An Aesthetics of Demonology, in which Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Irena Haiduk, Danh Vo, Linda Blair, and Courtney Love Make Special Guest Appearances
From 1240 Writing Resident / Anton Stuebner:
Last week, I met with artist Leigh Wells to begin the first in a series of image/text based experiments and responses, a collaborative project soon-to-be published on the 1240 Minnesota Street blog. Between studio time and initial interventions, Leigh and I began talking about transubstantiation, and the ritual of ingesting or consuming one material (in Catholic rituals, a wheat or bread-based wafer) as a transformative gesture which, through this activation, changes an object into another substance (such as the body of a spiritual figure or deity).
In thinking through Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spills, and the complexities of its own activation by removing and ingesting its constituent “parts” (in the case of Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), piles of intensely rainbow-hued, cellophane wrapped tutti frutti hard candy), I could easily draw the parallels with Catholic communion rituals, especially given the associations of bodies in absentia that Gonzalez-Torres’ work deliberately foregrounds.
But I haven’t been able to shake the idea that there’s a more sinister edge to Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spills, especially in that invitation to eat candy that’s filled with chemicals flavorings and artificial dyes: propylene glycol, Red 40, Blue 1. Was the shiny, glistening pile of candy actually a queer take on the Hansel and Gretel story and was Gonzalez-Torres casting a kind of darkly humorous brujeria through his art?
After my first meeting with Leigh, I attended a lecture by Serbian artist Irena Haiduk at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Haiduk’s talk focused on her oral corporation Yugoexport, a company that she founded in 2015 after assuming the name/corporate identity of a defunct-Serbian apparel manufacturer and weapons exporter. Haiduk frequently critiques structures of capital exchange and commodity fetish, and during her lecture, she discussed her distrust of image-based media, and how it stems from a concern that pictures reproduce the “perspective” of those who have the power to control channels of media distribution. In turn, Haiduk proposed that she wanted to think of her presentations at venues like Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens — installations that often resemble a kind of “anti” pop-up shop — less as exhibitions and more as demonstrations, a word that Haiduk slyly remarked not only has associations with political assembly (demos), but also a homonymic word play with the demonic. The artwork as demon, or sinister spirit — — maybe Courtney Love was onto something when she declared herself “a walking study / in demonology”:
That initial charge sparked by Haiduk’s proposition brought me back two weeks earlier, when I saw Danh Vo’s solo presentation Take My Breath Away at the Guggenheim in New York. I didn’t know much about Vo’s practice and was immediately floored by the juxtaposition of works: family artifacts re-imaged as sculptural assemblages, many from his parents’ flight from Vietnam following the political collapse of the 1970s; reclaimed historical objects; such as dismantled crystal chandeliers from the Hotel Majestic in Paris, where the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973 (and which led to the United States’ withdrawal from the Vietnam War); and monstrous sculptural hybrids composed of spliced and repurposed statues and reliquaries (a dissected French gothic wooden Madonna statues fused to the torso of a marble faun) that displayed a punkish “fuck you” ir/reverence for the historical object.
Painful personal and political narratives haunt Vo’s work, but his presentation at the Guggenheim — a full-scale takeover of its iconic ramp — has an anarchic force that resists straight-up elegy. Instead, Vo’s work possesses the Guggenheim, occupying its hallowed spaces with an almost demonic glee made all the more apparent through repeated invocations (both sculpturally and contextually) of the classic 1973 horror film, The Exorcist:
I’ve written about the ecstatic, and the experience of how a powerful artwork takes hold of me, but I’ve always conceptualized it in terms of an almost spiritual moment that, in more flowery moments, I’d characterize as a kind of grace. But maybe it’s time to stop thinking about grace, and to start conceptualizing an aesthetics of demonology. We need to reimagine our creative interventions as possessions — less Gwenyth Paltrow, more Isabelle Adjani — and to stop reading Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and start reading Aleister Crowley. More urgently, we need to take up Irena Haiduk’s proposition as a fundamental challenge to stop worrying about how our work will live up to institutional standards, and to start plotting how to haunt them instead.
