This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition In Longing, curated by Anna Cahn, on view at CUE Art Foundation from June 3 – July 14, 2021. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Marie Ségolène, Documentation of Esquisse pour Rouge Gorge, 2021. Photograph by Santiago Tamayo Soler.
While it is frustrating to shorthand, the global pandemic has exposed the isolation at the core of our condition. “Our” condition is not always shared, troubling the constitution of the collective. The upheavals followed by Covid-19 have also made clear not only how much we long for more intimacy, but also that we have trouble connecting even when we are together. Pitch-perfect, seamless connection is impossible—and boring. Or, as S*an D. Henry-Smith writes in the book of poems Wild Peach, “all isolation isn’t loneliness or yearning.” It is in that gap between isolation, loneliness, and yearning where In Longing lives. Is it in the interest of fantasia? Or, is it a cry out for love under conditions of oppression and violence?
In Longing attempts to reckon with a loss of communion, but not one that is a direct result of the pandemic. The curator, Anna Cahn, tells me the idea for the show began before March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic. The works that comprise the exhibition are mainly non-studio-based art practices: installation, movement, performance, video, text, and touch. All around the color palette is muted, but the feeling is resplendent, a repetition in open air. Put together, perhaps non-studio-based art is something like public sex: illicit, queer, without a requirement for delimitation.
I swore I’d try to sway from post-Covid writing, as if I am responding to a school assignment, so let me try something rather formalist. Let me quarrel over the preposition in the exhibition's title. Here, we are in longing, not on longing, or at longing. Here, we are in longing, like we are in love. This is love chronicled in a diary-esque manner, groping around for vital aesthetic forms. The artist Alison Chen’s In and Out (2005-ongoing) gets after that swing, between longing and love. In and Out comprises two lists, black ink on white sheets of paper, each documenting the hour, day, month, and year—down to the minute—one falls in and out of love. If only it were that easy.
The temporality of longing is now. 8:58 a.m. or forever. Let’s call it post-post-Covid art. Or, let’s say that cruising limbo is a given of In Longing. Let’s say that a practice of bad feelings, madness, virtuosic dullness, sexual depression, abject defenselessness, humiliation, a feeling of not enough, a feeling of too much is at the core of this exhibition.
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY’s expansive practice feels all this and takes it even further. HOLLOWAY is a new media artist who is difficult to describe by way of individual works. Not only because she has put in a lot of work, but because her engagement with the digital reframes the discreteness of individual and thus monetizable artwork. The HOLLOWAY oeuvre is like a waterfall of small experiments, with a sense of humor, and it’s best to stand right under it to get the full experience. Her guttural practice tends to lean on the new in new media—video, publication, software, poetry, performance, installation, sound, tweets, games, hashtags, cellphone photos, profile pages, GIFs—without fetishizing that newness.
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE, 2017. Blanket and cage, 50 x 60 inches.
Since 2017, her Chamber Series (2017-ongoing) has interrogated the co-constitution of sex, race, and power. Like in #004ACCOMPANIMENT-004_TRAINING-PLAN-AND-CODE-NOTES, sex can require some planning, some care. In the show’s Chamber Series companion piece, titled REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE (2017), a blanket and dog cage, the lushness of a silky silvery sheet—plush, ready to be dived into—asks a set of questions that at first glance seem algebraic: “Limitations of choice? Who kneels on command? Trickery or protection?” HOLLOWAY refuses to settle.
Raymond Pinto has a push and pull to his vertiginous movement-based practice. He investigates how close people can really get even if they are touching. With vernal delicacy, he wonders how intimate humans can get to nature, to trees, to water.
Fluids and spills and leakiness are a few of this art’s sine qua non. They’re tools for digging into the sensual brutality of everyday communication and relation. Xirin’s work twins disgust and desire, literally drools over both, trading spit. Don’t yuck my yum, I hear someone saying. The multi-referenced “egg pass”—mucous, viscous, nastily erotic, good and gross—is accompanied by a perversion of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in Xirin’s video installation, Hope Eats the Soul (2019). If you can’t take the heat, start a fight in the kitchen. As a framed letter in Hope Eats the Soul reads, love is “so performative, but real.”
In Marie Ségolène’s practice, there is another suggestion of the kitchen: a whole fish draping over a sheet pan as in L’Amour Désarmé (2018), assembled with herbs and pomegranate. Sur la table (on the table), as she says in her bilingual artist statement, is red wine, almost biblical, but also trauma and desire. A queer kitchen is still a kitchen, but this is a kitchen outside of a kitchen. In Agape (2019), for instance, at the edge of sculpture, performance, and text, she spits wine out on a canvas, staining the shit out of it, and paper and pants. These themes and visuals—of feminine excess, of soft sufferings, of tangled knots—are to be continued in Rouge Gorge, her new piece for In Longing.
Alison Chen’s multiple channel installation, For One Night Only (2015), traces touch, where skin meets skin. A pair of feet wiggle on cream-colored sheets. The smaller one, with toes painted vermillion, curls up into the arch and crevices of the other. They nestle each other like algae, toes swimming around. Toes to toes, back of hand to shin, torso to torso—physical intimacy in the blank awkwardness of a hotel room. For One Night Only runs on an infinite loop. The one night never ends. If only love were like that; instead, it’s the longing that never ends.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Tiana Reid is a scholar and writer from Toronto. She lives in New York City, where she is a PhD candidate and instructor at Columbia University. Her work has been published in many places, including Art in America, Bookforum, Frieze, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Teen Vogue.
Mentor Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, Frieze, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation.