide, offering only elegance and cutting edge features.” The performed
advert is immediately rendered suspect by its own phrasing. “Nothing to hide” points to smarmy
condominium real estate agents’ tactics that I can only imagine must so often go along with the shoddy
construction I've personally laboured to repair in my renovation jobs. Of course the promise is pointless
in the context of Alvarez's absurd tower. The structure is literally full of holes. These have been drilled
seemingly at random across the gridded surface and audience members have been captured peeking
through them with phones and eyeballs. Alvarez goes on to list luxury amenities in a put-on polished
media voice that reveals its artifice through awkward emphasis: “Quartz counter tops, [...] soothing
deep-soaking tubs and full...height...tile...showers!” It is revealed that he's reading a text that possibly
comes from the Atelier Condo corporation's actual advertisement promising “front-row seats to the
vibrant transformation of downtown Los Angeles.” The ad ends with a resounding “UGHHH.” The text
then repeats and Alvarez begins talking over a loop of what he has just read.
Keeping his media affect on, he instructs the audience to pick up a “white cube.” People begin
reaching for little white folded-paper box strewn around what has become a drywall stand-in for an
Atelier condo. They are told to hold the white cube close to their hearts. This elicits loud laughter from
the art audience. Alvarez then draws their attention to a white paper crane dangling from a paper spire
10
above the pigeon pigeon spikes. This small origami detail comically links the reality of urban
development machinery to the whimsical pseudo spirituality easily paired with the aspirational
aesthetics of romanticized condo living. The audience is asked to gaze up at the crane and wish into
their boxes. “What does your LA look like?” Alvarez prompts. Suddenly I'm thinking about meditation
apps and all over print yoga mats for sale next to matching phone cases and a Whole Foods just
downstairs. Alvarez satirizes a lifestyle predicated on immediacy. The fulfillment of wishes can be
made to seem as luxurious, and as available, and as slick as that quartz counter top. But not really. Not
here. Alvarez' intentionally under-rehearsed performance and weird little paper boxes are in sloppy
lockstep with the makeshift tower.
16
Alvarez emerges from the tower dressed in tight little grid-patterned shorts to collect all of the
“wishes” in a basket. After a number of additional absurdist interventions into the pseudo-Atelier space
—notably including the artist's placement of his tongue, fingers, and condom-clad penis through the
holes cut into the structure, which suddenly become glory holes- Alvarez leads the audience outside
where he burns all of the white cubes.
17
Moments of queer witchy earnestness seep into this otherwise
satirical piece through the idea of ritually burning intentions.
18
Queer aesthetics also pop in through
Alvarez' glory holes as well as his choice of attire. On the whole, this performance seemed focused on
deriding corporate condo-land; however, the burning ritual at the end seemed to provide a quite space,
away from the faulty tower where reflection on the broader implications of urban redevelopment could
potentially take place. In watching the documentation of Gridded, one sees that the finale was a
moment for thoughts on the impact of gentrification on marginalized communities. Thinking of this
performance in its original context, I wondered what an audience at the LA Queer Biennial might have
wished for into those white cubes. What does their LA look like?
While critical thinking around urban conditions in Alvarez's Gridded seems to come mainly
16 Alvarez, personal conversation, March 11, 2019.
17 14 Glory holes been an important historical method of intervention into urban public space shared by communities of
queer men, in both openly queer spaces and stealth cruising grounds.
18 This kind of activity has been widely adopted by queer communities through common interests in pagan practice.
11
from campy satire, moments of quiet work deepen the piece. Reflection on urban conditions in a late
capitalist Los Angeles are incomplete without the consideration of displacement. Homelessness and
economic precarity are the other side of the luxury condominium phenomenon. Though not addressed
specifically in Gridded, the work's irony is abundantly clear through the clash of crumbling drywall
with condo-land aspirational aesthetics. In the work's burning finale, Alvarez's floundering delivery of
luxury endorsement gives way to visions of anarchist strategy and images of historical crisis in the city
of Los Angeles. The work ends with a fire in the streets. (Fig. 5)
Alvarez's irreverent performance injects critique into the late capitalist urbanite existence as
unequivocally queer satire chisels away at the facade of mainstream social programming. The artist
points to a condition set up by environments made possible through planned obsolescence in the United
States. Obsolescence has had a particularly strong ideological bent in the US context. Giles Slade goes
as far as to frame “the very concept of? disposability itself” as an American invention.
19
Alvarez has
framed this phenomenon as absurd as well as anxiety provoking. Atelier's marketing is ridiculous, but
the social reality produced by the glass tower condo is very much real, part of the massive displacement
caused by gentrification. While Alvarez directly refers to conditions present in Los Angeles in this
historical moment, his use of materials follows a longer running thread in contemporary art.
In 1998 audiences walked into “the venerable Vienna Secession” gallery onto a floor that
“literally collapsed under [their] feet.”
20
I must rely on Susanne von Falkenhausen's description of the
installation as well as photo documentation to attempt to grasp the embodied experience of Monica
Bonvicini's Plastered. A black and white shot of the installation, which consists of the gallery space
“covered with sheet-rock over a layer of polystyrene,”
21
shows the work with only a few depressions in
the fragile floor, conspicuously marking the footfalls of only one of two individuals. Viewed in this
19 Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, 4.
20 Susanne von Falkenhausen, “From concept to gesture: Bonvicini's play with the strategies of modernism, of how to turn
minimalism from its head onto its hands,” in Monica Bonvicini, BAU, ed. Alessandra Pace (Torino: hopefulmonster,
2000), 85.
21 Ibid.
12
way, in grainy black and white, these first marks seem to contain the trappings of nostalgia.
Reproduced in this manner they become a morning's first steps into deep fresh-fallen snow—the kind
with that satisfying layer of ice on top that breaks with a crunch. Once again I'm transported to
Montreal, and just as quickly my nostalgia falls away into the memory of a job site. The clean gallery
takes on the look of a new build—and someone has done it wrong. The sheet-rock ceiling has been
installed on the floor. The image takes on a haunted quality—it's a renovation nightmare. I'm now
picturing myself standing on a reno site where the floor has been beautifully finished but someone has
discovered fire damage in one of the walls, or maybe someone has drilled through a water pipe—either
way the wall has to be opened up and, hurrying to bust through the disaster, sheet rock has been laid
down to protect the floor. Of course no such chaos is present in Bonvicini's work. The only disaster is a
measured one, signalled by a “menacingly gently crunch” as visitors continue to break open the false
floor, effectively “de-construct[ing] the hallowed act of looking at art.”
22
Plastered directly troubles the viewer's experience of the gallery space. The modernist blank
slate is literally broken down. The supposed neutrality of the white cube can no longer be taken from
granted. By virtue of the floor's destruction, the material condition of the gallery walls comes into
nuanced view. Complicit in the installation's destruction, I wonder whether the Secession audience,
captured in another black and white photograph (Fig. 3), see what I see. The inertia of the gallery walls
surrounding the audience seems to become conspicuous by virtue of the activation and utter destruction
of their horizontal double- the inappropriately drywalled floor. This action brings into view a power
dynamic inscribed into the pristine gallery walls.
Conceived “in the early twentieth century in response to the increasing abstraction of modern
art,” the white cube is related in its presumed neutrality as a functional framing apparatus to the broader
project of architectural modernism.
23
Employing pared down geometries to maximize air flow and fill
rooms with light, modernist architects set out to leave no dark corner for any “overburdening 'sense of
22 Ibid.
23 “White Cube,” Terms, Tate, accessed Febreuary 28, 2020, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/w/white-cube
13
the past'” to nest.
24
This “housecleaning operation,” as Anthony Vidler calls it, resulted in a skeletal
sparsity haunted by the “nostalgic shadows of all the [dwelling spaces] now condemned to history or
the demolition site.”
25
Vidler's analysis takes into account the uneasy structure of feeling produced by
modernist overhaul, and indeed by the instantiation and acceleration of obsolescence. The haunted
space of the “demolition site” is as present in 1998 Vienna and 2018 Los Angeles as it was during early
twentieth century preparations for the “marathon of modern life.”
26
Like Alvarez's hollow drywall
condo, Bonvicini's coproduced detritus points to the very constructedness of the pristine architectural
space inherited from modernism and haunted by a sense of “individual estrangement [and] class
alienation” that has followed us here from “the context of the nineteenth-century city” where people,
“lost in an isolation from nature[, found themselves] living only in a rapid present.”
27
Crushing the
constructed space underfoot, Bonvicini's viewer/performer quite literally feels the material
vulnerability of the contemporary space, potentially beginning to think—as I did viewing
documentation of their communal de-construction—about the vulnerability instantiated by social
structures that bring this kind of space into being.
24 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) 63.
Here Vidler is citing the unfinished novel by Henry James entitled Sense of the Past.
25 Ibid., 64.
26 Ibid., 63.
27 Ibid., 4. Citing Benjamin Constant, De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation dans les rapports avec la civilisation
européene (1814), in Benjamin Constant, Ouevres, annotated with an introduction by Alfred Roulin (Paris: Bibliotèque
de la Pléiade, 1957), 984.
14
Dismantling Architectures: Building Anti-colonial Perspectives
The question “what is it made of?” comes so easily when looking at a sculptural work of art. In an art
school critique it is one of the first things we ask of the artist. Both Bonvicini and Alvarez bring this
scrutiny to the gallery space and, by extension, into the larger Euro-American urban environment
through their use of crumbling drywall. Los Angeles based artist rafa esparza deploys an inverse
approach. Instead of laying bare for audiences the material precarity of the structures in which art is
being viewed, esparza brings a contrasting building material into the white cube. Exploring Indigeneity
in the colonial context of Los Angeles, esparza has come to use a traditional technique he learned from
his father to create adobe bricks. Before bringing his practice into the institutional space, esparza began
working with the material in an outdoor context, grounding the work in the acknowledgement of
Indigenous territory as well as the instantiation of material sustainability and equitable practices of
labour.
In 2014 the artist worked with his parents and five siblings to make adobe bricks from
materials sourced around the Los Angeles River for a piece entitled building: a simulacrum of power.
28
(2014, Fig. 9-10) In a seminar at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Art and
Design in 2018, esparza indicated the importance of sourcing the materials locally as a reflection of
Indigenous building practices continuing in Mexico today that are simultaneously need-based and
sustainable. The L.A. River site is also significant as “a space once occupied by the Tongva people that
has been physically pushed aside and paved over.”
29
In his seminar esparza also spoke of the
performative production of adobe as a way of taking on the craft employed by his father in Mexico
while exploring dynamic shifts that happen when a family labours together. Esparza expressed his
interest in a certain levelling of dynamics that occurs through shared labour. Age and gender melted
28 A work created in collaboration with Rebeca Hernandez; “Rafa Esparza: cumbre: look as far as you can see in every
direction- north, south, east and west,” filmed in 2018 at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, video,
31:09, accessed February 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UTu3k3yb3o
29 Janelle Zara, “Rafa Esparza at the Whitney Biennial,” March 27, 2017; available online at: http://janellezara.com/recent-
work/tag/Cultured; accessed February 29, 2020.
15
into the background as each of Esparza's family members played an equal part in creating the building
materials. This relational horizontality, along with adobe's sustainability, represents an inversion of
capitalist logic. The capitalist system is understood as pyramidal, with the working classes at the base
of a social structure that relies on their labour to build wealth that benefits not workers but land owners,
religious figures, heads of state, and/or the ruling class.
30
Esparza's work with his family can be
represented as a horizontal structure wherein the labourers design and execute a project together which
benefits each of them equally. In fact, horizontality is one of this artwork's chief visual metaphors.
The adobe bricks produced by esparza and his family for/during building: a simulacrum of
power were laid precisely to cover over Michael Parker's 2014 public sculpture The Unfinished, a
massive prone obelisk shape carved into bank of the L.A. (Fig. 11) River referring to an Ancient
Egyptian monument commission by Pharaoh Hatshepsut the but never actually raised.
31
Maintaining
the horizontal position in which the unraised obelisk had lain “a few miles from the Aswan Dam on the
Nile River,” Parker's site-responsive work transforms the earth on the L.A. River bank into a 137-foot
scale reflection of what is to date “the largest known Egyptian obelisk.”
32
While the horizontal position
of Parker's replica represents a physical inversion of monumentality, “explor[ing] ideas of temporality
[...] hierarchy and consumption” by creating a relationship between Los Angeles and a geographically
and temporally distant effigy of power, esparza's intervention turns Parker's site-responsive piece into a
site-specific gesture speaking directly to power dynamics extant at the very site of the work.
Symbolically furthering the practice of equitable labour and horizontal communication enacted
through esparza's work to build the installation with his family members, the completed adobe brick
simulacrum-of-a-simulacrum
33
was activated through dance. Wearing full Danza Azteca regalia- a
30 This structure was famous illustrated by Nicolas Lokhoff in 1901. Reinhard Bendix, Kings Or People: Power and the
Mandate to Rule, (Berkley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980), 540.
31 Hatshepsut was a female pharaoh who notably took on the title “king” along with “the full panoply of kingship” and
whose legacy is characterized by an epic list of architectural commissions. Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of
Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 207, 209.
32 “The Unfinished: Michael Parker, 2014,” Artworks, Clockshop, accessed February 20, 2020,
https://clockshop.org/project/bowtie-aa/the-unfinished/
33 A copy of a copy, esparza's adobe mimics Parker's stone which is in turn mimicking the Egpytian original.
16
contemporary Indigenous style of dress worn in dance performances that bring precolonial Indigenous
art broadly identified as Aztec into the contemporary context- esparza performed a belaboured and
highly evocative crawl from the “base” of the obelisk to what would have been its “peak.” Not only
does this gesture assert the presence and contemporaneity of Indigenous cultural and artistic practice in
Los Angeles, the visceral struggle of the performance brings to mind the possibility of horizontal
labour structures as key to the achievement of equity. This idea is extended from the accretion of
Indigenous contemporaneity toward concepts of gender through a series of movements performed
across and around the adobe surface by choreographer Rebeca Hernandez with dancers Victoria Rose
Wolfe, Olivia Mia Orozco, and Devon Stern.
Dressed in jeans and plaid shirts, the four women were marked through their attire as
performers of labour. While jeans and plaid shirts have long been popularized as street clothes, this
umpteen-times-revived trend maintains working-class ownership. In the context of manual labour, the
work-shirt-and-jeans combination has been claimed by women workers for at least as long as it has
been made a popular casual fashion choice.
34
Abstracted through dance in Hernandez's activation of
esparza's installation, the workers' garb enmeshed with the bodies of dancers floats in and out of class
and gender associations. The tether to labour is strengthened by the dancers' activations of their adobe
context, while the movement of the clothes along with the sinuously moving bodies of the performers
seems to have the power of mitigating stereotypes of gender. On the dancers' bodies, the clothes are
simply allowed to be seen for their practical dimensions. They allow for ease of movement. They are
sturdy and known to be easy to launder. When the dancers slide their bodies along the adobe the
clothes make sense. In both performances, clothing operates as a set of tools aiding the body in
intervening into architectural space. Esparza and Hernandez demonstrate ways in which the clad body
34 It is important to note that, while women are increasing recognized as skilled labourers in a variety of fields, it often
remains difficult to find suitable attire. My wife, who works as a carpenter and painter in homes as well as on theatre
sets has had many frustrating experiences at work apparel shops. Despite many of these shops carrying women's lines,
the selection remains limited and often comes with some gimmicky addition of the colour pink. On the whole, it can be
difficult to find work apparel tailored for wider hips and breasts. In my experience smaller sizes of work boots and
gloves also come in limited variety, although this is noticeably changing.
17
can assert marginalized cultural identity or conversely dilute normative readings of identity while
creatively and radically taking up space previously colonized, monumentalized, and made exclusionary
through dominant cultural code.
More than a polyvalent metaphor for family history, the shifting dynamics of gender and labour,
and resistance to colonial erasure, esparza's use of adobe has proven directly (physically) challenging to
institutional art world architectures. In a work entitled cumbre,
35
presented at MOCA's Geffen
Contemporary space in 2018 the artist installed and performed with an adobe brick bridge. (Figs. 12-
13) At the conclusion of the piece, now accessible online as video documentation, esparza reads several
texts gesturing to bodies of water and border sites, discussing familial connection and risk for brown
bodies. In one section of the text he reads a communication he received from the Hammer Museum
regarding his 2016 installation for the Made in L.A. exhibition, which consisted of an adobe rotunda
that would obliterate the hard edges of the white cube gallery space to present an alternative mode of
engagement with architectural enclosure. “We're concerned about contamination and dust blowing into
the vents that are shared with our private collection,” the artist reads, “can we think about another
location for your installation?”
36
Initially meant to be installed on an upper level of the main museum
space, esparza's adobe rotunda had been sequestered to a lobby gallery in order to minimize the risk of
“contamination.” Esparza's performed text goes on to liken the Hammer's institutional concern about
contamination to the systemic racism of the US government, which for decades forced Mexican
contract labourers to be sprayed with DDT upon crossing the US border. The constant sequestering of
brown bodies is extended to the adobe building material in esparza's experience with the art institution.
Of course, the adobe building style has also long been supplanted by unsustainable building practices
across the contentious colonial territory spanning the US Mexico border.
35 The English translation for cumbre is “summit.” This work is subtitled look as far as you can see in every direction –
north, south, east, and west. For me this title prompts a transhistorical visualization of geographical space on Turtle
Island (North America) that points first to the long and painful process of colonial border creation (north, south), then to
the oceans (east and west) that present a different form of containment. Of course, this is just one reading. Esparza's
work contains many openings for interpretation, resisting the monolithic read.
36 MOCA, “Rafa Esparza: cumbre: look as far as you can see in every direction- north, south, east and west.”
18
The text read by esparza in cumbre is accompanied by a dance performance by collaborator
Sebastian Hernandez who wears disco globe shards on their shaved head. At one point in the
performance Hernandez strips down to a thong and dawns a pair of high heels to dance under a
sculptural shower that formed part of the installation. The dancer's sinuous movements and glittering
attire signal modes of queerness as the water falling from above gestures towards esparza's discussion
of bodies of water as meeting places complicated by the painful necessity of clandestine border
crossings from Mexico into the US. The queerness signalled by Hernandez' performance is also taken
up directly by esparza, who connects queer identity to his larger critique of institutional space in his
reading. It is after Hernandez completes their dance under the falling water that esparza begin to read
his text. Among the opening lines he reads, “home is not a physical place. It never has been. Those
trappings come with the privilege of US American heteronormative patriarchal family units (...) the
same ones that [...] make their architecture exclusively theirs.” This statement can be viewed as a link
between the queer brown identities of the performers and the adobe bricks. Exclusion from the
dominant colonial narrative is not only discursive in this work, it is physical and present and real. The
adobe bricks, with their rich material history, and which are so threatening to an art institution's
permanent collection, are a physical manifestation of sequestered Indigeneity. As esparza himself has
noted, they are opposite in every way to the unsustainable building methods that form white cubes.
In his Roski seminar esparza thus talked about brown building materials and brown bodies as
being in direct metaphorical and historical relation to one another. Through his work with adobe the
artist creates Indigenous architectures, activated by performers with Indigenous heritage and often with
queer experience. Not only do these works produce symbolic opposition to the colonial norm, they
force institutions to contend with their own modes of operation that uphold exclusionary structures.
This tension is also palpable in the work of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, whose 2010 Breve Historia de
la Arquitectura en Guatemala turned the Guggenheim's famous spiralling ramp into a site for the
19
critical, symbolic demolition of monumental architecture.
37
Accompanied by a Guatemalan folk song played live on marimba, three dancers take their turn
twirling down the iconic central ramp of the Guggenheim.
38
The dancers in Ramirez-Figueroa's Breve
Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala move with an undeniable grace that is steadily interrupted by
an awkwardness clearly attributed to their bulky costumes, but also to the structure of the dance space.
The first dancer spins down the ramp slowly and dizzily while wearing an oversized white foam-board
architectural model of a Mayan pyramid. The downward spiral of the Guggenheim’s interior seems to
contribute to the uncertain footfalls of the dancer whose movement and vision have been limited by the
pyramid. The second dancer follows, their face peeking out of the rosette window of a colonial church.
The final dancer's head, arms, and legs jut out of a brutalist cube recognizable as the National Bank of
Guatemala. Each monumental structure appears stripped of its imposing monumentality, especially
when the dancers join hands and begin to skip in a circle. The movements of the dancers begin to
convey a celebratory sweetness, but the lighthearted feeling is quickly dispelled as the performance
becomes increasingly chaotic. Continuing to spin, the dancers soon begin the gently smash into one
another. It doesn't seem to take much force for each of the three buildings to fall in pieces from the
dancers' bodies. The work ends with the three dancers, now nude except for their white sneakers,
standing to face the audience in a sustained gaze.
Amara Antilla succinctly sums up the piece in a Guggenheim text, emphasizing Ramirez-
Figueroa's examination of “the way architecture memorializes regimes of power—in this case,
indigenous, colonialist, and modernist—and related histories of exploitation.”
39
Physically dismantling
the representations of monumental structures taken for granted as representations of glory throughout
Guatemala's architectural history, Ramírez-Figueroa with co-performer Kendra Ross and Pedro
37 It is important to note that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in its perfectly smooth curves represents the opposite of
disposable drywall box architecture.
38 Antilla, “Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en
Guatemala).”
39 Ibid.
20
Jiménez assert their own bodies as key figures in the historical drama. The built environment and “the
ultimate futility” of “conflicting ideologies responsible for [its multiple, memorialized] edifices”
40
crumble and the audience is suddenly confronted with three bodies who have been the central figures of
the work all along. While the remnants of the three model architectural monuments lay collapsed
before them, the audience is left to contemplate the relationship between real human bodies and the
ideologies responsible Guatemala's architectural landscape. Each broken edifice contains a human
history to unpack. Watching the work on video I am left considering how the memorialization of the
Mayan pyramid is instrumentalized to relegate Indigeneity to the past rather than to acknowledge
contemporary Indigenous cultures. The second dancer leads me into the history of the Catholic church
as often brutal colonial instrument. Finally the presence of the bank brings to mind the enormity of
Guatemala's public debt within a global economic system that operates on debt bondage maintaining
colonial power dynamics. In addition to contending with all of this continued colonial history, I cannot
help but consider the superstructure housing the performance—the Guggenheim itself.
At the end of Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala Ramírez-Figueroa, Ross, and
Jiménez assert themselves with stillness and a steady gaze, ending the piece in a proposition akin to
esparza's. They are three Brown artists taking up space in the white cube—or in this case, iconic white
spiralling rotunda. As its direct historical scope focuses on Guatemala's history, Ramírez-Figueroa's
work also interjects critically into its environment. As a major US art institution, the Guggenheim
operates as cultural gatekeeper in a colonial context. The institution has itself historically been
criticized for exclusionary curating practices. Notably, The Guerrilla Girls staged an action at the
museum's opening of its SoHo branch in 1992, passing out paper bag gorilla masks for audience
members to wear on their heads which read as follows: “What's new and happening at the
Guggenheim for the discriminating art lover? The same old isms: racism, sexism, classism, ageism,
eurocentrism, nepotism, elitism, phallocentrism.”
41
The success of Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en
40 Ibid.
41 “What's New and Happening at the Guggenheim for the Discriminating Art Lover? Guerrilla Girls” Division Leap,
21
Guatemala is the work's manipulation of architectural relationships to the body in order to operate
simultaneously in two discursive spheres: the first being the layered history particular to Guatemala,
the second being the inevitable dissection of the very space in which the piece takes place on the same
critical terms that question architectural primacy over the body and over Black, Brown, and Indigenous
bodies in particular. Rather than addressing architectural precarity, Ramírez-Figueroa’s piece presents
audiences with an allegorical decomposition of monumental and structurally steadfast architectures
suggestive of the need to dismantle structures inscribed carried through the built environment.
Inverting this line of questioning, Paul Donald's 2019 performance UNsettler critically
examines the white body's relationship to colonial structures through the process of building and the
use of cheap building materials. (Fig. 14) For a period of four days Donald spent eleven hours per day
in the public spaces of Wellington, New Zealand’s waterfront, a tourist attraction and the site of the
first colonists’ landing. In this charged environment, Donald constructed, sat in, and again dismantled a
prefab wooden facsimile of a typical colonial house just big enough for one adult to sit inside its
narrow doorway. Looking like a nineteenth century carpenter in black pants, a black vest, and a white
button-down shirt, Donald appears in the video documentation of the work talking to a child who has
become the artist's audience. Getting up from his sitting place on the diminutive veranda of his tiny
spired, pitch-roofed construction, Donald allows the young viewer to enter the building. Through this
kind of engagement of the symbolic space, members of the public are given the opportunity to
contemplate settler presence in New Zealand. While the conclusions audience members come to would
surely have been varied, Donald's performative disassembly favours a particular reading.
By repeatedly assembling and dismantling a structure representing the Edwardian homestead,
an architectural form emblematic of settler colonialism in New Zealand, Donald seems to engage in a
meditative process. A continuous cycle presents itself in the colonial context of Wellington urban space
accessed February 28, 2020, https://www.divisionleap.com/pages/books/26807/guerrilla-girls/whats-new-and-
happening-at-the-guggenheim-for-the-discriminating-art-lover. I find it is important to note that the feminist use of
“phallocentrism” to mean exclusionary of women has since been reexamined due to a preoccupation with anatomy that
positions gender in line with physical attributes in a manner that is in turn exclusionary of transness.
22
that points to the history of white colonists in the Maori territory of Aotearoa now known as New
Zealand. The title UNsettler suggest that the artist is using this symbolic process of continuous
deconstruction to unpack his own position as settler. By placing himself inside a colonial construction
of his own devising, Donald addresses white complicity in, benefit from, and consistent reinstantiation
of colonial dynamics in New Zealand. The fact that Donald's construction is relatively close to the
proportions of his own body seems to imply that the white body itself, taking up space on Indigenous
land, always occupies the settler position. The size of the building also suggests that the colonial
process has rendered the particular, European style of architecture replicated by the artist synonymous
with the white settler body. As Paolo Freire points out, the dehumanization resulting from the violence
of colonial oppression “marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a
different way) those who have stolen it, [through] a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully
human.”
42
Donald's distortion of the proportions of the settler homestead correlates with Freire's
concept of distortion. In this reading, UNsettler is illustrative of the white body building—and thereby
becoming—the very emblem of colonial power. The settler becomes the colonial process, their
personal motivation as humans with the potential for compassion is sublimated into the structures that
uphold European hegemonic power on Indigenous territory. Having lost their humanity generations
ago, settlers must work to rebuild it by dismantling the power structures that uphold dehumanizing
colonial supremacy. By introducing the cyclical assembly and disassembly of the colonial house as
metaphor, Donald is “unsettling” the unexamined white settler life that still rests in the dehumanized
form of colonial emblems that reinstantiate the imbalance of power by continuing to benefit from a
white colonial presence translated directly into white privilege on colonized land. Furthermore, Donald
positions whiteness itself as already theoretically unsettled, stating that “'[w]hite' is not a culture rooted
in a practice of place, ritual, familial and social connection and so the imaginary tends toward
unhealthy, uneasy, and unsubstantiated fantasies.”
43
42 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra B. Ramos (New York: Seabury Press, 1970), 44.
43 Paul Donald, email to author, December 12, 2019.
23
After spending some duration of his eleven-hour day sitting in his minuscule homestead in
public space, Donald dismantles the installation and moves along. This action seems to conclude each
contemplative segment of the work. It is as though, after giving serious thought to the implication of
his own presence within the colonial framework, the performer comes to the conclusion that the only
possible way to move forward is to dismantle the system and leave- and yet he simply moves along a
little only to begin the process again. This gesture points to a theoretical framework for the
acknowledgment of settler privilege accompanied by the understanding of how deeply implanted
colonial settler behaviours operate through every white body on colonized land. The suggestion of
white willingness to cede Indigenous territory articulated in every dismantling of Donald’s structure is
insidiously reversed with every rebuild. I view this framework—one that produces an opening for
white settlers to think about their own position critically and adopt the willingness to take up less space
—as crucial among many anticolonial voices.
Viewing Donald's work in its documented form as a white immigrant/settler to Canada now
living in the US, I am compelled to refocus my own self examination as I too take up space on
Indigenous land and benefit from white privilege directly linked to colonialism. In continuing this work
of self examination I find myself revisiting a set of questions proposed by Alicia Elliott who examines
what she calls “extraction mentality.”
44
In an experimental essay that asks readers to examine their
position in the colonial context, Elliott cites Leanne Betasamosake Simpson who “writes that
'extraction is a cornerstone of capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism. It's stealing. It's taking
something, whether it's a process, an object, a gift, or a person, out of the relationships that give it
meaning, and placing it in a non-relational context for the purposes of accumulation.”
45
With this
definition in mind Elliott asks her readers “What do you want? Are those desires based on extraction?
Are they dependent upon capitalism or colonialism? If the answers to those last two questions are yes,”
44 Alicia Elliot, A Mind Spread out on the Ground (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2020), 213.
45 Elliot, 213, citing Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical
Resistance, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
24
she concludes, “please revisit the first question.”
46
Viewing UNsettler as a process, I was reminded of
Elliott's questions. It seems as if Donald's performance is itself a form of questioning. As the house is
built up it performs a sort of manifestation of colonial desire to take up space, to stake a claim through
the construction of a homestead that marks Indigenous territory with European architectural emblems
of wealth while extracting that wealth from the land and the people who have been its caretakers.
Donald's deliberate use of cheap processed wood available at big chain hardware stores rather than
seeking out antique pieces from the initial colonial period his building style is another direct way in
which his work points to contemporary colonial reality and the new manifestations of extraction made
possible by large scale manufacture of these materials. While the cyclical, repeating structure of
colonial extraction can be interpreted as the guiding concept behind the allegorical structure of this
work, perhaps Donald's action of taking down the house demonstrates a willingness—even a perceived
necessity—to revisit and dismantle the desire to build it in the first place.
46 Elliot, 218.
25
Unbinding Materiality: Toward Queer, Feminist, Nonbinary Construction
“Labour has no gender.” In his talk with Roski students on October 31, 2018 rafa esparza echoed the
words of artist Beatriz Cortez in reaction to assumptions made about their collaborative installation,
Nomad 13 (2017, Fig. 15). Cortez—who works in large scale metal sculpture to explore ideas of
temporality, memory and migration—also spoke about this particular piece when she visited Roski
some weeks later. The installation consists of a large steel octagonal prism framework sitting on top of
a set of adobe bricks in diamond formation. The framework holds a variety of plants indigenous to the
landmass now known as the Americas. Evocative of Indigenous history and Indigenous futurity, the
work exemplifies the deeply intersecting interests of both artists. Cortez spoke about envisioning the
work as a true whole, made in equal partnership despite its elements being created by each collaborator
with their individual skill set. According to an anecdote shared by Cortez at her seminar with Roski
students, this holistic vision of the collaborative effort was crucial in the description given to viewers
during the exhibition, but an interesting problem arose in conversations in the presence of the work. A
viewer who seemed at least somewhat aware of esparza and Cortez' work commented that they were
excited to see that esparza had taken up welding. While making the assumption that esparza had
created the steel components of the installation, this viewer also assumed that all of the gardening was
solely Cortez' purview. This kind of gendering of labour persists both in the art world and at large. As
an artist who is also involved in the unfortunately gendered world of home renovation, Cortez made an
anecdote that struck a deep chord with me.
The relegation of feminized labour to the (already constructed) home has been explored by
various artists throughout history. Notably, in her Femme Maison (1946-47) series Louise Bouregois
created painted and sculptural hybrid forms integrating houses with women's bodies. (Fig. 16) While
literally translated into English as Woman House, the original French title of the series is a direct play
on the idiom “housewife.” The absurdity of the form and its eloquent nod to the oppressive
marginalization of women's roles remains striking today. In 1997 Monica Bonvicini revisited the image
26
in the installation Hausfrau Swinging. The work consists of a wooden framework holding up a drywall
panel configuration mimicking the corner into which the work is installed. On the floor in the centre, a
TV monitor shows a naked performer, identified as a woman in all extant analyses of the work,
wearing a “prosthetic head in the shape of a house.”
47
The figure aggressively yet still somehow
tentatively bashed the house-head against what appears to be the same drywall corner installation now
towering over the monitor. It feels too simple to suggest the performer might be trying to break free of
a set of stereotypes potentially symbolized by the image of the Hausfrau- or femme (de) maison. I
believe a more generous reading would suggest that this performance functions as a broader
exploration of the futility of prescriptive social structures. The performer's movements inside the house
head are erratic. The entire image defies logic and yet refers specifically, by association with
Bourgeois' exploration of the same image as well as through Bonvicini's title, to an idiom used to
circumscribe a woman's relationship to the physical and social architectures of house and home. Beatriz
Colomina suggests that, “[a]rchitecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject
[... it is also ] a viewing mechanism that produces the subject, It precedes and frames its occupant.”
48
The social designation of bodies becomes defined through the socio-architectural spaces they have
been designated to occupy. If the Hausfrau has been produced and prefigured by the haus itself,
Bonvicini's work seems to suggest that the entire image, the entire “viewing mechanism” is an ill fit.
Like the bodies of the dancers in Ramirez-Figueroa's Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala,
the body in Hausfrau Swinging is ultimately incompatible with the architecture encasing it. Following
Bourgeois, Bonvicini presents the viewer with an untenable hybrid that after some thought begins to
symbolize the arbitrariness of prescriptive social structures defining certain bodies and assigned
through certain architectures. Social codes are not innate to any structure. What a constructed space
means and how it is socially encoded is always interpreted through “an incomplete body of knowledge
47 Janet Kraynak, “Survey,” in Monica Bonvicini, Janet Kraynak, Monica Bonvicini, Juliane Rebentisch, and Alexander
Alberro (London: Phaidon, 2014), 67.
48 Ibid., 65. Beatriz Colomina, Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 83.
27
which is expanding without any sense of its own limitations.”
49
Gendered associations, as well as those
related to race, class, and power are inscribed into them through sociopolitical circumstance that are
constantly in flux. While architectures become emblematic, iconic, and memorialized through
repetitious displays of state or corporate power, the body never fits squarely into whatever roles those
powers wish to assign it. Sara Ahmed puts forth that “[the maintenance of] public comfort requires that
certain bodies 'go along with it,'” that people agree to be situated a certain way within social realms
through tacit reminders that “[to] refuse to be placed would mean to be seen [...] as causing discomfort
for others.”
50
I read Bonvicini's work as suggestive of a tension between the will to perform and the
uncomfortable suggestion of a refusal. Despite widespread tacit agreement to be placed, the body
always retains a certain messy autonomy, ill-fitting in its relationship to power structures. Assignations
of gender to bodies and objects operate similarly.
In my own performance work I make physical, conceptual, and hopefully generative messes
that combine construction labour and building materials with historically feminized attire. In my 2018
work Untitled (Studs), for example, I laboriously attach a set of steel studs to my high-heeled legs by
forcing pair after pair of pantyhose to encompass both steel stud and flesh leg. (Figs. 17-18) The
absurd, awkward and deeply laborious process soon becomes untenable and I inevitably fall to the
ground, forced to crawl away in my newly hybrid human-architectural form. Though somewhat more
abstract in its representation of the built environment, my hybrid behaves in a manner similar to
Bonvicini's Hausfrau and Ramirez-Figueroa's architecturally clad dancers. The architectural steel stud
armature, though coming to define the movements of my body, is clearly an ill fit. This bizarre form
entangled with my body becomes a sort of strange and ill-made replica of the steel stud structure
undergirding IFT Gallery at Roski where the performance is taking place. Through the absurdity of my
form, I hope to point to an unbound reading of both the construction materials and the hose and heels.
While the studs become a strange attire, the panty hose become a binding material, their tensile strength
49 Lefebvre, 7.
50 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 39.
28
pronounced in their ability to hold the ten-foot metal studs. My heels become a precarious looking,
though provide a surprisingly sturdy base for the whole bizarre construction. Even as I'm slowing
forced to the ground by the strangeness of what I have made, my hope is that the image my body
creates remains too absurd and abstracted to elicit only a simple reading as a failed combination of
tropes. My hope is that my hybrid, stud-legged form defies a monolithic reading, in turn pointing to the
open field of signification surrounding my body as well as each of my materials.
As a nonbinary person who has felt alienated from monolithic readings of the body as
gendered according to a strictly binary framework, my goal has always been to create work that allows
viewers to denature mainstream assumptions about gender and give in to a polyvalent understanding of
the performer's body—my body—as well as any objects at play. I have often used drag as a method of
stretching assumptions about femininity to their slapstick extreme. Drag queens have created an
incredibly diverse field for the deconstruction of femininity through sometimes seamlessly gorgeous,
sometimes shamelessly over-the-top femme figures that celebrate queer femmeness.
51
Femme-
identified people of all genders have engaged femininity critically and radically through strategic over-
identification.
52
As a nonbinary person I have been read at various points in my adult life as a cis
woman, a cis teenaged boy, a trans man, an androgynous lesbian, a twink, a femme, and who knows
who else. My appearance has shifted over the years through my choice in attire, my haircuts, my use of
testosterone, my shifting mannerisms. At this stage my hair is long, I sometimes wear lipstick and
dresses, I am not using testosterone, and I let my wrists go limp and my voice waver from lilting to
shrill. I am aware that all of these factors contribute to my passing for a cis woman in many settings. I
have come to terms with this over my lifetime and have engaged with many communities that embrace
51 I use the term “femme” in the way it has been used in queer contexts to denote attire, attitude, or identity that
appropriates tropes traditionally gendered as feminine, explicitly coding these elements as fierce, strong, and
intentional.
52 “According to Slavoj Zizek (1993), overidentification works by bringing to light an implicit and unspoken set of
assumptions that are shared by the powers that be and the members of a community.” Marco Deseriis, “Lots of Money
Because I am Many: The Luther Blissett Project and the Multiple-Use Name Strategy” in Cultural Activism: Practices,
Dilemmas, and Possibilities (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V. 2011), 81. Citing Slavoj Žižek, “Why Are Laibach and
Neue Slowenische Kunst Not Fascists?” in The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two (London:
Continuum, 2006), 63-66.
29
my nonbinary identity. I use tropes of femininity in my work with an intention that is both celebratory
and critical. With all of this in mind I am now facing a turning point in my artwork. I no longer wish to
rely solely on full drag queen attire to do the work of denaturing gendered stereotypes. I'm hoping that
my manipulation of objects can activate a multiplicity of tropes and elicit a variety of affective schema
thereby pointing to a conceptual fluidity around the body and its environment.
Just as gender is aggressively projected onto binarized modalities of labour has no gender, so
it is onto objects such as shoes. The preposition that certain shoe styles are suited for any particular
gender presentation is a key part of the political and historical construction of gender binaries. A lot of
work has been done by trans, gender-non-conforming (gnc) and queer people to unpack and expand
gendered associations with objects through the disruption of categories and reclamation of tropes made
problematic by power structures. Can publics—including the viewers of artwork—now challenge
themselves to learn about symbologies proposed, crafted, and publicized by trans/gnc/queer
artists/writers/thinkers/workers? The information is out there. I see no reason to remain stuck on
monolithic interpretations of such objects as high heels when femme discourse offers such a huge array
of approaches to these objects. Queer discourse frames high heels as weapons, as tools, as comforting
tropes that link wearers in a multigendered celebratory community. While high heels initially belonged
to the domain of menswear among seventeenth-century European courtiers, they are now becoming
increasingly accepted as polygendered streetwear, though not in a way that mitigates violence against
trans and gender nonconforming people. Commenting on this historical moment, performance artist
2fik has put on several iterations of the work High He High Heels in which a group of men in their
most comfortable daywear dawn high heels and perform a choreographed walk in an urban setting.
53
(Fig. 3) What I find most compelling about the work is that all of the performers are so casually
dressed. The stiff choreography allows the performers' outfits to be observed like pieces on a runway,
yet their provenance is likely that of humble wardrobes belonging to a group of urban, middle-class
53 2fik, High He High Heels (2011), October 11, 2018, https://2fikornot2fik.com/high-he-high-heels-montreal-2011/
30
men.
54
To a queer sensibility, the heels on 2fik's performers simply make sense due to our comfort and
positive set of associations with the intentional use of the heel in celebration of gender diversity and the
widely cast fish net that is queer femmeness.
55
Heels have become a huge staple of queer identity
building, accepted as a joyful symbol of empowerment through re-appropriation and intentionality. In
other iterations of the work, the men's movements have been stylized into a military march. In both
styles of this piece, the monotony of the performers' march-like movements marries associations with
soldiers to associations with runway models. Twin affects historically splintered as masculine and
feminine are inextricably linked in this work.
I view high heels as a powerful tool for self-imaging. I see my own experience in the domain
of building in an equally empowering light. At the same time, I would like my performances with
construction materials to reflect my own anxious navigation of historically gendered realms of labour.
This anxiety is connected to a larger consideration of the ways in which capitalist economies inscribe
marginality onto labouring as well as feminized and racialized bodies. It is through my own financial
precarity that I have come into close contact with interiors whose imminent decay is often staved off by
desperate bandaid solutions composed of yet another layer of drywall. Working small renovation jobs
to support my performance practice over that past six years, my movements through skeletal chambers
where walls have been stripped bare initiated a performative exploration of the built environment.
Performance has the potential to complicate relationships between the body and everyday objects rarely
analyzed beyond their utility. The built environment is always composed of objects whose political and
metaphoric weight is smoothed over via the primacy of function. My work to lay bare commercial
construction materials, wrenching them from their function and forcing them to become literally
54 The class dimension of this work, and it's ease of situation in an urban setting would be interesting to explore. I would
be interested to delve deeper into historical and contemporary instances of gender-non-conformity that are not relegated
to positions of relative privilege afforded to those with access to exploration of fashion in urban centres.
55 In his work “The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous,” SAIC Low-Residency MFA program director Gregg Bordowitz states that
“[there] are countercultural strategies that belong specifically to queers.” High heel imagery has been an important part
of these strategies. Gregg Bordowitz, “The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other
Writings, 1986-2003 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 49.
31
embodied, is situated in a substantial history of performance that reconfigures the relationship of the
body to the built environment in order to allegorize labour, make visible the vulnerability of
infrastructure, or deal with what is taken for granted about how humans build and where we dwell.
Turning metal studs into armatures for the performing body, I make ubiquitous materials visible in a
new way, building metaphors around the vulnerability of structures both physical and theoretical.
32
Conclusion
Performance makes bodies visible in a way that points to a vulnerability already present in their daily
navigation of the built environment. To perform publicly is to be viewed and to be read inside of a
proposed structure. This condition is always present as architecture frames our social interactions and
constantly reinscribes sociality in terms of gender, race, class, and physical mobility. Artists such as
rafa esparza, Monica Bonvicini, Oscar David Alvarez, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Paul Donald
directly interrogate the role played by architectural forms in prescribing the physical and social
movement of bodies. Whether it’s through symbolically tearing down iconic structures, demonstrating
the material vulnerability of hyper-capitalist new builds, reconfiguring classical forms to create space
for all bodies, or cooperatively considering sustainable modes of construction of both physical and
social structures, these artists demonstrate possibilities for generative disruption of the built
environment. Each artist subverts normative, codified relationships between the body and the built
environment, reminding viewers that bodies have always found cracks to slip through. Alvarez's
drywall glory holes reflect a long-standing practice of sustaining gay/queer pleasure by literally carving
out small spaces inside of larger oppressive structures. Rafa esparza incorporates an Indigenous
technique of building into provocative works that operate with varying degrees of subtlety to make
openings for inquiry into institutional space. Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Monica Bonvicini, and Paul
Donald use material and symbolic disintegration to pointing to the ways in which architectures are
instrumentalized towards prescriptive and often oppressive delineations of the body, while in my own
work I builds structures that provide an opening for bodily creativity in a field of queer possibility for
perpetual self-re/construction. I imagine my own work in conversation with all of these artists as each
presents a proposes a critical modality for the joyous, awkward, and painful bond between the body and
the build environment.
33
Figure 1. Monica Bonvicini, Plastered, 1998 Figure 2. Monica Bonvicini, Plastered, 1998
Figure 3. Monica Bonvicini, Plastered, 1998
34
Figure 4. Oscar David Alvarez, Gridded, 2018 Figure 5. Alvarez, Gridded, 2018 (finale)
35
Figure 6. Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa's Breve Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala (2010), The
Guggenheim Musuem, New York, 2017
36
Figure 7. Monica Bonvicini, Hausfrau Swinging, 1997
Figure 8. Monica Bonvicini, Hausfrau Swinging, 1997
37
Figure 9. Rafa esparza, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014
Figure 10. Rafa esparza, building: a simulacrum of power, 2014
38
Figure 11. Michael Parker, The Unfinished, 2014
Figure 12. Rafa esparza, cumbre, 2018
39
Figure 13. Rafa esparza, cumbre, 2018
Figure 14. Paul Donald, UNsettler, 2019
40
Figure 15. Beatriz Cotrez and rafa esparza, Nomad 13, 2017
41
Figure 16. Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947
42
Figure 17. Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Untitled (Studs), 2018
43
Figure 18. Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Untitled (Studs), 2018
44
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Historia de la Arquitectura en Guatemala),” Collection Online, The Guggenheim Museum
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Bordowitz, Gregg. “The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous.” In The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other
Writings, 1986-2003, edited by James Meyer, 43-68. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004.
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https://clockshop.org/project/bowtie-aa/the-unfinished/.
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européene. In Benjamin Constant, Ouevres. Annotated with an introduction by Alfred Roulin,
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Use Name Strategy.” In Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities. Amsterdam:
Editions Rodopi B.V. 2011.
Division Leap. “What's New and Happening at the Guggenheim for the Discriminating Art Lover?
Guerrilla Girls.” Accessed February 28, 2020.
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Lozanovska, 99-114. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
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Kraynak, Janet, Monica Bonvicini, Juliane Rebentisch, and Alexander Alberro. Monica Bonvicini.
London: Phaidon, 2014.
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west.” Filmed in 2018 at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA. Video, 31:09.
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Harvard University Press, 2006.
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von Falkenhausen, Susanne. “From concept to gesture: Bonvicini's play with the strategies of
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46
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In this thesis I analyze works of performance that put the human body in dialogue with architecture as a means to question the construction of paradigmatic social structures reflected by and reinforced through the built environment. As a performance artist, I will also analyze my own use of cheap materials ubiquitous to contemporary building styles in North America. I view my performances with materials such as metal studs and drywall as a lens through which to disarticulate a logic of looking at the body as a discrete and gendered occupant of space in favour of a relational perception that complicates understandings of the body's entanglement with the built environment.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Nawracaj, Joachim Magdalena
(author),
Nawracaj, Joanna
(author),
Nawracaj, Johnny
(author),
Nawracaj, Johnny Forever
(author)
Core Title
Dancing about architecture: performative interrogations of the body in the built environment
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Fine Arts
Publication Date
05/06/2020
Defense Date
05/05/2020
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Architecture,contemporary art,de/anticolonial perspectives,feminist critique,institutional critique,nonbinary perspectives,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art,planned obsolescence,public art,queer theory
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Jones, Amelia (
committee chair
), Bustamante, Nao (
committee member
), Chang, Patty (
committee member
)
Creator Email
j.nawracaj@gmail.com,nawracaj@usc.edu
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Nawracaj, Johnny; Nawracaj, Joachim Magdalena; Nawracaj, Johnny Forever; Nawracaj, Joanna
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Tags
contemporary art
de/anticolonial perspectives
feminist critique
institutional critique
nonbinary perspectives
performance art
planned obsolescence
public art
queer theory