Johanna Fateman
The artist’s present broaches a surfeit of concepts about survival and surveillance, visibility and vulnerability.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, curated by Vivian Crockett with Ian Wallace, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York City, by January 14, 2024
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The artist was not current throughout my first go to to her new exhibition, Nothing New. The glass-walled foyer gallery spanning the far finish of the New Museum’s floor flooring, which Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo has reworked right into a dwelling area—kind of—was quiet, an open can of Sprite the one signal of life. I used to be disenchanted, then relieved. The set up, with its clear entrance, resembles a wierd three-part dollhouse. A bed room, screened off by shoji dividers, is centered between an austere show of six hashish crops on tall white pedestals to the left and a small Japanese-style rock backyard to the proper. This final vignette is likely to be seen as an oasis, however beneath the sunless enclosure’s bleakly institutional overhead lighting, it looks like an enormous terrarium. I don’t need anybody to stay right here, I assumed. There’s nowhere to cover however underneath the covers.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
A video show mounted exterior the gallery, on a perpendicular wall in view of the foyer’s café seating, reveals a grid of stay surveillance feeds from cameras positioned each throughout the set up and off-site, one monitoring Kuriki-Olivo’s precise bed room. She was nowhere to be seen there, both. Waiting for one thing to occur, I took within the inexperienced décor of her public bed room—its 9 large paper lanterns (an identical to the lonely one hanging from the ceiling at home, seen on-screen) and pretend fur–lined partitions, the scattered biomorphic bathtub mats that appear like cartoon lily pads or islands of moss, a glowing LED signal that spells “Jade” on the ground.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
By the indoor forest of leafy marijuana, a wall label explains the cultural, non secular, and medicinal makes use of of the crops and their which means to the artist, together with the significance of CBD in her restoration from mind surgical procedure. (She had a cancerous tumor eliminated in 2010.) A darkish rectangle of thirty MRI scans, which obscures a bit of the wall right here, memorializes the expertise, whereas the radiological images, as photographs of the within of her head, grow to be an acutely intimate, but additionally a starkly dissociative, self-portrait. Contradictions like these—the collision of the inscrutable and indifferent with the pressing and honest—outline the difficult present.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
The intensive exhibition textual content makes no promise that the artist will all the time be seen within the set up, stating solely that it’s going to function a “mise-en-scène for her daily activities.” Yet it cites as precursors Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh, whose best-known endurance works hinge on the spartan simplicity of (and strict adherence to) predetermined guidelines; it frames Nothing New as a three-month train in self-exposure. Kuriki-Olivo’s presence, within the museum or on-screen, is supposed to represent an additional step away from the enigmatic persona and anonymized gestures of her earlier observe—“towards radical visibility,” we’re advised—a journey initiated in 2018, when she started dwelling brazenly as a trans girl. It may very well be that this premise is a feint; that she intends to show a standard understanding of visibility (or endurance artwork) on its head. Either means, a excessive bar has been set for fulfillment.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Working underneath the identify Puppies Puppies since 2010, the artist has, in previous performances, appeared in disguises, mass-produced costumes (Party City–kind iterations of SpongeBob SquarePants, Voldemort, and Lady Liberty amongst them), attaining a meme-come-to-life presence. In a legendary 2015 solo present on the adventurous Queer Thoughts (which sadly closed this fall), the artist—in any other case dressed solely in a loin material—deployed a Gollum masks to extra startling and poignant impact. But the cagey conceptualism of those wearable readymades ultimately took on an undesirable significance: “It means something very different to be hidden as a trans woman,” she has mentioned. Last 12 months, Kuriki-Olivo, whose Taíno and Japanese ancestry can be a topic of her work, mounted a present at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin that includes a collection of in-situ vinyl textual content items. Her relinquishment of cooler or absurdist methods—no less than for the second—was made clear in anguished and exasperated first-person declarations, such because the unapologetic line “I’M SORRY MY IDENTITY IS A PART OF MY WORK.”
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Text performs a job in Nothing New, too. Behind the museum café counter, which faces and runs parallel to the set up, one other accumulation of inexperienced issues, in hues from neon to hunter, fills the wall. Packaged merchandise comparable to Fabuloso all-purpose cleaner, lime La Croix, and jalapeño potato chips kind a verdant monochrome, above which an indication, its reflection showing on the floor of the set up’s glass wall, quotes Sylvia Rivera, trans advocate and heroine of the Stonewall rebellion. “We have to be visible. We are not ashamed of who we are,” it reads, underscoring the activist high quality of Kuriki-Olivo’s endeavor. In this gentle, the artist—or the cordoned-off compartment that holds her place—occupies the institutional area in harrowingly vulnerable defiance of the present deadly cascade of right-wing laws and vigilantism, the agenda that goals to eradicate trans folks from public life. But her use of Rivera’s phrases to invoke one sense of visibility—as a political crucial in social battle—is in pressure with different notions of illustration and survival right here. Maybe refusal and absence present the artist extra clearly, in silhouette, because the destructive area between these inexperienced issues; perhaps invisibility is preferable if the choice is to stay as a spectacle, behind glass.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
During my second go to, the artist was beneath a puffy inexperienced comforter, purse tossed on the mattress, her telephone. A fogging gadget made the barrier between her and me intermittently opaque, generally switching on and off shortly, like an eye fixed blinking in bursts. The interruptions compelled me to observe the scene extra intently, to stare obscenely in effort and frustration. The different choice was to observe a otherwise mediated view of her within the mattress on the close by display screen, which felt, after a second, simply as unhealthy. Of course, there was additionally the choice to look away.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
There is a lot happening right here, a surfeit of concepts presumably, loads I haven’t touched on. The conceptual extra and blended messages may not be such an issue, although, have been it not for the curatorial over-explanation of the artist’s intent. The present would possibly replicate “on the art world’s power dynamics and financial structures and how they mirror those of sex work”; it would discover “new registers of transparency and obfuscation”; Kuriki-Olivo is likely to be “eliding tokenization and reductive narratives of racial and trans identities.” Eleven days in, I believe it’s too early to evaluate. Nothing New is incomplete, nonetheless unfolding. Of course, if I’m accusing the exhibition textual content of untimely interpretation, am I doing the identical? Today, the present appears to suggest one thing fascinating about illustration by institutional intervention, by absence fairly than inclusion, however, by January, it would say one thing else.
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New, set up view. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
On my third go to, I got here within the late afternoon and sat working at one of many café tables within the foyer till the museum closed. Perhaps I got here on the flawed time, once more. I stored an eye fixed on the video feeds, because the bed room was empty. When I used to be gathering my issues to depart, I noticed motion on the close by display screen. In the top-right nook, a leg emerged from deep shadow, to rearrange itself beneath the covers. I froze, watching, however that was it.
Johanna Fateman is a author, artwork critic, and musician in New York.
The artist’s present broaches a surfeit of concepts about survival and surveillance, visibility and vulnerability.
