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Carey Young – Body
Techniques, 2007:
passive resistance and
the artist as double agent
Listening to Carey Young last night at the
Clore Auditorium transported
me back to my first encounter with Young’s Body
Techniques at Tate Britain in 2010. Executed
in 2007, Body Techniques sees Young re-enact
iconic conceptual performances from Kirsten Justesen, Richard Long,
Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, Dennis Oppenheim, Bruce Nauman and Valie Export
against the
backdrop of the uninhabited science fiction city landscapes that are
the
legacies of the oil-generated construction boom of Dubai and Sharjah. Young’s Body Techniques
resembles something
of a corporate Dune, a
post-technocratic Modernist ruin reminiscent of
distant
failure, and forgotten loss.
Perhaps it was Young’s evident solidarity
with the political and aesthetic struggles of these landmark conceptual
performances;
perhaps it was her subtle extension of a dialogue these artists began
at a seminal moment in history;
perhaps
it was the barren stillness of Young’s desert backdrop so audibly
resonating
other forms of silencing. Carey Young’s
work had a profound effect upon my soul.
Body Techniques seems to restage and
reframe these iconic interventions as something that has yet to happen
– a
proleptic flash forward summoning the rise and fall of civilizations. Young places herself directly in the camera’s
eye, weaving a complex web of cross references and ambiguous ironies
that
invite dialogue and reconsideration between generations of artworks and
artists
and, even more acutely, between the ostensible radical opposition of
the Islamic
and Judeo-Christian cultural frames, oppositions that are both
magnified and
interceded by the higher orders of money and power.
CAREY YOUNG
Body-Techniques (after Sculpture II, Kirsten Justesen, 1969),
2007
lightjet print 48 x
56 in. (121.9 x 142.2cm)
© Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New
York
In Body Techniques
(after Sculpture II, Kirsten Justesen, 1969), we
see Young, in her characteristic business
attire,
cocooned in foetal position in the middle of an freshly paved road
which runs
vertically through the centre of the image and perspectivally fades
into the
distance of an unfathomable landscape.
Young presents us with the perfect geometry
of a
Delacroix-like Romantic scene -- the ubiquitous boulevard now replaced
by
low-sweeping structures resembling heavy goods loading bays, ominously
painted yellow
on the right and blue on the left, presenting an uncharted causeway
framed by
development, distribution channels and international flows of
capital,
while the artist passively prostrates herself amidst these forces. Is it protection she seeks or rebirth, I
wonder? Young appropriates
Justesen’s
frame, first from the crate and then from the museum, placing it into
the
emergent corporate landscapes of the Biennale desert.
The frame in whatever form it seems always
composed of the same material – money.
Young’s passive figure contrasts with her
very active restaging
of Richard Long’s A Line in Ireland, 1974,
invoking both the metaphor of Long’s practice and that of a nation’s
identity ripped
open by the imposition of artificial boundaries, and the resulting
political
and economic struggles that are eventually guised by religious fervour. Young‘s line reaches diagonally toward the
horizon -- broken concrete rubble stretching across the landscape
appearing to
continue indefinitely. Below
the horizon lies the desert while stretching
above is a skyline of rectilinear towers. Rubble,
the remains from an abandoned construction site,
forms a
boundary that cuts through an otherwise indivisible desert landscape
framing a distant
and possibly unreachable mirage. Young is
attired in her corporate power suit. As
an artist, hers is a delicate balance atop this boundary.
Despite the rhetoric of an insuperable
ideological divide
and the language of a clash of cultures, here the desert landscape
bears the markers
of transnational progress – construction and development.
Movements of capital transgress cultural and
geopolitical boundaries, eventually usurping and redefining the
discourses that
govern nationhood, identity, law, ideology and culture.
CAREY YOUNG
Body Techniques (after Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a
Square [Square Dance], Bruce Nauman, 1967-68), 2007
light jet print, 48 x 56 in. (121.9 x 142.2 cm)
© Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Resistance is likewise transposed in Body Techniques
(after Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square
[Square Dance],
Bruce
Nauman, 1967-68). Responding to Nauman’s challenge, Young
reforms
the perimeter
of the square (itself a frame) onto a sand swept desert using available
readymade -- scaffolding materials. Dancing
along the edge of the square is Young’s tiny body, methodically
matching step
for step with Nauman, while in the distance behind six monochrome
behemoths
rise from the desert floor. The desert
with its unoccupied construction sites become her studio, while the
frame, now a
precariously propped vertical, assumes a mimetic connection that
indulges in a
moment of consubstantiality between frame and the buildings themselves
suggestive once again of an oscillating identity. Young’s
performance strikes me as a
mischievous
yet resolute staging of resistance.
Quiet resistance contrasts with an
unexpected and perhaps
improbable solidarity with the worker in Young’s restaging of
Mierle Laderman Ukeles' Hartford
Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance:
Outside, 1973, the iconic
performance in which Laderman Ukeles scrubs clean the outside steps and
entrances
of the Wadsworth Athenaeum at regular intervals. Years
later, the artist (now in the form of
Young) has traded in her overalls for a corporate suit.
She appear oddly out of place as she hunches
over a mop scrubbing the steps of what appears to be the semi-developed
outer
shell of a low rise concrete apartment block.
CAREY-YOUNG
Body Techniques (after Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks,
Maintenance: Outside, Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, 1973), 2007
light jet print 48 x 54 3/4 in. (121.9 x 139.1 cm)
© Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
What is being cleaned here?
A futile act to remove the debris of Modernism? Or does the artist engage in an act of
self purification? An affinity with the
thousands of imported workers whose labour forms the invisible armature
underlying
these monuments of steel, glass and concrete? Or
perhaps more invidious is a shared guilt, a solidarity
with the post modern worker, labelled ‘white collar’ whose intellect
and
creativity are
servants to the demands of capital flows. By
placing herself
directly in the position of the worker, Young queries how differently
placed is
the work of the artist, who is herself
a form of
“unpaid” intellectual labour,
whose imagination and idea are systematically converted by markets
to form
image advertising, slogans, packaging, lifestyle marketing, and perhaps
more
insidiously, to
expand capitalist aspirations into otherwise resistant markets
and cultures.
As Young has noted: Business thinking is now voraciously nimble,
especially at the level of advertising, where new subcultures are
quickly
understood both as social demographic and new sets of trends. Transgression rarely seems able to remain
transgressive for long. [‘Gap Analysis: An
annotated report derived from an evolving discussion
between Carey
Young and Liam Gillick’ in Carey Young
Incorporated (exhibition catalogue, John Hansard Gallery, ed.
Stephen Bode
(London: Film and Video Umbrella in association with John Hansard
Gallery,
20012)) 42]
CAREY-YOUNG
Body Techniques (after Lean In, Valie Export, 1976),
2007
light jet print 48 x 54 3/4 in. (121.9 x 139.1 cm)
© Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
In Body Techniques (after Lean In, Valie Export, 1976), Young re-contextualises
Export’s
inquiry into
the boundary between inner and outer space. Young’s
camera brings us in closer to the unfinished
high rise
development. A line of low concrete
outdoor steps are blocked by a Serra-like barrier running diagonally
across a
horizontal plane toward the high rises emphasising the steps as a path
to
nowhere. The
boundary here becomes an
explicit barrier to entry reflecting perhaps the invisible barrier that
conceals the transgressions that are all too often permitted in the private space. Young’s body,
a solitary figure in an otherwise disinterested landscape, appears
again prostrated, futilely
draped, body curving about the steps, head hidden ostrich like
downwards in the
sand, her black stiletto heels comically appearing as the bird’s
exposed
plumage. Body, a silent marker, adopts a
stance of quiet resistance, becoming a line of demarcation between
inner and
outer space, both a reflection of the architecture of domesticity and
the barrier it
creates.
Quiet resistance re-appears in Body
Techniques (after Encirclement, Valie Export, 1976).
Young
wears a bright red business suit, and
lies with her body horizontally converging around the curving curb of
paved
cul de sac surrounded by what appear to be scores of drab apartment
blocks. Young’s slim red figure
simultaneously
disappears into the landscape yet appears conspicuously out of place. Her passive figure reflects an ambivalence
that suggests action in art through a form of non violent resistance. Her body as a blood stained question mark
punctuating the landscape.
CAREY YOUNG
Body Techniques (after Encirclement Valie Export 1976), 2007
lightjet print 48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
© Carey Young. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery New York
Young’s engagement and dialogue with
conceptual performance art
is both poignant and searching. It
continues an inquiry which Young began as early as 2001, in her four
minute video piece, I am a Revolutionary.
Young, in
business attire, is being coached by her trainer, a tall well
dressed
publicity
coach in his 50s who attempts to teach her to repeat with conviction
the
phrase, ‘I am a revolutionary’. Young
paces about the smart office space repeatedly rehearsing the line as if
with a
drama coach, yet she continually fails to deliver this declaration in a
manner
convincing to herself or the viewer.
I am a Revolutionary
might be seen as a meditation, perhaps
even a response, to the possibility of a revolutionary artistic
practice – a
dialogue with Joseph Beuys, questioning the role the artist as
revolutionary. Beuys’ attire and his
strident march toward the camera in The Revolution
is Us, 1972 seems out of step with Young’s tentative uncertainty,
her
exposed doubt and the forms of resistance she articulates in Body
Techniques.
To paraphrase Young's insights delivered at
a Tate Symposium
in 2008, the
avant-garde in art is cyclical. The business world has usurped the
language of
imagination and creativity for its own ends. The
artist’s capacity to dissent is cyclical because the
market absorbs
dissent, repackages it and sells it back to the consumer under the
pretext for
identity, individualism and lifestyle choices.
[Carey Young, "Imagination, Engineering" delivered at Tate Symposium, Against the Avant grade? Duchamp, Man Ray,
Picabia, 08/03/2008)]. Young stressed this point
again at the Clore Auditorium,
“The artist’s
fails to act as a revolutionary force inasmuch as capitalism succeeds
in
diverting the intellectual energy and creative force toward its own
ends.”
The doubt raised in I
am a Revolutionary finds its answer in Body
Techniques. Here Young’s strategies
are subtle and quite often amusing. There
is no
attempt to openly declare a revolutionary war on capitalism. She draws on strategies and forms of
conceptualism, even treating conceptual works as ready mades, but her
work
demonstrates a desire to move beyond immanent critiques. In
Body
Techniques, Young alternates between passive and active
performances, the
passive as acts of resistance, while the active offer moments of
intervention,
infiltration and insertion. Young
treats
the artwork as a readymade, re-appropriating it now from the art
market (and from the art historian). Through
her re-performances, she resurrects and reinforms these conceptual
pieces. She offers us a space where the
artist might
act as resuscitator, resistor, infiltrator, virus and double agent. There is always a risk of being
contaminated
by the very pollutant she seeks to expose. Yet Young’s work bears
a
hidden resistance whose apparent complicity
and homeopathy just might, it seems, enable her work to catalyse the
pollutant and draw it out, so that it might eventually float to the
surface.
An extract from “Object Analysis: Carey
Young, Body Techniques, 2007” (Rozemin
Keshvani, Christies Education 3/6/2010).
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