Rocío García and Carmen Maria Machado Navigate the Joys and Horrors of Power and Submission

Installation view. Photograph by Garrett Carroll

text by Hank Manning

Rocío García’s oil paintings look like frames taken from a movie’s climax. We wonder what led to the perilous conundrums depicted and if the subjects will get out safely or meet their demise. With a single perspective and key details cropped out, both the viewer and subject have only a partial understanding of the situation. Within every scene, there is a composite of genres—action, drama, mystery, horror, comedy. Headless men are chained together and handcuffed, whilst curiously riding rollerskates. Another headless man, this one with chicken feet, guards his bed with a rifle, while the decapitated heads of his prey above have seemingly reincarnated to plot against him. A fierce-looking man called Jack the Punisher stands shirtless in the snow, seemingly held captive by a small rabbit. 

 

Rocío García
Magia blanca, 2012
From the series El regreso de Jack el Castigador
oil on canvas
79 × 85.5 in
Photograph by Garrett Carroll

 

The exhibition is a collaboration between García and the author Carmen Maria Machado, whose memoir In the Dream House focuses on an abusive same-sex relationship. Machado, here in her first curation, wrote captions that thoughtfully explore some of the context the paintings so demand. She chose the show’s title, The Object of Power is Power, from George Orwell’s 1984. The paintings certainly support the assertion that people seek power without any need for external reward, but for sheer enjoyment of power itself. The works interrogate the multidimensionality of power—how individuals and institutions dominate one another through force, but also through voluntary and even enthusiastic consent. Power is a subject that naturally blends genres. It is sometimes simultaneously horrifying and hilarious, demeaning and arousing. It often feels permanently entrapping, though it may only truly endure for a brief period. 

 

Rocío García
La Bella Samurai, 2021
From the series Bella floras del mal
oil on canvas
63 x 75 in

 

Personality differences sometimes naturally precipitate power dynamics—in romantic couples, a confident, assertive partner may exert power over one who is more apprehensive. García draws on another literary influence in the painting La Bella Samurai, named after Charles Baudelaire’s book of poetry. Two women sit in a bath in a bright turquoise room. One of them appears relaxed, drinking a glass of wine, while the other, on high alert, grips a samurai sword, as she looks outward at the viewer. Clearly, love can feel like one thing for one partner and at the same time something very different to another. Baudelaire’s Le Vin de l’Assassin described the “dark enchantments” of love. García and Machado also clearly highlight the frequent anxiety involved. They further challenge the misogynistic tropes associated with femininity and, in particular, lesbian relationships, by showing that these dynamics are just as complex as any other. The sword contrasts symbols of domesticity also on view, including brushes, slippers, and flowers. 

Rocío García
Like the Last Blues (Triptico), 2006
From the series El Thriller
oil on canvas
all works 47 x 55 in
Photograph by Garrett Carroll

The exhibition links these intimate, natural power dynamics with those entirely artificial and at a systemic level. Like the Last Blues, a triptych, depicts a scene of tied-up and gagged migrants under the discretion of one free man who wields a passport. Besides the shackles and binds seen in most paintings (which Machado reminds us may be applied either by force or by choice), weapons, here swords and guns, can reinforce or reshuffle existing hierarchies. 

The large canvases are not black and white—neither literally nor figuratively. They all feature otherworldly bright colors, like Technicolor film cranked to maximum saturation. Likewise, most do not portray obvious good and evil. Neither García’s paintings nor Machado’s pontifications encourage us to root for or against any of the subjects, although many of them seem moments away from determining a winner and a loser, whether a victim escapes or succumbs, or if a complete reversal of fortune could occur. Power exists for its own sake, but it may be natural or man-made, voluntary or enforced, benevolent or destructive, or somehow, all of these contradictions simultaneously. 

The exhibition forces us to consider how to balance the power we give up. Some amount of vulnerability is pleasurable, and even necessary for social and romantic relationships. But erring too far towards submission leaves us vulnerable to abuse, both by individuals and the state. 

Rocío García: The Object of Power is Power is on view through September 20 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York

Hugh Hayden Examines the Prosthetics of Power in Hughman @ Lisson Gallery

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

Upon entering Hugh Hayden’s Hughman exhibition at Lisson Los Angeles, you’re confronted by three interconnected rows of metallic stall doors, the same as you might find in a public restroom. The doors simultaneously invite you toward entry and expel you, intriguing as they are impersonal and ominous. Before you glimpse an object resembling art, you’re implicated in the hidden meaning, an active participant in its revelation. You’re immediately made aware of the physicality of your body, your relationship to the space, and the identity you present to the unknown system of order. Questions arise: Is this a gendered bathroom? Do I belong here? Who am I sharing the space with? The interactive element of opening and closing each door, maneuvering in, out, and between the confined, private spaces, renders engaging from a disembodied perspective nearly impossible. As the exhibition's title implies, there’s no leaving one’s hughmanity at the door.  

My initial impression of imposition and interest follows me into the first stall, where a carved commode sprouts a bramble of thorny fir tree branches. The protrusion of sharp limbs obstructs further inspection; the effect is claustrophobic and disconcerting, and I back out cautiously. Behind the next door, a baby’s crib constructed from barbed wire and chain link fencing; behind another, interlocking wedding rings with Descovy pills [HIV antiviral] where the solitaire would be; and behind yet another, a classroom desk consumed entirely by abrasive white nylon bristles. Each object offers participation in a facet of contemporary American life under conditions as unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and caustic as the specular toilet seat. 

The visceral materiality of the various textures, though not physically touched, commandeer the senses as the bristles scrape, the barbs prick, and the branches snag against your skin. Prongs, spurs, and skewers disrupt movement and threaten physical confrontation while also poking metaphorical holes in expectations and illusions. Here, the most fundamental promises of the American dream, like the right to an education, are rendered onerous, animating the question: for whom were these institutions made? If the skin you’re in determines your experience, and the object's surface or skin reflects the relative ease or distress of the encounter, then certainly not for the artist, a Black queer man, and by association, those like him. 

Hugh Hayden
Cleanse, 2023
High density polyethylene bristles, cast resin
66 x 38.1 x 35.6 cm
26 x 15 x 14 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Start 'Em Young, 2023
Chain link fencing and hardware
142.9 x 141 x 81.3 cm
56 1/4 x 55 1/2 x 32 in

© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Brainwash, 2023
PVC and nylon bristles
83.8 x 66 x 73.7 cm
33 x 26 x 29 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 
 

As I continued around the room, the stalls began to feel more like dressing rooms with various identities available for perusal inside. Within one, a suit jacket and pants sewn from the rough and rigid bark of a cherry tree hang from a clothing rack. Elsewhere: a football helmet encompassed by boar hair, and still elsewhere: a bronze strap-on harness with a gun protruding from the crotch. The striking contrast between organic materials and those that are artificial and mass-produced recalls the antagonistic relationship between what’s natural and instinctual and what’s a consequence of sociopolitical structures. For whom are these spaces made? 

Those capable of comfortably wearing the prosthetics of power appear as idealized, neoclassical male torsos carved from white silicone. They wear their means for control where their sex would be; for two, cocked pistols; for another, an abject skyscraper. A fourth iteration sees the male body replaced by a miniature basswood model church whose phallic steeple hangs limply across the shingled roof. In a nod to the dominant enterprise in Los Angeles, a director’s chair projects tapered wood penises in every direction. The appendages appear to both protect the seat of power and stage an assault on the unendowed who come too close. Their audacious vulgarity tempers the violence of the cultural implications and satirizes familiar tropes like toxic masculinity and the male impulse to think with an organ south of the brain.  

When that door closes with a bang—emphasized by the acoustics of the room and made ominous by the presence of so many firearms—another door opens onto a bronze and acrylic sculpture of the waist and thighs of a man in navy uniform pants sporting a flashy leather belt, holstered gun, and handcuffs posed atop his white pedestal. Only when you move around the sculpture or are so moved by it do you see where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me. The man is twinned by another sculpture in the exhibition of a tree trunk spliced open to expose the biological contents of a womb carrying a luminous carved baby. 

Hugh Hayden
Real Tree, 2023
Cherry bark on Zegna Suit
Suit: 99.1 x 91.4 x 17.8 cm
Suit: 39 x 36 x 7 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Hugh Hayden
Eve, 2023
Cherry Bark and acrylic on resin, Black Walnut
63.5 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
25 x 15 x 10 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Their combined effect illuminates how stripped of societal status, we are of the same nature and origin and made from the same stuff. As intricately connected to one another as we are to the trees, the earth from which the trees grow, and the animals, like the stuffed buffalo in another stall, roam. Hanging together in a red-flocked closet, two raceless, genderless, crimson rib cages tenderly embrace—as the only forms made from material gentle enough to hold and be held. The fellow feeling carries me out of the closet, the stall, the gallery, and I re-enter the world a little more human than I was only an hour before.

Hughman is on view through January 13 @ Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, Los Angeles

 

Hugh Hayden
The Audition, 2023
Bald cypress, steel hardware and canvas
149.9 x 188 x 154.9 cm
59 x 74 x 61 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

 

Nasan Tur Interrogates the Uses of Power through Lifelessness in Hunted @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

Nasan Tur deals with the political and social conditions of our time. His works are experimental arrangements that make ideologies, social norms and behavior patterns visible and expand them to include possibilities for individual action. To do this, he examines statements, gestures and images that he finds in the media and public space and condenses them into miniatures of current social crises and discourses. The focus is on the question of how predetermined role models influence us and when we are ready to cross boundaries and actively change social patterns in the face of oppression, powerlessness and manipulation.

New works were created for Hunted, his current exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, which deal with questions of the exercise of power and its legitimacy. Why do people kill? What violence lies within us, and how and under what circumstances is it activated? By arranging the works in space, Tur creates images that express an ambivalent attitude toward death and life. They range from confronting one's own inner demons to questioning hunters and the act of killing to the careful staging of lifeless animals in space.

Hunted is on view through April 1st at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin.

Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection In Miami

Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection celebrates their most recent acquisitions, which consists of a sizable selection of international African and African Diaspora artists. Inspired by his upbringing in a number of Latin American countries, Pérez began collecting the work of Cuban and Afro-Latino artists several years ago. Recently he has expanded that focus to include artists of the full African diaspora. Allied with Power shows the result of these years of dedicated effort and exploration.

The exhibition highlights artists whose works embody the possibilities and complexities of our contemporary moment. Allied with Power showcases a wide range of practices and thematics, including abstraction, representation, politics, spirituality, and race. Collapsing national borders, the artists in the exhibition ally with power, representing a kaleidoscope of voices that declare their authority.

The exhibition includes works by Igshaan Adams, Juan Carlos Alom, Firelei Báez, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Kudzanai Chiurai, Jonathas de Andrade, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Tomás Esson, Genevieve Gaignard, Sam Gilliam, David Goldblatt, Sonia Gomes, Nicholas Hlobo, Pieter Hugo, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Rashid Johnson, Isaac Julien, Kiluanji Kia Henda, David Koloane, Guido Llinás, Arjan Martins, Misheck Masamvu, Manuel Mendive, Zanele Muholi, Christopher Myers, Odili Donald Odita, Naudline Pierre, Robin Rhode, Deborah Roberts, Chéri Samba, Yinka Shonibare, Elias Sime, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Mickalene Thomas, Guy Tillim, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Sue Williamson, and Portia Zvavahera.

Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art is on view through summer 2021 @ Pérez Art Museum Miami 1103 Biscayne Blvd.