Friends Emily Harding, the art lover and exhibition goer, and Joana P. R. Neves, the art curator and writer, examine Lauren Halsey's exhibition. What was the Los Angeles-based black artist’s strategy with her maximalist, object laden environment? By being so specific to her community, how did it reposition what a spectator is and is their role in a show?
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Halsey’s rich and culturally affirmative exhibition promotes aesthetic liberation. How does the artist link freedom and care? The catalogue of the exhibition provides clarifying clues for the show, namely, a quite shocking revelation regarding Afro-Futurism…
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To know more about the exhibition: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/lauren-halsey-emajendat/
Curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas and Chris Bayley
We also mention Emily's friend, an artist using street signs in her work.
Go to Instagram and check her out! @janeroerevolution
Music by Sarturn
Did the episode stir Art Wonderment memories? Share them via text or voice message.
Created & Hosted by Dr. Joana P. R. Neves, art curator and writer with over 20 years of experience in the contemporary art field. Artistic director of Drawing Now Paris since 2018, she has worked across the industry, from the art market to education. She co-launched the art residency and project space Worlding in 2020. Exhibitionistas’ first year offered exhibition discussions with guest co-host Emily Harding; organically, it grew into a more experimental show exploring art topics, stories and interviews complemented by Joana’s publication Art Thinkosaurus on Substack. She champions ‘Art Wonderment’s’ embrace of complexity against the lure of ready-made opinions. A polyglot, she grew up in Lisbon, studied and lived in Paris, to finally settle in London with her artist husband, four children and two cats.
Find us:
On Instagram – @exhibitionistas_podcast
On Substack (NEWSLETTER: sign up!): Art Thinkosaurus > Exhibitionistas Files
Online: www.exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Do you want to be a guest on Art Etiquette? Reach out: joana@exhibitionistaspodcast.com
Copyright: Joana P. R. Neves, 2024.
00:00:09
Hello. Hello, Joanna here.
00:00:11
Welcome to Exhibitionistas. Today we talk about Lauren
00:00:14
Halsey's exhibition Imagine That at the Serpentine Gallery,
00:00:18
curated by Lizzie Kerry Thomas and Chris Bailey.
00:00:22
It's a maximalist environment that led us to a discussion
00:00:26
about art, freedom, identity, revolution, care.
00:00:31
It also allowed us to find out more about the myths and origins
00:00:35
of the term Afrofuturism, which I have to say, surprised us a
00:00:39
great deal. This episode unexpectedly
00:00:43
located us as spectators in our freedoms and in our edges, as
00:00:48
you will see. It also reminded us that one of
00:00:51
the things that connects us is probably the ability to dream
00:00:56
without systematically placing our own desires at the centre of
00:01:00
dreamscapes. You know, dreamscapes are not
00:01:04
always about us, and world making is a joint effort,
00:01:08
specific at times to groups that not always have the possibility
00:01:12
of even having one. Dreams are actually realities in
00:01:17
the making. But this is really what we've
00:01:19
learned by visiting and talking and researching this incredible
00:01:24
exhibition. And we also kind of got to the
00:01:28
conclusion that all of this may very well be one of the facets
00:01:33
of joy. So without further ado, come
00:01:37
with me. Let's push the doors of the
00:01:39
Serpentine and discover this incredible world of Lauren
00:01:44
Halsey. Hello and welcome to
00:01:58
exhibitionistas. If you're new here, this is the
00:02:00
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,
00:02:12
contemporary outwriter and curator and from an outsider's,
00:02:15
albeit passionate and many times erudite point of view.
00:02:19
I'm talking about my lovely Co host who I will let introduce
00:02:24
herself. So kind.
00:02:26
And yes, I'm Emily Harding, an art lover and an exhibition
00:02:30
goer. I don't know how erudite, but
00:02:33
it's it's a great pleasure to view exhibitions and discuss
00:02:37
them with you Joanna, and with the dear listeners.
00:02:41
A phrase that I am picking up from you very much though.
00:02:46
So this exhibition is, is Lauren Halsey.
00:02:49
Imagine that at the Serpentine and it gives a lot to consider,
00:02:54
emphasis on a lot because there is a maximalist theme going on
00:03:00
throughout it. So it's at the Serpentine until
00:03:03
the 23rd of February in London. It's a site specific
00:03:07
installation, which makes it I think kind of additionally
00:03:10
interesting. It's also really inspired by
00:03:13
funk, the group Parliament in particular, which I loved
00:03:16
because you know, you can kind of go down a rabbit hole of funk
00:03:20
on title or Spotify or wherever you stream your music.
00:03:24
Does that did that ring a bell for you?
00:03:26
Oh God yeah. Oh wow, 100%.
00:03:30
I was wondering, I was wondering.
00:03:32
Yeah, definitely. And yeah, no, it was, it was
00:03:35
really fun and Funkadelic, you know, all those bands.
00:03:39
But for me personally, it was a this kind of whole, this
00:03:43
exhibition was a real roller coaster.
00:03:45
So I was super excited to see it when I kind of saw it online.
00:03:50
And then I had a bit of a disorienting experience within
00:03:53
the exhibition and I, and I was like trying to land on where I
00:03:58
felt about it. It was, you know, I left with it
00:04:00
still pretty up in the air. And then, you know, I did
00:04:05
research for the podcast and I, I feel now like I, I'd like to
00:04:10
return to Palsy's perspective with more knowledge than I had
00:04:15
before. Like that could be an
00:04:16
interesting world to go back to because as we said, there's a
00:04:20
lot. So there's certainly would have
00:04:22
been a lot that I would have missed and a lot that deserves
00:04:26
more attention. Totally agree.
00:04:28
Totally agree. I also want to go back and
00:04:31
experience it again for sure. It's one of those where this
00:04:35
episode makes so much sense for it because there is so much to
00:04:41
find out about Lauren Halsey, about the exhibition, about the
00:04:46
choices that were made, project itself, what it links to.
00:04:50
I mean, there's a lot to talk about and I'm really can't wait
00:04:54
to dig in. But before we go into it, I just
00:04:58
want to inform our listeners, our dear listeners, that we are
00:05:02
now officially one year old babies.
00:05:06
Oh. Exhibition.
00:05:07
Mr. wandering around, holding under the coffee table.
00:05:15
Exhibitions are toddlers. So on the 25th of January of
00:05:18
2024, we dropped our first episode and I think you should
00:05:24
check this episode. If you discovered us midway, I'm
00:05:28
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
00:05:38
doesn't pique your interests, I don't know what will.
00:05:43
Gosh, can you remember one year ago?
00:05:46
Innocent, sweet innocence, yeah. The innocence.
00:05:49
Marina Abramovic exhibition Yeah, will live in my memory
00:05:54
forever. But more importantly, I would
00:06:00
like to thank you, our listeners, followers,
00:06:04
subscribers. Thank you.
00:06:06
Thank you so much for being here.
00:06:08
Thank you for listening. And please, if you want us to
00:06:11
continue to grow and to develop, you can do lots of things to
00:06:16
support us. So you can, first of all,
00:06:18
subscribe to the podcast. You know what?
00:06:20
I know it sounds very abstract, but it does count.
00:06:23
Yeah, totally. It's really important.
00:06:27
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.
00:06:42
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
So that's why I'm talking about it because we are not all aware
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of what we can do and how we can interact with podcasts.
00:07:03
And actually you can and you can send US ideas, you can give
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So please, please contribute because when we go to the
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analytics of Spotify, there's that one comment.
00:07:16
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
But anyway, another thing you can do is to leave us a rating,
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We do listen and we're very interested in knowing how we can
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00:07:55
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Another easy thing to do is just tell your friends about us.
00:08:03
Just talk about the podcast, put the word out there.
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And finally, another thing that you can do, and obviously this
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is really important to us as well, is to support us
00:08:15
financially. Obviously, we want to continue
00:08:18
doing this and we want to grow. And for that we can also rely on
00:08:25
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00:08:28
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00:08:34
monthly. But we are also adding a PayPal
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00:08:42
it's easier for a lot of people to do that.
00:08:45
So we will have that in our newsletter, in our Instagram
00:08:48
account, in our website and in the show's notes.
00:08:51
So please think of us. I know Christmas is behind us
00:08:56
and January is a tough month, but you know, we don't need big
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
00:09:14
France from a small town called Amyang, where the Frac Picardie
00:09:20
is located. So at Drawing Now.
00:09:23
So I'm artistic director of Drawing Now Paris, which is a
00:09:26
not fair dedicated to drawing that takes place every year in
00:09:30
March, last week of March. So we have a partnership with
00:09:35
the Frac, and we do that because it's a collection and a space
00:09:40
that is exclusively dedicated to contemporary drawing.
00:09:44
So I curate 2 shows there every year, more or less around the
00:09:48
time of the art fair in March. And that's what I did last week.
00:09:55
And this year I focused on the notion of codes and notations
00:09:59
for the exhibition. You know, when written words are
00:10:03
no longer enough to convey what you want to convey.
00:10:06
Think music and dance notations, but also mathematical signs,
00:10:10
etcetera. And I took inspiration from
00:10:14
Emily, a really important artist in France called Jacques
00:10:18
Filigley, who passed away in 2018, I think at 90.
00:10:22
He was a really, really interesting artist.
00:10:25
He was an aficist as well, which means that he would retrieve
00:10:31
posters from the street and make colleges with them.
00:10:35
He's quite an established artist by now in France and a
00:10:39
historical one. And he also had a project that
00:10:41
he started in 1969 called the Sociopolitical Alphabet, which
00:10:48
was composed of signs that were socially and politically
00:10:53
motivated and that he would find in the streets and that he would
00:10:56
collect. Cool, I love that.
00:10:58
It's so compelling. I mean, I, you know, I, I, yeah,
00:11:02
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
00:11:11
more depth to them now. I mean, a friend of mine is a,
00:11:14
is a street artist and she does a lot of the, she does a lot of
00:11:19
stickers, Yeah. With various kind of different
00:11:23
signs on them. And you know, through her
00:11:27
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.
00:11:40
Wow, Maybe we can put her Instagram account in the show's
00:11:43
notes. Yeah, what's her?
00:11:44
Name, her name is Paula Finbo, but the Instagram account, I
00:11:51
think it's a Jane Roe revolution.
00:11:54
But we'll, we'll, we'll leave it in the show's notes.
00:11:57
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.
00:12:10
So of course, he kind of drew inspiration from that.
00:12:14
And the cultural highlight for me, I'm getting there, is when I
00:12:19
was shown at the FRAC, a book of Benjamin Perry.
00:12:24
He was a French poet with Villeglis alphabet.
00:12:28
Oh, there's a fox peeing in a Bush right outside my window.
00:12:33
Excuse me for being very distracted by it.
00:12:37
Okay, picking up again. So Benjamin Perry, French poet.
00:12:44
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
00:12:54
the use of poetry by politically motivated agendas, namely the
00:13:00
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.
00:13:11
Because, and I love this sentence of the text quote, they
00:13:16
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.
00:13:31
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
00:13:42
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.
00:15:01
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
00:15:16
undid the words even more and created a whole of the meaning.
00:15:22
So I was just so taken by this book.
00:15:25
It was such a special moment in the week.
00:15:28
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.
00:15:41
And then to have that absolutely infused with all sorts of other
00:15:46
abstract meaning through these symbols.
00:15:48
I can imagine that was. I can imagine your joy and
00:15:51
pleasure in that. Yeah, it was fantastic.
00:15:54
I was. I was.
00:15:55
So yeah, it was a special moment.
00:15:57
Thank you, Kristoff at the FRAC who showed me the book.
00:16:01
They have an amazing person who takes care of all the books and
00:16:05
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
00:16:16
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.
00:16:30
The Night Watchman is the name of the book.
00:16:33
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.
00:16:57
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
00:17:16
one. But she's a Native American from
00:17:19
Minnesota, so from my home state.
00:17:21
And she is totally a local luminary.
00:17:26
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
00:17:35
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.