When we began researching SCREENING RACE IN AMERICAN NONTHEATRICAL FILM, we put out a call to archivists for suggestions of lost, hidden or neglected films that deserved scholarly attention.
Stephen Parr of Oddball Films, who passed away in 2017, enthusiastically recommended Nikolai Ursin’s BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN (circa 1967), a short 16mm portrait of a transgender African American person. Mark Quigley at UCLA made it possible for us to view the film, which had been recently restored. We were moved by its sophisticated engagement with questions of gender, sexuality and race. Noah Tsika of Queens College wrote a thoughtful and deeply informed essay on the film’s representational politics as well as its subject’s self-presentation.
Rediscovering an important film in the archives like BEHIND EVERYGOOD MAN and helping bring more attention to it energized us—it’s one of the reasons we do what we do. — Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, editors of Screening Race
I came upon the word transmissions while thinking about how the ethereal, corporeal, and technical dimensions of ballet resonate in the artworks and souvenirs it produces. Transmissions are subject to interference and interruption. Ballets are conveyed to us through mediations, anecdotes, and bodies. And often when I’m watching ballet in its contemporary manifestations, I wonder how these transmissions have occurred.
I started looking into the history of ballet in the twentieth century… Through a web of genealogies, I eventually arrived at the flamboyant intersection of ballet and art in New York, beginning in the 1930s. There the avant-garde experiments of the previous decades in Europe incited a particularly intense cross-contamination, an overt articulation of homosexual erotics long before the emergence of a public language around queerness. Looking at modern American art of this period through the prism of ballet reveals a tangle of interrelationships, collaborations, derivations, and hybrid aesthetic programs that still feel surprisingly contemporary. — Nick Mauss*
Two years after the close of TRANSMISSIONS—Nick Mauss’ multimedia installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art—the museum and Dancing Foxes Press have published an exhibition catalog that beautifully extends the show, combining performance and exhibition images from the Whitney with an extensive selection of new illustrative and textual documentation.
I drew multiple webs of interrelationships, elective affinities, and echo waves of influence, focusing as much on the social, professional, sexual, and collaborative points of contact as on transhistorical resonances that were in some cases perhaps fantasy—eschewing standard mappings of modern art… [embracing] anachrony and distortion over apparent objectivity…
My decision to insist on ballet as the fulcrum in TRANSMISSIONS was also a response to the ubiquity of postmodern dance derivations within the contemporary museum environment and the reductive version of modernity that these prequalified dance idioms signify and cement. Contemporaneity is reduced to a “look” of modernity. Modernist ballets make for engaging historical documents precisely because their own relationship to history is a kind of suspension of disbelief; they are intrinsically modernist, even if they don’t “signal” modernity to contemporary eyes.— Nick Mauss*
The world of the spectator, the receiver, was a primary lens through which I constructed TRANSMISSIONS, and the flux of the exhibition’s daily audience over the course of two months took on a central role within it. This book is similarly directed at the wholly different—private, rather than social—negotiations of the reader. — Nick Mauss*
NICK MAUSS,TRANSMISSIONS (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press; New York: Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, 2020).
This week, Adam Pendleton and Performa present an online screening of the artist’s work JUST BACK FROM LOS ANGELES—A PORTRAIT OF YVONNE RAINER as well as a conversation with Pendleton and Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg. See links below for details.
They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at…
I remember the breathlessness of the lifting section
I remember your Martha Graham story and your voice rising, and I got worried you were going to talk about whether she ate cock or not and Steve starting to read on the other mic and changing the atmosphere.
I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers and doing Trio A slow, very slow, and Steve joining me and then fast, with and against Steve’s tempo.
I remember… you grinning at the pleasure we had.
Oh, and the wings.
I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face.
I remember talking to you in the hotel, before “stoned,” and you said I was always wanting to get someplace and that I should just be where I was…
and only there… and that was what happened in the performance.
I remember standing around waiting to start the run-thru, and you were talking and then you turned and said, “What are you waiting for?”
and Doug saying what I had been doing, which was waiting for you!
I remember the pleasure of huddling in the rolls and Steve coming down on me with his self-conscious silly grin.
And I remember being out of it thru Becky’s solo, then toward the end seeing her so totally there with that changed and changing body of hers…
I remember the box improvisation with David.
The specter of crisis was also bolstered by the cops’ simple inability to stop killing black people. Just prior to Brown’s murder, forty-six-year-old Eric Garner of State Island, New York, unarmed and minding his own business, was approached by police and then choked to death as he gasped eleven times, “I can’t breathe.” Two days after Brown was killed, Los Angeles Police department officers shot and killed another young black man, Ezell Ford. Months later, autopsy reports would confirm that Ford was shot multiple times, including once in the back, while he lay on the ground. In a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, police shot to death John Crawford III, twenty-two years old and African American, while he was talking on his cell phone and holding an air gun on sale in the aisle of a Walmart. And as the nation waited to hear whether a grand jury would indict officer Darren Wilson for Brown’s death, Cleveland police killed thirty-seven-year-old, African American Tanisha Anderson when they slammed her to the ground, remaining on top of her until her body went limp. The following week, police in Cleveland struck again, murdering a twelve year old boy, Tamir Rice, less than two seconds after arriving at the playground where Rice was playing alone. Making maters worse, the two Cleveland police stood by idly, refusing aid, while Tamir bled to death. When his fourteen-year-old sister attempted to help him, police wrestled her to the ground.
I remember the breathlessness of the lifting section
I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers
I remember… you grinning at the pleasure we had.
I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face.
I remember talking to you in the hotel, before “stoned,”
I remember standing around waiting to start the run-thru, and you were talking and then you turned and said, “What are you waiting for?”
I remember the pleasure of huddling in the rolls and Steve coming down on me with his self-conscious silly grin.
I remember the box improvisation with David.
Whenever one writes about a problem in the United States, especially concerning the racial atmosphere, the problem written about is usually black people, that they are either extremist, irresponsible, or ideologically naïve.
What we want to do here is to talk about white society, and the liberal segment of white society, because we want to prove the pitfalls of liberalism, that is, the pitfalls of liberals in their political thinking.
Whenever articles are written, whenever political speeches are given, or whenever analyses are made about a situation, it is assumed that certain people of one group, either the left or the right, the rich or the poor, the whites or the blacks are causing polarization.
The fact is that conditions cause polarization, and that certain people can act as catalysts to speed up the polarization; for example, Rap Brown or Huey Newton can be a catalyst speeding up the polarization of blacks against whites in the Untied States, but the conditions are already there. George Wallace can speed up the polarization of whites against blacks in America, but again, the conditions are already there.
Many people want to know why, out of the entire white segment of society, we want to criticize the liberals. We have to criticize them because they represent the liaison between both groups, between the oppressed and the oppressor. The liberal tries to become an arbitrator, but he is incapable of solving the problems. He promises the oppressor that he can keep the oppressed under control; that he will stop them from becoming illegal (in this case illegal means violent). At the same time, he promises the oppressed that he will be able to alleviate their suffering—in due time. Historically, of course, we know this is impossible, and our era will not escape history.
A line is the distance between.
They circled the seafood restaurant singing “We shall not be moved.” — Adam Pendleton, Just back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer, 2016–2017
A portion of the proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to Artist Relief, a coalition of national arts grant-makers to support artists during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Wilding Cran Gallery exhibition IT’S A SAD AND BEAUTIFUL WORLD…—featuring new figurative work by Vanessa Beecroft, Michelle Blade, Karon Davis, Katja Farin, FebruaryJames, and Bari Ziperstein—is on view by appointment.
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