Question Bridge: Black Males in America (Aperture/Campaign for Black Male Achievement, 2015).

Question Bridge: Black Males in America, a companion publication to the innovative, crowd-funded multimedia installation of the same name, opens with a quote from a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass commemorating the twenty-fourth anniversary of slavery’s abolition. Though drawn from a longer quote, the passage above speaks as urgently to 21st-century audiences as it did to those of the 19th century, and perhaps more so. As long as Black Americans are denied basic human rights and dignities, as long as state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies is condoned, we must not take shelter in relative definitions of “safety.”

It’s against such hard truth that this compact volume unfolds. Question Bridge is a continuation of a mid-’90s project initiated by artist and educator Chris Johnson, who teaches photography at California College of the Arts (CCA). For the project’s original iteration, Johnson asked African Americans from different socioeconomic backgrounds to sit before a camera and to pose questions to other African Americans outside of their cultural milieu. Johnson hoped this frank exchange could address the widening chasm between African Americans in disparate social classes.

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Moment to Moment, installation view, Castro Muni Train Station, San Francisco. On floor: Starlee Kine. On right wall: Susan O’Malley.

If you’ve boarded a train at the Castro Muni station since mid-July or spent time near the intersection of Market and Sixteenth Streets, you may have noticed the large text panels and billboard installations currently on view and wondered what you were looking at. Well, wonder no more. San Francisco–based artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan have temporarily intervened in our daily comings and goings with Moment to Moment, the latest installment in the ongoing project THE THING Quarterly, on view first in San Francisco and later in New York City, London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. (Though the San Francisco exhibition was scheduled to be up from July 22 to August 18, as of this writing it was still on view in the Castro Muni station, though how long it will remain is anyone’s guess. Companies that own public ad space will often wait until the next campaign is ready before swapping out the old one.)

What is THE THING Quarterly? Broadly described, it is a publication…with a twist. Each iteration of THE THING is conceived of and executed by different collaborators. Since its inception in 2009, an impressive roster of artists and writers have contributed, including Miranda July, Allora & Calzadilla, Dave Eggers, Tauba Auerbach, and the annoyingly ubiquitous James Franco. Each project produces a useful object, such as Eggers’s readable shower curtain, July’s forlornly notated window shade, and a switchblade Franco commissioned to honor the memory of friend and fellow actor Brad Renfro. Through subscriptions and sales of these unique items, Herschend and Rogan have established both a sustainable business model for small arts institutions and thrown a wrench into our thinking about the form and lifespan of a publication. For Moment to Moment, Herschend and Rogan drew from the work of conceptual artist Dan Graham. Graham was inspired by the musings of the nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who considered the book as a performative, collective experience. Between 1966 and 1968, Graham co-opted commercial advertising space in publications as wildly different as Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Review of Sex. In each instance, he drew attention to text-based work and proposed that publications, conservative or radical, were ideal locations for intervention.

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Jenny O’Dell. 195 Yachts, Barges, Cargo Lines, Tankers and Other Ships, 2009-2011; digital print.

In the trailer for his 2006 film Babel, director Alejandro González Iñárritu includes a voiceover, one reciting a well-known passage from the Book of Genesis that tells of a unified language and pervasive understanding that man enjoyed prior to the Flood. That clarity, that point of agreement was troubled when dissimilar languages — understood here as a metaphor for different identities and interests — were introduced and the disparate tribes with which we associate were formed. Iñárritu’s inclusion of the voiceover is a predictable cinematic trope, but it raises issues about what and how we communicate, and how that dialogue is often overwhelmed by other concerns. Electronic Pacific, which opened at SOMArts on July 11, takes up the increasingly digitized exchange of art and language in the work of eighteen artists that span the complex divide between countries around the Pacific Rim.

The main gallery at SOMArts is not the easiest space to curate, given the institution’s broad mission and it’s unusual architectural footprint. It could easily look or feel crowded with multiple 3D objects vying for viewer’s attention. For Electronic Pacific, gallery curator and director Justin Hoover creates a very manageable experience, one that permits audiences to move through the space without the worrying sense of tripping over or backing into the objects on display.

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Jason Lazarus, From the series, Too Hard to Keep, 2010 - present

One of the less understood figures in Christian folklore is the sin eater. This person, usually a beggar, was charged with absolving someone of their sins by consuming food and drink that had been touched by the dying person before their passing. Through this ritual, the nearly deceased are eased of their burdens, their mortal infractions kept in check, and the spiritual health of the community at large strengthened.

In a way, Chicago-based photographer Jason Lazarus takes on the role of a sin eater. Through his project, Too Hard to Keep, Lazarus collects the reminders of pain, sorrow, shame, and a universe of other emotions and in doing so, alleviates the suffering of their former owners.

Too Hard to Keep is an archive of objects — photographic prints, books, digital prints received via text message or on discs — that were donated on the premise that the images are too hard to look at, yet too important to discard. Since its inception in 2010, Lazarus has received well over 3,000 objects, and the collection continues to grow with donations from as far away as Europe and South America.

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