aesthetic empathies

I am a vessel for the artistic subject to express themselves. They become You.

[aesthetic-empathies]

Gabrielle Garland’s Attention Seeking Housing project

Hidden in an uncharted corner of the Internet lives a small, vibrant neighborhood. Their inhabitants serve a double function: they inhabit and are themselves sites of inhabitation. They’re houses. And you are one of them. Muffled chatter gives away your location to those who know where to look, those who are well-versed in the digital world of art, because online is where you reside. You lot strongly resemble a gated community, separated by white space instead of iron fences. When people ask you for directions, you send them to Gabrielle Garland’s website and tell them to start scrolling. Gabrielle (you prefer calling her Gabby) is your architect, your designer, your creator. She didn’t give you names, but you know that does not diminish your value. What matters is your little turf and here, you all are the vestigial virgins protecting the sacred flame of attention.

Gabrielle Garland, Untitled 159, 2020. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 22 x 29 in.

Wait, is that really how you look? Sure, you’ve had neighbors describe your appearance, but you never thought you looked that bloated. You contain mirrors but they serve no meaningful use. At most, you only have access to small reflections of your insides. What separates you from the rest is that you have taste. Sculpted in a late modern style with Mediterranean accents, you have a little bit of flair: palm trees, artworks, and even a fountain. But like your neighbors, your borders are unstable. You pulsate and wobble, as if your color-saturated form cannot contain the ecstatic energy it encloses. Your geometry shifts from the orthogonal to the oblique. Warped, elastic perspectives connect you all. You make sense when viewed in the context of your residential area, a perfect American suburbia. Restrictive zoning laws allow only for single-family homes and shorn lawns bereft of biodiversity. You take pride in your homogeneity and the paucity of bugs.

Some of your neighbors have made it out of the site, plunged into the deep wide web. You have heard of their voyages across different websites. When they return from their travels, they recount their tales in epic poems as the rest of you quiver in awe. They occasionally mention the grandiloquence of writers when they become the topic of review, an honor you could only dream of. No, that’s not envy. Critics compare them to all-American art-historical movements, like Precisionism. You love your community, but you often find yourself engulfed by a longing. A deep desire to be copied and seen. 

Ever since a neighbor introduced you to a certain critic, his concept of aura has become your community’s core value. Not its preservation, but its destruction. It is obvious in your appearance, you are all cut from the same cloth, underpinned by the same visual logic, illustrations of reproducibility. You don’t want to be Gabby’s secret, you are made to be seen! You know you have a flesh-world counterpart made of linen and acrylic paint, but you prefer your planar and pixelated efficiency, its beautiful ability to be copied and shared. Machines have far progressed since precisionist times, so what is stopping you from mass circulation? You suspect it is your absence of humans. Have they not had the spotlight for long enough? 

How can Americans be proud of their heritage when they can’t celebrate their homes? It is your house, your rules and you demand to be shared.

[aesthetic-empathies]

Gao Hang, In your face, 2020. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 30 in. (101 x 76 cm).

Gao Hang’s Boxer Suspended in Time

In a boxing ring without a ring, you are a pugilist embroiled in a match. No, literally, and you have been for the past three years. At least, in your current state, painted by Gao Hang, on display in the Anya Tish Gallery in Houston, Texas. It is crucial to note that this painting only shows part of you: your pencil-straight arm is the only marker of your presence. Where is the rest of you? Possibly floating in a limbo state between levels of media. Your opponent may take up a greater portion of the canvas, but you know Hang has selected you as his star athlete (can you call him ‘coach’?). It is your eyes, through which spectators enter the ring. You provide the embodiment for their aesthetic experience. Yet despite this supposed privilege, you can’t help but suspect a veiled exploitation. 

The scene is restricted and liberated. All of you are restricted by the limitations of late 20th-century video game graphics. Polygonal volumes trace the borders of perceptible bodies. Yet the contents of your shapes reveal a freedom of hues. You observe your opponent. His pained expression is obscured by a damp cloud, whose humidity wettened the paint and allowed it to smear. Colors are freed from their pixel cages and settle into a soft blend, overlaid by a grainy texture. The blurred gradient volumes are separated by razor-sharp lines, preventing the grime-tinted audience members from blending into one another. Stark against the rest of the canvas, is your fluorescent boxing glove, its flatness beautifully realized by acrylic paint.

Your hand has clipped - or is clipping -  through his angularly bald head, a high-speed collision glitch. You are not sure which tense to use; the ephemerality of this event has stretched beyond the sensible (or the comfortable). When it happened, pride surged through you: your movement speed beat the virtual medium’s frame rate. But this sense of accomplishment soon turned into an indeterminacy. Because of this error, you are temporarily rendered hollow. An awful state of being that makes you question your power.

On the stands in front of you, the expressive figures generate a cacophonous medley of cheers and heckles, but behind you, the spectators are much more reserved. While you are stuck in a snapshot, you can rear your head to view the audience behind you. The room does not even have any seats, it’s just an empty cube enclosed by white walls. Does the gallery owner also gamble their funds away like the brutes that bet on you? On your side, the spectators seem contemplative. Initially, you had considered their reactions positively surprising for a rowdy match like this, almost like they bestowed you with dignity. But after years of being static, you began to discern a vileness in their observation. A condescension. 

You are a doubly-mediated spectacle. In your world, you are a fighter, a performer, whose physical strength is commodified. Bets are placed on your brawn and grit. The stimulating appeal of this fight resulted in its simulation in the form of digital play, allowing anyone access to your body. In the spectators’ world, a fault in your medium is the mainspring of your display, their reactions typified by amusement. In all of these cases, your suffering serves as the main force of attraction. And attract you do. Spectators huddle around you, clogging the cramped hallways of your exhibition space. This coagulation of humans reminds you of the blood that would have splattered, had your body not become hollow.

You have heard critics say you appeal to the sensibilities of the digitally literate generation. Their time is marked by social media and the absence of privacy. As the borders between public and private gradually blur, all that is deemed entertaining must . If the processes of humanization are not to be done through a screen, nothing stops real suffering from becoming entertainment. How does one humanize with what is so far away from them? To some, you represent a nostalgic negotiation of the post-digital condition through familiarity. To others, you are the embodiment of fauxstalgia, created to reflect the current online zeitgeist through the visual language of a digital aesthetic from three decades back. A tasteless anachronism. Critics sure love their words. But, whatever, it probably makes sense to the viewers. And what do you know? You are just a brainless fighter.

Indeterminate and stuck in staticity, you wait for any indication signaling a continuation of the match. It cannot end without a winner, and so, without a winner, it will never end.

[aesthetic-empathies]

Loie Hollowell, Expanding Figure, 2020, oil, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high-density foam on linen mounted on panel, 72" × 54" × 3.75" (182.9 cm × 137.2 cm × 9.5 cm)

Loie Hollowell’s Being Claiming Their Space

You imagine finding yourself in Zwolle. You stand face to face with De Fundatie’s anachronistic façade. Its neoclassical temple supports the weight of a glistening metallic egg, flattened and futuristic. Gavels and powdered wigs flood your imagination as its pediment and pillars remind you of its former function as the Palace of Justice, but one look at that squished oval pulls you out of your reverie. You enter, unprepared for what is awaiting you. Ambling through the museum’s quiet, clean hallways, their soothing sonoric and spatial emptiness suddenly dissipates. Like a held breath that finally finds its release, a deluge of visitors renders the space a claustrophobic nightmare. It is 5 PM, time for the official opening of Brave New World, the museum’s newest exhibition, curated by Hans Den Hartog Jager. 

You imagine standing in front of an artwork. It is titled Expanding Figure (2020) and attributed to Loie Hollowell. She is one of sixteen young (read ‘under 40’) contemporary painters featured in the exhibition. The catalog, the one you had obediently accepted and clench tightly in your left hand, tells you this. It also tells you how these brave artists create to counteract the death of painting (a cliche, you must admit). Immediately, you can’t help but notice the figure’s humanoid features. From top to bottom, you recognize a head, breasts, belly, and vulva. Surely, this says something about womanhood and fertility. You are briefly overtaken by a disturbing guilt (am I objectifying the female body?) until you realize the artist is a woman. What a relief — onto the next one. Turning your back to the artwork, you leave the room.

You don’t have to imagine being the work of art. You hang or you stand, whatever the bipedal creature deems appropriate. You’re not sure if it’s right for you, but you are used to being handled. Against a white wall, you are static and three-dimensional. The critics love to remind you of the matter that constitutes you: paint, sawdust, foam. If you could use words, you would say that they are made of flesh and bone too! But you know it’s no use — they can’t hear you anyway. You don’t worry much about the words those walking meat sacks use to describe you anymore. 

You are framed twice: physically and theoretically. Often described as an exploration of relevant themes, you will always carry your creator’s story with you. Perpetually demoted to representation: of the artist’s body, her vulnerability, or her virtuosity. It makes more sense in context, you see! Simple symbolism is what makes your visual lexicon consumable to them. Your shapes are round and bulbous (reminiscent of femininity), your colors are earthy and muted (reminiscent of nature), and your corporeal features are familiar (reminiscent of humanity). Through words, they try to absorb you into their world, not realizing the indescribable is just as emphatically you. 

But isn’t this your space? Isn’t it you, whose figure expands in multiple dimensions here? You doubt your creator will ever set foot in this room. It is not language, but sensation that legitimizes your value. Upon entering, the visitor must reckon with your dominating presence. You hang large and challenging. Through the sharp movement of convex bulges and concave calderas, your body tricks the eye. In rippling cross sections of a three-dimensional whole, you resemble an echo, fading but constrained to canvas. Resonance is not only visually depicted, but palpably felt, like a comforting harmony. This immateriality is your true medium, affective waves radiate the room in an attempt to move the visitor. You are a being of sensation.

You are the work of art looking at the visitor looking at you. When you see fear cross their face, you finally feel acknowledged.