Open Your Eyes, 2022
‘Levity’ is not a word one would normally associate with the artistic practice of Sam Durant. The American multimedia artist’s work has long questioned, highlighted, and reframed social and civic issues from the more complex sides of history: colonialism, the death penalty, surveillance and slavery among them.
But in this intimate exhibition, a certain levity, a playfulness, gently sneaks into otherwise serious and weighty subject matter. A new suite of twelve prints reconsiders, and in part remixes, images that Durant has collected in his extensive research of protests and revolutions throughout history. In times of rupture and political turmoil, protesters have toppled the symbols of and monuments to existing power structures to assert their own (his recent Iconoclasm series renders images of such protests as graphite drawings; other past works have proposed news ways of creating monuments and being monumental, so to speak).
In the making of these prints, Durant mined this source material and in lieu of drawing protest events, he disassembled and cut, and then reordered, fragments of these mostly black-and-white images of toppled monuments. ‘Iconoclasm’ means the breaking of images, but here it’s as if the artist not only breaks but strips these images down to their smallest elements, like reducing a word to its letters—as if to ask whether reducing symbols and representations of power to their elemental parts can result in a kind of minimal visual poetry.
… Poetry, or, in some of these small works, clever punch lines. In Heads (all prints from 2020), rows of statues’ heads—large or small, ancient or contemporary, right-side up or upside down, appear almost like a running gag (or a taxonomic assemblage: one thinks of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas). The wonky legs and arms in Legs and Arms look like letters from a nonwestern language: There’s a vaguely silly row of noses and a lone ear in Ears and Noses. In Fall of Communism, another single ear, from a statue of Vladimir Lenin, floats alone in the picture plane; along the print’s lower edge is a repeating image of a crowd toppling a statue in Albania (what does Lenin hear?). Things get topically and visually denser in Ambivalence, Transparency, and Certainty, all of which layer transparent images of monument fragments atop each other—as revolutions revolve, ghosts of revolutions past continue to haunt.
More than a century after the Dadaists cut and pasted socio-political imagery and text into their biting, playful collages, Durant samples himself in similar way, riffing on themes as he pushes limits of reduction and abstraction on a small but still compelling scale. Made with a team at the
Singapore Tyler Print Institute workshop during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the prints were also a collaboration, their structure and print techniques the result of material experimentation. Some of the handmade paper contains small amounts of concrete; some images appear in subtle relief.
Also on view are Durant’s narrative graphite drawings of protesters—shot with blasts of colorful spray paint, like paintball hits—and two of the light boxes the artists has been producing for the past several years in an ongoing series that highlights the slogans protesters handwrite on the signs they carry while marching for their causes. Their messages, Open Your Eyes (2022) or Love is Louder (2023)—are indeed loud, clear, and profoundly important in today’s fraught, divisive geopolitical climate. But as we try to make another, better world, we can’t forget to take some joy in the process.
Kimberly Bradley
