the spaces between objects and images: A Conversation with M Acuff
Torso, Installation view at Carnation Contemporary, October 3–October 18, 2020. Photo: Marcelo Fontana.
BY LAUREL V. MCLAUGHLIN
Twisting torsos, neon rope tethering images or sculptures to the walls, silver spray-painted bricks, a traffic cone, and a lawn ornament deer lay strewn, hung, and mounted throughout the shifting performance-installation in M Acuff’s exhibition Torso, on view October 3–October 18, 2020, at Carnation Contemporary. Navigating the terrain carefully, I walked around the interconnected works, until Acuff asked how I was doing. Automatically (and somewhat stupidly because they had spoken to me first), I replied with a question: am I allowed to speak to you? Finding myself with a performer in the midst of interacting with objects, I assumed my presence was secondary. Perhaps these thoughts reified the very patriarchal norms that Acuff’s object-relations circled around, rearranged, and ultimately unraveled, or perhaps this question embodied the feminist logic that Acuff continually infuses within their object-oriented relations. Or were there shades of gray?
M Acuff graciously spoke with me, once again, over a shared Google Doc in December of 2020. The following conversation expanded this gray zone where M’s practice resides, plunging into the interstices that compound within visual culture, identity, and the environment.
Torso, Installation view at Carnation Contemporary, October 3–October 18, 2020. Photo: Marcelo Fontana.
Torso, Installation view at Carnation Contemporary, October 3–October 18, 2020. Photo: M Acuff.
Laurel V. McLaughlin (LM): Thank you for joining me in conversation, M. The last time we talked was one of those rare in-person meetings during this pandemic existence. I remember walking into Carnation Contemporary, prepared to view your exhibition Torso, but perhaps unprepared for your performance and our exchange in the gallery—which I found extremely generative. This brings me to start with asking you about this interactivity with audiences—how do you envision this within your practice?
M Acuff (MA): Yes, truly how rare was our meeting!?! There has been such a tiny window this year for boldly venturing out in public (to see art no less); I’m grateful we were both able to pass through the same opening and are now able to continue our conversation here. The day we met at Carnation I was simply playing around within the space of the objects and images I had amassed. Originally, I had imagined myself doing a range of formal and informal performances/actions as part of the exhibition programming. On account of the pandemic, gathering even a small audience inside the gallery was no longer an option. Instead, I just decided that anytime I was in the space I would try to “perform,” which came to mean interacting with the materials and/or people present, sometimes filming these activities, sometimes not.
The body has always been central to my thinking in and about sculpture or more accurately stated, sculpture has always meant a kind of thinking with the body. Object making slows down thinking. The tedium of facture produces a kind of alchemical response in the mind, transforming ideas in unforeseeable ways. I’ve also acquired a similar understanding of the spaces between objects and images, where my body functions in a spatial and kinesthetic relation that is time-based and also a powerful portal to the unconscious. Moving around physically within my installation has allowed me to cultivate a trust in the intelligence of the body, and to follow its often surprising direction.
Torso, Installation view at Carnation Contemporary, October 3–October 18, 2020. Photo: Marcelo Fontana.
LM: The exhibition included other urgent negotiations among United States myth, whiteness, and masculinity in particular. These notions crystallize around the cultural form of heroic sculpture, lauded in Western art such as the Belvedere Torso (ca. 1192). Could you discuss how such a historical form figures as a kind of nexus point for these contemporary negotiations?
MA: I think I first started to notice my fascination with male torsos through the trans culture that exists on Instagram. I was seeing a lot of female-presenting bodies go through elaborate transformation via hormone replacement therapy, surgery, and rigorous muscle-building workout and dietary regimes. The tacit endgame of all these actions seemed to me very much the approximation of a classical male heroic body. Of course, as a sculptor, I’d been keyed into torsos, male and female, my entire visual life. Seeing this echoed within trans culture just added a new dimension for me to think about. I was really curious about how contemporary biotechnology, ideas about gender, and strategies of digital/photographic rhetoric collided to produce such imagery. I wondered deeply about the cultural impetus behind these images: I was watching women become men, but not just any men—men of muscley, epic proportions. It made me wonder about white, male hegemonic power, its allure and fascination, the politics of its propagation and the ongoingness of its reproduction.
When I looked deeply into the Belvedere Torso, oddly I found a story that connected masculinity to shame and defeat. I found this shocking but also really compelling, and it synced with my understanding of texts as malleable. It’s one of the fundamental conditions of material to resist certain kinds of legibility, despite a representational appearance. This sculpture is said to have impacted Michelangelo and later Rodin, and formed a kind of touchstone for them. I knew that for me too, it had an enduring, erotic power. But I also knew that I had the intellectual tools to consider it from other angles as well; I felt a feminist obligation to do so! These were my reasons for wanting to play with this image, for colorizing it (bright yellow), scaling it up, attaching a climbing rope to its umbilicus (to which I could harness myself), and for putting a tiny looped video version of it inside the tv, atop my very unstable “monument” to masculinity.
LM: In that way, it seems to have an anti-monumental impulse, as it actively undid the premise of its construction! You also explore how seemingly exceptionalist male heroics permeate other adjacent issues, such as climate change and racial violence. Could you share more about this conceptualization and how it manifested in the exhibition?
MA: In 2017 I was a participant in the Arctic Circle Residency. There were many features of that trip that resonated with how I understand extractive global economies, empire, capitalism, etc.; but finding out about the growing data on hermaphroditic polar bears stirred something in me that remains today, very, very unsteady. Because of how industrial chemical toxins travel through the food chain, they end up accumulating in apex predators, like the polar bear. This kind of chemical contamination can disrupt the endocrine system; and, in the bodies of polar bears, this yields a creature possessing both male and female reproductive organs or a kind of hermaphroditism. The real-life consequence of this is that polar bears who exhibit these features are even less likely to be able to reproduce (the penis actually blocks the entrance to the vagina), amounting to yet another strike against them, survival-wise. So, on the one hand, we sort of have these complicated “trans” polar bears, and on the other, we have an image of what somatized environmental trauma looks like in the Arctic. Obviously, the bears are extreme victims in this absolutely non-consensual situation. Yet no place, however remote, is immune to these forces.
This is where I couldn’t help but see larger patterns constellating between the centuries of exploration/domination, extraction of fossil fuels, and hunting of whales—all activities entangled with masculinity in some way—and the sixth extinction. Juxtaposing the mostly male figures in Torso against a projected video landscape of swirling, melting icebergs was my way of starting to stitch these ideas together. I had already made some headway in this direction with the pieces Iceberg with Strap-on (After Henry Moore) (2018) and Arctic Glory (After Brancusi) (2018), in which I connected the practices of white, male artists with American Slavery and climate change. Torso just continued this line of thinking.
LM: Your lectures and performances (and conversations) intervened within the installation. When I walked in, you were in the midst of drawing a mushroom-like figure on a chalkboard and nearby text read: “anatomy is alchemy.” How did you conceive of your own bodily participation in the space alongside the sculptural and installation elements?
MA: A lot of my recent life experience has pointed me toward this new activity in which I want to exist within and alongside objects and images. I started to imagine a continuum, at the far end of which live the ancient bronze and marble statues revered in the West for so many centuries. Next come the re-presentations of those statues, whether that be during the Renaissance, through Michelangelo, or much more recently as they manifest in the commercialized fiberglass replicas found in garden catalogs (my own source material). Then come the ways I have employed and transformed these figures within a found object and installation-based practice over the last 10 or so years. Lastly, and at the near end of the continuum, is my own trans body, equally the product of different manipulations, aesthetics, and technologies. It felt somehow duplicitous to not see myself in some way among these other creations. My performances/actions are aimed at exploring these relations.
For example, I have a walnut plank that is vaguely yet unmistakably shaped like a shotgun that has been present with me in my studio now for a number of years. The fact of its gun-shapedness is no accident; I bought it from my local wood seller who sells them to gun makers; it is the raw material for making one’s own wood carved shotgun. To me it's an object redolent of early to mid-century abstract sculpture, in which source material for many artists involved a voyeuristic gaze toward the global South. I perform various actions with the gun; posing seductively with it, holding it in a way that makes it seem physically hot to the touch and therefore unable to be held, and more recently writing with it (inserting chalk into a hole that I drilled into its barrel). These are ways for me to think about the violence of representation historically, and how it is connected to the violence (gun and otherwise) so prevalent in American society. It’s also an important way for me to think about my own implication in these various forms of violence.
Teaching is also a very performative act, and so that plays a role in wanting to move in the interstices of things, or perhaps has led to a feeling of comfort in doing so! Related to this is the fact of having worked at a small college now for almost 15 years and having opportunities to collaborate with and learn from colleagues in other departments like Theatre, Dance, and English. For example, I recently acted as the set designer for a play production, took a Modern Dance class, and basically orient my entire schedule around the Visiting Writers readings. I love all of those experiences for how they let me expand my own aesthetic sensibilities beyond the static space so often associated with sculpture.
Torso, Installation view at Carnation Contemporary, October 3–October 18, 2020. Photo: Marcelo Fontana.
Torso, Installation and performance view at Carnation Contemporary, October 3–October 18, 2020. Photo: Marcelo Fontana.
LM: This idea of orienting the performative pedagogical part of your practice in and around transformative relations, such as learning, is admirable for numerous reasons in my mind. The practice of the “everyday” finds new meaning if one actively searches for ways in which to exercise it, and I would imagine that it creates an amazing ecology of exchange with your colleagues, students, and visiting artists.
And speaking of transformation, did the conception of this work shift considering its pandemic context and the massive inequities, precarities, and tragic histories that have been both been exacerbated and exposed as a result?
MA: As an artist, the pandemic has inspired financial restraint for me; along with many others I just became averse to spending any money, largely out of fear. Many of the items in Torso had been exhibited previously in other works and contexts; when I looked around my studio there was more than enough extant material (literally and conceptually) from which to build totally new work. It excited me to revisit and rearrange, to see previous statements in new light and from a new perspective, so a pandemic-inspired ethos of “recycling” was definitely at play, informing the work on many levels.
But I’m not sure I would call the pandemic a turning point for me in the same way that I would the 2016 American Presidential election. During the last four years, I have felt an urgent daily call to address the inequities and precarities of which you speak. Yes, the pandemic gave a radical new image of vulnerability and interdependence at a global scale, of this I’m certain. But mostly the pandemic has made me want to feverishly hold space for even more profound transformation, to cease the war against the earth, and to imagine—even in small glimpses—a totally new world order. I resist the nostalgia of longing to return to “normal” and all the unexamined dysfunction and violence that is and was, as you suggest, so pervasive in the world.
LM: I find the idea of recycling and return in the materiality of these works generative and responsible on multiple levels. As a model of making, I hope that it will find more traction both in opposition to an allure of the new and the rip-roaring pace that is so pervasive in the arts. But I also hear you that another type of return—to any mirage of a normalcy that actually wasn’t—should not be entertained.
In this same vein, my last question perhaps might be the most difficult. In our email exchange, you mentioned that this work is ongoing—could you share what forms it’s currently taking, or, in what directions it’s moving?
MA: I’m currently working on a series of micro "lectures" which collapse drawing, writing, speaking, dancing, and object making. I’m continuing to use materials from Torso, and adding other materials as inspired. The subject of these lectures continues to circle around how the body means, where masculinity resides, and how images manifest within us as much as they circulate around and through us. I’ll be posting these to my Instagram (@parched_and_sated) for starters and see if I can build some live performances from them down the road.
M Acuff hails from the Midwest where they received their B.A. in Art from Augustana College and their M.A. and M.F.A. in Sculpture and Intermedia from The University of Iowa. Acuff’s artistic practice ranges from object making to installation to video and performance and addresses the tangled web of relations—aesthetic, ecologic, and material—that define the period in human/geologic history now known as the Anthropocene. In recent years Acuff has exhibited their work nationally in group and solo exhibitions across the country at venues such as Carnation Contemporary, 3S Artspace, the Jundt Museum, White Box, The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Woman Made Gallery, AIR Gallery, and the Attleboro Museum of Art. Acuff has been awarded fellowships at many artist residencies throughout the United States including Signal Fire, Djerassi, The Arctic Circle, Jentel, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Acuff is an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA.
Laurel V. McLaughlin is a curator, writer, and art historian from Philadelphia, currently based in Portland, OR. McLaughlin holds M.A.s in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art and Bryn Mawr College, and is presently a History of Art Ph.D. Candidate at Bryn Mawr College and a 2020–2021 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art. Her writing has appeared in Art Papers, Art Practical, Performa Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and Performance Research, among others, and she has co-curated exhibitions and programs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, FJORD Gallery, AUTOMAT Gallery, Vox Populi. Most recently, she organized the exhibition Networks of (Be)longing at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture and a satellite solo exhibition, Rami George: and one day will tell you so many stories, at Paragon Arts Gallery.