Correcting the Record to Preserve It: The Art of the Intersectional Archive
Catherine G. Wagley, June 2, 2021
I am lucky. I had all the JPGs, PDFs, and PNGs I needed, utilitarian scans and snapshots from archives across the country, before the libraries shut down. So instead of sitting in cold rooms at large wood tables, I have spent the last year navigating a sea of digital files for a slow-moving project I’ve been working on about the history of support networks for artists. Even compressed on hard drives and desktops, the sheer quantity of research material still feels like something “unsettling and colossal,” as scholar Arlette Farge put it in her 1981 book The Allure of the Archives.1 “Faced with it,” wrote Farge, “you feel alone, like an individual confronting a crowd.”2 This feeling is paradoxical, considering that Farge, who spent years in Paris’ judicial archives, worked toward finding and giving voice to marginalized people, building a new, wider chorus of experiences. In my case, the goal of spending time in the archive is to understand how art workers and artists can and have connected with and sustained one another. So why is it so lonely?
Bodies that Move: On Process Over Product
Catherine G. Wagley, March 17, 2021
Beyond the devastation of the illness itself, the coronavirus has disrupted routines that previously kept us healthy and sane. It turns out that isolation, ubiquitous uncertainty, and sadness exacerbate everyday maladies—backaches, migraines, stiff limbs—and that taking care of our own bodies proves difficult while we’re watching the world fall apart. I wasn’t that interested in celebrity fitness fads before Los Angeles County temporarily prohibited hiking, around the same time freelance work began to dry up. And while it is uncomfortable to be seduced by a trend, to watch yourself pulled in hook, line, and sinker, I—like so many—began auditioning different, virtually-available exercise methods with an alarming urgency.
Stuck in the Same Muck: Journeying Through Asher Hartman’s Psychic Theater
Catherine Wagley, February 11, 2021
God seduced Jesus on a Circuit City breakroom table. The seduction began as we, the audience, sat circled in child-sized chairs in a too-bright room. God, played by Jasmine Orpilla as cunningly and sexily in-control, crawled on all fours toward her divine son. The set felt like a contraption that had us rotating within it. We were made to trail the performers through a tricked-out hallway lined with photos of Circuit City employees. And we moved from one room to another, jumping when walls shifted or hidden windows opened.
THE SHORT, EXHILARATING LIFE OF GALLERY 669 - PART 1
Catherine G. Wagley, January 2021
Those who attended Gallery 669’s festive, celebrity-filled inaugural opening likely left with a misguided idea of what the fledgling space would become. The actress Zsa-Zsa Gabor was there in her finery, as was playwright Arthur Miller. One guest wore an elegant kimono, and Channel 4 News brought cameras. Watercolors by Henry Miller, the well-known novelist, could barely be seen behind the bustling bodies. In the few photos of the event, Miller's fiancé, the pianist and vocalist Hoki Tokuda, then 29, looks like the youngest in attendance.
The Short, Exhilarating Life of Gallery 669 - Part 2
Catherine G. Wagley, January 2021
The day she broke out in hives, Riko Mizuno decided her collaboration was over. She woke with a rash from her neck down, and rushed to her doctor. She was clearly under stress, he told her. She knew immediately where the stress came from: her partner Eugenia Butler, who had by this point co-run Mizuno’s fledgling art space, Gallery 669, with her for the past year and whose forceful energy contrasted Mizuno’s own more reserved personality. The two women partnered early in 1968, Butler coming in to co-run the space Mizuno had already started. And from the outside, their partnership seemed to be going remarkably well.