Objecthood: A Conversation with Lucy Cotter
BY JESS NICKEL
Lucy Cotter’s second exhibition, Unquiet Objects, in her Curator-in-Residence series, Turnstones, at Disjecta leaves you with much to chew on. If you haven’t gone yet (the exhibition closes May 2, 2021) I highly recommend going and spending some time with the work featured in this exhibition. Maybe you can even safely go with a friend, and afterward discuss this show’s breadth of work over a safely distanced walk or cocktail. A conversation with Lucy Cotter helped me to hone in on the layered entanglements around the concepts of objecthood woven together in this group show, featuring work by; Morehshin Allahyari, Noah Angell, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Stephanie Dinkins, Kristan Kennedy, Aram Lee, Christine Miller, Melvin Moti, Lorraine O’Grady, Itziar Okariz.
Itziar Okariz, Las Estatuas / The Statues: Jorge Oteiza’s Head of the Painter Otano (1948), 2019. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
Jess Nickel: Philosophically speaking, an object is a term used to describe the opposite of a subject. There is the entity observing (subject) and the thing (object) being observed -- so then the object can also be thought of as the “other”. Can you expand on how these two concepts are synonymous in this exhibition?
Lucy Cotter: Unquiet Objects foregrounds the relationship between how we think about, categorize, and treat objects and people. The exhibition sets out to present objects as placeholders for human subject positions – present and past – as well as evoking the denial of that humanness through the objectification of people and the plundering of cultural objects by colonizers and missionaries. The concept of “otherness” is highly charged; it has been used historically and is still used to produce difference and to turn human subject positions into object positions. Several works in the show seek to actively reverse that process.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s film Un-Documented– Unlearning Imperial Plunder, 2020, for example, not only proposes the restitution of museum objects from former colonies but argues that their long-term residence in Western museums should constitute rights for migrants from those locations. The film’s voiceover is performed by contemporary music and voice artists of Color, whose words are resonant with this human presence.
Another example is Christine Miller’s Picaninny Freeze in Process, 2019, which juxtaposes an old advertising placard containing racist imagery of a black child with a collection of swatches of tactile fabrics, like fake leather and fur. Instead of allowing this “historic” object to rest, she creates a tactile set-up in which we feel its connection to the human body. We consciously register its dehumanizing imaginaries while experiencing the seductive appeal that made it marketable to white consumers as a desirable object. While classical Western philosophy assumes that an observing subject engages with a (non-observing) object, this exhibition consciously manifests other possibilities.
Christine Miller, Picaninny Freeze in Process, 2019. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
JN: Absolutely, there is throughout this exhibition an invitation to challenge the way in which one thinks about the sentience of objects. In Itziar Okariz’s videos and Noah Angell’s Ghost Stories of the British Museum, among others, the object being discussed or displayed takes on a sense of self and responds to the world around it as much as it exists within the world. What do you see as the line between being and object, or is there one?
LC: The artworks in Unquiet Objects unsettle the apparent obviousness of the subject-object relationship. Okariz’s videos show the artist having live conversations with artworks and statues in various museums. Sometimes she whistles or sings “Happy Birthday” to them. Her performances suggest that artworks materialize their makers’ subject positions. They playfully show us that we invisibly negotiate those positions as embodied viewers with our own gender, race, cultural identity, etc. We’re not usually encouraged to ask whether the artworks chosen by “our” institutions speak to our own subject positions or exclude them. But Okariz refuses to treat artworks as discrete objects. This exhibition intentionally brings together works that ask us to re-examine our own perceptions around the relationship between objects and subjects. It works on a meta-level, with each artwork commenting on or showing awareness of its own status as an object.
Noah Angell’s project Ghost Stories of the British Museum, 2016–present, documents almost two hundred oral testimonies by former or current museum staff of collection objects moving, producing temperature differences, setting alarms off, generating ghostly appearances in photographs, and so on. The public can listen to some of these recorded interviews and follow the location of the related incidents on a wall-size map of the museum. Many of the “unquiet objects” are sacred objects from cultures worldwide; some are related to the many human remains that are contained in the museum collection. Angell’s project is presented alongside videos by Morehshin Allahyari refiguring Middle Eastern mythic beings because they both push back against the assumption that Western post-Enlightenment understandings of reality are the only possibility.
Installation image of Unquiet Objects, curated by Lucy Cotter. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
Installation image of Unquiet Objects, curated by Lucy Cotter. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
Installation image of Unquiet Objects, curated by Lucy Cotter. Foreground: Kristan Kennedy, M, 2014. Background: Melvin Moti, Eigenlicht, 2012/2020. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
JN: Neighboring Angell and Allahyari’s works in the main space, you’ve positioned Melvin Moti’s video installations and the amorphous sculptures of Kristan Kennedy. How do these works continue the conversation about questioning how we understand reality?
LC: The main space looks at the inner life of objects. The walls are painted dark gray and the light levels are low, with the intention that entering that space will feel a bit like going into the subconscious or another realm of being. Melvin Moti’s video installations show two museum collections from an almost Quantum level. In Eigengrau we visually plunge into objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum, which slowly become immersive fields of colored light, and in Eigenlight, 2011/2021, a museum collection of rocks with natural phosphorescence has been filmed as though each object were a whole world onto itself. Standing in the space, you are physically surrounded by these luminous installations, which open up the living world of matter that many global cultures have always believed in.
Kristan Kennedy’s gold-colored shapeshifting “sculptures” draw attention to artworks being made of fluctuating intelligent matter. They are amorphous and contain imprints of the artist’s fingers, as though she were battling with the unruly life of the material, unable to manipulate it into a stable art object. I presented her works in display cases to emphasize the sense of them being unknowable objects. I’ve seen people at the exhibition pressing their nose to the glass as if they’re trying to get closer to a meteorite or some precious object that has fallen to earth.
Aram Lee, On a possible passing from the inscription to the body, 2020. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
JN: I love the phrase “fluctuating intelligent matter”. Part of an artist’s power and skill is in the relationships they form with matter/materials through care to create a new fixed object. Or the care and conversation they create with an existent object, as in Aram Lee’s work digitally scanning and brushing the unidentified bundle of human hair from the National Museum of Ethnology. So, in this train of thought about objecthood, is there a difference between an artist imposing ownership upon intelligent matter and an institution imposing ownership over an artist-made object?
LC: Obviously, artists work in a wide spectrum of ways, some including the making of material objects and others not. Rather than thinking about artists “imposing ownership” on the matter, I’m interested in how artists think through matter – think in material-conceptual, embodied, and spatial terms – which is highly unusual in the Western world where intelligence has long been defined in linguistic and computational terms. In support of the art market, the art world has typically thought about artworks as being discrete objects that can be owned. But for the maker, a physical art object is always a temporary stopping point in an ongoing process. The object itself is constantly in flux in that process and there’s a dialogue with matter rather than the artist dictating everything. Kristan Kennedy’s work hints at this experience of making.
Artworks are not immortal objects with a perennial value that the art market would have us believe. Last year I curated an exhibition called The Unknown Artist, which partly looked at the physical labor behind this “immortality”. It takes ongoing human effort to store, conserve, and repair art objects, and even more labor to keep them alive in cultural memory and public consciousness. Aram Lee takes a neglected object and, using 3D rendering, cares for it at a level that has never happened at the museum. In doing so, she asks us to notice that a devalued human life is present in this devalued object. As Lee’s work suggests, institutional care for cultural objects relates to care for people and for the cultural memories that contribute to their sense of identity and worth in the present. Whether they are considered artworks or not, the responsibility of owning cultural objects lies in recognizing this interrelationship. For this reason, I would differentiate between an individual artistic claim of ownership over matter and an institutional claim. Nevertheless, artists’ self-perceptions of their role and the role of their work can contribute to maintaining or challenging institutional definitions of art, and the social and cultural hierarchies embedded within those definitions.
Lorrain O’Grady, Left: Miscegenated Family Album (A Mother’s Kiss), T: Candace and Devonia; B: Nefertiti and daughter, 1980/1994. Right: Miscegenated Family Album (Motherhood), L: Nefertiti; R: Devonia reading to Candace and Edward, Jr., 1980/1994. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
JN: In a previous conversation, we discussed how one of the unique things about the PNW is the number of artists still making objects. This is in contrast to artists abroad making art that for the most part solely exists on the computer or as a digital file. When I look at Lorraine O’Grady’s work in this show I think about the world continually moving towards the digitization of mementos and experiences. How do you think humanity’s relationships with these types of objects are responding?
LC: Moving here from the Netherlands, where contemporary artworks are often immaterial, the object-orientation of the U.S. art scene raised a lot of questions for me. Libby Werbel, a local artist and curator who saw Unquiet Objects, said it struck her that I had made a post-object exhibition about objects, which was an interesting observation. Beyond Aram Lees’ work, the show as a whole raises questions about the role of objects in carrying forward cultural memory. O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album juxtaposes images of ancient Egyptian sculptures with photographs of her family members; showing close physical resemblances that invoke the suppressed cultural and racial flows between the US and Africa. At the moment I’m researching some of the ways that Artificial Intelligence is supplanting existing cultural memory, re-entrenching cultural, racial, and gender biases in unfathomably all-encompassing ways. One room of the exhibition engages with some of the ways that digital technologies co-determine the future of objects and intervene in our sense of subject-object distinctions.
Through Allahyari’s Digital Colonialism project, for example, we see how the digital rendering of museum collections solidifies Western ownership of world heritage, with perpetual intellectual and image copyrights that diminish the human rights embodied in the restitution of physical objects. We’ve discussed Lee’s 3-D rendered video of a neglected “artifact”, which also shows how strangely intimate and corporeal our digital engagement with objects can be. The final work in the exhibition by artist Stephanie Dinkins pushes this level of intimacy into the terrain of imagining future day-to-day level encounters. Across a series of four monitors, we see the artist in conversation with Bina48, the world’s most socially advanced social robot. Uncannily, this robot is designed to look like a middle-aged African American woman and Dinkins sets out to explore what “she” understands about “her” own existence.
The Bina48 robot is cut off at shoulder level, echoing the form of an antique sculptural bust, which is hardly an afterthought. In the exhibition, this form returns in Ariella Azoulay’s film in the plaster casts of people used as scientific evidence for the field of eugenics. The juxtaposition of Dinkins and Bina48 visually echoes the form of Okariz in conversation with a modernist marble head sculpture and the pairing of a contemporary woman’s face with an Egyptian “artifact” head in O’Grady’s work. These kinds of visual echoes occur throughout the show and it’s this push-pull of imagery and forms that I hope will ultimately inspire questions in the people who visit the show: On what basis do we perceive discontinuity between artworks and other cultural objects? How does the concept of “artwork” dictate our value judgments of objects relative to other concepts like “artifact”? Why is the art world referred to as a “world” and in whose benefit is it symbolically separated from the “real world”?
Installation image of Unquiet Objects, curated by Lucy Cotter. Images courtesy of Disjecta. Photographed by Mario Gallucci.
JN: I feel like Unquiet Objects has succeeded in inspiring questions from myself as a visitor, which is one of the many reasons I was excited to have this conversation with you. I’m curious, what are the questions and thoughts that composing Unquiet Objects leaves you with?
LC: There’s a lot of important work going on right now to decolonize institutions, in the US and many parts of the world. Greater access and inclusion are part of this project, but I’m thinking about inclusion not being enough to achieve equity. Decolonization necessarily involves reassessing deeper inherited frameworks of thinking. The European invention of modern art was entangled in creating a cultural and racial superiority system, so there’s foundational complicity between all of the art professions and the colonial project and its system of white supremacy. Unquiet Objects is part of my own ongoing attempt to come to terms with this complicity and look at how unexamined understandings maintain this status quo. It reflects and deepens my questions about the roles I personally play in the art world, and how I contribute to maintaining value systems I don’t subscribe to, but benefit from as a white art professional. These are not new questions – decolonization is a life-long commitment, but my conversations with people visiting this exhibition have helped me further imagine the restructuring of the roles and institutions underpinning the art and cultural world. It has brought a renewed sense of possibility.
Unquiet Objects, in conjunction with Turnstones, Season 10 in the Curator-in-Residence series on view from 12 March– 02 May 2021 at Disjecta.
Jess Nickel is an independent curator and arts producer based in Portland, Oregon. She received a BA in Fine Art focusing on painting, and a BA in Literature from the University of Oregon in 2009 and began her career in the arts as an artist. In 2011 she was awarded a year-long artist residency with Engage Studios in Galway, Ireland. Here, she curated a series of pop-up exhibitions in vacant spaces throughout the city in collaboration with Niland Gallery. Since then, she has worked for institutions such as the For-Site Foundation in San Francisco, and held directorship positions at Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center, Upfor Gallery, Newspace, and Converge 45 in Portland. Currently, she is the studio manager of the public art company Site Specific and continues her independent curatorial practice through her roving exhibition series entitled SATOR projects.