text by Perry Shimon
“Perpetual self-optimization—as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self—represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation. As an ‘entrepreneur of himself,’ the neoliberal achievement-subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly – and even passionately. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely.
Under neoliberalism, the technology of power takes on a subtle form. It does not lay hold of individuals directly. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized – and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one.
-Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2014)
“Sometimes when things you love get really commercial, you end up feeling betrayed by it.”
-Gwyneth Paltrow
Sam Contis’ Phases, in the American Academy of Arts and Letters galleries at Audubon Terrace, presents 24 miniature photographs: tightly-cropped, daguerrotype-sized portraits of teenage girls approaching or crossing the finish line of a race—anguished and ecstatic faces in a graduation evoking a lunar orbit. Nearby, Five Kilometers, a three-channel video work of lone girls running through a New England landscape bleeds their climactic, intense, and layered breathing into the adjoining gallery.
Considerations of power and gaze are often present when viewing representational work today, particularly in a contemporary art context, and especially so when looking at adolescent women’s bodies in a galvanized state. Critical discourse, social media, and institutional reprimand have produced a conservative and cautious climate in art contexts, more so than other milieux of visual culture. It seems more common today in an institutional setting to encounter critical interrogations of the gaze, than the kind of unadorned looking on view in Contis’ presentation. Contis leaves the space for us to make our own assessment and curator Noa Wesley, in the accompanying gallery text, offers:
When the runners’ rhythmic breathing rises to a crescendo—full of droning moans, gasps, the holding in of a cough—each girl begins to look like her will is running ahead of the body that carries her forward. And then the sound cuts out and they continue to run. Their pace intensifies. In the relief of that silence, we experience ourselves watching the runners perform an incredibly intimate feat of endurance. Their effort, and the amount of time that has passed since the starting shot, is newly visible: Sweat is pushed back, cheeks flush red, grimaces appear. The audience becomes voyeur to the ecstasy of their labor. The moment their pace reaches its peak, a low, sustained drone made from the instrumentation of the runners’ voices swells in; the suspended sound is an ominous anachronism. We watch their faces as they finally cross the finish line and continue to watch until, one by one, the screens cut to black. Wait a few minutes for the film to replay and the girls appear again, back at the starting line. You can leave them there, knowing their race will continue, just as the moon keeps roving round and round.
This curious framing seems to naturalize the competition, toiling endurance, and “ecstasy of their labor,” making this cycle as inevitable as the cycles of the moon.
Han in his Good Entertainment offers:
The construct of true or serious art, strictly separated from mere entertainment, arises in concert with a number of dichotomies characterized by internal tension: reason / mind versus the senses, for example, or transcendence versus immanence. The positing of dichotomies is characteristic of occidental thinking. Far Eastern thinking, on the other hand, is oriented toward complimentary principles. Rather than stiff oppositions, reciprocal dependencies and correspondences preside over being. The dichotomy of mind versus the senses, which grounds the concept of a low art addressed only to the demands of the senses, never developed in the Far East. Nor does Far Eastern culture recognize the idea of artistic autonomy or the conflation of truth and art. No passion for truth, which suffers the extant as false, predominates in Far Eastern art, and it proposes no utopian antithesis to the existing world that serves to negate it. Negativity does not animate Far Eastern art. It is primarily concerned with affirmation and entertainment.
I wonder how much of a Christian tradition informs the production and reception of this work, and likewise the development of the neoliberal achievement subject. Is it possible to view Contis’ work as entertainment? Does the “ecstasy of labor” constitute a form of entertainment? For me, encountering the work after coming from a Dia de los Muertos celebration at Met Cloisters suggested a syncretic tendency for culture to overflow any attempts to neatly contain and classify it. The resonances between Contis’ passionate visages and medieval Christian iconography are clear enough, though an afternoon spent watching a New York crowd dance to cumbia, adorn ofrendas with plastic toys, and place calaveras among Christian icons complicates any easy casting of Christian tropes.
Phases is on view through February 8 @ American Academy of Arts and Letters Audubon Terrace, New York