This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Even there, there are stars, curated by Allie/A.L. Rickard, on view at CUE Art Foundation from January 14 – February 17, 2021. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Emily Oliveira, A Vision of the Leisure-Dome, 2019. Two-channel video, 7:47 minutes.
Here, we are. I am kitchen table, open window, record just and not yet spun. My household is pandemic and canned goods and washing hands dry. Purple gloves on the sidewalk; ambulances wailing down Brooklyn Avenue. Extended intimacies are kept at an extended distance; we only leave to walk the dog.
The stakes are high, but they have always been. Violences have always threatened vulnerabilities. There has always been urgency in dreaming inclusive futures and pasts.
The artists in Even there, there are stars pose vulnerability as a source of potential, create from a place of abundance, and insist on multitudes. Let’s follow them.
*
In his book Documents (2019), Jan-Henry Gray ponders essay and poem through exchanges with his friend Jennifer S. Cheng. She asks, I’m curious, what does the form free up?
He responds:
I used to think that poetry = freedom. Freedom out of the sentence, proper grammar, or reasoned reasoning. I used to think that a poem, more than other types of writing, allowed for leaps, disjunction, mystery, even magic. I thought that the poem was the best (and cheapest) way to create collage . . . The poem as sketch. As document. As a walk. As a conversation with oneself.
This is why I inhabit poetry.
But for Gray, there’s rupture—I’ve begun to grow fatigued, he writes. I’ve learned that writing poems is possible and possibility diminishes exploration.
The space between possibility and exploration is one of the cruxes of feminist and queer futurity, and of the artwork in Even there, there are stars.
For example, Emily Oliveira’s new mural depicts a spinning portal at the back of Ginger’s—the Brooklyn dyke bar my barber Ruthie frequents—opening up into a new world. A brown femme crawls through and is greeted by a multi-breasted, one-eyed alien. Here, the explorer is not white or male, and the physical possibilities of a known space are expanded.
*
Perhaps in some futures we’ll forgo exploration when we’ve become fully familiar with our surroundings (natives, even).
Perhaps to arrive there will require full detachment from that exploratory impulse, maybe forever linked to its colonial baggage.
Perhaps in some futures we will be bored by the constructs that dictate possibility.
Perhaps some futures are possible, regardless of their proximities or whether we will reach them, and perhaps it is that possibility that demands exploration.
*
Gray continues:
When I arrive elsewhere, say, to the essay, I feel at play . . . I wander. I hold an idea longer. I think freer. I don’t look for the exit door as quickly as I would in a poem.
He describes something oceanic: queer, dense, full of strange currents with different temperatures, something immersive, at times panicky . . . Essay as a vast, limitless, edgeless, impossible-to-keep-in-one’s-head-all-at-once phenomenon . . . a break, a reprieve.
Freedom from forms.
This vastness and freedom are central to the artistic and political approaches in this exhibition. Rejecting the bounds of borders and binaries, the artists work across media and in series. Much of their work imagines something queer, playful, and seemingly limitless. They counter the trope of the scarcity model often projected onto marginalized communities with abundance and fullness.
Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s three-eyed erotic femmes take up colorful space in her mixed-media works, surrounded by layered landscapes and starscapes. Oliveira’s The Goddess is Born in a Column of Fire (2018) is made out of hand-dyed cotton and velvet with Swarovski crystals, while Tuesday Smillie’s banner Reflecting Light (2018) is composed of textile, oil paint, sequins, and embroidery floss. These works represent richness, both compositionally and materially.
These artists reclaim space for Black and brown femmes, starkly against historical and current constructs that foreground identities of power.
*
Some of us bend time.
Queer folks experience heteronormative milestones (marriage, owning a home, children) later, differently, or not at all. Many of us have unsubscribed from prescribed expectations, instead embracing more fluid ways of moving through the world. In Jack Halberstam’s words, writing in In a Queer Time and Place (2005), queerness is an outcome of strange temporalities.
My undocumentedness also twists time; constant consideration of protections and permissions lingers between periods of application and authorization.
My body, too, shapes temporality. As for many, periods of sickness shake future planning. My impulses for calendars and control are undermined by a body on its own timeline.
This has been characterized by scholars and activists including Alison Kafer, who, in her book Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), describes crip time as flex time not just expanded but exploded, necessitating a reimagining of what can and should happen.
Kafer writes about how illness and disability cause time to slow, or to be experienced in quick bursts, how they can lead to feelings of asynchrony or temporal dissonance . . .
These shifts in timing and pacing can of necessity and by design lead to departures from ‘straight’ time.
In her essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” (2017), Ellen Samuel writes, crip time is time travel.
*
Tuesday Smillie, The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969, 2016. Watercolor on paper, 9 7/8 x 6 1/2 inches.
The artists in Even there, there are stars queer straight time, tangling past, future, and present.
In The Goddess is Born in a Column of Fire (2019), Oliveira’s two-headed goddess looks forward and back simultaneously. In DeJesus Moleski’s Alarm Clock (2019), a sensual, sword-holding femme with two ponytails and countless blue eyes is shown in a cave. The figure and the setting could be of ancient origin or a vision of things to come—or, even more likely, both at the same time.
Chitra Ganesh and Tuesday Smillie reach into the past to consider futuristic texts. Ganesh adapts Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 feminist story Sultana’s Dream, in which women lead a utopian society, into lush linocuts that are dense with symbols and signs of community. Smillie engages with Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness through an array of works including an essay, a textile banner, and a series of watercolor, gouache, and ink paintings of the book’s various covers. In one piece titled A Slow and Arduous Progression (2016), Smillie annotates a page from Le Guin’s 1988 revision of her 1976 essay Is Gender Necessary? Le Guin places her update, titled “Redux,” alongside the original essay in a second column on the same page, to which Smillie adds her handwritten annotations. The print presents three layers and moments of grappling with a single text, which, rather than being something stable, becomes especially elastic.
*
Kafer also describes how, in ableist constructions of the world, a future with disability is a future no one wants.
I think about this as I lay in bed. Hanging above me is Romily Alice Walden’s Notes From The Underlands: A Manifesto for a Queer Future. The poster proclaims a queer future as an accessible one, an interdependent one, one that is messy, limp, lame and leaky, one that centers the most vulnerable and prioritizes care, an inclusive future.
I look at it often.
*
Our imaginings take place between the walls of a single bedroom, on entire planets, and in spaces that upend or ignore differences between the two.
In this exhibition and in many experiences of queer embodiment, structures of space bend and break. Scale scrambles. The mundane becomes cosmic and the cosmic, mundane, as in Oliveira’s two-channel animation A Vision of the Leisure-Dome (2019), which depicts a color-saturated, otherworldly landscape full of people lounging.
Leisure as liberation (protest, even) is also part of the utopian world of Sultana’s Dream, which begins sleepily and liminally: One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not. In Ganesh’s linocut adaptation, the reclining figure dozes with one foot up, as wisps of dreams leave or enter through the open window.
*
Whether they’re cartoonish or sinister, aliens are a constant in science fiction. The artists in Even there, there are stars destabilize this trope, questioning who is an alien and why, asking: under whose gaze is something unfamiliar (scary, even)? DeJesus Moleski’s figures, for one, could be seen as alien, with their many eyes and not-fully-human bodies, but perhaps in her world they are the norm.
For me this trope also conjures the nativist term illegal alien, which has been weaponized against undocumented and refugee bodies. During one of the Democratic presidential debates, the former vice president referred to undocumented aliens before twitching to undocumented people. While the term is rooted in racist tactics of othering, I have been thinking of the possibilities of its reclamation.
*
Let’s be aliens. Let’s be foreign to the nation-state and its underpinnings; let’s be others to be feared.
Let’s join these artists in expanding and shuffling time, language, and lineage. Let’s make queer sense of past texts and images, create new ones that we may see ourselves in, and future-build together.
Smillie concludes her reflections on The Left Hand of Darkness like so:
To build another world, we must first be brave enough to imagine how that world could be, knowing we will make profound mistakes in the process. The potential for radical action, and for radical transformation is embedded in how we proceed as our failure becomes clear.
*
I build future collaboratively and communally, sometimes with reams of white paper and too many words. My future is at my kitchen table, sturdy despite its shaky legs, between pink bed sheets, in poems, and, sometimes, in essays.
*
What is your future building?
Who are we taking with us?
Where?
Here?
*
Afterword
October 2020
This essay was started in February and completed in May. Now, parts feel like relics. I am still—here, within my walls. The constellation of our living room furniture has shifted and shifted. I now write this looking out another window, at another tree. Outside, the sirens have slowed and, for a few weeks this summer, all we heard was fireworks. Museums and galleries all shut, then slowly reopened.
As I write this, more than 220,000 are dead in the United States from the virus and even more face hospitalization, long-term complications, and grief. The numbers are increasing and undercounted, spiked by preventable incompetence and compounded inequities. I’m restless watching the reckless and irresponsible endanger already vulnerable communities with selfishness and conspiracy.
The pandemic continued and continues, along with the state violence against Black bodies and daily protests for justice. Tear gas, non-indictment, chokehold. Names are incantations of mourning and rage: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Nina Pop.
*
Signs point to more loss and upheaval to come. The world is bound to have been flipped and turned back and around more than once by the time this is printed. I’ve been thinking about how our warped experience of time these last months can further open us to futures like those imagined by the artists in Even there, there are stars. Perhaps the simultaneous dizziness and fog of pandemic makes the potential of fluidity clearer, and even more necessary.
Through all this, conjuring and sustaining legacies of care and mutual aid has felt grounding—like a kind of futurity itself. Queer and trans communities insist on our survival, but beyond that, we insist on our abundance and our pleasure, not unlike the universes of the exhibition. We continue to show up and gather in new ways. Sometimes, in virtual rooms of video rectangles—my frame is often a pink corner, behind me a shelf holding a potted, dotted Hypoestes (also pink) and a neat acrylic painting by a friend titled Post Scarcity—I feel possibility. I feel like I am building another, better world.
*
With deep gratitude to Jillian Steinhauer, A.L. Rickard, Lilly Hern-Fondation, Josephine Heston, the entire team at CUE Art Foundation and the Art Critic Mentoring Program/AICA USA, Malcolm, Jan-Henry Gray, Romily Alice Walden, and all of the queer and trans artists and writers in this exhibition and beyond—I’m so glad to be creating futures with all you stars.
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.
Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020-21 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, ArtCritical, TAYO Literary Magazine, among others. A Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum, danilo is also the curator of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, 2019-20) and the upcoming support structures, featuring the 2019-20 cohort of Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency. danilo is the co-founder and co-curator of the reading series Maracuyá Peach and the chapbook/broadside fundraiser already felt: poems in revolt & bounty. They are working to show up with care for their communities.
Mentor Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist focused on art and politics. Her work appears in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and other publications. She’s a recipient of a 2019 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital, and won the 2014 Best Art Reporting Award from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for her work at Hyperallergic, where she was formerly a senior editor. She curated In the Presence of Absence, an exhibition about grief, at EFA Project Space in spring 2019. Jillian received her MA from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program in NYU’s journalism school.