“Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen, and dark,” writes the critic, novelist, and photographer Teju Cole in his 2021 book of essays Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. The artistic collateral of that liberty is at the crux of the Guggenheim’s new survey, “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” which displays over 100 works by 28 artists, from Lorna Simpson and Dawoud Bey to Sondra Perry and Rebecca Belmore. The mediums on view, ranging from sculpture and photography to painting and video, emphasize the expansive topography of the central question: What are the stakes of seeing and being seen?
In the subterranean dialogues they facilitate between the works that punctuate the museum’s rotunda, associate curator Ashley James and curatorial assistant Faith Hunter argue for “going dark” as an active strategy, not a resting state. To mark the show’s opening last weekend, CULTURED brought poet, archivist, and filmmaker Harmony Holiday—who contributed to the exhibition’s catalog—and the interdisciplinary American Artist—whose installation Security Theater, 2023, probes the museum’s structure and services—into conversation. Below, the pair talk compulsion, dead zones, and going off the grid.
American Artist: When I was asked by Ashley [James] to think about something for this exhibition, I wanted to embrace a sense of compulsion. I didn't want to do something that felt comfortable for me or for a museum goer. I felt like this was a rare situation where I'm being asked to interface with this really unique architecture and iconic museum venue—even if it’s problematic in many ways, and I'm sure it was never designed with me in mind or to be capable of holding the type of work I make. So to me, it was like, “What can I do to really complicate the museum and have it reflect on itself?”
It presents its own challenges because there is a lot of funding that’s going to go into this project, but I don’t necessarily have eyes on it, or even know what it entails. There’s something about the way that funds are filtered through museums where a lot of times they can’t give the money to an artist, but they can give it to the staff to produce something or hire an outside contractor.
Harmony Holiday: You have to activate these bureaucracies in a way that serves you and also seems like it's serving or flattering them. With Ashley, I like that there’s an intimacy so it doesn’t get to that.
Artist: Working with Ashley has been really chill. A lot of the time, she's interfacing with [the museum] so that I don't have to. It just allows us to have a more human relationship [with someone] who’s invested in the project from an intellectual and personal side as well.
Holiday: I was watching an [Amiri] Baraka talk, and he was talking about this concept of the return of the native and [what happens when] we get to a certain point in academic or cultural success. Usually it's the Black people who become bougie who then go and parody being “African.” That’s something that I’ve started to interrogate. Like what is the impulse to militancy at Columbia University really about? He brought up that it’s not because we're opportunistically returning to the native; it's that we're actually the most bitter. The ways that we think we're coming up are breaking our spirits a little bit, and we're broken and domesticated. We see people who just kick it with other working class Black people, and they're actually happier. Then we're like, “Oh, we need community. We’ll wear African clothes at Columbia. That'll work.”
Artist: I thought about militancy when I was thinking about “going dark” originally as a concept. One of the first things that came to mind was when the military blocks out electricity or radio signals in a certain area. And I thought, What if we make the museum a dead zone? What does it mean to go dark in that literal sense of just not being able to connect? I wanted to create a space that was a bit alienating for people visiting museums, particularly in a place like the Guggenheim, which is very luxurious and has this history around its aesthetic value as a building as well. So many tourists from around the world come to see just a beautiful thing.
Holiday: It’s so hard to imbue [the Guggenheim] with whatever we call soul. That would sort of tamper with the awe of the structure itself. So how do you, while acknowledging that that might be beautiful, bring in another kind of beauty that is less prestigious?
Artist: One aspect of this installation is asking people to separate from their phones in a sense. If people do engage with this installation, they're not going to be able to access their phones for a good portion of their time in the museum. And when that happens, it is going to change people's relationship to art because they're so used to just taking a photo or texting and calling while walking around the museum. It will be interesting to see them sit without having that relationship to it and seeing what else might be possible.
Holiday: That kind of disruption is the only way to get us to face these environments and how pristine they are and how we expect everything to go right in certain spaces. The point of good art is to force [people] to improvise a little bit.
Artist: One of the things that we talked extensively about at the museum was how are we going to deal with someone that gets really disgruntled or upset at what's being asked of them, and how do we deal with someone feeling entitled to be able to experience the art in a way that they're used to?
Holiday: I'm curious about how many people will refuse uncertainty or trade uncertainty for an experience. Because often as people get older, they do that less and less. I've been thinking about the global situation because that's the darkest thing that's happening right now, and how, during the things that were happening in 2020, this phrase “ally fatigue” came about. It was like two weeks, and people were like, “I have ally fatigue.” They had performed alliance longer than they ever had in their life, and it was like they were out of breath. It was beautiful to watch that come up because it was like, “Yeah, that’s your stamina.” Now we know the stamina of the general population.
But I was wondering even right now, how much of people's outpourings of immediate, know-it-all theorizing about a situation they aren’t in that’s been going on for thousands of years, how much of it is a compulsion that comes about when you feel inconvenienced. How much in the West is being inconvenienced what makes us militant? Because beyond our entitlement to security and safety, there’s also this entitlement to convenience and to a sort of ease in daily life that we don’t even think about. The supermarkets are always there. Someone's always going to deliver your Uber Eats in various storms and floods and hurricanes. There's always a working class person who's driving through puddles to bring you fast food or something. It's out of control. I love that your work will strip that down a bit.
Artist: I think about this notion of convenience a lot because when it comes to new technologies, so much of how they’re made to be enticing to us is through the conveniences that they offer. The way it's so easy to do certain things on an iPhone or the way the experience becomes so aesthetic—it makes you feel perfectly willing to subject yourself to certain surveillance technologies without even a question. It’s like, “Yes, they can hear my every breath, but at least I can watch Instagram Reels for a longer battery life than I could before.” So I think it'll be interesting to think about this notion of “going dark” in relation to being confronted with the lack of convenience. [The installation] maybe makes you less capable of being surveilled, but it’s also possibly frustrating because you won’t have access to certain conveniences.
Holiday: I recently wrote something about Ye, which is already problematic, and specifically about his song “Off the Grid” and this idea of going off the grid that's romanticized, especially for performers. What does it mean to have to go dark to get attention off of you? I've been trying to write about this idea of canceling yourself for a while. I’ve written about the double entendre of the dead zone, like how back during slavery, slaves used to play dead to get off the plantation. And that’s sort of how I think about it in terms of performance, like how dark do you have to go to get out of fame? Usually what you end up having to do is just go toward infamy; you have to ruin yourself.
One of the things I write about a lot, that I also wrote about a little bit in the exhibition catalog, is how Black culture ends up being something that we make out of ruins, of going and submerging and playing dead for a minute. It goes back to voodoo and traditional resurrection; the only way to get out is to fake your death. There’s also such an unnatural life cycle to creative life in the U.S. specifically, where you're not meant to follow your spirit, you're meant to follow a sort of career arc. So it's like, “You're mid-career; you have to do this solo exhibition now.” You can't really break with the narrative of fame without doing something terrible. And that's actually really scary. It's like a horror movie.
Artist: Being an artist is made to be so untenable or, like, just inhospitable. It's really not a place that's meant to be occupied in society. That might sound funny, but the way I think about it as an artist, you really are pointing out all the inconsistencies, or all of the problems of society and like, that's not really meant to be a job, you know? So what does it mean to make a job out of that?
Holiday: There's this one Mos Def interview where he says, “An artist is someone who can go to the queen’s palace and then back down to the hood, and be comfortable in both places.” When I see art becoming sterile, it's often because you've only ever kicked it at the Guggenheim. That's why Miles Davis dropped out of Juilliard to go play with Charlie Parker. That's why he became who he is. But now that we have less access to becoming who we are and more access to becoming the meme edition…
I'm doing something at the Kitchen, what I’m calling Black Backstage, next year, because I was interrogating what is redemptive about the legacy of Black performance. What could make it go on in a way that feels somatically secure and safe and not just like it's going to get worse? And somehow backstage culture came to mind, like the things that happen when you're gathered around a performance. Even something like this—the conversations that happen because something is going on are often much more therapeutic than the actual goings on.
Artist: That's kind of why I was looking forward to this conversation, as a space to just reflect outside of the practical thing of like what the exhibition is or what it's doing. It’s like what are the resonances and unsaid things that are percolating around these concepts that we’re both engaging with. And just kind of talking and hanging out.
Holiday: I started to realize through curating performances and being a part of things that the most gratifying parts are the meta spaces where, like, everyone's eating together. What happens when you can finally not be in the spotlight? My dad was a performer, so I'm very biased about what it does to people. But it's also like a cultural fact that you see whatever drugs or alcohol people have to resort to to numb themselves into being able to be on that often … Those people deserve to go into a dead zone. We need to invite a bunch of Black performers who never get to turn off their phones and just let them go into your installation and get some actual security.
"Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility" is on view through April 7, 2024 at the Guggenheim in New York.
