Yayoi Kambara with David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge. Who Do You Trust?, April 20, 2017 (performance still). Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Photo: Quincy Stamper.

Dance is a powerful medium in which to explore trust. When dancing, a dancer must have physical self-confidence, letting their body go in order to flow with music and through space. A dancer must open up for corporeal proximity as other bodies touch and lean on one’s own form. A dancer must further trust the audience in their sensitivity and capacity to feed the dancers through their energy. Trust provides the ground for any dance performance to flourish.

Who Do You Trust? was an interactive dance performance choreographed by Yayoi Kambara and video work by David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge, and presented on April 20, 2017, as a part of the Asian Art Museum’s Artists Drawing Club series. In a hospitable institutional frame, this piece was an invitation for the audience and the dancers to establish, through dance, a mutual trust bond.

The performance took place in the museum’s ballroom-like space, Samsung Hall. A large-scale screen divided the space in two symmetrical parts and played a video on loop. The film presented an intimate portrayal of the dancers’ understanding of trust and its implications in life. The confidential tone of this video, accompanied by soulful background cello music and the soft illumination of the space, generated an atmosphere of openness, demonstrating trust in the audience while inviting them to reciprocate.

As the dancers came into the left side of the space, the video continued looping for the entirety of the piece. Several audience members were invited to participate in the live dance. Throughout the performance, the dancers alternated taking care of and guiding the selected audience through space, by holding their hands and utilizing them as support for balance and jumps. Midway through the piece, the dancers switched to the right half of the room, where a couple of chairs were. As the dancers sat with the participants, the dancers asked them to touch both of their hearts, a request followed by the dancers’ poetic and extensive movements around the selected audience’s bodies.

The rest of the audience seemed to feel the need to support these acts of intimacy by opening up to the possibility to feel themselves through the performers and see the performers in themselves. Who Do You Trust? was a heartfelt proposal that utilized dance to collectively explore the corporeal and emotional potentialities of trust in order to arrive at a more sensitive human experience.

Who Do You Trust? took place on April 20, 2017.

Sofia Villena Araya is a Costa Rican artist based in San Francisco. Her present work is an exploration of the intersections between drawing and dance.

The recent controversy over Kelley Walker’s exhibition Direct Drive at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the departure of that exhibition’s curator, Jeffrey Uslip, was another reminder that museums are not built and programmed for all audiences alike. As this column has taken up questions of race in the museum on numerous occasions (and class in the museum, and gender in the museum), a comment on the St. Louis situation seems warranted. Public protests were mounted after audiences discovered that Walker’s artwork consisted of enlarged, appropriated photos of African Americans, smeared with toothpaste. Against the backdrop of outcries precipitated by the killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, the decision to feature a White, New York–based artist whose work takes up race in a manner that is provocative but not analytical seems almost comically ham-fisted. Still, both Uslip and CAM’s director, Lisa Melandri, have steadfastly defended the artist and the exhibition despite what appears to be a failure on the artist’s part to articulate any coherent justification or motivation for his work. Some observers are scratching their heads, wondering how this public-relations train-wreck could have been avoided. Others contend that racially insensitive missteps such as these are inevitable when the leadership of art museums across the country remains largely a hermetically sealed echo chamber of apologetic, but unshakeable, whiteness.

Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh, September 17, 2016–January 8, 2017; installation view. Courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Simone Leigh’s installation in the Hammer Museum’s Hammer Projects series proposes an alternative to the typically White, upper-middle-class hegemony of the contemporary art gallery or museum. The central structure within her exhibition, Cupboard IV (2016) is a round hut made of raffia and stoneware that references the forms and materials of sub-Saharan architectures built predominantly by women. The hut is an early indicator that Leigh’s exhibition is shifting our notions of the “default” contemporary art viewer. Within the structure, a video plays of independent curator and choreographer Rashida Bumbray, dressed to the nines in a floor-length gold lamé gown, dancing furiously with bells around her ankles. The elegance, power, and grace of her body contrast with a mounting sense of exhaustion and futility as the performance goes on.

On an adjacent wall of the gallery, five sculptures from Leigh’s series Anatomy of Architecture (2016) passively adorn the exhibition space, bearing silent witness. Four of these are recognizable as sculptural busts, glazed deep black, with recognizably African American features. Their heads are crowned with dozens of tiny, colorful ceramic flowers. A fifth sculpture, second from the right, offers only a gaping void where a head or face would be. The effect is silencing, and violent. Delicacy and decoration contrast with erasure—the two polarities of the female condition. This work extends bell hooks’ concept of “an aesthetic of Blackness” beyond the home and private sphere into institutional space. In “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” hooks writes:

In one house I learned the place of aesthetics in the lives of agrarian poor black folks. There the lesson was that one had to understand beauty as a force to be made and imagined. Old folks shared their sense that we had come out of slavery into this free space and we had to create a world that would renew the spirit, that would make it life-giving. In that house there was a sense of history. In the other house, the one I lived in, aesthetics had no place. There the lessons were never about art or beauty, but always only to possess things.[i]

If the museum is the repository of our collective historical aesthetic, the actions of the CAM staff suggest that engagement with the institution’s African American neighbors was more about possession—of the narrative, of the moral high ground, of decision-making—than it was about “life-giving.”

Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh, September 17, 2016–January 8, 2017; installation view. Courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

She continues: “Critical theories about cultural production, about aesthetics, continue to confine and restrict black artists, and passive withdrawal from a discussion of aesthetics is a useless response […] Black artists concerned with producing work that embodies and reflects a liberatory politic know that an important part of any decolonization process is critical intervention and interrogation of existing repressive and dominating structures.”[ii] While Kelley Walker employs the rhetoric of “anti-aesthetic” in lieu of cogent social or political critique, Black artists do not have this luxury. Craft, technique, and awareness of the history of materials are very much in evidence in Simone Leigh’s work, which takes up subjects cast as inherently abject by the cultural mainstream for the fact of their unapologetic Blackness, but appeals on a technical and material level to curators and audiences who might otherwise marginalize the work and its message.

Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh, September 17, 2016–January 8, 2017; installation view. Courtesy of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Questions of the body, its commoditization and exchange, are central to this work. African people and their cultural products have been commoditized for over 500 years, resulting in a worldwide condition of alienation between labor and its outcomes; cultural production is affective, or emotional, labor. Undercompensated and undervalued, art’s continued existence in a fully commoditized society points to the high intrinsic motivation of artists to produce objects of significance irrespective of whether the culture holds space for them. CAM chose to claim a space for Blackness and then fill it with white guilt. Simone Leigh takes the opposite tack, infusing a space customarily held for white cultural narratives with the boundless energy of Black community-building.

Hammer Projects: Simone Leigh is on view through January 8, 2017.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[i] bell hooks, “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, vol. 1 (1995), 66.

[ii] ibid, pp. 69-70

Simone Leigh. Althea, 2016; terra-cotta, india ink, porcelain, cobalt, epoxy. Courtesy of the Artist and Hammer Museum. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Simone Leigh uses sculpture to tell stories that transcend time and space. In her first solo West Coast exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Leigh draws on Africa’s colonial past while remaining rooted in the present, incorporating political resistance and performance to craft a decidedly modern aesthetic.

The exhibition features five onyx-colored sculptural busts adorned with raffia skirts, beads and headdresses made from small porcelain roses in shades of indigo, gray, white, and gilded 14-karat gold. Distinct facial expressions and gestures distinguish each bust from the others. None of the sculptures, however, have eyes. If eyes are the windows to the soul, their absence creates a façade; their obfuscation may be a protective emotional shield. One sculpture stands apart from the rest. A black hole in the center of the bust surrounded by black flowers in india ink replaces the details of her face. With her identity unknown, the piece becomes a mirror for the viewer to project their own narrative onto the work. When looking at her, I couldn’t help but think of Nina Simone’s powerfully emotive song “Four Women.” The song invites us into the lives of her subjects, engaging us in simple, vivid stories of pain, history, and perception. Viewing Simone Leigh’s work through this lyrical storytelling lens, I saw these sculptures as an abstract adaptation of the song. The artist extends the narrative by including the faceless woman whose story is unknown.

In Leigh’s exhibition, music strategically fills the void left from the absence of the spoken word. A work that sits across from the five busts in the gallery deploys music in this way. In a large-scale piece called Cupboard V, Leigh incorporates dance, improvisation, and music into her sculptural practice. A large, raffia-covered hut kisses the gallery’s ceiling, taking up three-quarters of the space in the small room. Its entrance is obscured from the front of the gallery. Music plays within the hut, beckoning the viewer toward the entrance at the back of the gallery. Inside, the video installation Aluminum plays. This piece features performance artist Rashida Bumbray dancing in a studio, her ankle shakers rhythmically accentuating her moves in harmony with the piano accompaniment.

A key to this exhibition lies in the many possible ways viewers can interpret how the two sets of works connect. The combined works in the exhibit represent a multigenerational and trans-Atlantic exploration into the origins of African and African American storytelling traditions that resonate throughout the diaspora.

Simone Leigh is curated by the ICA’s Jamilla James and is on view at the Hammer through January 8, 2017.

Colony Little is a Los Angeles–based writer and founder of Culture Shock Art. As a Bay Area native and long-term Southern California resident, Colony covers emerging contemporary art in California, the aesthetic of urban culture, and is a champion of African American art and media.

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Yvonne Rainer. Rehearsal for Parts of Some Sextets, 1965; gelatin silver print; 23.5 x 20.5 cm. The Getty Research Institute. Photo: Al Giese.

Rainer studied under Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham before creating her own choreography, and was a founding member of the experimental and influential Judson Dance Theater in New York in the early 1960s. The show begins with a 1966 article on Rainer from the New York Post titled “Rebellion in the Arts,” published after her Parts of Some Sextets (1965), a performance that involved ten dancers and mattresses and a lot of “pedestrian” movements, or movements that come very naturally to a human being: running, jumping, falling, and walking. The Getty presents photographs of rehearsals and the performance, as well as Rainer’s own writings on the piece that include complicated lists and movement diagrams. The dancers did not have music to guide their rhythms, and learning the dance was incredibly difficult—Rainer wrote that some dancers “ended up memorizing [the steps] by rote, like multiplication tables or dates in history.” Of the piece, she said she “wanted it to remain undynamic movement, no rhythm, no emphasis, no tension, no relaxation. You just do it, with the coordination of a pro and the non-definition of an amateur.” She was trying to remove all personal affectation or theatricality from the work and let the human body move on its own. The next year she created her most famous work, Trio A (The Mind Is a Muscle, Part II) (1966), of which there is a looped video of Rainer performing the entire piece, one steady flow of movements.

Yvonne Rainer. Score for “Trio B: Running” from The Mind Is a Muscle, 1966-68; graphite and ink on paper; 21.1 x 18.5 cm. The Getty Research Institute. © Yvonne Rainer.

Also in this room is a display case full of journals and sketchpads from the late 1940s through the 1980s. For each journal, there is a pair of headphones with which to listen to a contemporary Rainer; she reads a selection of her old thoughts and then reflects on them at the end. I was so engrossed with these auditory pieces that I spent a full hour listening to them all the way through. It is fascinating to hear the artist’s thoughts shift and change; to learn her processes, depressions, and struggles; and even to see her handwriting go from a tight and perfect script at age 15 to a loose scrawl in her 50s. The physical properties of her handwriting mirror the looseness with which she tied concepts together as she aged, or perhaps belied her confidence in the “radical juxtapositions” of ideas she was using in her work. One entry, from her 1951–1952 journal, reads: “I was a plagiarist. Yvonne Rainer is a fake. I long ago lost what self I was born with—I can only steal from others. I try to make the motley assortment me through appropriation.”

Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne Rainer and John Erdman in This Is The Story of a Woman Who… performed at Theater for the New City, New York, 1973; gelatin silver print; 20.2 x 25.2 cm. The Getty Research Institute. Photo: Babette Mangolte.

In the next room, there are more photographs and paper ephemera from her time with the Judson Dance Theater and the experimental dance group Grand Union. At this time, Rainer was beginning more narrative work, such as This Is a Story of a Woman Who… (1973). Eventually she quit dance altogether to become an experimental filmmaker, but in 2000 she returned to choreography. A collection of excerpts from her performance works from 1961 to 2012 plays on an hour-and-a-half loop.

The piece that brought Rainer back to dance is After Many a Summer Dies a Swan (2000), in which Mikhail Baryshnikov reprises “Valda’s Solo” from Lives of Performers, originally produced in 1972. In the first iteration, which is loosely based on Nazimova’s Dance of the Seven Veils, Valda dances sensually with a ball and eventually holds it—mesmerizingly—in the crook of her neck. In After Many a Summer, Baryshnikov wears a costume similar to Valda’s: Her strapless evening gown is harnessed to the front half of his body, with khaki pants underneath, to provide an examination of gender politics. It seems that Rainer came back to choreography with a much stronger sense of humor.

Another piece worth mentioning is AG Indexical with a Little Help from H.M. (2006), in which Rainer reimagines George Balanchine’s famous pas de deux, but replaces the male dancer in the couple with three female modern dancers; the piece clearly reveals the mechanics involved in such difficult choreography, as well as the inherent sexualizing of the female dancer. Spiraling Down (2008) is her most recent work, and it is full of quotes from sources as varied as Steve Martin, soccer legend Pelé, Fred Astaire, and Facebook, and physical juxtapositions of face and body, as the four dancers eventually wind down to Ravel’s incessant and haunting Bolero. The performance videos are so hypnotic, I watched them fully twice through. Realizing that the four hours I had to spend in the gallery were nearly up, I barely had time to look into the video gallery where Rainer’s avant-garde films are on a constant rotation. This is a vast retrospective contained in a very little space, but with the proper amount of time, it is an incredibly fulfilling experience.

In a contemporary art world where one-liners, memes, and easily digestible ideas are granted more resonance than they deserve—due to the technology with which we view art and the amount of time we are able to invest—Rainer’s works are slow and defiant. She trades ego for emotional resonance, and because of that, her works are ultimately more rewarding. Fifty years later, her works feel just as rebellious.

Yvonne Rainer: Dances and Films is on view at the Research Institute Galleries at the Getty Center through October 12, 2014.

Malick Sidibé. Pique-Nique à la Chaussée, 1972/2008; silver gelatin print, 17 x 17 in. (image size). Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Malick Sidibé’s photographs of Mali, Africa, at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, are an ethnographic tour de force. Taken soon after the country gained independence from France in 1960, the compelling black-and-white images from the 1960s and 1970s capture the significance of music and dance in Malian culture.

In Regardez Moi (1962), Danseur Méringué (1964), and Dansez le Twist (1965), the impact of Cuban music, which became extremely popular in Mali in the 1960s, is apparent. Felt mostly in the francophone African countries that had historical ties with Cuba, the music was returning to its roots. Sidibé’s frames portray movement and energy from salsa or merengue in such a way that the viewer can feel the rhythm of the music and the pulse of the beat. The dapper dancers display an exaggerated sense of mobility as they commingle traditional cadence with modern movements, making a new pastiche. Time and again Sidibé, who was born in Mali in 1936, documents the spirit of this recently liberated, prosperous generation with the intimacy of an insider whose comfort with his subjects is palpable.

Similarly, Twists avec Ray Charles (1969) and Un Admirateur de Jimi Hendrix (1967) express a certain joie de vivre through the subjects’ engagement with the photographer. Open in their admiration of American blues music, which had become a worldwide phenomenon, both individuals show their ardor and lack of self-consciousness in their proud display of LP records by the two American musicians.

Sur les Rochers à la Chaussée (1976) and Pique-Nique à la Chaussée (1972) are celebrations of youth culture outside the setting of nightclubs and daily soirées. The titles refer to the famous Sotuba Causeway (Chaussée Submersible de Sotuba in French), the bridge across the Niger River in Mali’s capital Bamako. These images of young men and women cavorting in swimwear attest to Sidibé’s instinctive ability to document special moments in history that are more than a casual representation of Mali’s people and culture. Abounding with carefree gestures and youthful élan, no different than the fervor of the dancers, the figures highlight the photographer’s holistic approach and inherent sincerity of expression.

Ultimately, Sidibé’s vast, well-documented archives of a certain time and place in history are as valuable to ethnography as they are to photography for relating the pulse and magic of Mali after independence.

Malick Sidibé is on view at Jack Shainman Gallery through April 26, 2014.

Bansie Vasvani is an art historian and critic. She lives in New York City.

Mike Kelley's "Adaption: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses" (1999/2010), photo by Alastair Muir, courtesy of Hayward Gallery

A life-size theatrical set with colorful objects ranging from a punching bag in the shape of a human form to a cylindrical bowl and a wire mesh are placed for visitors to play with. Titled Adaption: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (2010), artist Mike Kelley modeled the set after Harry Harlow’s primate laboratory, a psychologist who investigated the impact of bodily contact and isolation on aggression and affection in monkeys in the 1950s and 60s. The set is presented with two films, a black and white dance choreography by Anita Pace in the manner of Martha Graham’s mythological dance pieces, and a large color projection of a dance filmed in Kelley’s installation of the same work created in 1999, where dance movements were derived from the monkeys in the laboratory experiments, with violent movements evoking the films of psychologist Albert Bandura’s studies of the effect of televised violence of on children. Kelley’s practice is recognized for its engagement with popular culture by recontextualizing the subject of his work, in this case, the aura of psychological studies and its pervasive influence on contemporary culture. Coursing through the theatrical set of the film which was arranged to evoke Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural sets produced for Martha Graham, are four actors including performers wearing gorilla suits. The combination of the physical laboratory with a dance expressing ritualistic gestures, and the language of the lengthy title which contributes to a mythical allure, produce a rule system where art forms are related to each other through a common theme. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1951, Kelley received a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and now resides in Los Angeles.

Pablo Bronstein's "Magnificent Triumphal Arch in Pompeian Colours" (2010), photo by Alastair Muir, courtesy of Hayward Gallery

Pablo Bronstein’s Magnificent Triumphal Arch in Pompeian Colours (2010) is a monumental arch set in the gallery and forms the setting for an visitor or a dancer at intervals during the day, whose everyday movements are transformed upon stepping through the arch, making a sprezzatura-inspired flourish.  Bronstein’s installations, performances and two-dimensional works explores notions of private and public, individual and collective, by combining the language of architecture and dance. The grandiose title of the neo-classicist styled work speaks to Bronstein’s interests in drawing on the ways in which the built environment exerts power and intervenes in our everyday behaviors and use of space. According to the guidelines in the exhibition, “while the dancer performs, visitors become bystanders and etiquette decrees that during that time, no one except the performer can set foot in the space”, and the way the visitors are guided to circulate is reminiscent of Bronstein’s earlier work, Concept for a Public Square (2005) where visitors could not step across, but had to skirt around a low wall demarcating an area of dead space. The imposition of the guidelines satirize the continuing nostalgia and reverence for architectural structures which exude a sense of authority and grandeur, and the ways the public or the ideal citizen conforms to these conventions. Bronstein was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and attended the Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmiths in London, where he now lives.

Christian Jankowski's "Rooftop Routine" (2007), photo by Alastair Muir, courtesy of Hayward Gallery

On entering the second level of the exhibition, one is drawn towards lively music from a film, Rooftop Routine (2007) by Christian Jankowski. The video is of Chua Suat Ling, of New York City’s Chinatown, hula-hooping and setting off a chain of hula hoopers across twenty-five rooftops in the area. It was a formal gesture to Trisha Brown’s 1973 Roof Piece which tested the impact of distance on improvised movements and involved dancers dressed in red across half a mile of rooftops in downtown New York. In similar fashion, Rooftop Routine played on the limitations of the camera in capturing the sequences of all the movements in one shot, and viewers of the film are left to imagine the communal experience and the visual rhythms of the hula hoopers with their circular movements against the grid-like views of the city. The participants’ prominence in Jankowski’s works are emblematic of his process, where he collaborates with people from all walks of life, from fortune tellers and magicians to street performers. In this case, it was a chance glimpse of Chua Suat Ling’s daily hula hoop routine, which provided Jankowski with the inspiration for the piece. Jankowski’s performance-based works continue the spirit of the improvised nature of the dance movement from the 1960s and 70s, from its concept and process through to its eventual performance. Hula hoops are placed in front of the video, for visitors to practice or to follow the instructions given by the red-suited Chua Suat Ling on the screen. Jankowski was born in 1968 in Göttingen, Germany and is now based in Berlin. His recent solo exhibition, The Perfect Gallery, was held at Pump House Gallery, London.