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Como a arte fala?

DEBBIE MENIRU

Quais são as diferentes maneiras pelas quais a arte pode falar no mundo
de hoje? Explore as muitas maneiras pelas quais a arte se comunica
conosco.

Um pouco como as proverbiais árvores caindo nas florestas, a arte fala se não houver
ninguém por perto para ouvi-la?

Acho que é muito raro pensar em como a arte fala. Talvez pensemos que fazemos isso o
tempo todo quando olhamos, falamos e escrevemos sobre arte. Com o passar dos anos,
porém, descobri que estava fazendo algo totalmente diferente. Em vez de pensar em
como a arte fala, pensei em como falar sobre arte. Claro, os dois se sobrepõem.
Escorregando e deslizando um sobre o outro até achar impossível pensar em um sem o
outro. Mas elas não são as mesmas. Depois de responder a essas perguntas por alguns
meses, percebi que pensar sobre como a arte fala é, na verdade, incrivelmente
libertador. Não há razão para ficar constrangido ao pensar sobre como a arte fala,
nenhuma necessidade particular de ter feito a leitura ou lido as resenhas. Fazer essas
coisas pode alterar a forma como a arte fala com você, de maneira positiva e negativa.
Mas, mesmo sem eles, as conversas que se pode ter com a arte podem ser profundas,
pessoais, frívolas, íntimas. E eles serão influenciados por quem você é e com quem está,
onde a arte é exibida e quanto tempo se passou desde o almoço.

No passado, eu me concentrava muito em como falar sobre arte. Tentei transmitir

através da minha escrita o que pensava que a arte dizia “em geral”. Tentei imaginar o
que outras pessoas poderiam querer que eu dissesse sobre isso. Eu estava com medo
de contar honestamente as conversas que estava tendo com a arte, caso a forma como a
arte falasse comigo fosse “errada” ou talvez revelasse demais. Este texto oferece
algumas maneiras pelas quais a arte pode falar com você e algumas maneiras pelas
quais ela falou comigo, mas, como sempre, a melhor maneira de ouvir o que a arte tem
a dizer é ouvindo, olhando, participando e imaginando.

LY L E A S H TO N H A R R I S
Falando através da fotografia

Lyle Ashton Harris

Constructs #10 - #13 (1989)
Emprestado pela Tate Americas Foundation, adquirido com fundos fornecidos pelo Comitê de
Aquisições da América do Norte, The Agnes Gund Fund and Salon 94 2019
© reservado

I’m standing in Tate Modern in front of Constructs #10 - #13 (1989), Lyle Ashton Harris’s
series of four black and white self-portraits. I look up and unexpectedly catch his eye in
the photograph on the far left. He looks straight back at me, assertive in his netted tutu
and ballet pose. Even when facing away from me in the second photograph, I feel like he
is in control of the conversation. He appears to communicate his attitude through the
sway of his hip, his tousled wig, and the netted material that barely covers his behind.
He seems at ease, confident in front of the camera. But the last in the series is different.
This time, instead of him choosing to turn away, it feels as though I’m the one who has
decided to watch him from behind. The power has shifted to me, as his body shows
none of the attitude marked by clothes or pose so evident in the other photographs. He
doesn’t speak to me and instead I am left to project onto him, almost a blank canvas.

Across the four photographs, Harris plays with the language of classical sculpture and
ballet: art forms with high cultural value. But, as a gay Black man making this work at the
height of the AIDS pandemic, he subverts this language of established power. Harris has
described the photographs as “almost an aggressive assertion of sex positiveness” and
“a tool for embodiment to reimagine the self [...] and rethink our understanding of
identity.” Made while he was still a student in California, the series has become some of
his most celebrated work, included in exhibitions such as Black Male: Representations of
Masculinity in Contemporary American Art curated by Thelma Golden in 1994 at the
Whitney Museum of American Art. In a conversation with artist and writer Morgan
Quaintance, Harris described how his work and the Whitney exhibition made a lasting
impact on many who saw it at a time when Black and queer identities were not very
visible in mainstream art spaces.

The great [artist] Kehinde Wiley said it was seeing that work at the Whitney, Thelma
Golden's landmark show, that did something for him in terms of speaking about the
possibility of gender. Or the curator of media at MoMA, Thomas Lax, my dear friend,
who said seeing that work as a teenager, it resonated and it caused a rupture in terms
of his thinking.

Lyle Ashton Harris in conversation with artist and writer Morgan Quaintance at a Tate
event

Harris’s art is both the product and creator of many conversations between artists and
artworkers and this is integral to how he speaks about his art and career. His work forms
part of a dialogue between a network of Black creatives and thinkers, including
filmmakers, artists, poets and theorists, many of whom he first met when they were
visiting lecturers at the California Institute of Arts (CalArts). He took a one-week seminar
led by writer bell hooks on the theme of “talking back”. For Harris, “being exposed to
that book, what it meant to be able to speak in my own language, in my own voice,
became a way in which I began to somehow seek out other forms of community, etc.”

We have to also transport ourselves back to LA where CalArts is situated, where I was
one of a few people of colour and what it meant to negotiate that terrain. And I think
having people, whether that's the great late Marlon Riggs or meeting Isaac Julien or
John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, and having them telegraph, if you will, to the
professors that “he's one of us” - if you think about the idea of care and nurture. And I
did as well as an academic, because even today in 2023, where obviously it’s much
more diverse, the absolute necessity, in terms of pedagogy, to be able to pull forward
someone who you might intuitively understand that they might be a messenger of a
certain body of knowledge. So I think in a way there was a mutuality.

Lyle Ashton Harris in conversation with artist and writer Morgan Quaintance at a Tate
event

S H A R O N H AY E S
Speaking Through Love

Sharon Hayes
Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love? (2007)
Tate
© reserved

Sharon Hayes’s work speaks to us in a more literal sense – aloud, and with words.
Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love? (2007) is an installation by
Hayes that replays "love addresses". Hayes explains that a “love address” captures how
she memorised and delivered these passages in the form of letters, as if they were
composed on the spot. The installation comprises five PA speakers placed directly
opposite five posters advertising the performance, one for each day of the week. From
each speaker in turn, we hear Hayes’s amplified voice above the noise of a busy New
York street, speaking to unnamed lover. In the original performance, Hayes stood on a
busy corner outside an investment bank in Manhattan, speaking each "love address"
aloud to the passing public, repeating each three times. In conversation with writer So
Mayer, Hayes described how she wanted to “butch up” her appearance for the
performance as she hoped the anonymised letters would be interpreted as expressions
of queer love. But the “you” she addresses in the work remains an open invitation to
whoever is listening.

Art in Focus | Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time For Lo…

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T R A N S C R I PT 

The title of the work Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think it’s Time for Love? is taken
from a placard that was held up during a protest in Berkeley, California in 1967. Over the
years, Hayes has amassed a large collection of photographs of protest signs containing
the word “love”. For Hayes, the love expressed by these signs “is a commitment, a
collective tactic, a vital component of [...] non-violent resistance.” In her work, Hayes uses
the intimate language of a personal letter to a lover, but, like with the placards, the
implications are different when they are shared publicly. “The letters are not being read
to their [original] addressees but to imagined future audiences,” she explained.

“Everything else has failed! Don't you think it's time for love?” I found this image in a
very general folder in the picture collection at the Mid Manhattan Library in New York
City in probably the early 2000s. I have not seen images of it circulate elsewhere. The
love here is not confident or clear. It does not enthusiastically recruit. It pleads. It's
doubtful. It's vulnerable. I love it.

Sharon Hayes performing “What is Love?” presented as part of a Tate event with So
Mayer.

© Wendy Parker, East Cobb News, Georgia, USA

I see you. I hear you. I stand with you. I love you.

I, as the I who holds the sign, love you, who is not specified. You, who might be
marching next to me, or passing by in your car, or walking by me and seeing this, or
seeing this image on the internet.

Sharon Hayes performing “What is Love?” presented as part of a Tate event with So
Mayer.

Everything Else Has Failed… is the first in a series Hayes calls Love Addresses, a series
that speaks of Hayes’s despair and helplessness – and the failure of mass protest – in
the face of the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is interested in the idea that speech
can do more than communicate, it can also perform “speech acts” (a theory developed
by philosopher J.L. Austin in his 1962 book “How to do things with words”). Examples of
speech acts include apologies, congratulations, invitations or promises, like the words “I
do” during a marriage ceremony. I like to think Hayes’s work is a speech act of solidarity,
of love. As with protest signs, art is an open invitation that can speak – and offer this act
of love – to anyone who sees it. Hayes explained how to understand the address from a
protest placard, you need to look at the words on the sign, the person holding it and the
place and time they are in. Although referencing specific political events of 2007, as part
of Tate’s collection, the work will now exist across time, preserved by the museum to
perform speech acts at potentially infinite future moments.

I went towards love to talk about war, because to arrive on the street with a
microphone and a speaker to talk about war did not feel possible actually. It did not
feel possible in that moment. And so I do think of this work as a way to speak
indirectly to a public or a set of publics that was right in front of me, walking by, but
who weren't the literal addressee. So it allowed for a kind of way to sit or stand or
listen from or absorb from a place of kind of ethical witnessing rather than from a
place of being the “you” themselves.

Sharon Hayes in conversation with writer, film curator and organiser So Mayer at a Tate
event

T R I S H A B ROW N
Speaking Through Movement

Trisha Brown, maker James Byrne

Rehearsal of ‘Set and Reset’ 1983 in Trisha Brown’s Loft, New York, NY, in advance of the taping of ‘Set
and Reset, Version 1’ as part of the GBH New Television Workshop (Performance Documentation) (1984)
Tate
© Trisha Brown

I often think of dance as an ephemeral performance, but its life is also prolonged when it
enters a museum’s collection. Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset is a work of post-modern
dance first performed in 1983. Brown originally choreographed the piece using a
process of memorised improvisation. The improvisation was done to a set of five
instructions from Brown: “keep it simple, act of instinct, stay on the edge, work with
visibility and invisibility, and get in line”. Carolyn Lucas (Associate Artistic Director of
Trisha Brown Dance Company) explained how dancers must learn a new vocabulary of
dance in order to master the choreography, putting together memorised phrases of
movement to create longer passages.

Trisha develops movement vocabulary. So she always starts with phrase work. And
then she's thinking, What am I going to do with these phrases? And that's pretty much
her motor through the trajectory of her career, it’s always to make the vocabulary first.

Carolyn Lucas in a Tate event panel discussion about Trisha Brown’s 1983 dance Set and
Reset

Watching the performance, I feel like I am experiencing improvisation, full of the happy
coincidences that occur when a group of people know each other so well that they are in
tune with each other’s movements, like when you adopt a tilt of the head from your
mother or an eyebrow raise from your best friend. In discussion with Carolyn Lucas,
dancer Joel Brown and Director of Programme Catherine Wood, Benoit-Swan Pouffer
(Artistic Director of Rambert) spoke about bodies being collectors of experiences. There
is the physical memory of the dance choreography but also the memories of how the
body has moved before, both through dance and in the world in general. The end
performance expresses all of these experiences, this knowledge. In the original
performance of the piece, we can compare the movement of Eva Karczag, a dancer who
brought her traditional ballet training to her movement, to Trisha Brown, whose
movements were deliberate refusals of ballet’s strict language.

I just do believe that the more [dancers] get into a work, the more [...] they immerse
themselves in the work, they're going to leave with something. [...] It makes them
richer. It makes them collectors and that’s what we all are as dancers.

Benoit Swan Pouffer in a Tate event panel discussion about Trisha Brown’s 1983 dance
Set and Reset

The choreography speaks across generations to other communities of dancers. Dancer

Joel Brown, who performs a version of Trisha Brown’s choreography called Set and
Reset/Reset with Candoco Dance Company, spoke of his excitement that Set and Reset
would be kept alive through new dancers who will need to learn the choreography every
time the piece is brought out for “display”.

I feel a connection or a history or a shared knowledge with other people who also
know this knowledge. But I have this fantasy of being a really old man in a wheelchair.
And there’s hopefully some young dancers learning this work, and I just join them.

Joel Brown in a Tate event panel discussion about Trisha Brown’s 1983 dance Set and
Reset

GEE’S BEND
Speaking Through Community

Aolar Mosely
“Log Cabin” - single block “Courthouse Steps” variation (local name: “Bricklayer”) (c.1950)
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation 2022
© Estate of Aolar Mosely / DACS 2023

In Gee’s Bend, Alabama, the skill of quiltmaking has been passed down through
generations of African-American women since the 19th century. Seeing these quilts in a
gallery, I am very aware that many were made to be used, not to be seen in the white
cube of a contemporary art space. The quilts were traditionally taken outside after the
winter months to be aired out and were laid over washing lines and fences to be
examined and enjoyed by neighbours. They contain the material evidence of the
mundane and everyday, of special memories and loved ones passed away. They make
me think of the cloth that has held important places in my life – a blanket given to me by
my nana, a t-shirt I kept for years after I outgrew it. A different kind of beauty is found in
wear and in age, in something that has meant many different things to different people
over its life and theirs.

Until the middle of the 20th century, the majority of patchwork quilts from the area
were constructed from the remains of ragged shirts, dress bottoms and worn out
denim work trousers. This is what we refer to as the work-clothes quilt. And in a way,
these work-clothes quilts really provide a tangible record of lives lived in the
community and is part of that kind of constancy of understanding of self, of community
and also of history. There is something really profoundly autobiographical about these
works. The ancestors are still there keeping you warm. They act as these extended
family portraits, in a sense. In Gee's Bend, this recycling practice really became the
founding ethos for generations of quiltmakers who have transformed this otherwise
useless material into the marvels that we see now all around the world.

Raina Lampkins-Fielder in conversation with art historian and curator artist Alayo
Akinkugbe about The Gee’s Bend quiltmakers at Tate event

Most quilts from Gee’s Bend can be considered “my way” quilts. Speaking with art
historian Alayo Akinkugbe, curator Raina Lampkins-Fielder explained how “the quilter
starts with basic forms and then heads off “their way”, allowing the material to really
direct their hand with unexpected patterns, unusual colours, and surprising rhythms,
really seeing where the quilt takes you”. There are also many popular quilt styles
including “house top”, a pattern of concentric squares that begins with a medallion of
solid cloth to which rectangular strips of cloth are added. Aolar Mosely’s quilt “Log Cabin”
– single block “Courthouse Steps” variation (local name: “Bricklayer”) (c.1950) is a
particular adaptation of the house top style, which in Gee’s Bend is called “bricklayer”.
The quilt is hung like a painting in the gallery, but I imagine what it would be like to look
down on it from above, like the aerial view of the housetop it depicts. I see the stains
faded by time and imagine a time long ago, a clumsy child spilling a drink and scolded
by their mother who had spent so long crafting together the scraps of material.

The quilts do not just reveal individual and family histories preserved in the materials
but they also record the history of the community. The Freedom Quilting Bee was a
sewing co-operative to which many of the Gee’s Bend quilters belonged. In 1972, Sears
Roebuck, a nationwide retailer in the US, commissioned the co-operative to create
corduroy pillow covers. You can now see this commercial enterprise reflected in the gold,
avocado leaf, tangerine and cherry red corduroy used in many quilts around that time –
offcuts and scraps from the commission that the women saved from the floor and
shared with other quilters in the community.

The way that art has been and continues to be categorised can change the way it is
received. Artists from Gee’s Bend have often been described as “self-taught”, a label
Raina Lampkins-Fielder believes “doesn’t have a bearing on the work that these artists
are producing.” The term self-taught not only affects the way that people perceive the
art but also affects people’s ability to talk about it, giving the impression that this
artform has sprung up from nowhere and has no relationship to the rest of art history.

[The term self-taught means that] work might not be shown in a museum in a certain
way, that there might not be curators who are able to work with those works of art.
They might not be written about. That information about these artists won't be
disseminated as widely. [...] The fair market value of their work will be significantly
diminished by all of these titles.

Raina Lampkins-Fielder in conversation with art historian and curator artist Alayo
Akinkugbe about The Gee’s Bend quiltmakers at Tate event

E N D T H O U G H TS
Escrever esta peça me permitiu passar um tempo com essas obras e refletir sobre como
elas falam comigo pessoalmente e como essa conversa depende de muito mais do que a
obra de arte em si. Existem muitas estruturas de poder em jogo que moldam a nossa
percepção da arte e influenciam onde ela é mostrada, como é descrita e até mesmo
quem está aberto a ouvi-la. As obras de Lyle Ashton Harris, Sharon Hayes, Trisha Brown e
os fabricantes de colchas Gee's Bend geraram conversas entre artistas, historiadores,
curadores e dançarinos sobre como a arte pode falar no mundo de hoje. É emocionante
pensar em como estas obras de arte podem gerar novas conversas com as gerações
futuras, para falar de formas que ainda não podemos imaginar.

SOBRE DEBBIE MENIRU

Debbie Meniru é uma escritora e curadora radicada em Londres que explora arte e
museus através da emoção, da anedota e do humor. Seus escritos foram publicados
internacionalmente e você pode ler mais em seu site .

O Como a Arte Fala? Série faz parte da Terra Foundation for American Art Series: New
Perspectives

N Ó S R ECOM E N DA MO S

Compromisso e desejo
em Ricerche de Sharon Trisha Brown, nascida em
Hayes: três 2013 1936. Homem andando
Larne Abse Gogarty pela lateral de um prédio,
1970
Este artigo examina o vídeo Ricerche: three
2013 de Sharon Hayes e a forma como ele Acácia Finbow
representa e medeia os processos
psíquicos muitas vezes dolorosos de Estudo de caso examinando Man Walking

formação de grupos, neste caso Down the Side of a Building 1970, de

impulsionados por pressões sociais A arte de olhar devagar Trisha Brown, publicado como parte de

internas e externas. Baseando-se no Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art,

O que acontece quando passamos um
trabalho do psicanalista britânico Wilfred uma publicação da Tate Research
tempo conhecendo detalhadamente uma
Bion e da filósofa Iris Marion Young, o única obra de arte?
ensaio analisa a exploração da
“feminilidade” pela obra de arte como o
locus da subjetividade coletiva e da
agência política.

SOBRE APOIAR JUNTE-SE

Sobre nós Coletivo Tate
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