Charting Changing Times
As curator and artist, Charles Gaines is decolonizing our historical sensibilities.
By William Corwin
Installation view, 'RETROaction (part two),' Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles
Courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Keith Lubow
In his recent seminal work, Moving Chains (2022), Charles Gaines created a machine of remembrance. Like many of the artist’s works, Moving Chains was a set of data— different speeds, materials, and objects, a “strategy of making things that are based upon connecting unrelated things so that the viewer makes the relationship...the connection between those things, and the feelings that are accrued by the connection are classically performed by metaphors.” In Moving Chains, the overarching metaphor is that of African enslavement and colonialism as a foundational block of the United States. Charles Gaines is an artist known for a meticulous and calculated approach to investigating images, and creating hybrid images that present the literal ingredients that go into making symbols. He’s concerned with how we think about what we are looking at and how those conclusions further influence our way of thinking. When talking about Moving Chains, Gaines opined about viewers reading his structure as simply a boat, “once you read it as a boat, then it narrows the definitions. This is not a boat, if you put it in the water it will sink!” Think of Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (1928-29), inscribed with the words “This is not a Pipe” and you will begin to get a handle on Gaines’ approach to art making.
MOVING CHAINS Charles Gaines, 2022. Sapele (African Mahogany), aluminized steel chains, rockwool, Marine grade plywood, stainless steel and Zinc-plated hardware, Plexiglas, rubber, electric motors Unique © Charles Gaines Presented by Creative Time and Governors Island Arts © Charles Gaines Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Timothy Schenck
“‘once you read it as a boat, then it narrows the definitions. This is not a boat, if you put it in the water it will sink!’ Think of Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (1928-29), inscribed with the words ‘This is not a Pipe’ and you will begin to get a handle on Gaines’ approach to art making.”
In the late 80s though, Gaines began to feel that he needed to deal with how African American artists were treated differently in terms of their art making. How does a viewer/critic/curator approach a work if they know the artist was Black? In considering this set of assumptions, Gaines co-curated, with Catherine Lord, an exhibition of African American artists called The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism in 1993, which happened simultaneously with the famous 1993 Whitney Biennial, another major mainstream exhibition which also addressed issues of race, and presented the work of several of the same artists. This winter at Hauser and Wirth, The Theater of Refusal is being revisited by Gaines in RETROaction (part two) (February 27 through May 5th), co- curated with Kate Fowle, Ellen Tani, and Homi K.Bhabha, and undergoing the necessary alterations required after thirty years of societal change.
Installation view, 'RETROaction (part two),' Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles
Courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Keith Lubow
Gaines is succinct about the changes that have taken place in the intervening three decades. In 1993, The Theater of Refusal was organized with the specific purpose of liberating Black artists from the burden of marginalization imposed by social expectations. It took place at the University of California, Irvine’s University Art Gallery, and featured the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Ben Patterson, Adrian Piper, Sandra Rowe, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Williams, and Fred Wilson. Dovetailing nicely with Gaines’ theoretical approach, he sought to deal with Black art detached from the expectations imposed upon it by the mainstream white art world, which would automatically cast the work as“BlackArt.” This did not necessarily mean that the work lost any of its liberatory energy, it just didn’t suffer from the dismissive idea that critique somehow lessened the value of the work. But over the intervening 30 years, Gaines found that the art world’s perception of Black artists had changed. Many, if not most of the artists in the original show have become household names in terms of the art world. “We concluded that the issue now is not the issue of marginalization, but de-coloniality, how you move beyond the influences of colonial or white supremacist privilege.” Gaines posits this question as the central idea of RETROaction.
“We concluded that the issue now is not the issue of marginalization, but de-coloniality, how you move beyond the influences of colonial or white supremacist privilege.”Gaines posits this question as the central idea of RETROaction.
Installation view, 'RETROaction (part two),' Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles
Courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Keith Lubow
Gaines has constructed his critiques by bringing disparate ideas and objects into close quarters, an idea that the artist Fred Moten calls the “space of entanglement.” In this rarefied space, different ideas intertwine and form new meanings. It’s a foundational idea for conceptual art, and one spearheaded by Gaines. In 2015 Gaines presented a series of works called the Libretto series at Art + Practice, a community-centered art space in Leimert Park LA founded by Mark Bradford. The Librettos bring together two things: the score of an opera written by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), and a speech by civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998). When Gaines creates his famous binaries, does he choose the works at random? Not quite: “My general proposition on works of art is that they have to contribute to the history of ideas; part of the humanistic project of adding to our understanding of the world.”
The artist finds it funny that viewers are often unaware of the almost scientific process, especially if they like the work: “even though I show them how the system is deployed to make the work, because their response to the work is pleasurable, they’re convinced that either I’m not telling the truth, or what I’m saying is just subjectivity.”
The artist finds it funny that viewers are often unaware of the almost scientific process, especially if they like the work: “even though I show them how the system is deployed to make the work, because their response to the work is pleasurable, they’re convinced that either I’m not telling the truth, or what I’m saying is just subjectivity.” It’s a rorschach test for both artist and viewer and acts as a window onto our very human capability of generating unexpected, and often unfounded connections.
Back to Moving Chains which was displayed on Governors Island. The piece is both a sculptural object and an immersive experience. Gaines created a hallway open tothesky,astructurefacedinBurntSienna- colored Sapele wood, also known as African Mahogany. Gaines calls it “not really an abstraction of forms, as it is an amalgam of objects.” In lieu of a roof, nine chains spanned the length of the passageway. The chains, in gigantic loops, turned on axles set at regular intervals along the length of the structure. The chains moved at different speeds, some to represent the speed of the harbor currents, others to represent the speed of boats in the harbor, creating an ever-present grinding sound of metal on metal. The artist added, “the sound of the piece becomes an incredibly emotional experience for people, they imagine the chains sound like they did to the slaves being transported: it sounds very metaphorical because it humanizes the sounds--those are things I’d never intended!”
“the sound of the piece becomes an incredibly emotional experience for people, they imagine the chains sound like they did to the slaves being transported: it sounds very metaphorical because it humanizes the sounds--those are things I’d never intended!”
In his Numbers and Trees series that utilizes trees as a subject, he has contrasted photographs of trees and then overlaid a collection of data describing the movement of the trees depicted. He has also done this with faces, as in his Identity Politics series. Part of Gaines’ goal in creating these diagram works was to depict information that seemed impossible to chart—comparisons of faces and the forms of trees reveal the biased and unbiased nature of measurement, as well as the propensity for measurements to trigger symbolic references—a concept which Gaines returns to frequently is the Metaphor/Metonym dichotomy. Since the 1970s, Gaines’ art has presciently envisioned wide swathes of technological innovation: data gathering and presentation methods that would both allow the identification of the smallest details of our identity, and also create deep fakes perfectly mimicking what we expect to see.
With his reinterpretation of The Theater of Refusal (this time with Edgar Arceneaux, Kevin Beasley, Torkwase Dyson, Lauren Halsey, Leslie Hewitt, Rashid Johnson, Caroline Kent, Tony Lewis, and Rodney McMillian) and Moving Chains, Gaines has staked a claim in the ability of art to actively decolonize our historical sensibilities and sensitivities. RETROaction at Hauser and Wirth redirects the efforts of the original artists, and several new additions towards a reinterpretation of American history. Moving Chains has done something much deeper and visceral. Moving Chains sat on western walkway on the waterfront of Governors Island, with a view of the downtown, and most historic part of the city, as well as a view of the Statue of Liberty.
The Statue of Liberty stands on broken chains, referencing its original purpose as a gift from France for the ending of slavery in the United States. Gaines says: “It’s very important that it’s a site specific object so that it can enter into a conversation with the environment: the metaphors and the metonyms that one perceives in the abstraction then become deployed into the general environment and create a context.”
The Statue of Liberty stands on broken chains, referencing its original purpose as a gift from France for the ending of slavery in the United States. Gaines says: “It’s very important that it’s a site specific object so that it can enter into a conversation with the environment: the metaphors and the metonyms that one perceives in the abstraction then become deployed into the general environment and create a context.” He continues, “in the dialogue you have Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty; you have Wall Street which speaks to the idea of slave economy: I think it’s part of the list of analogies and metaphors that can be attached to the object [Moving Chains].” With all this work that Gaines and fellow artists are doing in order to shift the current of thinking in the United States, how is this projected on the wider political situation in this country? “This history of the right to dominate is colliding with a greater power distribution throughout the world over time,” says Gaines thoughtfully, “power is in the hands of a lot more people who are not white Europeans, so they’re requiring a lot more attention and so what we’re going through now is a kind of reckoning.”
Installation view, 'RETROaction (part two),' Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles
Courtesy the artists and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Keith Lubow
Charles Gaines Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1, Tree #5, Thunder 2023Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 3 parts Unique Overall: 241.3 x 323.9 x 14.6 cm / 95 x 127 1/2 x 5 3/4 in Photo: Keith Lubow
Numbers and Trees: Arizona Series 1, Tree #5, Thunder (detail) 2023Acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, photograph, 3 parts Unique Overall: 241.3 x 323.9 x 14.6 cm / 95 x 127 1/2 x 5 3/4 inPhoto: Keith Lubow
MOVING CHAINS Charles Gaines, 2022 Sapele (African Mahogany), aluminized steel chains, rockwool, Marine grade plywood, Stainless steel and Zinc-platedhardware, Plexiglas, rubber, electric motors Unique 518.2 x 548.6 x 3352.8 cm / 204 x 216 x 1320 inches © Charles Gaines Presented by Creative Time and Governors Island Arts © Charles Gaines Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Timothy Schenck
MOVING CHAINS (DETAIL) Charles Gaines, 2022 Sapele (African Mahogany), aluminized steel chains, rockwool, Marine grade plywood, stainless steel and Zinc-plated hardware, Plexiglas, rubber, electric motors unique
Presented by Creative Time and Governors Island Arts © Charles Gaines Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Timothy Schenck