00:00:09
Hello. Hello, Joanna here.
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Welcome to Exhibitionistas. Today we talk about Lauren
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Halsey's exhibition Imagine That at the Serpentine Gallery,
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curated by Lizzie Kerry Thomas and Chris Bailey.
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It's a maximalist environment that led us to a discussion
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about art, freedom, identity, revolution, care.
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It also allowed us to find out more about the myths and origins
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of the term Afrofuturism, which I have to say, surprised us a
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great deal. This episode unexpectedly
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located us as spectators in our freedoms and in our edges, as
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you will see. It also reminded us that one of
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the things that connects us is probably the ability to dream
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without systematically placing our own desires at the centre of
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dreamscapes. You know, dreamscapes are not
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always about us, and world making is a joint effort,
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specific at times to groups that not always have the possibility
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of even having one. Dreams are actually realities in
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the making. But this is really what we've
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learned by visiting and talking and researching this incredible
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exhibition. And we also kind of got to the
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conclusion that all of this may very well be one of the facets
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of joy. So without further ado, come
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with me. Let's push the doors of the
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Serpentine and discover this incredible world of Lauren
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Halsey. Hello and welcome to
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exhibitionistas. If you're new here, this is the
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only conversational podcast where we visit solo exhibitions
00:02:04
in London to discuss them here in this recorded space from an
00:02:09
art specialist perspective. Me, Joanna Pierre Nevers,
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contemporary outwriter and curator and from an outsider's,
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albeit passionate and many times erudite point of view.
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I'm talking about my lovely Co host who I will let introduce
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herself. So kind.
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And yes, I'm Emily Harding, an art lover and an exhibition
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goer. I don't know how erudite, but
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it's it's a great pleasure to view exhibitions and discuss
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them with you Joanna, and with the dear listeners.
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A phrase that I am picking up from you very much though.
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So this exhibition is, is Lauren Halsey.
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Imagine that at the Serpentine and it gives a lot to consider,
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emphasis on a lot because there is a maximalist theme going on
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throughout it. So it's at the Serpentine until
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the 23rd of February in London. It's a site specific
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installation, which makes it I think kind of additionally
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interesting. It's also really inspired by
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funk, the group Parliament in particular, which I loved
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because you know, you can kind of go down a rabbit hole of funk
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on title or Spotify or wherever you stream your music.
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Does that did that ring a bell for you?
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Oh God yeah. Oh wow, 100%.
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I was wondering, I was wondering.
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Yeah, definitely. And yeah, no, it was, it was
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really fun and Funkadelic, you know, all those bands.
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But for me personally, it was a this kind of whole, this
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exhibition was a real roller coaster.
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So I was super excited to see it when I kind of saw it online.
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And then I had a bit of a disorienting experience within
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the exhibition and I, and I was like trying to land on where I
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felt about it. It was, you know, I left with it
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still pretty up in the air. And then, you know, I did
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research for the podcast and I, I feel now like I, I'd like to
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return to Palsy's perspective with more knowledge than I had
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before. Like that could be an
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interesting world to go back to because as we said, there's a
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lot. So there's certainly would have
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been a lot that I would have missed and a lot that deserves
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more attention. Totally agree.
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Totally agree. I also want to go back and
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experience it again for sure. It's one of those where this
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episode makes so much sense for it because there is so much to
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find out about Lauren Halsey, about the exhibition, about the
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choices that were made, project itself, what it links to.
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I mean, there's a lot to talk about and I'm really can't wait
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to dig in. But before we go into it, I just
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want to inform our listeners, our dear listeners, that we are
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now officially one year old babies.
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Oh. Exhibition.
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Mr. wandering around, holding under the coffee table.
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Exhibitions are toddlers. So on the 25th of January of
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2024, we dropped our first episode and I think you should
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check this episode. If you discovered us midway, I'm
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just going to tell you that Emily was manhandled by a
00:05:32
security guard while trying to get some nudes, so if this
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doesn't pique your interests, I don't know what will.
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Gosh, can you remember one year ago?
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Innocent, sweet innocence, yeah. The innocence.
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Marina Abramovic exhibition Yeah, will live in my memory
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forever. But more importantly, I would
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like to thank you, our listeners, followers,
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subscribers. Thank you.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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Thank you for listening. And please, if you want us to
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continue to grow and to develop, you can do lots of things to
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support us. So you can, first of all,
00:06:18
subscribe to the podcast. You know what?
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I know it sounds very abstract, but it does count.
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Yeah, totally. It's really important.
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You can leave comments and there's platforms that allow you
00:06:31
to, Spotify in particular, you can leave comments there.
00:06:35
So far, we only have one. It's in the Mike Kelly episode
00:06:38
and it says ladies, pick up a brush.
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So I would really urge you to contribute with other kinds of
00:06:47
comments. I mean, we really love that one.
00:06:50
We cherish it. It's the first one, but I didn't
00:06:53
know personally that Spotify had comments.
00:06:55
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It's there. It's looking at us all the time.
00:07:19
And it's not just we love it, we'd like it to have friends.
00:07:22
You know, yeah, I think it feels lonely, you know?
00:07:26
Exactly. As it should, honestly.
00:07:29
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So we will have that in our newsletter, in our Instagram
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00:08:51
So please think of us. I know Christmas is behind us
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00:09:00
donations. Lots of ways to support us.
00:09:03
Independent journalism is what we do and therefore we really,
00:09:07
really need your support. So tell me, Joanna, what was
00:09:10
your week in culture like? Well, I just got back from
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France from a small town called Amyang, where the Frac Picardie
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is located. So at Drawing Now.
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So I'm artistic director of Drawing Now Paris, which is a
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not fair dedicated to drawing that takes place every year in
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March, last week of March. So we have a partnership with
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the Frac, and we do that because it's a collection and a space
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that is exclusively dedicated to contemporary drawing.
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So I curate 2 shows there every year, more or less around the
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time of the art fair in March. And that's what I did last week.
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And this year I focused on the notion of codes and notations
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for the exhibition. You know, when written words are
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no longer enough to convey what you want to convey.
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Think music and dance notations, but also mathematical signs,
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etcetera. And I took inspiration from
00:10:14
Emily, a really important artist in France called Jacques
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Filigley, who passed away in 2018, I think at 90.
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He was a really, really interesting artist.
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He was an aficist as well, which means that he would retrieve
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posters from the street and make colleges with them.
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He's quite an established artist by now in France and a
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historical one. And he also had a project that
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he started in 1969 called the Sociopolitical Alphabet, which
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was composed of signs that were socially and politically
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motivated and that he would find in the streets and that he would
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collect. Cool, I love that.
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It's so compelling. I mean, I, you know, I, I, yeah,
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that's, that's really cool because it's like you can think
00:11:05
of like the peace sign and, you know, people putting that around
00:11:07
everywhere in the 60s, but there's so much more and so much
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more depth to them now. I mean, a friend of mine is a,
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is a street artist and she does a lot of the, she does a lot of
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stickers, Yeah. With various kind of different
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signs on them. And you know, through her
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Instagram account, you see so many, you see the variety of, of
00:11:33
different signs that that there are and wow, what a great idea
00:11:36
to kind of really capture and distill those.
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Wow, Maybe we can put her Instagram account in the show's
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notes. Yeah, what's her?
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Name, her name is Paula Finbo, but the Instagram account, I
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think it's a Jane Roe revolution.
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But we'll, we'll, we'll leave it in the show's notes.
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And that's exactly what he took inspiration from, but obviously
00:12:00
also from slogans. And, you know, 69 was that
00:12:06
period was quite a revolutionary period and a period of protest.
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So of course, he kind of drew inspiration from that.
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And the cultural highlight for me, I'm getting there, is when I
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was shown at the FRAC, a book of Benjamin Perry.
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He was a French poet with Villeglis alphabet.
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Oh, there's a fox peeing in a Bush right outside my window.
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Excuse me for being very distracted by it.
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Okay, picking up again. So Benjamin Perry, French poet.
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So the text that was published in this little booklet, it was
00:12:49
called The Poet's Dishonor. It was written in 1945 against
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the use of poetry by politically motivated agendas, namely the
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communists. So Benjamin Perry was a
00:13:01
Trotskist. He was part of the surrealist
00:13:04
movement as well at some point, but it was also against
00:13:07
criticism that about of poetry as being escapism.
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Because, and I love this sentence of the text quote, they
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scorn dreams in favour of reality, as if reality were not
00:13:20
one and the most overwhelming of its aspects unquotes.
00:13:25
The text is quite something. I really urge you to read it.
00:13:28
You can find it in English online.
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But more importantly, Pirae has a stance against poetry as a
00:13:36
liberating tool and equates fascist and democratic poetry or
00:13:40
communist. Obviously that was kind of the
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aim of his text. So he equates both.
00:13:46
Both are chained to the ideas of God or nation or both.
00:13:51
So of course this is very contained by the period that he
00:13:56
was writing about. He was living in Mexico at the
00:13:58
time. He had such a look him up, he
00:14:00
had such an incredible life. So he was against the poetry
00:14:05
being attached to ideas of belonging rather than total and
00:14:10
unconditional revolutionary irreverence.
00:14:15
And we go back to so many things discussed in past episodes,
00:14:18
right? Such as, you know, when we
00:14:21
talked about American curator Helen Molesworth's comment about
00:14:25
how we went from ideas of revolution and anarchy even in
00:14:29
exhibitions and in art, to ideas of caring and community in art
00:14:34
spaces and exhibitions in particular, which falls right
00:14:37
into the subject today, right? Yeah, it really is.
00:14:43
It really is the subject. But to be honest, I was really
00:14:46
mostly taken by the book that I kind of had in my hands.
00:14:50
It was published in 2004. And The thing is, you managed to
00:14:55
read it despite the subverted graphics of the letters.
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So, for example, A becomes the anarchist, AO is the swastika
00:15:06
inside a sort of multifaceted kind of roundish shape.
00:15:10
And you can read the text, but you read it in a sort of
00:15:12
syncopated manner. So it's as if you're reading
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undid the words even more and created a whole of the meaning.
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So I was just so taken by this book.
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It was such a special moment in the week.
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It feels like there could not be something more up your street
00:15:31
person, you know, I mean. If you know me it.
00:15:34
Has, yeah, it has like, you know, your, your love of just
00:15:38
like words and letters and the written text.
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And then to have that absolutely infused with all sorts of other
00:15:46
abstract meaning through these symbols.
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I can imagine that was. I can imagine your joy and
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pleasure in that. Yeah, it was fantastic.
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I was. I was.
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So yeah, it was a special moment.
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Thank you, Kristoff at the FRAC who showed me the book.
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They have an amazing person who takes care of all the books and
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all the catalogues and they choose, they always have books
00:16:09
available that connect to the exhibition that they're showing,
00:16:13
curated by Kristoff, but also by the artists and the curators who
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are there. So it it is a really great
00:16:18
institution to work with and and I had a wonderful time.
00:16:21
So. But how about you?
00:16:23
Yeah, I mean, I mean, for me, pretty low key, but I finished a
00:16:27
book from one of my favorite authors, Louise Erdrich.
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The Night Watchman is the name of the book.
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She won appeal for it in 2021. And it's, you know, for those
00:16:39
who may have cracked the spine of an Erdrich novel before and
00:16:43
found them a challenge because she is really known for using
00:16:47
magical realism in her work and kind of she messes with a
00:16:52
narrative timelines quite a bit. She's one of those authors where
00:16:56
you really have to pay attention.
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You know, it's hard to it's hard to be nodding off to sleep in in
00:17:01
her in her works. Usually this book uses a more
00:17:05
straight narrative structure. And there is some of the great
00:17:08
symbolism and sort of magical realism that she's known for in
00:17:12
there, but it's a little bit more in the background in this
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one. But she's a Native American from
00:17:19
Minnesota, so from my home state.
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And she is totally a local luminary.
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And the book follows the story of a night watchman, which is
00:17:30
roughly based on her grandfather, I think it was, who
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worked at this jewelry settings plant that had been put on the
00:17:40
reservation. His real kind of purpose was
00:17:44
working with the Native Council to resist the federal
00:17:47
government's push to erase Native heritage and rights.
00:17:51
I mean, there was, you know, I mean, obviously the story of
00:17:53
Native Americans is a long and rich, but with the US
00:17:57
government, you know, they've been pushed and pushed and
00:17:59
squeezed into these reservations.
00:18:02
And then at a certain point they were like, oh, no, no, we're
00:18:05
just going to say that you're Americans now, so anybody can
00:18:08
come into your lands and and buy them.
00:18:11
And you know, you've been horribly treated and you know,
00:18:16
you've had genocide and you know, massive, massive
00:18:22
disenfranchisement economically, educationally, etcetera.
00:18:26
And culturally. And culturally, but now this,
00:18:29
this particular move was to just say we're not going to have any
00:18:33
protected lands because we're just going to see you as regular
00:18:36
Americans. And so obviously, there was a
00:18:40
big push against this. You know, it's a real thing that
00:18:42
happened in history. And she's building up this novel
00:18:46
around that historical thread. It takes place in North Dakota
00:18:50
and a bit in Minnesota. And it's just another great
00:18:55
offering of a Native writer telling the story of what has
00:19:00
happened to Native Americans throughout time and in very
00:19:04
recent history, too. Wow.
00:19:07
I'm so glad that, you know, Native American voices recently
00:19:11
have reached some of the mainstream platforms.
00:19:15
And that's absolutely amazing. And it's great because, you
00:19:21
know, the story has been very hushed.
00:19:25
And it's good to know, you know, a bit more about it, but also a
00:19:28
bit more about the present and the future of these communities
00:19:31
and not just kind of like stick them to an, an idea of the past
00:19:35
that is very tokenizing and and romanticized.
00:19:38
And yeah, that's amazing. I, I think I'm going to have a
00:19:42
look. I hope I have time to pick up a
00:19:45
a novel at some point this year. Yeah, I would.
00:19:48
I would super super recommend it.
00:19:50
Yeah, amazing. She's brilliant.
00:19:52
OK, so we are about to push the Serpentine's S gallery doors and
00:20:01
enter the topical world of Lauren Halsey.
00:20:05
If not for the fact that she is LA based and wildfires have
00:20:09
literally consumed the part of the city and killed many people
00:20:13
there. Which is a terrible, terrible
00:20:16
thing that has happened in this turn of the year, but.
00:20:23
Anyway, moving on to Lauren Halsey, do you want to introduce
00:20:26
us to her Emily? Yeah, it's my great pleasure and
00:20:31
and I'm I really am so happy that we're doing an episode that
00:20:34
is so LA based considering the the heartbreak that's happening
00:20:39
there now. I mean, obviously, as you say,
00:20:41
people have died, but people have lost everything.
00:20:44
And there's something very specific about the loss with
00:20:47
fires as well. It's like a flood comes.
00:20:50
The things are kind of mostly still there only in a, you know,
00:20:54
in a different form. And you you choose to then get
00:20:58
rid of them. But it's like with you just see
00:21:01
ash heaps everywhere of people's lives.
00:21:04
And yeah, it's just been so heartbreaking.
00:21:07
So I'm going to start by citing a great write up in there in the
00:21:11
Guardian about the exhibition by Kaddish Morris.
00:21:15
But there are so many other reviews of the exhibition and
00:21:18
info, and there's info on Lauren Halsey out there.
00:21:22
I saw this super charming short on YouTube of an interview with
00:21:28
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Halsey. And at a certain moment in the
00:21:32
short, you see the both of them on stationary bikes, which was
00:21:36
really cute. So yeah, so I really enjoyed a
00:21:40
podcast episode as well with Halsey and George Clinton, who
00:21:44
is the founder of Parliament, super famous funk band from the
00:21:49
late 60s. They're still going to be
00:21:50
honest, but that was kind of when their heyday was sort of
00:21:55
late 60s, early 70s. He's in his 80s now.
00:21:58
Yeah, yeah. And it's this sort.
00:22:00
Of incredible. This interview between the two
00:22:03
of them, honestly, look it up. It's on the David's Werner
00:22:06
podcast. I think it's called dialogues.
00:22:10
Through this episode that we're having now, it will become clear
00:22:12
why that connection is so important.
00:22:16
But the the interview between Clinton and Halsey is just
00:22:21
beautiful. It's like people across
00:22:24
generations, you know, different sort of artistic mediums, but
00:22:30
but have this lively sense of connection.
00:22:33
And yeah, it was really, really nice.
00:22:35
And he is, he's just like a super sweet, yeah, super sweet
00:22:38
old, you know, artistic elder. Really.
00:22:41
Yeah. And not to jump the gun, I think
00:22:44
that's one of the strengths of Lauren Halsey, isn't it?
00:22:48
Because she really is looking into a past and different
00:22:52
generations before her and also ahead of her.
00:22:55
But that that's, that's kind of one of the moving things about
00:22:58
her, I find. Yeah, totally, Totally.
00:23:02
So Lauren Halsey was born in LA in 1987, more specifically South
00:23:07
Central LA, which is where much of her work is physically and
00:23:12
conceptually centered. As she grew up, her dad was an
00:23:16
accountant, her mom was a school teacher who apparently brought
00:23:18
home lots of craft supplies home for Halsey to play with, which
00:23:24
again, is something a feature of of this exhibition in
00:23:27
particular. You can kind of draw a line
00:23:29
there. Her first love was basketball,
00:23:32
which is also reflected in the exhibition, but her parents
00:23:36
really pushed a more academic route.
00:23:39
She eventually graduated with ABFA from the California
00:23:43
Institute of Arts, AKA Cal Arts, as did Mike Kelly and Judy
00:23:48
Chicago from other recent episodes.
00:23:51
And it for me personally, it was kind of fun to be like, oh, I
00:23:55
think I'm seeing the vibe, you know.
00:23:57
I mean, you know, there is there is a thing that was going on
00:24:00
there that feels very specific. Would you agree?
00:24:05
Or I was expecting that comment because when we started with LA
00:24:10
was through Judy Chicago and I remember expecting you to be
00:24:15
super knowledgeable about LA, California, the scene.
00:24:20
And I forget that the United States is bigger than Europe.
00:24:24
I mean, you're from Minnesota for Christ's sakes.
00:24:27
So yeah, are discovering with a whole lot of insight compared to
00:24:33
me obviously, and probably being even more extra careful to not
00:24:38
contain things and characteristics too quickly.
00:24:44
But I was wondering, you know, how you would feel about having
00:24:48
done like this Is the third episode about that scene?
00:24:51
The West in the American West has a fascination and a
00:24:58
connection to land in space that that is different than the rest
00:25:06
of the country. I mean, if you think of like the
00:25:10
great novelists, you know, Steinbeck or Wallace Stegner, I
00:25:15
mean, these people who, you know, were California writers to
00:25:19
their bones or or, or American West writers to their bones,
00:25:23
really. And, you know, you certainly see
00:25:26
that in Judy Chicago with like the, you know, the colorful
00:25:30
explosions of, you know, the land projects and things like
00:25:34
that. And I mean, Lauren Halsey is
00:25:38
really different. She is not, you know, she's not
00:25:42
reflecting the natural environment as much, but
00:25:45
environment is, is really at the heart of of the work that she's
00:25:50
doing and representing that environment rather than an
00:25:55
internal idea or something necessarily political.
00:26:00
I mean, there are internal ideas and it is political in a way,
00:26:03
but. They're Mike Kelly too.
00:26:05
The expansion of the projects in time and space of Mike Kelly.
00:26:10
Although he's not originally from California or from the West
00:26:15
Coast, he comes from Detroit. And there's something like, I
00:26:18
mean, I think maybe with Mike Kelly and Lauren Halsey is
00:26:23
there's sort of this cacophonous thing that they both have.
00:26:27
I mean, I'm thinking of like that second to last room of the
00:26:32
of the Mike Kelly show, which was just like Everything
00:26:36
Everywhere All at Once. And Lauren Halsey definitely has
00:26:41
that same thing going on where you're almost like, what is my
00:26:45
focal point? Like where, where am I supposed
00:26:47
to land in this room? I'm not sure.
00:26:49
But I think it's interesting because she she then went to the
00:26:52
East Coast. She went to Connecticut and
00:26:54
finished an MFA at Yale in 2014. So yeah, it was a really
00:26:59
prestigious. It's one of those Ivy League
00:27:02
schools, right? Yeah, but I, I, when I think of
00:27:06
Yale and the arts, I think of drama.
00:27:10
Oh, I didn't know that. OK.
00:27:12
There were a couple of encounters, though, that put her
00:27:15
on the path of art. And the first was her exposure
00:27:18
to funk music, which we talked about.
00:27:21
This was, you know, she's on her parents computer in the early
00:27:24
arts, and she comes across the funk band Parliament on
00:27:28
Limewire. Remember that, folks, for those
00:27:32
who aren't familiar with funk music, you have a glorious
00:27:35
exploration ahead of you. It's a style that emerged in the
00:27:39
late 60s, has its roots in black empowerment and expression.
00:27:43
Parliament is a biggie, but there were lots of bands in sort
00:27:47
of the late 60s that were kicking off with Funkadelic, Sly
00:27:51
and the Family, Stone, Earth Wind and Fire.
00:27:54
I mean, these were enormous bands.
00:27:57
Funk is maximalist. So, you know, lots of band
00:28:02
members, lots of wild outfits, makeup, different characters.
00:28:07
None of them had to relate to one another.
00:28:11
You know, it was it was a, it was a very slippery gender
00:28:14
spectrum that was on clear display.
00:28:17
I mean, George Clinton used to wear these long blonde wigs and
00:28:21
dresses and, you know, but there was never like, you know, a
00:28:25
question about his sexuality is just this was his expression in
00:28:30
the band. And and that's, you know, that
00:28:32
sort of community open aspect really, really seemed to speak
00:28:38
to Halsey and, you know, and. Inform her work, but that
00:28:42
openness as well. So I, I read a review that was
00:28:46
about that was, you know, kind of fixated on this idea of Funko
00:28:52
funkicizing the space, which is what she proposes to do in her
00:28:57
artwork and her installations. And she was expecting music and
00:29:03
the idea of funk. And it took me a while to
00:29:06
understand this in Lauren Halsey is that funk is a philosophy of
00:29:10
life? Is this idea of not having a
00:29:13
fixed structure that then you have to hold on to?
00:29:18
There's an interview in the catalogue with the two curators,
00:29:22
Obrists and Lizzie Carey Thomas, and they are trying to
00:29:27
understand what is the project because the basis of this
00:29:31
exhibition is that she wants to develop a sculpture park in
00:29:35
South Central LA. And the last answer is her
00:29:39
saying, I don't know. I don't want to behold to any
00:29:43
plan. I want to see what people are
00:29:44
doing. This is a live thing in the
00:29:47
present, in the now. And so I need to remain open to
00:29:50
that. And that was fascinating.
00:29:53
Yeah, I know, I know. I think it's really special.
00:29:56
The second kind of point that helped her put her on a path of
00:30:02
being an artist where she met a fellow LA artist called
00:30:05
Dominique Moody and this inspired an interest in
00:30:10
architecture and inspired me to look up Dominique Moody and was
00:30:15
a very satisfying trip down an Internet rabbit hole.
00:30:18
So go and check her out as well. Really interesting artist,
00:30:22
Halsey said. I knew I didn't want to become
00:30:24
an architect with a capital A, but I thought I could navigate
00:30:29
the language of architecture through art.
00:30:31
So she was drawn to ancient Egyptian expressions of, of, of
00:30:37
heritage through architecture. So of course, there's obelisks
00:30:41
and, you know, you think of Cleopatra's needles, sphinx as
00:30:46
examples that can help tell the story of the people for their,
00:30:50
you know, their history and their hopes for the future.
00:30:53
And Halsey was inspired to do this for her community in South
00:30:57
Central LA, primarily by building community gardens in
00:31:02
vacant lots. There was also because there was
00:31:06
so many rabbit holes in this investigation.
00:31:09
Was there I don't know more than most right, I just.
00:31:12
More than most. There was just so much
00:31:14
exploration, unique amalgamation of what sort of puts an artist
00:31:19
together or you know, their world.
00:31:21
The other influences she talks about is a dad and the
00:31:26
connection between her dad's headspace, the way he thinks,
00:31:30
the way he connects things, and Sunra.
00:31:33
There's there's a great video of her working on a piece one of
00:31:37
these community gardens in a vacant lot.
00:31:40
And this, this lot is on a corner in a massive, you know,
00:31:44
kind of LA intersection, it looks like where a big box store
00:31:50
might have been. At one point across the way, you
00:31:53
can see a Macy's and a giant parking lot.
00:31:56
And, you know, you can you can imagine what she built within
00:32:00
that with celebration of South Central culture and how that is
00:32:05
juxtaposed in those, you know, super commercial, super LA
00:32:10
consumerist kind of spaces. And, you know, it's actually
00:32:14
injecting a bit of like, what is the history that is behind that
00:32:20
place? I mean, you know, she, as she
00:32:21
says, her family's lived there for generations.
00:32:24
You know, it was part of the Great Migration that.
00:32:26
Since in the 20s, a century, a whole century of a progression
00:32:32
in that history for the black community where they arrived
00:32:36
from the eastern S, let's say, and they migrated there in, you
00:32:42
know, obviously from a very segregated space in the hopes of
00:32:47
getting more freedom, more work. And that's when her family
00:32:51
arrived there. And then progressively, South
00:32:55
Centre LA became a place where the black community thrived,
00:33:00
grew. Now there's also a Latino
00:33:03
community. So there really is a community
00:33:06
that started in the 20s, lived segregation, built their own
00:33:12
community in that space that is now really thriving.
00:33:17
As Lauren Halsey shows us, that stimulates her to imagine her
00:33:22
family coming in, her parents as well.
00:33:26
You know, the the Central Ave. which was also historically
00:33:30
connected to music, How what what would have happened there
00:33:34
in the 60s. And and that's very much
00:33:38
something that really, really feeds her imagination, but also
00:33:43
makes her work. So she talks about the fact that
00:33:45
everyone has a garden over there and that the first sculptures
00:33:49
she did and she she made for the Hammer Museum and the first
00:33:53
exhibition she had were made in that garden by the family and
00:33:58
the friends with her. Because she was thinking about
00:34:02
that garden and what that space could be and how it could be a
00:34:05
communitarian space. So.
00:34:06
I mean, LA used to be a Mexican city like it started off.
00:34:11
Los Angeles. Yeah, exactly.
00:34:13
Yeah. So the Latino community has been
00:34:15
there literally forever. But yeah, so we have funk, we
00:34:20
have architecture and community, specifically South Central LA,
00:34:24
all oozing out of Lauren Halsey's art.
00:34:28
And in the podcast interview, she talked about how when she
00:34:31
made art in the beginning especially, she required so much
00:34:35
help from her family. You know, parents, cousins.
00:34:38
Her brother established this principle of community and art.
00:34:43
I should mention as as the art specialist here, her career was
00:34:47
born in 87, so she has had quite the career in terms of
00:34:52
institutional projects. Obrist mentions the fact that
00:34:58
him and Lizzie Carey Thomas discovered her work at the Mocha
00:35:02
in Los Angeles, so the Museum of Contemporary, where in 2018 she
00:35:06
was invited to do a show that she called.
00:35:09
We still here there. And it's very close to what we
00:35:14
have at the Serpentine with a very big environment with these
00:35:19
kind of fake rocks and mounds and corners with a lot of
00:35:24
archival stuff that she collects and then places and colleges
00:35:27
into the space. Another highlight I think that
00:35:31
is quite connected to her project here is the Roof Garden
00:35:35
Commission at the Met in New York in 2023.
00:35:39
That's a great one. And just to say, there's some
00:35:42
great videos about that on YouTube that I really encourage
00:35:45
people to check out. It's called the East Side of
00:35:48
South Central Los Angeles Hieroglyph Prototype
00:35:50
Architecture 1. And it is again, this idea that
00:35:57
what she's doing are prototypes for this dream she has of
00:36:02
building a sculpture park in South Central Los Angeles for
00:36:07
the community, with the community in the community.
00:36:11
And finally, I have to mention, so in 2024, last year, she was
00:36:16
part of the Venice Pianale, the 60th Venice Pianale in the
00:36:21
Arsenale, which was actually the first place where you had mass
00:36:27
production. So the Arsenale was a very long
00:36:30
building where you built ships. And it was kind of, you know,
00:36:34
like we have now in, in, you know, like in a factory when you
00:36:39
have things that are in the line of production.
00:36:42
And apparently in, I think in the 17th century, 16th century,
00:36:46
you could build a boat in a day at the end of that line.
00:36:50
So that was kind of, it's interesting to know that we talk
00:36:53
about mass production related to the industrial Revolution, but
00:36:56
actually, but the ships are so connected with colonization
00:37:00
capitalism. Interesting.
00:37:03
And so she in that context, has this project called Keepers of
00:37:07
the the the Crown. And these are a couple of
00:37:11
pillars that are these columns that she takes from and she
00:37:17
borrows from Egyptian ancient architecture where they're very
00:37:22
monolithical. And at the top, they have these
00:37:25
faces exactly in the style of Egyptian sculpture.
00:37:29
And they all bear faces of her family and friends.
00:37:35
And they are engraved as well, like Egyptian monuments.
00:37:41
So kind of relief, but they have words that come from her
00:37:47
culture, her community, Like I'm, I'm looking at the picture
00:37:51
now, like Black Fang, pride, expressions of community that
00:37:56
you also find in the exhibition. So she's had these really
00:38:00
beautiful landmarks in her career and that took her to the
00:38:04
Sopentine Gallery where we discovered her in the UK for the
00:38:09
first time. Yeah.
00:38:12
And I mean, I think just to add to that, she has the Summer
00:38:15
Everything project in LA, which she started in 2019, which is a
00:38:20
community centre. That said, I think we're ready
00:38:23
for a break. We've introduced Lauren Halsey,
00:38:25
so we'll be with you in a little while.
00:38:42
Welcome back from the break. I think you're going to bring us
00:38:45
into this exhibition, right? Yes, yes, I will.
00:38:48
You push the doors and it's an explosion.
00:38:53
It is. Yeah.
00:38:54
Explosion is exactly the right word, Yeah.
00:38:58
So it's an explosion of decorative objects and obsessive
00:39:02
making, gluing, stacking, cutting, collaging.
00:39:10
You're immersed in a universe that hits you as being super
00:39:17
specific, and as specific, I imagine, as it is foreign to you
00:39:23
if you're not familiar with the community Laura Halsey
00:39:27
represents here. So chances are for most of us,
00:39:31
this will be a new experience. You move across it clockwise,
00:39:35
which is an unusual direction in the South gallery.
00:39:38
So you perform a sort of circular walk through three
00:39:42
rooms, right, Including the entrance.
00:39:45
Yeah. And and just to say like that
00:39:47
entrance, the spectrum of the types of objects that are in
00:39:52
there. I mean, you go in and there's
00:39:53
like the the on the floor, there are rugs that you would find in
00:39:57
a home. You know, I mean, one of them is
00:40:00
depicting children. It looks like they're praying.
00:40:03
And then there's lots of kind of animal skin kind of rugs around.
00:40:10
And so you go from like this domestic sphere to things that
00:40:13
should be outside, like Sphinx and, you know, big animals and
00:40:18
sculptures that you could imagine in very large scale, but
00:40:22
you see them in miniature scale here.
00:40:24
And then the wallpaper is outer space, you know, so it's like
00:40:28
you are going from like, you know, sitting around someone's
00:40:32
coffee table almost, you know, that you could imagine sitting
00:40:35
on one of these rugs to outer space.
00:40:38
I mean, it is just such a big spectrum of of time and space
00:40:42
that she's representing. Totally.
00:40:45
And the entrance is very dark, so as if like really giving that
00:40:49
impression of interior And the reason why you go clockwise,
00:40:53
it's because that last room, which I always find a very
00:40:57
difficult room, it kind of creates a lull in the
00:40:59
exhibition. That first room has a long, long
00:41:03
wall. It's kind of a corridor like,
00:41:06
and it has a long wall to the left with windows.
00:41:10
So it has a very specific connection to the garden.
00:41:14
And the idea for Lauren Halsey was ready to think of Kensington
00:41:19
Gardens has something that you don't have over where she comes
00:41:24
from that much. And it's such a feature in the
00:41:28
city and it really makes a connection between the way you
00:41:34
are in a garden and the way you are supposed to experience the
00:41:41
exhibition. The exhibition becomes a place
00:41:45
where you spend time, you observe, but you're also
00:41:49
immersed in an atmosphere as if you were, you know, doing a
00:41:53
stroll and spending some time in in a garden.
00:41:57
Yeah, yeah, totally. And so there's that kind of
00:41:59
conversation going on there, which also took place in the Met
00:42:06
rooftop garden that she created that was very much in
00:42:09
conversation with Central Park, which was right there.
00:42:12
And, you know, she was thinking about what people, what parts of
00:42:16
the structures people would actually be able to see from the
00:42:19
park. And, you know, there's
00:42:22
Cleopatra's Needle and she's doing, you know, kind of
00:42:26
something in response to that, a little bit of call and answer.
00:42:29
And so, yeah, so that's definitely something she's
00:42:32
played with before. Definitely.
00:42:35
So suddenly the exhibition space has become a very involving
00:42:41
urban area where you can relax, you know, you can chat, you can
00:42:45
look around you. There's even a little fountain
00:42:49
in the central space or the central room of the Serpentine S
00:42:53
gallery, which is also the most gregarious.
00:42:56
There's it's really where people spend time.
00:43:00
There are at least two places to sit.
00:43:03
But I read in one of the reviews that you weren't allowed to, but
00:43:08
then I saw someone do it. Me too.
00:43:10
And I, I did scratch my head. I was like, I don't know if
00:43:13
that's legal. Waiting for the police to come
00:43:17
in and cuff them, you know? After our experiences and my
00:43:24
recent Hayward Gallery experiment, I'm here to fall.
00:43:27
I'm interested in physical contacts with the artworks.
00:43:32
That's over for me. Yeah, yeah.
00:43:36
So this relation with the garden is great to know because so
00:43:41
that's also in the text at the entrance, you learn that that
00:43:45
was one of the inspirations as well as the funkicizing of the
00:43:49
space. Because I mean, if you are
00:43:54
confused by maximalist decorations, you may not get
00:43:58
that. So when I talked about
00:44:01
explosion, it is a maximalist environment in the strictest
00:44:07
sense of the word. Even the window panes have
00:44:11
colour and so there's pink, I think there's a blue as well.
00:44:15
So to be very honest with you, if I hadn't read that there was
00:44:19
a relationship with the garden, I don't think I would have even
00:44:22
looked outside because there's so much stuff.
00:44:26
I mean, even the floor is elevated by a structure that is
00:44:31
a sort of mosaic like structure with transparent glass, which
00:44:36
I'm presuming is perspex. And you can see through and
00:44:40
underneath your feet. You're basically walking over
00:44:44
lots of a paraphernalia of objects.
00:44:47
Palm trees, toy cars, images of people, signage, stickers.
00:44:55
Yeah, absolutely. And that's all underneath your
00:44:57
feet as well as the, yeah, the the huge amounts that are sort
00:45:03
of on the walls and around you. Yeah, I mean, there's so much to
00:45:06
look at. There's a CD covered room
00:45:08
forming a sort of fish scale pattern.
00:45:12
There are shop signs. Yeah, there's colleges of
00:45:16
children, people. So from cuttings, photos or
00:45:20
newspapers or magazines, there are statues, there are green
00:45:24
plants, sculptures made of resin, a bit like you would find
00:45:29
in fun fairs. One of them is a black child
00:45:33
sporting basketball clothes. So I knew that Halsey wanted to
00:45:37
be a basketball player in her teens.
00:45:40
There's a video of a Street View with people playing and passing
00:45:43
that's quite blurry. At the end of that corridor,
00:45:46
like first room, there are lots of pyramidal fixtures, often
00:45:51
covered in mirrors with words written across them, but also
00:45:57
other objects such as free person or my hood.
00:46:00
There are lots and lots of symbols of blackness, from the
00:46:03
hair to the long manicured nails in sculpture form as a fountain.
00:46:09
And so you know that all of this represents a specific place and
00:46:15
a specific community. Yeah, absolutely.
00:46:17
I got to say two things. So I went there after.
00:46:21
It was after the sun had set. So it was, you know, it was
00:46:25
after 4:30. It's a 4:30 at the moment in.
00:46:27
The UK, so it was really dark, so I didn't get that sense of
00:46:31
the light coming through those windows, so I didn't notice the
00:46:34
color on the windows at all. I didn't even really notice the
00:46:38
windows to be honest because it was so dark outside and that
00:46:41
fountain was not working when I was there.
00:46:44
Same. I OK, yeah.
00:46:47
So I, yeah, I didn't even kind of clock that it was a fountain.
00:46:52
I it was, it was one of the most captivating kind of sculptures
00:46:58
in the whole exhibition, I would say.
00:47:01
I I was really kind of found myself, you know, settling in on
00:47:06
that for a long time. But but yeah, it wasn't until I
00:47:10
read some of the reviews and saw some pictures of it actually
00:47:13
acting like a fountain that I was like, oh, I didn't see that.
00:47:17
Yeah, and there isn't that sound element that is talked about in
00:47:20
the reviews. Yeah, for sure.
00:47:22
This is where I was confronted with my complete ignorance of
00:47:28
this context and also I think with my own identity as a person
00:47:34
who will not relate from the inside to this environments
00:47:43
created. Because Lauren Halsey is very
00:47:46
specific. She's a queer woman and she's
00:47:48
very specific about her projects being about blackness, about her
00:47:53
own community, but also the fact that in many of the spaces, of
00:47:57
course, brown and Black people will have, will see themselves
00:48:01
in this space. So that was really apparent.
00:48:05
And also my ignorance of LA. So I've never been there and my
00:48:09
relation with this side of LA, perhaps a bit further South, is
00:48:14
with Inglewood, which is at times mentioned in Halsey's
00:48:18
Colleges and installations. I noticed through ESA Ray's
00:48:22
series Insecure. I don't know if you've watched.
00:48:24
That no Huh. So this aesthetic is really
00:48:27
unfamiliar to me. And so I I was, as I was in the
00:48:31
space, I was trying to place it and I kept being reminded of my
00:48:35
kids Guinness record books because they have lots of
00:48:38
metallic glitter E shiny surfaces, neon greens and
00:48:42
yellows. And the catalogue is exactly
00:48:45
that. It has this kind of shiny
00:48:47
lettering and font that is very round and curved.
00:48:51
Yeah, and I, I got to say, just like that room with the CDs all
00:48:55
over, I just loved. It was just, you're bathed in
00:48:58
iridescent light, you know? And I loved that about it, the
00:49:03
shininess. Yeah.
00:49:04
And there's this aspect of, of the, the, the iridescence of
00:49:09
the, the, these materials that also kind of points to the idea
00:49:14
of layering and of kind of the reality being made of folds and
00:49:18
of different aspects. The same space has different
00:49:22
aspects to it and has different readings and different relations
00:49:26
and different connections to it, which is really beautiful
00:49:30
because you know that it comes from recuperated materials and
00:49:35
and makeshift constructions and handcrafted things.
00:49:39
Because, I mean, Lauren Halsey is a maker.
00:49:42
She is an archivist, as she says so herself.
00:49:46
She goes around the neighborhood, she collects
00:49:48
things, she buys these. For example, there's these
00:49:51
animal toys or animal miniatures that she buys from people in the
00:49:55
street that are made by people there.
00:49:57
And she was kind of thinking, OK, these will be the animals of
00:50:00
the park. And so she collected them.
00:50:02
She really sees herself as a visual material culture
00:50:07
archivist, and I think that's really important.
00:50:09
So for me, it immediately connoted as American, which I
00:50:12
know is such a horrible reduction because America is
00:50:15
made of so many things. But just to say that it felt
00:50:19
like something very far. And also you could see that
00:50:24
there was these kind of icons. So you have Lionel Richie, which
00:50:27
made me. Crack up.
00:50:29
Yeah. It's kind of a in kind of a
00:50:30
lengthy sort of side laying pose with one knee up.
00:50:35
It was very 80s sweater going on.
00:50:38
Yeah. Atop one of those rock seats
00:50:42
kind of structures, but very small.
00:50:47
And then you have lots of images of people from the
00:50:50
neighbourhood. You learn that some of them have
00:50:52
passed away as well. There's some hardship as well.
00:50:55
And they're they're a bit like angels in Christian iconography
00:50:59
where you don't know where they come from as a spectator.
00:51:03
Obviously, like us, other people will know very well who they
00:51:08
are. And that's the richness of this
00:51:10
proposal. And for you, there are kind of
00:51:12
these beautiful, joyful, smiling creatures hovering around those
00:51:19
Saints, which are the known icons that are there as well.
00:51:25
You know, there there's kind of all that community and they're
00:51:28
placed in a way that is very joyful and very playful and at
00:51:33
the same time connected to making, obsessive collecting and
00:51:38
making. I can imagine what her basement
00:51:41
looks like just full of stuff and just absolutely chock full
00:51:46
of objects that have inspired her at one time or another and
00:51:50
will play a role in a, in a, in something that she makes, you
00:51:54
know, at some point. There's another aspect to it
00:51:57
that I realized later. She's concerned with an
00:52:00
experience she had when she was a kid where she would move out
00:52:05
of South Central LA to school and she would see the the
00:52:11
difference in neighbourhoods where there were streets with no
00:52:17
protections. And then there was a part where
00:52:21
shops seem to be protected from violence and seem to expect
00:52:24
violence and economic difference between those neighbourhoods.
00:52:28
And therefore, when you went to this space, there's also
00:52:33
something that isn't an important aspect to everything
00:52:38
she collects, which is that nothing is precious.
00:52:41
The only precious thing that you might think would be an
00:52:44
expensive thing or something unattainable is, but it's
00:52:48
written, it's not. The object itself is Gucci,
00:52:50
which obviously is kind of also promoted with a certain
00:52:54
blackness, with a certain style, with a certain St. style, but
00:52:59
it's written as a sort of a slogan rather than being
00:53:03
represented by stuff. So the stuff that is there is
00:53:06
cheap stuff. It's stuff that is made of
00:53:08
plastic. And even the the kind of rocky
00:53:12
mounds that she produces, they're white and they're and
00:53:16
they bear lots of iridescent colors that very neon bright
00:53:19
colors and they look plastic. As you know, I am quite baffled
00:53:27
by maximalism, not in terms, not intellectually, but like
00:53:32
sensorially really. And we talked about this during
00:53:35
the Dido Moriyama episode. I get really overwhelmed.
00:53:39
I don't know what to look at, how I feel.
00:53:42
I think my brain just stops. And I was feeling a bit, you
00:53:47
know, discombobulated in the space.
00:53:50
And I was there with my friend Liberte, with whom we did the
00:53:54
episode about art advising Liberte Nuti.
00:53:58
And she said the word utopia. And suddenly it kind of
00:54:04
constellated the utopia, the dream, the megalomaniac,
00:54:09
nonsensical idea of bringing a whole culture, a whole
00:54:14
neighbourhood, a whole group of people, a whole self
00:54:18
determining, self affirming ethos into a context that is
00:54:22
completely disconnected from it. And of course, geographically.
00:54:28
But when you say geographically, the everything else gets dragged
00:54:32
into it in Kensington. Old school, old values,
00:54:37
tradition, knowledge, museums. And then there's a Serpentine
00:54:41
sponsored by Dior and the Luma Foundation.
00:54:45
You know, it's a whole context and it is it feels like a
00:54:51
utopia. And the title of the show, which
00:54:54
is written in this kind of slangy kind of way of of writing
00:54:59
in English in many communities. So imagine that is imagine that.
00:55:04
So it's dream, dream this. And so there's suddenly this
00:55:13
idea of this self-described archival impulse behind the
00:55:18
project, which actually makes me think of Vigli's collection of
00:55:22
revolutionary and protest signs amalgamated in his drawings.
00:55:29
But there's no sublimation here. So there's no, I'm going to take
00:55:33
this and put it into drawing form and appropriate it for
00:55:36
myself here. This is a sort of Madame
00:55:40
Tussauds of South Central LA. She talks about human sized
00:55:45
maquettes of these projects are maquettes that you can go into.
00:55:50
And so the question for me here was like, how do I, you know,
00:55:55
see this, connect with it? Is it culturally?
00:55:58
Is it an aesthetic? And I would also be intrigued,
00:56:02
you know, to see how English, black and brown, young,
00:56:05
middle-aged, older people from different backgrounds connected
00:56:08
to it. So, yeah, so that was kind of
00:56:09
the question for me there. And then, you know, in in the
00:56:15
exhibition. I'm curious to know how you
00:56:17
experienced it. So first of all, I want to thank
00:56:20
Liberte for utopia, because I think that is a word that
00:56:24
captures it. And it's funny because it is
00:56:27
described that way. I mean, Afrofuturism is also
00:56:31
something that runs through Halsey's work.
00:56:34
And she talks about, you know, having this sort of idealized
00:56:37
representation of where she's from, in part because of what
00:56:42
you mentioned in terms of, you know, going to other
00:56:45
neighborhoods and seeing how things are different.
00:56:46
And that gentrification that's happening in South Central LA.
00:56:50
She wants to resist that and make sure that there is, you
00:56:54
know, a Canon where this time and place of her upbringing is,
00:56:59
is captured and and and preserved.
00:57:03
But yeah, I so when I saw the exhibition online, I was really
00:57:08
excited. I was like, wow, I'm going to be
00:57:11
going into another place and I'm going to, you know, have this
00:57:17
very, you know, fully sensorial experience of, you know, South
00:57:22
Central LA as she offers it. And so I was really excited
00:57:28
about it. And I went there and those doors
00:57:34
opened and I was, I, you know, I felt overwhelmed as well.
00:57:37
I felt like there was so much to look at.
00:57:40
There was so many suggestions that I, I was looking for a
00:57:45
focal point of like something to help me latch onto, to make
00:57:50
sense of, you know, of, you know, these animal skin rugs and
00:57:55
the outer space that was happening on the, on the
00:57:58
wallpaper, etcetera. And, and I had a hard time
00:58:02
locating that. And so it was like, OK, I'm just
00:58:05
going to take a breath and just be here.
00:58:08
And this is how I feel right now.
00:58:10
There's often that kind of chatter that goes on in my head
00:58:13
when I first enter an exhibition, which is like
00:58:17
deciding whether or not I want to like it or not right there
00:58:19
and then. And that's it, you know, and I
00:58:21
kind of get a ride that out anyway.
00:58:24
But walking through that second room, the long room where there
00:58:29
was the video of, you know, these people dancing in the
00:58:32
street at the at the end of the at the end of the room, that
00:58:37
felt like a focal point. And and that gave me a bit more.
00:58:43
That gave me something to kind of hold on to and to understand,
00:58:48
you know, where the signs were coming from, etcetera.
00:58:52
And the, the last room, you know, I really, really enjoyed.
00:58:58
I think that those, I think that, you know, look, this is
00:59:02
supposed to be a park, right? This is supposed to be a space
00:59:05
where people come and hang out. And I almost wish there were
00:59:10
just more benches because it, it felt like the kind of thing that
00:59:14
needed that. And like you, I was afraid to
00:59:18
sit down. You know, there was there was a
00:59:20
young woman sitting there and there was this part of me that
00:59:23
was like, oh, they're going to get you, you know, like, but
00:59:26
they and they didn't. Obviously I wanted I wanted
00:59:29
somewhere to linger because there are there is so many
00:59:32
suggestions and so many things where you're like, I wonder what
00:59:35
that is about, you know, and where you kind of need to make
00:59:38
sense of it. That I think that those benches
00:59:43
would have been really, really helpful to sort of allow people
00:59:47
to relax and really become infused in the space.
00:59:51
So when I was there, I felt kind of, you know, yeah, as I say,
00:59:56
kind of uncertain about about it and and uncertain about what I
01:00:01
made about it. Going away and doing more
01:00:03
research on her, you know, gives a lot of context.
01:00:07
And I think that some exhibitions don't need a lot of
01:00:10
context. And I, I think this one would
01:00:14
have, would have helped me more, which which is why a repeat
01:00:17
visit I think is is absolutely necessary.
01:00:20
There are expectations that you have through the exhibition text
01:00:25
about the funk, about the park, about the way you'll be in that
01:00:31
exhibition that are confusing. Because the exhibition for me
01:00:35
was an experience of looking. It wasn't an experience of
01:00:39
spending time. It was an experience of
01:00:41
discovering more than an experience of spending time in
01:00:45
the place, observing, playing, talking like you would have in a
01:00:50
park. And I really thought long and
01:00:53
hard about it because I was definitely thinking of this idea
01:01:01
of bringing a community. So the difference between the
01:01:05
previous episode, Zanelli Mahali, who also brings their
01:01:09
own community as a non binary queer black artist in South
01:01:14
Africa, taking pictures of people from South Africa,
01:01:17
bringing them into the museum and then doing the self
01:01:21
portraiture of their own body and enacting some things in the
01:01:27
the photographs. For me, there's a storytelling
01:01:30
there. And in this situation, there's
01:01:33
again, a black queer artists who identifies as female, who brings
01:01:42
to the forefront of the iconography blackness and their
01:01:47
and, and the culture of that huge group in the world, very
01:01:53
located in a city within a big city.
01:01:55
So a very small part of that city.
01:01:58
But the the, the meaningful part for her and for her community.
01:02:03
And it's brought as a maquette. So it's brought as real size
01:02:08
things. So it is an environment.
01:02:10
It's not storytelling. It is a sort of simulacrum of a
01:02:15
space that is not known to you as a spectator in the UK.
01:02:20
And there was voluntary. That was the goal.
01:02:23
The goal was not to tell stories.
01:02:25
One of the things that I was a bit surprised by is that if you
01:02:29
don't do the research around the exhibition, and that's why I've
01:02:33
talked about angels, you see people, you you know that
01:02:39
they're people from the community, you see them, you
01:02:43
don't know who they are, you don't know the stories behind
01:02:45
them. And and that's voluntary, you
01:02:48
know, there is no explanation of the context.
01:02:50
There's a real want to focus on the community and not to bring,
01:02:57
like Zanelli Mahali brings at a certain point an individual
01:03:01
perspective into it. And that's kind of what was
01:03:05
missing for me going back to Benjamin Perry's text, which is
01:03:10
poetry is unconnected at ultimately, which is a European
01:03:17
stance that he had against futurism, against communism.
01:03:22
Saying, you know, poetry and art in general is the space of
01:03:27
irreverence. And one of the things that I
01:03:30
found really interesting was that I was so baffled by the,
01:03:35
the, this ability to be, to adhere completely to anesthetic
01:03:41
and an identity. Whereas with Zanelle Mahali,
01:03:45
there was this diversity of the LGBTQIA plus community that was
01:03:49
showcased there. There was their experience then
01:03:51
as a subject of, of, of photography.
01:03:54
And here it is like this thing of adhering completely as a
01:03:58
person. So I misunderstood that because
01:04:01
it's not an identity thing. It's a community.
01:04:04
It's a group of people. It has nothing to do with the
01:04:07
identity of the artist. And when you hear the artist
01:04:11
speak, there's really this concern first and foremost,
01:04:15
ultimately across the whole work, with an iconography, with
01:04:21
but a life, a real life in the present.
01:04:26
And that's something that is interesting because I would say
01:04:30
that here the revolutionary, the irreverence is brought by the
01:04:40
space. It's not the artwork in itself,
01:04:43
but it's the fact of placing that community in that space
01:04:46
that automatically turns that work into something much freer,
01:04:52
especially in the place where you don't adhere as a spectator.
01:04:57
You know, I imagine in, in great parts the people who go there.
01:05:00
I mean, in majority the, I mean, I can't tell you the exact
01:05:07
percentage, but museums and galleries have to study the
01:05:12
profiles of their visitors. Great majority, white.
01:05:18
There's a white spectatorship in this space and that is really
01:05:25
interesting. And I think that's exactly for
01:05:28
me, the core of that project, which for me as a white woman, a
01:05:33
European white woman, became about thinking about that
01:05:37
gesture, not as much the experience in the space, but
01:05:40
really thinking about that. And I came across this really
01:05:45
interesting article in the Guardian yesterday while doing
01:05:47
my research by a social analysts called.
01:05:55
I'm looking at the article right now.
01:05:57
So the title is, are we a racist society?
01:06:00
The majority of us say no, but science begs to differ.
01:06:03
And so his name's Keon W He's the author of Science of Racism,
01:06:09
and it is a truly beautiful article.
01:06:14
So he's a social psychologist. That's who he is.
01:06:16
And he talks about the fact that if you ask people whether
01:06:22
they're racist or not, they will say no, but how can you measure
01:06:28
racism? And he's claims that there is a
01:06:31
measuring that is quite, you know, objective studies made
01:06:35
with wood CVS go on top of the pile and and under the pile,
01:06:40
black people have to send 50 times more CVS to have the same
01:06:44
number of calls than a white person.
01:06:46
So he numbers like a very objective examples of that very
01:06:51
crude reality. And in museums it's the same
01:06:54
thing. The spectatorship is mainly
01:06:56
white. And he talks about unconscious
01:06:59
racism and how undermining that expression is.
01:07:04
So there's unconscious racism and there's on the other hand,
01:07:10
implicit race racism. Because when you talk about
01:07:12
unconscious racism, tests were done as well, scientific ones
01:07:16
that you forgive yourself because it is unconscious.
01:07:20
So you're not the master of it. You inherited it.
01:07:23
Whereas implicit means that it's there and you have to be
01:07:27
accountable for it. I situate myself immediately
01:07:30
there. And I think that's a wonderful,
01:07:33
you know, thing to experience and to dig into and to
01:07:37
understand exactly the gesture of doing that of of of bringing
01:07:42
this community there and also enjoying the joy of it.
01:07:47
There is a lot of joy in that space.
01:07:50
There is no victimization you. Know, yeah, that's beautiful.
01:07:54
Thank you. And I mean, I think so.
01:07:57
Well said too. Thank you for that.
01:07:59
That's that articulation of the difference between Mahole's
01:08:03
perspective and what she's bringing through storytelling
01:08:06
and what Halsey is bringing through atmosphere and, you
01:08:11
know, experience of being in a place.
01:08:15
That was really important because I did find myself
01:08:17
comparing the two, and I wasn't sure why, you know, I wasn't
01:08:23
sure why I felt like I wanted Maholis.
01:08:26
But I think you've nailed it. It is because she's telling me a
01:08:29
story and she's bringing me in in a way that is very different.
01:08:36
There's a there's a very, there's a side door that Lauren
01:08:38
Halsey is going through that is about here's the community and
01:08:42
all of its wonder and you can be here for a while.
01:08:46
It's a place rather than a story.
01:08:49
So thank you. Yeah, that's really, yeah,
01:08:51
that's really helpful. And yeah, that that whole thing
01:08:54
of, of racism and you know that it's, you know, that it's not a
01:08:58
choice that only abhorrent people make.
01:09:01
Oh yeah, yeah, it is. It is.
01:09:02
You have to include yourself in that narrative as a white
01:09:05
person. Absolutely.
01:09:06
It is just in the water we drink, unfortunately.
01:09:11
Yeah, it's it's a really important thing to remember.
01:09:14
Wow. Brilliant.
01:09:16
Great. So, I mean, I think there's
01:09:18
this, you know, this issue of Afrofuturism and Afro pessimism
01:09:23
that's alive in her work. And you, you did some digging
01:09:27
into that, didn't you? I did, yes, because so we had,
01:09:31
we've had an experience of Afro pessimism through the Ariadine
01:09:36
exhibition at the ICA last year and we had to look into that a
01:09:40
little bit. I also went to during the
01:09:44
pandemic when the museums reopened to the Toyin OG
01:09:48
Auditola exhibition at the curved space at the Barbican.
01:09:52
She's a Nigerian American artist who was very much inspired by
01:09:57
Afrofuturism. So that's the first time I came
01:10:00
across that term. The exhibition was incredible.
01:10:03
It was these charcoal drawings based on a fiction of a a
01:10:09
mythical community in the African continent that was a
01:10:12
matriarchy. And the men did the labour and
01:10:15
the drawings were fantastic. There was music.
01:10:17
It was a really beautiful show. In the interview of the
01:10:21
catalogue, Lauren Halsey does mention that as something in the
01:10:24
beginning that inspired her because George Clinton, the funk
01:10:30
movement was very much sunrise as well connected to that
01:10:34
notion. So from the Tate website, the
01:10:37
term Afrofuturism is explained. So I'm going to quote straight
01:10:42
from that. The term Afrofuturism has its
01:10:45
origins in African American science fiction.
01:10:48
Today, it is generally used to refer to literature, music and
01:10:52
visual arts that explores the African American experience and
01:10:56
in particular the role of slavery in that experience.
01:11:00
Central to the concept of Afrofuturism are the science
01:11:03
fiction writers Octavia Butler, Samuel R Delaney, and the jazz
01:11:08
musician Son RA, who created a mythical persona that much
01:11:12
science fiction with Egyptian mysticism.
01:11:15
It is this otherness that is at the heart of Afrofuturism.
01:11:20
Those inspired by Afrofuturism include the musician George
01:11:24
Clinton, the artist Ellen Gallagher and the film director
01:11:28
Winery Caillou. So I thought that probably
01:11:34
Lauren Halsey's work could be linked to that.
01:11:38
And so just to counterbalance and bring a whole panorama of
01:11:43
these discourses and these terms, when we explored Afro
01:11:47
pessimism, we situated it in the popularisation of that term by
01:11:55
Frank B Welderson, the third, who grew up in Minneapolis,
01:12:01
Emily from From is, he's a neighbour.
01:12:05
So this theory, Afro pessimism, explains that racism against
01:12:10
black peoples is so deeply rooted that it's almost
01:12:15
impossible to overcome. And so there is this kind of
01:12:21
chewing and throwing between one and the other.
01:12:23
I found an article of Kadish Morris's about this American
01:12:28
poet called Dennis Smith, who goes from 1:00 to the other.
01:12:34
So from Afrofuturism to Afro pessimism in his two books, one
01:12:42
is called Don't Call Us Dead. It was very lauded, won the won
01:12:49
several prizes where the ideas imagining a world liberated from
01:12:54
anti blackness. And then in his recent book
01:12:57
called Bluff, there's an almost Afro pessimist take.
01:13:01
According to the Guardian journalist, you know, he's from
01:13:05
George Floyd's hometown and is the, the, the book is very much
01:13:11
traversed by that and, and what came about in in the aftermath
01:13:18
of that. So there's this kind of chewing
01:13:20
and throwing as if Afro pessimism and Afro futurism was
01:13:25
kind of like a sort of a 2 ends of a very complex spectrum of
01:13:30
the, the reality of blackness, particularly in America.
01:13:35
I would really urge you to read these books.
01:13:39
I was almost going to read 2 poems from one from each book
01:13:44
because it's so incredible writing.
01:13:47
It's also graphic poetry. There's one called Dinosaurs in
01:13:50
the Hood where he imagines so they imagine because they're
01:13:54
known binary as well. They imagine the Jurassic Park,
01:14:00
but only in blackness against the so they go over all the
01:14:04
tropes of the black character that dies all the time in
01:14:07
thrillers. The first is always the first
01:14:09
victim, etcetera. And they imagine a Jurassic Park
01:14:13
that is completely devoid of all those all those kind of
01:14:17
containing and crushing tropes for blackness.
01:14:21
And then in the poem anti poetica in the the recent book
01:14:25
Bluff, a lot of the lines are a poem cannot feed you, a poem
01:14:29
cannot solve in the social injustice.
01:14:31
And he almost apologizes in the book for having been so utopian.
01:14:36
So and then in the catalogue, just to close this chapter up,
01:14:40
there is a text called Against Afrofuturism by it's a very
01:14:48
angry text by Harmony Holiday. And it's a really interesting
01:14:54
text where Harmony talks about the fact that thinking about the
01:14:59
future takes away the responsibility of the now and
01:15:05
takes away your agency. And also, by the way, the term.
01:15:12
And that's why, Tate, if you're listening, please change your
01:15:15
website. Harmony Holiday says something
01:15:19
really critical, which is that Afrofuturism was coined by a
01:15:26
white scholar in the 90s and was developed in a book where one of
01:15:34
the people interviewed is the Delaney, the writer mentioned in
01:15:38
the Robert Delaney in the Tate website.
01:15:42
It's a really difficult read. I read some bits of it.
01:15:47
And another thing that Harmony Holiday doesn't do is to name
01:15:52
the author. Just not to give that person a
01:15:55
platform. So I dug up and I kind of
01:16:00
checked the source. I was like, really?
01:16:02
So the person who coined this term is Mark Derry, who's an
01:16:07
American cultural critic, writer and lecturer.
01:16:11
And in 1993, he coined the term for a book of interviews.
01:16:16
And so he was the one who named that.
01:16:19
And so that really surprises me. I would have guessed that it
01:16:22
would have been much further back than the 90s.
01:16:26
Yes, me too. You know, I'm, I'm surprised
01:16:29
it's as recent as that. That's really interesting.
01:16:32
I was very confused by Harmony Holiday's text that starts The
01:16:36
West is resolutely doctrinaire, and the invention of a shiny new
01:16:40
doctrine often reinvigorates the indomitable colonial impulse,
01:16:45
subtly or otherwise. Under the dictatorship of the
01:16:49
most effective doctrine, the will of a group of discreet
01:16:52
individuals is often trained on one aesthetic genre, whether or
01:16:56
not its protagonists agree. Such is the case with
01:16:59
Afrofuturism, a term and doctrine coined by a white
01:17:02
academic in the 1990s to help make sense of black science
01:17:06
fiction, which has since been deployed to collapse the work of
01:17:10
disparate black artists and thinkers into one over
01:17:14
simplified silo. So the text is really
01:17:17
interesting and quite indomitable itself.
01:17:22
So just to finish and to close up this contextualization, I
01:17:28
guess, and also kind of this education, Harmony Holiday makes
01:17:32
a case for this idea of agency and being in the now, which we
01:17:37
also talked about regarding Zanelli Mahali, which is they're
01:17:41
doing the work now in the community and not just
01:17:45
documenting it, bearing witness. They are actively engaging with
01:17:50
change and trying to promote change, namely through activism
01:17:55
or community oriented projects. And that's something that the
01:17:58
term Afrofuturism cannot encapsulate and cannot destroy.
01:18:02
And so at the end, Harmony Holiday rights, Knowing this,
01:18:07
and from the vantage of the renewed paradigm, Lauren
01:18:10
Halsey's work, which belongs first to South Central Los
01:18:14
Angeles and then to the collective imagination of that
01:18:18
place as a myth, and then to the use of myth to render the
01:18:23
reality there anew by inflecting it with tones it already carries
01:18:28
quietly and unceremoniously, can be seen as a blueprint for a new
01:18:33
now. If we refuse to displace her
01:18:36
vision onto the future, what is her testimony about the current
01:18:41
of black desire and pleasure and friendship today, right now, as
01:18:46
you read this? How does her friendship with
01:18:49
George Clinton guide her building a funk mounds and
01:18:53
stages for him that can fit into her hometown today?
01:18:58
And why is this work exhibited in museums and galleries without
01:19:02
being brought directly to urban planners?
01:19:05
How can her fantastic become part of the black mundane and
01:19:09
reel? And will the circle be unbroken?
01:19:12
Will you seek entry in the into that reel at its most
01:19:16
unglamorous and functional? Risk vanity to be there or
01:19:20
attend only as it becomes art, object and simulation.
01:19:25
If you can only process the black everyday by pretending it
01:19:29
lives outside of time, then love is absent and you as a spectator
01:19:34
become a grim Reaper and thief. How's his work resists that or
01:19:38
forces us to confront it, entering to the tune of America
01:19:43
Eats Its Young and leaving in the song's mouth.
01:19:47
Wow, that is yeah. Goodness.
01:19:49
Afrofuturism. Born in the 1990s from a white
01:19:56
scholar. That blows my mind.
01:20:00
I mean, so I just looked up the National Museum for African
01:20:06
American Heritage. That's in the.
01:20:08
It's in DC. Yes, yeah.
01:20:10
And, and there's a curator there who's talking.
01:20:13
I mean, he talks about Afrofuturism.
01:20:15
He doesn't. He just says that it was
01:20:18
originally coined in scholarly circles to explore how black
01:20:21
writers and artists have utilized themes of technology,
01:20:24
science fiction, fantasy and heroism to envision stories and
01:20:27
futures. I don't know.
01:20:29
I mean, I'm wondering like is that is that is she 100% on that
01:20:34
identification of of it being born in 1993?
01:20:38
Yes, yes, I've, I've looked into it and what I saw.
01:20:42
And again, admittedly, I didn't read the whole book, just saw
01:20:46
some excerpts. And there was this kind of thing
01:20:49
of like, how come black American authors haven't explored
01:20:53
fiction, I mean, or science fiction.
01:20:55
I mean, it would seem to be the ideal place for black identity
01:20:59
to expand because it would be creating a new world from
01:21:02
scratch and therefore affirming themselves, which is a great
01:21:07
idea, but it's not your place to have it and certainly not to
01:21:10
question a black author about that.
01:21:13
And it also speaks to a huge ignorance.
01:21:16
I mean, I only knew Octavia Butler or of Octavia Butler a
01:21:21
couple of years ago. I had never heard of her before.
01:21:25
And, you know, and even Ursula K Le Guin, I learned about her
01:21:29
very late, earlier than Octavia Butler.
01:21:32
So black, white science fiction authors emerge, and later black
01:21:40
female authors emerge. You know, there's always this
01:21:43
cadence of white feminists and then or whites female, whatever.
01:21:49
And then, you know, the, the the same category but with a
01:21:54
different ethnicity comes later. So there's this pattern really
01:22:00
in the culture. So it was the author himself who
01:22:04
didn't know about the reality of science fiction, you know,
01:22:08
having been explored already before you had the crazy idea
01:22:12
that it would be appropriate to, you know.
01:22:14
So that's the criticism. I'm talking about what I read
01:22:18
partially on the winter webs. So again, take this with a grain
01:22:23
of salt. Do your own research, as I will
01:22:25
continue to do mine. Yeah.
01:22:27
So that was kind of like my huge rabbit hole.
01:22:32
And in the meantime, I discovered the new poet, Dennis
01:22:35
Smith. Go into it, read it.
01:22:37
It's beautiful. Wow, brilliant.
01:22:39
I mean, there's just so many questions and so much to explore
01:22:43
off the back of this exhibition of Lauren Halsey's work.
01:22:47
And I mean, gosh, she's young. There's so much more that's
01:22:51
going to be coming from her and more things that she can that
01:22:55
she can bring to us in the wider world from her very unique and
01:23:00
really special point of view from her community.
01:23:04
So that's just fabulous. And thank you, Joanna.
01:23:07
I mean, this has been just a fantastic conversation.
01:23:10
I have really have enjoyed hearing your articulation of the
01:23:15
difference between the Holy's exhibition and Halsey's
01:23:19
exhibition, you know, resonance in a very, very different way.
01:23:24
So, yeah, So thank you for that. Well, it was my pleasure and it
01:23:28
was a pleasure chatting with you.
01:23:29
As ever, apologies if I misread, misquoted, misinterpreted any of
01:23:34
the things that I talked about that concern a community that is
01:23:38
certainly not mine. Lauren Halsey, thank you for
01:23:40
making me doing do this. Thank you, Serpentine, for
01:23:44
having this exhibition that really, really questioned a lot
01:23:48
of things. And I will certainly be going
01:23:51
back. And you still have time to do so
01:23:54
as well. If you're in London, it's open
01:23:56
until the 23rd of February. So that's it.
01:23:59
It's there for you. And if not, Lauren Halsey, I'm
01:24:03
sure is very young, has other things coming up in your
01:24:06
hometown, in your country for sure, but more specifically and
01:24:10
more importantly in South Central LA.
01:24:13
May she continue to build that community, support it, and
01:24:18
expand it. Yeah.
01:24:20
All right. Well, thanks everyone.
01:24:21
Take care. See you next time.
01:24:24
See you next time. Bye, bye, bye.